News

FDA clears first contact lens with light-adaptive technology

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration today cleared the first contact lens to incorporate an additive that automatically darkens the lens when exposed to bright light. The Acuvue Oasys Contact Lenses with Transitions Light Intelligent Technology are soft contact lenses indicated for daily use to correct the vision of people with non-diseased eyes who are nearsighted (myopia) or farsighted (hyperopia). They can be used by people with certain degrees of astigmatism, an abnormal curvature of the eye.

China’s Strategic Ambiguity and Shifting Approach to Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems

A step-by-step guide to the “World Models” AI paper

Teaching a machine to master car racing and fireball avoidance through “World Models”.

Decades-Old Graph Problem Yields to Amateur Mathematician

It is unusual, but not unheard of, for an amateur mathematician to make significant progress on a long-standing open problem. In the 1970s, Marjorie Rice, a homemaker with no mathematical background, ran across a Scientific American column about pentagons that tile the plane. She eventually added four new pentagons to the list.

Selling full autonomy before it’s ready could backfire for Tesla

GraalVM: Run Programs Faster Anywhere

Zero overhead interoperability between programming languages allows you to write polyglot applications and select the best language for your task.

IBM Releases Open Source AI Security Tool

IBM releases Adversarial Robustness Toolbox, an open source software library designed to help researchers and developers secure artificial intelligence (AI) systems

China’s tech giants are venturing into autonomous driving

If there’s one thing China’s tech giants are known for, it’s their ability to venture into everything from social media, to online payments, to delivery services. The latest thing they’re all speeding towards? Autonomous driving.

Improved Hubble data provide fresh evidence for new physics

Measurements made by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which maps the cosmic microwave background, predicted that the Hubble constant value should now be 67 kilometers per second per megaparsec (3.3 million light-years), and could be no higher than 69 kilometers per second per megaparsec. This means that for every 3.3 million light-years farther away a galaxy is from us, it is moving 67 kilometers per second faster. But Riess’s team measured a value of 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec, indicating galaxies are moving at a faster rate than implied by observations of the early universe.

Thin film converts heat from electronics into energy

Nearly 70 percent of the energy produced in the United States each year is wasted as heat. Much of that heat is less than 100 degrees Celsius and emanates from things like computers, cars or large industrial processes. Engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, have developed a thin-film system that can be applied to sources of waste heat like these to produce energy at levels unprecedented for this kind of technology.