May 2013

Peter Cushing in the trailer of the movie The Brides of Dracula

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Peter Wilton Cushing was born on May 26, 1913 in Kenley, South London, England. He’s been a great actor in theatre, television and cinema. He’s been a simbol of horror movies in the ’60s and ’70s. He had other famous roles such as Sherlock Holmes, The Doctor and Tarkin in “Star Wars”.

Image of the Ring Nebula obtained combining observations from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Large Binocular Telescope (Image NASA, ESA, C.R. Robert O’Dell (Vanderbilt University), G.J. Ferland (University of Kentucky), W.J. Henney and M. Peimbert (National Autonomous University of Mexico), David Thompson (University of Arizona))

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The Hubble Space Telescope gave us the most detailed observations ever obtained of the Ring Nebula. It’s a well known nebula but it still had some secrets. Now it’s been possible to build a three-dimensional model which includes the surrounding region by combining observations taken using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 with other ones such as the infrared ones from the Telescope Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mount Graham, Arizona, and the spectroscopic data from the San Pedro Martir Observatory in Mexico.

IBM Watson Solutions VP Stephen Gold interacts with the system (Photo courtesy IBM. All rights reserved)

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IBM launched Watson Engagement Advisor, a new version of its artificial intelligence technology system Watson. Two years after winning the quiz Jeopardy!, IBM Watson will now be used for customer service, even handling conversations with users understending their questions and providing them with adequate answers via chat, e-mail, SMS and smartphone apps.

Rendering of a bacteriophage virus

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A group of researchers at San Diego State University led by microbial ecologist Forest Rohwer found that the mucus that exist in the body of almost all the animals in various organs contain a type of bacteriophage (informally phage) viruses (image ©Adenosine) that can function as a second immune system that procects from infections.

128 qubit quantum processor by D-Wave Systems (Photo D-Wave Systems)

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Last week Google announced the launch of the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab together with NASA’s Ames Research Center and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA). This laboratory will host a quantum computer created by D-Wave Systems, the D-Wave Two model that will be used for various scientific research, particularly on machine learning. The ultimate goal is to build new models for problems such as climate change.