DeepArt - Paints your Potrait

What would you say to having your selfie turned into a Van Gogh or Matisse painting? That’s exactly what you can do with DeepArt, an algorithm that can generate a digital painting from any photo. It is now available for the first time on a platform designed at EPFL.

The process is easy enough to explain, but it draws on the latest advances in deep learning, which refers to automatic learning algorithms that make use of high-level abstractions. Those algorithms are used for such things as face recognition and computer vision. With DeepArt, the user provides the computer with a photo and asks it to produce a painting according to a particular style or artist. “The algorithm analyzes the image and extracts the key features, such as a face or an object,” said Kidzinski.

 

The program then paints an image by repeatedly comparing the initial features with the painting it is meant to emulate. After around 10 minutes of calculations, the painting is ready: the program delivers a unique, original work of art.

http://actu.epfl.ch/news/deepart-the-computer-that-paints-your-portrait/

The Jungle Book 'Tech & vfx' Featurette (2016)

 

 

 

Saturn’s past and present moons

Saturn’s beautiful rings form a striking feature, cutting across this image of two of the planet’s most intriguing moons.

The rings have been a source of mystery since their discovery in 1610 by Galileo Galilei. There is not full agreement on how they formed, but among the possibilities are that they may have formed along with Saturn, or that they are debris of a former moon that strayed too close to the planet and was ripped apart.

The rings are now shepherded by the gravity of some of the planet’s surviving moons. Of more than 60 known natural satellites, two of the most fascinating are also pictured in this image: Titan and Enceladus.

At 5150 km across, Titan is 10 times larger than Enceladus, which measures just 505 km in diameter. Titan is seen as a disc because light from the distant Sun is being refracted through the moon’s dense atmosphere.

Somewhere on Titan’s surface rests the Huygens probe. On 25 December 2004, Huygens detached from the Cassini mothership and, a few weeks later, parachuted through the dense atmosphere to return the first pictures of Titan’s rugged landscape of icy mountains.
Although Enceladus is a smaller moon, it has as much character. The restless interior means that water constantly jets through cracks in the icy surface. In some images, these geysers can be glimpsed at the south pole.

The image was taken on 10 June 2006 in red light with the Cassini spacecraft’s narrow-angle camera, and is orientated with north facing up. The spacecraft was some 3.9 million km from Enceladus and 5.3 million km from Titan.

Copyright NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Image & Info via ESAhttp://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2016/04/Saturn_s_past_and_present_moons

Funny and Weird Clips (765)

SpaceX

 

SpaceX announced they are planning to send their Red Dragon capsule to Mars as soon as 2018

To send Red Dragon spacecraft to Mars, SpaceX is building a mega-rocket called Falcon Heavy. Based on the company’s successful Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy consists of three core rocket stages, each of which is equipped with landing legs for re-usability. They would use the capsule’s thrusters to make a landing. 

Article:https://spaceflightnow.com/2016/04/27/spacex-announces-plan-to-send-mission-to-mars-in-2018/

Reference:http://www.spacex.com/falcon-heavy

Nansen gives birth to two icebergs

Multiple satellites, including Europe’s Sentinels, have captured images of two large icebergs that broke away from Antarctica’s Nansen ice shelf on 7 April.

The icebergs are drifting to the northeast, propelled by wind, tides and currents. Experts say they do not pose any immediate threat of blocking supply routes to research stations such as the Italian Mario Zucchelli and South Korean Jang Bogo Stations in Terra Nova Bay.

Nonetheless, the icebergs may pose a threat to sea-floor moorings in the region that have been used by Italy’s National Antarctic Programme since the 1990s, and more recently by New Zealand ocean scientists.

The Nansen ice shelf, around 50 km long and 25 km wide, developed a fracture over recent years. Ice shelves are particularly sensitive to climate change because they can melt from warm air at the surface and warming ocean waters below.Source & further reading:http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Copernicus/Sentinel-1/Nansen_gives_birth_to_two_icebergs

Funny and Weird Clips (764)

Teslaphoresis

Scientists from Rice University have developed a way to make carbon nanotubes self-assemble in a dish using a powerful Tesla coil transformer circuit.

Similar to graphene, carbon nanotubes are considered “supermaterials” with many potential applications but they have yet to be implemented on a wide scale. This new development will allow scientists to build circuits without actually touching them, marking a major step forward for potential uses of the material.

Watch:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1d0Lg6wuvc

Paper:http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acsnano.6b02313

Article:http://techcrunch.com/2016/04/14/teslaphoresis-activated-self-assembling-carbon-nanotubes-look-even-cooler-than-they-sound/
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/watch-these-carbon-nanotubes-assemble-themselves?utm_source=mbfb

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