Scientists have built a Nightmare Machine to generate the scariest images ever

    We’re supposed to be building robots and AI for the good of humankind, but scientists at MIT have pretty much been doing the opposite - they’ve built a new kind of AI with the sole purpose of generating the most frightening images ever.

    Just in time for Halloween, the aptly named Nightmare Machine uses an algorithm that 'learns' what humans find scary, sinister, or just downright unnerving, and generates images based on what it thinks will freak us out the most.

    "There have been a rising number of intellectuals, including Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, raising alarms about the potential threat of super intelligent AI on humanity," one of the team, Pinar Yanardag Delul, told Digital Trends.

    "In the spirit of Halloween and following the traditional MIT hack culture, we wanted to playfully commemorate humanity’s fear of AI, which is a growing theme in popular culture."

    Based on Google's DeepDream computer vision program, which uses a type of artificial neural network to create a dreamlike or hallucinogenic filter to run over regular images, the Nightmare Machine can create images according to a number of themes, such as "ghost town", "tentacle monster" and "slaughterhouse".

    Basically, it learns what a haunted house, a toxic city, or a zombified human looks like, and applies this to innocuous images to make them horrifying.

    "We observed some interesting outcomes," says one of the researchers, Manuel Cebrian. "Say we train a neural network on places, like a haunted house, and apply it to a person or group of people. The result is equally haunting."

    So far, it's just been focusing on images of people and places, and starts by applying a scary filter based on what it's learned about what humans find scary. The public is then asked to vote on the generated images, so it can learn which are the most effective.

Here are some of the most effective scary faces:

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Laser Mounted Combat Vehicles Are Set to Roll-Out in 2017

    The development of lasers for combat purposes goes as far back as at least the Regan era, as the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) from that time period had many innovate ideas about how we could develop a sophisticated anti-ballistic missile system. Many of these anti-ballistic ideas featured lasers prominently. Despite this fact, laser weapons haven’t really ever proliferated on the battlefield, but that could soon change.

    The army, together with General Dynamics, an aerospace and defense company, is developing a short-range laser weapon that can identify and intercept drones, mortar shells, and other flying threats.

     The weapon system could be mounted on the roof of an armored personnel vehicle, and it features a 5 kilowatt laser, a step-up from General Dynamics’ previous effort, which came in at just 2 kilowatts. It has its own radar, so it stays operational even if the existing systems in the vehicle go down.

     The joint venture is also looking to integrate a jamming system to the weapon, so it does not have to fire a shot to take down a threat. Remarkably, their current tests show that the system can identify and destroy UAVs 21 times out of 23.

    This development shows how the changing landscape of war—the advent of technologies like drones and autonomous weapons—spawns a host of new innovations that ultimately reshape combat…and even society itself. In the end, those behind the work note that this laser system is just one of many in development that aims to protect soldiers in dangerous environments.

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New Research Shows How Stars Turn to Gold

    A study of the nearby dwarf galaxy Reticulum II hints at an exotic origin of the heaviest elements on Earth—through the merger of neutron stars. 

    Astrophysics has managed to paint a pretty accurate picture of how the elements were formed. Hydrogen and helium were created in those first staggering moments after the Big Bang; “metals” (all heavier elements) were later created through nuclear fusion in the central furnaces of super-massive stars.

    The problem is, once iron and nickel are formed, the fusion process requires more energy than it releases, which has predictable results—the star collapses. So how do heavier elements such as gold, lead, copper, and platinum form?

    The explanation is “neutron capture,” in which existing heavy elements accrete neutrons one at a time; subsequently, these neutrons beta decay into protons and voilà—you have a ready-made new element. Neutron capture may happen slowly, over long periods in stellar cores, or all at once, through a catastrophic neutron bombardment.

   Ultimately, astronomers are undecided about how such elements are formed—in supernova explosions, which are relatively common, or in something rare and exotic, such as the merger of neutron stars.

    Surprisingly, a new study of the dwarf galaxy Reticulum II hints that it is the latter.

