San Francisco News

3D-printing the brain’s blood vessels with silicone could improve and personalize neurosurgery – new technique shows how
Senthilkumar Duraivel, University of Florida and Thomas Angelini, University of Florida A new 3D-printing technique using silicone can make accurate models of the blood vessels in your brain, enabling neurosurgeons to train with more realistic simulations before they operate, according to our recently published research. Many neurosurgeons practice each surgery before they get into the operating room based on models of what they know about the patient’s brain. But the current models neurosurgeons use for training don’t mimic real blood vessels well. They provide unrealistic tactile feedback, lack small but important structural details and often exclude entire anatomical components that

AI isn’t close to becoming sentient – the real danger lies in how easily we’re prone to anthropomorphize it
Nir Eisikovits, UMass Boston ChatGPT and similar large language models can produce compelling, humanlike answers to an endless array of questions – from queries about the best Italian restaurant in town to explaining competing theories about the nature of evil. The technology’s uncanny writing ability has surfaced some old questions – until recently relegated to the realm of science fiction – about the possibility of machines becoming conscious, self-aware or sentient. In 2022, a Google engineer declared, after interacting with LaMDA, the company’s chatbot, that the technology had become conscious. Users of Bing’s new chatbot, nicknamed Sydney, reported that it

How to use free satellite data to monitor natural disasters and environmental changes
Qiusheng Wu, University of Tennessee If you want to track changes in the Amazon rainforest, see the full expanse of a hurricane or figure out where people need help after a disaster, it’s much easier to do with the view from a satellite orbiting a few hundred miles above Earth. Traditionally, access to satellite data has been limited to researchers and professionals with expertise in remote sensing and image processing. However, the increasing availability of open-access data from government satellites such as Landsat and Sentinel, and free cloud-computing resources such as Amazon Web Services, Google Earth Engine and Microsoft Planetary

Radio interference from satellites is threatening astronomy – a proposed zone for testing new technologies could head off the problem
Christopher Gordon De Pree, National Radio Astronomy Observatory; Christopher R. Anderson, United States Naval Academy, and Mariya Zheleva, University at Albany, State University of New York Visible light is just one part of the electromagnetic spectrum that astronomers use to study the universe. The James Webb Space Telescope was built to see infrared light, other space telescopes capture X-ray images, and observatories like the Green Bank Telescope, the Very Large Array, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and dozens of other observatories around the world work at radio wavelengths. Radio telescopes are facing a problem. All satellites, whatever their function, use