<ul>
<li>Honda joins basically the rest of the auto industry, including Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, and Tesla, in realizing that self-driving cars could be significantly safer and less expensive to operate than human-driven vehicles. The permit allows Honda to test its vehicle on public California streets.</li>
<li>Honda previously built a self-driving prototype in an Acura SUV, but since then it&#8217;s been quiet about its autonomous ambitions.</li>
<li>In related news, Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mazda, Mercedes Benz, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo all said in a statement to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that autonomous braking systems would &#8220;become the norm in their new cars.&#8221;</li>
</ul>


Artificial Intelligence

Last week, Honda joined the list of companies in California that are legally permitted to test self-driving cars.

Now Honda is testing self-driving cars on California streets too

<ul>
<li>NASA will deliver the channel as part of a partnership with Harmonic. All video will be delivered at 4k resolution, or 4096 x 2010 pixels.</li>
<li>Content will largely come from cameras install on the International Space Station, as well as footage from other NASA missions. If old footage can be remastered in 4K, the channel will show it as well.</li>
<li>According to NASA&#8217;s press release, the channel will be available online as well as through cable and satellite TV providers. You&#8217;ll need quite a bit of bandwidth to stream it though: 13 MBps, according to NASA.</li>
</ul>


Sci-Fi Visions

Can't get enough high-resolution space porn? You're in luck -- NASA will launch a channel on November 1st with tons of high-definition content.

NASA to launch round-the-clock 4K TV channel

<ul>
<li>Although chips themselves &#8212; sophisticated electronics &#8212; are inexpensive, there&#8217;s an issue on the battlefield where it&#8217;s difficult to track and recover every device, potentially leading to important technology or data falling into enemy hands.</li>
<li>The chip is printed on a glass substrate which is then brought to its breaking point by heat. The team was able to switch a circuit on, and when a resistor got hot enough, the glass shattered into thousands of pieces.</li>
<li>The self-destructing chip could be used to store encryption keys. So instead of wiping a hard drive, you could merely destroy the chip remotely and render the data useless.</li>
</ul>


Robots & Machines

A project from Xerox PARC, funded by DARPA, has come up with a chip that can self-destruct on command.

This chip will self-destruct in 10… 9… 8…

<ul>
<li>The key to the new AI is that it&#8217;s unsupervised. Current machine learning systems ro applications such as speech processing need to be trained on data sets which associate human transcriptions to the raw speech files.</li>
<li>Because the system doesn&#8217;t require annotated data, it&#8217;s had to make a few assumptions. One is that words that occur in speech follow a standard power-law distribution. The team tested its system on six recordings of lectures given at MIT, but there were still problems. For instance, it thought that &#8220;open university&#8221; was one word, not two.</li>
<li>One big application for this kind of technology is that it might be able to be applied to languages that aren&#8217;t as widely spoken. It could also help the accuracy of systems that transcribe accented speech.</li>
</ul>


A new AI from researchers at MIT can not only learn to distinguish spoken works, but it can identify their phonetic components, without human supervision.

A new unsupervised AI can identify words and sounds without annotated data

<ul>
<li>The advance, made possible by sophisticated neural technologies developed under DARPA’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics points to a future in which people living with paralyzed or missing limbs will not only be able to manipulate objects by sending signals from their brain to robotic devices, but also be able to sense precisely what those devices are touching.</li>
<li>The clinical work involved the placement of electrode arrays onto the paralyzed volunteer’s sensory cortex—the brain region responsible for identifying tactile sensations such as pressure. In addition, the team placed arrays on the volunteer’s motor cortex, the part of the brain that directs body movements. Then, breaking new neurotechnological ground, the researchers went on to provide the volunteer a sense of touch. The APL hand contains sophisticated torque sensors that can detect when pressure is being applied to any of its fingers, and can convert those physical “sensations” into electrical signals. The team used wires to route those signals to the arrays on the volunteer’s brain.</li>
<li>In the very first set of tests, in which researchers gently touched each of the prosthetic hand’s fingers while the volunteer was blindfolded, he was able to report with nearly 100 percent accuracy which mechanical finger was being touched. The feeling, he reported, was as if his own hand were being touched.</li>
</ul>


Enhanced Humans

Through DARPA, a 28 year old paralyzed man has become the first person to feel physical sensations through a prosthetic hand directly connected to his brain

Huge Milestone Crossed: First Person to Feel Physical Sensations Through a Prosthetic Hand

<ul>
<li>His most recent trip was relatively short, starting on March 27 and ending a few days ago.</li>
<li>He&#8217;s taken four trips to ISS and one trip to Mir. which was his longest trip at 199 days. He&#8217;s 57.</li>
<li>Despite all the time he&#8217;s spent in zero gravity, he says he &#8220;feels fine.&#8221; NASA and Russia will study him to get better insight into how microgravity affects mental and physical health.</li>
</ul>


Off World

Welcome cosmonaut Gennady Padalka back to Earth -- after landing  on Saturday, he now holds the record for most days in space: 879 days over five missions.

Artificial Intelligence

Now Honda is testing self-driving cars on California streets too

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Huge Milestone Crossed: First Person to Feel Physical Sensations Through a Prosthetic Hand

Off World

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