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Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 16, 2020 at 8:39am

Sleep, Memory and Dreams: Fitting the Pieces Together

https://www.the-scientist.com/videos/whats-in-a-dream-68223?utm_cam...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 16, 2020 at 7:22am

Spiders in Space

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 16, 2020 at 7:15am

A Deep Dive On Deepfakes Telling fact from fiction may be harder than you think—a new study from Singapore has found that even people aware of deepfakes have inadvertently shared them online. 

Ahmed (2020) Who Inadvertently Shares Deepfakes? Analyzing the Role of Political Interest, Cognitive Ability, and Social Network Size. https://www.asianscientist.com/2020/12/tech/deepfakes-social-media-...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 15, 2020 at 10:05am

Improving portraits by adding light after a picture was taken

Recently, Google introduced Portrait Light, a feature on its Pixel phones that can be used to enhance portraits by adding an external light source not present at the time the photo was taken. In a new blog post, Google explains how they made this possible.

In their post, engineers at Google Research note that professional photographers discovered long ago that the best way to make people look their best in portraits is by using secondary flash devices that are not attached to the camera. Such flash devices can be situated by the photographer prior to photographing a subject by taking into account the direction their face is pointing, other light available, skin tone and other factors. Google has attempted to capture those factors with its new portrait-enhancing software. The system does not require the camera phone operator to use another light source. Instead, the software simply pretends that there was another light source all along, and then allows the user to determine the most flattering configuration for the subject.

The engineers explain they achieved this feat using two algorithms. The first, which they call automatic directional light placement, places synthetic light into the scene as a professional photographer would. The second algorithm is called synthetic post-capture relighting. It allows for repositioning the light after the fact in a realistic and natural-looking way.

Both of the algorithms rely on deep-learning networks. Google trained the software using available photographs and by photographing hundreds of portrait shots of 70 people with lights placed in 331 locations and cameras placed at 64 viewpoints. They also employed well-known principles such as the best angles for placing lights relative to the particular features of a person's face.

The software is available in newer Pixel phones. Older camera users can try the new software on the Google Photos online service, while it's built into newer phones. Users can either accept the automatic enhancement provided by their phone or change it manually.

https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/12/portrait-light-enhancing-portrait...

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-12-portraits-adding-picture.html?u...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 15, 2020 at 10:01am

** 

Hibernating lemurs may be the key to cryogenic sleep for human spac...

Science fiction is shifting into reality. With humanity's plans to return to the moon this decade and further ambitions to travel to Mars in the next, we need to figure out how to keep astronauts healthy for these years-long missions. One solution long championed by science fiction is suspended animation, or putting humans in a hibernation-like sleep for the duration of travel time.

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AI can predict Twitter users likely to spread disinformation before...

A new artificial intelligence-based algorithm that can accurately predict which Twitter users will spread disinformation before they actually do it has been developed by researchers from the University of Sheffield.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 15, 2020 at 9:54am

Chance played a major role in keeping Earth fit for life

A study by the University of Southampton gives a new perspective on why our planet has managed to stay habitable for billions of years—concluding it is almost certainly due, at least in part, to chance. The research suggests this may shorten the odds of finding life on so-called 'twin-Earths' in the Universe.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 15, 2020 at 9:34am

**The moon controls the release of methane in Arctic Ocean

It may not be very well known, but the Arctic Ocean leaks enormous amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane. These leaks have been ongoing for thousands of years but could be intensified by a future warmer ocean. The potential for this gas to escape the ocean, and contribute to the greenhouse gas budget in the atmosphere, is an important mystery that scientists are trying to solve.

The total amount of methane in the atmosphere has increased immensely over the past decades, and while some of the increase can be ascribed to human activity, other sources are not very well constrained.

A recent paper in Nature Communications even implies that the moon has a role to play.

The moon controls one of the most formidable forces in nature—the tides that shape our coastlines. Tides, in turn, significantly affect the intensity of methane emissions from the Arctic Ocean seafloor.

Researchers noticed that gas accumulations, which are in the sediments within a meter from the seafloor, are vulnerable to even slight pressure changes in the water column. Low tide means less of such hydrostatic pressure and higher intensity of methane release. High tide equals high pressure and lower intensity of the release.

It is the first time that this observation has been made in the Arctic Ocean. It means that slight pressure changes can release significant amounts of methane. This is a game-changer and the highest impact of the study.

Nabil Sultan et al, Impact of tides and sea-level on deep-sea Arctic methane emissions, Nature Communications (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18899-3

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-moon-methane-arctic-ocean.html?utm_so...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 15, 2020 at 9:24am

** Toward imperceptible electronics that you cannot see or feel

Transparent electronics—such as head-up displays that allow pilots to read flight data while keeping their eyes ahead of them—improve safety and allow users to access data while in transit. For healthcare applications, the electronics need to not only be cheap and straightforward to fabricate, but also sufficiently flexible to conform to skin. Silver nanowire networks meet these criteria. However, current methods of development create random nanowire alignment that's insufficient for advanced applications.

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Nanoparticles, from hype to actual clinical product

Ph.D. candidate Jaleesa Bresseleers, of the TU/e department of Biomedical Engineering, investigated a robust and scalable manufacturing process for nanocarriers and their building blocks. With these insights, the road to widely available clinical applications for nanocarriers has become much shorter.

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The moon controls the release of methane in Arctic Ocean

It may not be very well known, but the Arctic Ocean leaks enormous amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane. These leaks have been ongoing for thousands of years but could be intensified by a future warmer ocean. The potential for this gas to escape the ocean, and contribute to the greenhouse gas budget in the atmosphere, is an important mystery that scientists are trying to solve.

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A young but completely evolved entirely self-made galaxy

So young and already so evolved: Thanks to observations obtained at the Large Binocular Telescope, an international team of researchers coordinated by Paolo Saracco of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica (INAF, Italy) was able to reconstruct the wild evolutionary history of an extremely massive galaxy that existed 12 billion years ago, when the universe was only 1.8 billion years old, less than 13% of its present age. This galaxy, dubbed C1-23152, formed in only 500 million years, an incredibly short time to give rise to a mass of about 200 billion suns. To do so, it produced as many as 450 stars per year, more than one per day, a star formation rate almost 300 times higher than the current rate in the Milky Way. The information obtained from this study will be fundamental for galaxy formation models for objects it for which it is currently difficult to account.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 15, 2020 at 7:27am

Physicists create time-reversed optical waves

Optics researchers  have developed a new technique to demonstrate the time reversal of optical waves, which could transform the fields of advanced biomedical imaging and telecommunications.

Time reversal of waves in physics doesn't mean traveling back to the future; it describes a special type of wave which can retrace a path backwards through an object, as if watching a movie of the traveling wave, played in reverse.

UQ's Dr. Mickael Mounaix and Dr. Joel Carpenter, together with Dr. Nick Fontaine's team at Nokia Bell Labs, are the first to demonstrate this time reversal of optical waves, using a new device they developed that allows full 3-D control of light through an optical fiber.

Time reversed optical waves by arbitrary vector spatiotemporal field generation 

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-physicists-time-reversed-optical.html...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on December 14, 2020 at 12:05pm

Expandable Foam Supersizes 3D-Printed Objects - Headline Science

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