Your WIRED daily briefing. Today, Enceladus could support life, Tesla plans to reveal an electric lorry in September, Google has trained an AI to doodle like a human and more.
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Nasa has new evidence that oceans on Saturn's moon Enceladus have "the ingredients needed for a habitable environment" (WIRED). With reference to a newly published paper which found evidence for the presence of hydrogen - required for life - in data from the Cassini spacecraft's trip through the moon's geysers, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate Thomas Zurbuchen said: "These results demonstrate the interconnected nature of NASA's science missions that are getting us closer to answering whether we are indeed alone or not." Meanwhile, new findings by the Hubble Space Telescope indicate the presence erupting cryovolcanoes spewing plumes of water from Jupiter's moon Europa, and thus the likely presence of liquid water beneath its icy shell.
Tesla plans to reveal its first electric HGV tractor-trailer in September, according to CEO Elon Musk, who tweeted: "Tesla Semi truck unveil set for September. Team has done an amazing job. Seriously next level" (The Verge). He also revealed that the company plans to unveil an electric pick-up track in "18 to 24 months", with a convertible version of the Tesla Roadster also set to come in the future. So far, everything seems to be in line with last summer's update on Tesla's Master Plan development roadmap. In keeping with the company's current release schedule, the new Tesla Model 3 is set to get its official reveal in July.
Google scientists have trained an AI to sketch simple objects with all the gay abandon of a small child or a tech journalist trapped in a conference call (The Verge). Detailed in a new paper, the Sketch-RNN AI was trained on human input from the rather fun Quick, Draw! web game, released last year, in which a neural net tries to work out what human players are trying to draw. Learning from 70,000 doodles in 75 categories - including the order in which lines were drawn, as well as the final image - the [link url="[link url="https://www.wired.co.uk/topic/artificial-intelligence/"]artificial intelligence[/link] first combined parts of existing human attempts, and then began to create its own original sketches. While this kind of technology may in the future prove useful to artists and designers, Google's emphasis is on bridging the gap between neutral nets and the human creative process. Google Brain Resident David Ha writes: "These simple drawings may not resemble reality as captured by a photograph, but they do tell us something about how people represent and reconstruct images of the world around them."
Using the popular GloVe algorithm, trained on around 840 billion words from the internet, three Princeton University academics have shown AI applications replicate the stereotypes shown in the human-generated data (WIRED). These prejudices related to both race and gender. Machine learning, the computer scientists write in a paper published in Science, "absorbs stereotyped biases" when learning language. In the research, Bryson and colleagues Aylin Caliskan and Arvind Narayanan, used the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to determine where biases exist. Since it was developed in the 1990s the test type has been used in psychological studies to determine human traits. "A bundle of names associated with being European American was found to be significantly more easily associated with pleasant than unpleasant terms, compared to a bundle of African American names," the authors write in the research paper. In another instance, female names were found to be more associated with family than career words when compared to male names. The IATs completed by machine learning replicated the results of when humans completed the test. The findings of the study do not come as a massive surprise, as machine learning systems are only able to interpret the data they are trained upon.
Astronomers working with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) radio telescope have published details of what could be our solar system's next recognised dwarf planet: 2014 UZ224 , affectionately known as "DeeDee" - short for "distant dwarf" (Gizmodo). The new data for the first time indicates the rocky body's size, which appears to be around 625 kilometres across, or two-thirds the diameter of dwarf planet Ceres. Assuming DeeDee is sufficiently massive to be spherical, it'll qualify as a dwarf planet by International Astronomical Union (IAU) criteria. Lead author David Gerdes of the University of Michigan said: "Because these objects are so distant and dim, it's incredibly difficult to even detect them, let alone study them in any detail. ALMA, however, has unique capabilities that enabled us to learn exciting details about these distant worlds."
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A startup called Luminar Technologies has revealed a new high-resolution LiDAR sensor designed to improve the ability of autonomous vehicles to sense the world around them (TechCrunch). Luminar's LiDAR tech builds on the same principles used by established autonomous vehicle firms such as Alphabet's Waymo, but the young company engineers every element, from chips to lasers, in-house. During a public demonstration, Liminar's system clearly picked out hard-to-see hazards including a pigeon in the road, a weaving cyclist at over 100 metres away and pedestrians in dark clothes - all challenges that were barely, if at all, met by rival LiDAR systems. Luminar says that it's been working with four as-yet-unrevealed partner firms involved in autonomous vehicles and plans to build over 10,000 units of its system by the end of the year.
Nasa's #AdoptThePlanet scheme is hoping to encourage people to learn more about our home and play a part in its protection (WIRED ). The space agency has sectioned off 64,000 individual pieces of Earth to be "adopted" by supporters. While this process carries no legal rights, your adopted section will be added to a global map of the world, accompanied by a variety of scientific data. The pieces are roughly 55 miles wide and are assigned at random. Users can interact with this map and click anywhere in the world to view a range of data, including information regarding carbon monoxide levels, enhanced vegetation index, global digital elevation, sea ice and surface temperature. This data is compiled from a variety of sources, including Nasa's fleet of 18 Earth science missions, satellites in orbit and information from other space agencies. Nasa hopes to have all of the spaces adopted by Earth Day on April 22, 2017.
The prestigious Cannes Film Festival will for the first time screen films produced for streaming media service Netflix, as well as episodes from TV series, including the first two parts of David Lynch's new season of Twin Peaks (A.V. Club). Netflix's entries in the festival are Bong Joon-ho’s monster movie Okja and Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories, while arch-rival Amazon Studios also has two movies in the competition: Todd Haynes' Wonderstruck and Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here. The festival also sees its first ever VR film - Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Carne y Arena - and more women directors than ever before, although they still make up just 12 of 49. The 70th Cannes Film Festival will run from May 17 to 28.
Nintendo has officially announced that it's discontinuing its wildly popular NES Classic mini console in North America (NOA) and - apparently - elsewhere in the world (VG247). In a statement to IGN, the company said: "Throughout April, NOA territories will receive the last shipments of Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition systems for this year. We encourage anyone interested in obtaining this system to check with retail outlets regarding availability." Nintendo has also announced that in the case of the Japanese Famicom Classic: "Production of this product is ending temporarily. When manufacturing resumes, we will provide information at another time on this homepage." This leaves open the possibility that the mini console may return for future holiday season shopping sprees, in Japan, at least.
If you're stuck for something to do over the long weekend, look no further than the Humble Intergalactic Bundle, where you can pick up an entirely free copy of Stardock's sci-fi 4X strategy game, Galactic Civilizations, just for scrolling down the page and logging in or signing up for a Humble Bundle account (PC Gamer). For those who have a few pennies burning a hole in their pocket, other tiers - starting at $1 (80p) - will net you a variety of games set among the stars, ranging from Space Hulk Ascension to Planetary Annihilation: TITANS and the latest entry in the Galactic Civilizations series. The top tier costs $15 (£12) to unlock.
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