The new research shows that of Reticulum II’s nine brightest stars, seven have a greater amount of heavy elements formed from rapid neutron capture than other dwarf galaxies; this fact, coupled with the excessive amounts of neutron capture-derived elements in the galaxy, seems to prove that a rarer mechanism than supernovae.

    Ancient stars in the Milky Way betray the same signatures of neutron capture, suggesting that an identical process obtains in larger galaxies as in the dwarfs—and that even Earth’s heavy elements were similarly formed. Which means the gold in that piece of jewelry you’re wearing may have been born inside colliding neutron stars.

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Harvard Engineers Create the First Fully 3D-Printed Heart-on-a-Chip

   Engineers from Harvard University have made the first entirely 3D-printed organ-on-a-chip with integrated sensing. Using a fully automated, digital manufacturing procedure, the 3D-printed heart-on-a-chip can be quickly fabricated and customized, allowing researchers to easily collect reliable data for short-term and long-term studies.

    This new approach to manufacturing may one day allow researchers to rapidly design organs-on-chips, also known as micro physiological systems, that match the properties of a specific disease or even an individual patient’s cells.

    “This new programmable approach to building organs-on-chips not only allows us to easily change and customize the design of the system by integrating sensing but also drastically simplifies data acquisition,” said Johan Ulrik Lind, first author of the paper, postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), and researcher at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

    Organs-on-chips mimic the structure and function of native tissue and have emerged as a promising alternative to traditional animal testing. However, the fabrication and data collection process for organs-on-chips is expensive and laborious. Currently, these devices are built in clean rooms using a complex, multi step lithographic process, and collecting data requires microscopy or high-speed cameras.

    The researchers developed six different inks that integrated soft strain sensors within the micro architecture of the tissue. In a single, continuous procedure, the team 3-D-printed those materials into a cardiac micro physiological device — a heart on a chip — with integrated sensors.

    Jennifer Lewis, Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering, core faculty member of the Wyss Institute, and co-author of the study, said: “We are pushing the boundaries of three-dimensional printing by developing and integrating multiple functional materials within printed devices, this study is a powerful demonstration of how our platform can be used to create fully functional, instrumented chips for drug screening and disease modeling.”

    The chip contains multiple wells, each with separate tissues and integrated sensors, allowing researchers to study many engineered cardiac tissues at once. To demonstrate the efficacy of the device, the team performed drug studies and longer-term studies of gradual changes in the contractile stress of engineered cardiac tissues, which can occur over the course of several weeks.

    “Translating micro physiological devices into truly valuable platforms for studying human health and disease requires that we address both data acquisition and manufacturing of our devices,” said Kit Parker, Tarr Family Professor of Bio-engineering and Applied Physics at SEAS, who co-authored the study. Parker is also a core faculty member of the Wyss Institute. “This work offers new potential solutions to both of these central challenges.”

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Nose cells fix knee cartilage in human trial

    Using nasal cartilage cells to repair joints is nothing to sniff at. As researchers reported August 27 in Science Translational Medicine: Patches of cartilage grown from snippets of nasal tissue worked so well when implanted into the goats that a small group of people with knee injuries have now undergone the treatment with their own nasal cartilage, While full results aren’t yet available, “the patients are doing extremely well,” says study coauthor Ivan Martin, a bio-engineer at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland.

    It has worked in goats. And now, in the first human trial, researchers at the University of Basel have taken the cells, called chondrocytes, from the noses of 10 patients with damaged knee joints and grown them into cartilage grafts. These repair patches were then surgically implanted into the patients' knee joints.

    Two years after surgery, nine patients have seen improvements in knee function, quality of life and pain. (One patient dropped out of the trial due to additional athletic injuries.) MRI scans showed that the grafts looked like normal hyaline cartilage, the hard-to-replicate material that coats the tip of bones, the team reports October 20 in The Lancet. Tests in more people are needed to determine whether the technique is truly ready for prime time.

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