Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) models from the US-based AI company use deep learning to create images and human-like text. You can let your imagination run wild as DALL·E is trained to create diverse — and sometimes surreal — images depending on the text input. But the model has also raised questions regarding copyrights issues since DALL-E sources images from the Web to create its own.

AI illustrator DALL·E creates quirky images

The name DALL·E, as you might have already guessed, is a portmanteau of surrealist artist Salvador Dali and Pixar’s WALL·E. DALL·E can use text and image inputs to create quirky images. For example, it can create “an illustration of a baby daikon radish in a tutu walking a dog” or a “snail made of harp”. DALL·E is trained not only to generate images from scratch but also to regenerate any existing image in a way that is consistent with the text or image prompt.

Image results for the text prompt ‘a snail made of harp’

GPT-3 by OpenAI is a deep learning language model that can perform a variety of text-generation tasks using language input. GPT-3 could write a story, just like a human. For DALL·E, the San Francisco-based AI lab created an Image GPT-3 by swapping the text with images and training the AI to complete half-finished images.

DALL·E can draw images of animals or things with human characteristics and combine unrelated items sensibly to produce a single image. The success rate of the images will depend on how well the text is phrased. DALL·E is often able to “fill in the blanks” when the caption implies that the image must contain a certain detail that is not explicitly stated. For example, the text ‘a giraffe made of turtle’ or ‘an armchair in the shape of an avacado’ will give you a satisfactory output.

CLIPing text and images together

CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training) is a neural network that can perform accurate image classification based on natural language. It helps more accurately and efficiently classify images into distinct categories from “unfiltered, highly varied, and highly noisy data”. What makes CLIP different is that it does not recognise images from a curated data set, as most of the existing models for visual classification do. CLIP has been trained on a wide variety of natural language supervision that’s available on the Internet. Thus, CLIP learns what is in a picture from a detailed description rather than a labelled single word from a data set.

CLIP can be applied to any visual classification benchmark by providing the names of the visual categories to be recognised. According to the OpenAI blog, CLIP is similar to “zero-shot” capabilities of GPT-2 and GPT-3.

Models like DALL·E and CLIP have the potential of significant societal impact. The OpenAI team say that they will analyse how these models relates to societal issues like economic impact on certain professions, the potential for bias in the model outputs, and the longer-term ethical challenges implied by this technology.

A generative AI model like DALL·E that picks images directly from the Internet can pave the way to several copyright infringements. DALL·E can regenerate any rectangular region of an existing image on the Internet. And people have been tweeting about attribution and copyright of the distorted images.

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The project, headed by Professor Mohamed Thariq Hameed Sultan at Malaysia’s Putra University, has been trying to find sustainable uses for pineapple waste generated by farmers in Hulu Langat, an area about 65 km (40 miles) from Kuala Lumpur.

“We are transforming the leaf of the pineapple into a fibre that can be used for aerospace application, basically inventing a drone,” he told Reuters at a workshop.

Mohamed Thariq said drones made out of the bio-composite material had a higher strength-to-weight ratio than those made from synthetic fibres, and were also cheaper, lighter, and easier to dispose of.

A student holds pineapple leaf fibres at a workshop of University Putra Malaysia, in Serdang, Malaysia

If the drone was damaged, the frame could be buried in the ground and would degrade within two weeks, he said.

The prototype drones have been able to fly to a height of about 1,000 metres (3,280 ft) and stay in the air for about 20 minutes, he added.

Ultimately, the research team hopes to create a larger drone to accommodate bigger payloads, including imagery sensors, for agricultural purposes and aerial inspections.

“Our role here is to help the industry, the farmers, to increase their yield and make their jobs much easier,” said William Robert Alvisse of the Malaysian Unmanned Drones Activist Society, a non-governmental group helping to design the drone and advising on the project.

Before the project launched in 2017, pineapple stems were discarded after the once-in-a-year harvest period, but farmers hope the drones project will encourage more innovation to find uses for the waste and boost incomes.

“With the health issue, the economy problem due to COVID-19, the society is desperate and there is no alternative to increase income,” said pineapple farmer Irwan Ismail.

© Thomson Reuters 2020

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A new breakthrough could help reduced the carbon footprint of air travel, with the aim to bring emissions by jets to net zero. A team of researchers from Oxford University has successfully managed to turn carbon dioxide (CO2) into jet fuel, though as of now the experiment was performed at a very small scale. As concerns about climate change keep mounting by the day, scientists have been looking into converting CO2 into sustainable, synthetic hydrocarbons fuels for transportation purposes for a few years now. As of now, this reverse engineering has only been experimented in the lab but could be a game-changer when introduced on a larger scale – making air travel carbon neutral.

