Technology Tuesday: August 28th
Welcome to Technology Tuesday! Every week The Job Shop Blog will bring you our 5 top science and technology news stories from around the web.
This week: Artificial intelligence with a memory, an exceptional bionic eye, water in Jupiter’s atmosphere, a “deep space gateway”, and the proliferation of Amazon’s cashier-free stores.
NEW AI APPROACH DOES SOMETHING EXTRAORDINARY – IT REMEMBERS
When you return to school after summer break, it may feel like you forgot everything you learned the year before. But if you learned like an AI system does, you actually would have — as you sat down for your first day of class, your brain would take that as a cue to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.
AI systems’ tendency to forget the things it previously learned upon taking on new information is called catastrophic forgetting.
THIS EXPERIMENTAL BIONIC EYE COULD HELP THE BLIND SEE
Think exceptional sight would be a cool superpower? You’re in luck: Researchers from the University of Minnesota have built a bionic eye prototype that could restore sight to the blind and give superhuman vision to those who can already see.
They published their research on Tuesday in the journal Advanced Materials.
The researchers used a custom-built 3D printer to construct their bionic eye prototype. First, they printed a base of silver particles on the inside of a hemispherical glass dome. Next, they used semiconducting polymer materials to print photodiodes, devices that convert light into electric signals, on top of the silver base.
THERE’S WATER IN JUPITER’S ATMOSPHERE!
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot used to be “great” — the hurricane-like storm swirling above the planet’s surface is twice as wide as the Earth and has been going strong for 150 years.
Now, it’s great for another reason: According to a team of researchers from NASA and several U.S. universities, the Great Red Spot contains the first evidence of water on Jupiter.
The team published its research in The Astronomical Journal on August 17.
Two instruments located on Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano in Hawaii, made possible the team’s discovery of water in Jupiter’s atmosphere.
NASA WANTS ITS “DEEP SPACE GATEWAY” IN ORBIT AROUND THE MOON BY 2024
It’s no secret that humans (well, at least presidents) are aching to go back to the Moon. And now, we have more concrete plans on how we might do that. Earlier this week, the Human Exploration and Operations Committee for NASA’s Advisory Council presented the most detailed plan to date of how, exactly, it will go about it.
NASA’s plan involves something called the Deep Space Gateway, aka the Lunar Orbital Platform Gateway. First announced in March 2017, the Gateway would be a small habitat that would orbit the Moon and would act as a “spaceport for human and robotic exploration to the Moon and beyond.”
AMAZON’S CASHIER-FREE STORES ARE GOING NATIONAL
If you live in Seattle and want to pick up a quick snack without having to wait in a checkout line, you’ve now got two options for where you can do so. On Monday, Amazon officially opened its second cashier-less convenience store in the Emerald City.
To begin a shopping experience at an Amazon Go location, a customer must first download the Amazon Go app and swipe it upon entering the store. Then, cameras and sensors constantly monitor the items the customer removes from the shelves. When the customer later walks out of the store, Amazon charges their account for the items they take with them.
COMING EXPANSION. The first Amazon Go opened to the public in January after Amazon’s own employees tested it for a few weeks.