Tag: algorithm

New discovery pushes star Kepler-90’s menagerie to eight planets

Enlarge / That’s a lot of mouths to feed. (credit: NASA/Wendy Stenzel ) If you have an emotional attachment to our Solar System’s distinctions, you may want to look away. We’ve found another star system with eight planets, tying our own mark. Oh, and a Google machine-learning algorithm is responsible for the discovery. This is one of two new exoplanets scraped from the massive archive of data from the Kepler space telescope by NASA’s Andrew Vanderburg and Christopher Shallue of the Google AI team. Planets detected by Kepler show up as slight dips in the brightness of a star—the result of the planet passing in front and blocking some of the light. Some planets are more obvious than others, and the goal here was to turn the algorithm loose on digging through past measurements for weak signals that had been missed. Like all machine learning systems, this one was fed measurements from previously identified exoplanets to work out what differentiates real signals from coincidental blips. The researchers say the system emerged with the ability to correctly identify false positives about 96 percent of the time. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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New discovery pushes star Kepler-90’s menagerie to eight planets

Prisma’s art filters can turn your videos into moving paintings

A Prisma for videos doesn’t sound so enticing now that Prisma itself has begun supporting the format. The popular app can now apply filters to videos and spit out 15-second snippets that look much more artistic than their source. Even better, it can process files even if you’re offline , which the team made possible by optimizing the algorithm. The bad news? Only the iOS version of the app supports videos for now, but the team is working on bringing the feature (along with offline processing) to Android. If you’ve ever used the app, you know that it can take some time to pass images through its filters, so you may be wondering how much longer videos take. It all depends on your device: it will take iPhone 7 up to 30 seconds, iPhone 6s a full minute and iPhone 6 two minutes to reveal your 15-second masterpiece. At the moment, videos only work with nine filters, but the developers plan to add more until all their filters can be applied to both photos and videos. While the app sounds more useful now, this still isn’t Prisma’s final form: the company promises to add support for GIFs “very soon, ” so you can give those reaction GIFs the artistic touch they deserve. Source: iTunes

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Prisma’s art filters can turn your videos into moving paintings

Scientists map human brain in more detail than ever before

Scientists are still using a 100 year-old map to identify 83 known regions of the brain, but that’s about to change. A team from Washington University in St. Louis, working with the Human Connectome Project , has plotted 97 new areas of our gray matter, bringing the total to 180. The updated map will help researchers better explore the brain and may lead to breakthroughs in autism, schizophrenia and other neurological disorders. “If you want to find out what the brain can do, you have to understand how it is organized and wired, ” says study leader Dr. David Van Essen. Scientists scanned 1, 200 test subjects with customized MRI machines packing three teslas of magnetic field strength. The patients were given simple tasks like listening to stories and doing math to see which regions lit up. They found that certain brain areas are clearly involved with, say, listening to a story, while others map a person’s field of view or control movement. The team not only developed a precise, well-defined map, but also released an “alignment algorithm” so that other researchers can repeat the tests. The researchers defined 180 regions per hemisphere, but each of those can likely be subdivided further by future researchers. And while different regions of the brain perform specific functions, they also provide assistance and pass signals to other parts of the brain. In fact, the Human Connectome Project previously determined that strong connectivity between regions of the brain was a good marker for intelligence. Using the algorithm, researchers and doctors can map a new subject’s brain in an hour or so with nearly 97 percent accuracy, even if the regions are irregular. The study should help doctors find areas affected by diseases like dementia to better see how treatments are working. Down the road, it will serve as a blueprint for further development and help us discover more about how our brain’s tick, and therefore, what makes us human. Via: The New York Times Source: Nature , WUSTL

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Scientists map human brain in more detail than ever before