Even a UN is Right Twice a Day; Graphene Screen; Data Film; Steam Suit; Foolish AI; Federated Learning; and The Cats Ain't Enough

Israel

Top UN Official Calls Jerusalem the Ancient Capital of Israel israeltoday.co.il

Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, which last year passed a motion denying the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, shocked many last week when she publicly affirmed the Jews’ historic connection to the Holy City.

Research

Graphene is the key to tougher flexible OLED displays engadget

The hyped wonder material is both flexible and shouldn't chip, which is more than a little important for a display that you're going to bend and twist. This will ideally lead to displays woven into your clothes, or next-generation wearables that can take a lot of punishment.

Ultra-Thin Multilayer Film for Next-Generation Data Storage and Processing rdmag t

The nano-sized thin film, which was developed in collaboration with researchers from Brookhaven National Laboratory bnl.gov, Stony Brook University stonybrook.edu, and Louisiana State University lsu.edu, is a critical step towards the design of data storage devices that use less power and work faster than existing memory technologies. The invention was reported in prestigious scientific journal Nature Communications on 10 March 2017.

Taking the heat: Navy tests new submarine steam suits phys.org

Machinist's Mate 1st Class Nathan Lindner was testing the newest suit designed to protect Sailors from steam leaks on nuclear-powered submarines. He pulled on thick gloves and boots, and donned a face shield for a self-contained breathing apparatus. Then he slid into the sleek, silver prototype steam suit, hoisted an air tank onto his back and connected a regulator to the breathing apparatus. Total time: a little more than two minutes.

AI

The tiny changes that can cause AI to fail bbc

To you, the stop sign looks exactly the same as any other. But to the car, it looks like something entirely different. Minutes earlier, unbeknownst to either you or the machine, a scam artist stuck a small sticker onto the sign: unnoticeable to the human eye, inescapable to the technology.

Google Makes Your Smartphone Smarter With Federated Learning forbes

Google is working on a machine learning technique that allows deep learning models that reside on a mobile device to learn directly from the user’s input without having to send the user's data to the cloud. The result is immediate improvements in performance for the user, subsequent improvements for all users, and increased privacy. They call it federated learning and it has the potential to be a game changer.

Five years ago, AI was struggling to identify cats. Now it’s trying to tackle 5000 species qz

Five years later, a contest Google is sponsoring speaks volumes about the field’s advancement. Instead of finding cats, researchers will be required to train an AI to identify more than 5000 different species of plants and animals. The contest, called iNat, will open in June and conclude in July.