The team of researchers have discovered a way to use low-cost iron catalysts to convert CO2 in the atmosphere (or directly from emissions of factories) into synthetic jet fuel. The scientists first prepare the Fe-Mn-K (iron-manganese-potassium) catalyst by the organic combustion method (OCM). This catalyst then exhibits a CO2 conversion through hydrogenation to hydrocarbons in the aviation jet fuel range of 38.2 percent and a low carbon monoxide output of 5.6 percent. The conversion reaction also produces other by-products which are important raw materials for the petrochemical industry and are presently also only obtained from fossil crude oil.

In this method, the carbon dioxide extracted from air is employed for conversion and later re-emitted from jet fuels when combusted in flight. Resultantly, the overall effect of this process is a carbon-neutral fuel.

As of now, this process remains inside the walls of the lab. There are challenges that need to be overcome before this could be made a practically viable method of aviation fuel production. One of the hurdles involve carbon capturing – the process of capturing carbon from the atmosphere. The activation of CO2 is also a challenge. Another complication is that hydrocarbon synthesis via the hydrogenation of CO2 usually favours the formation of short-chain, rather than the desirable long-chain that is required for the synthesis of aviation fuel.

This new process represents a significant social advance that highlights CO2 recycling and resource conservation as an important, pivotal aspect of greenhouse gas management and sustainable development. This catalytic process is expected to be the route to achieving net-zero carbon emissions from the aviation industry in the near future – that is until we as a society are fully equipped to run on eco-friendly electric airplanes.

Speaking to Wired, one of the paper’s authors, Tiancun Xiao from Oxford’s Department of Chemistry, said, “Climate change is accelerating, and we have huge carbon dioxide emissions. The infrastructure of hydrocarbon fuels is already there. This process could help relieve climate change and use the current carbon infrastructure for sustainable development.”

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The Indian Space Research Organisation on Thursday said it has released the first set of data from the country”s second mission to the Moon, the Chandrayaan-2, for the general public. Chandrayaan-2 was launched on July 22, 2019 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre at Sriharikota in Andhra Pradesh. The Orbiter which was injected into a lunar orbit on September 2, 2019, carries eight experiments to address many open questions on lunar science.

“All experiments have been performing well and the data received suggests the excellent capability to deliver on the pre-launch promises,” ISRO said. In the period since the launch, payload teams tuned on-board systems for optimal instrument configurations, derived essential in-flight calibration data, revised / updated data processing steps / software and have started to publish early results, it said.
On Thursday the first set of data was being released for all users, the ISRO further said.

The public release data archived at the Indian Space Science Data Centre in Bylalu, near Bengaluru is prepared in the standard, globally followed Planetary Data System 4 (PDS4) format for public release, it added.

The Indian Space Science Data Centre (ISSDC) is the nodal centre of planetary data archive for the planetary missions of ISRO. The Chandrayaan-2 data is required to be in the Planetary Data System-4 (PDS4) standard, and is required to be peer-reviewed scientifically and technically before acceptance as PDS archives and declared ready for sharing with the global scientific community and the general public, ISRO said.

This activity has been completed and hence the first set of data from the Chandrayaan-2 mission is now being released for the wider public use through the PRADAN portal hosted by ISSDC.
The ISRO Science Data Archive (ISDA) currently holds data sets acquired by Chandrayaan-2 payloads from September-2019 to February-2020 from seven instruments.

Data sets from the Imaging Infra-Red Spectrometer (IIRS) payload will be added to this shortly, it said, adding that this release has Level-0 and Level-1 basic data sets prepared using Planetary Data System (PDS) version 4 standards. The Chandrayaan-2 mission was India”s first attempt to land on the lunar surface.

ISRO had planned the landing on the South Pole of the lunar surface. However, the lander Vikram hard-landed in September last year. Its orbiter, which is still in the lunar orbit, has a mission life of seven years. ISRO Chairman K Sivan had recently said that the work on the Chandrayaan-3 mission, comprising a lander and a rover, was in progress.

“We have not yet fixed the schedule (for the Chandrayaan-3 launch),” he had said.

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In an article in Cell, National Institutes of Health-funded researchers described how they used advanced genetic engineering techniques to transform a bacterial protein into a new research tool that may help monitor serotonin transmission with greater fidelity than current methods.

Preclinical experiments, primarily in mice, showed that the sensor could detect subtle, real-time changes in brain serotonin levels during sleep, fear, and social interactions, as well as test the effectiveness of new psychoactive drugs.

The study was funded, in part, by the NIH”s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative which aims to revolutionize our understanding of the brain under healthy and disease conditions.

The study was led by researchers in the lab of Lin Tian, PhD, principal investigator at the University of California Davis School of Medicine. Current methods can only detect broad changes in serotonin signaling. In this study, the researchers transformed a nutrient-grabbing, Venus flytrap-shaped bacterial protein into a highly sensitive sensor that fluorescently lights up when it captures serotonin.

Previously, scientists in the lab of Loren L. Looger, PhD, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus, Ashburn, Virginia, used traditional genetic engineering techniques to convert the bacterial protein into a sensor of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.

The protein, called OpuBC, normally snags the nutrient choline, which has a similar shape to acetylcholine. For this study, the Tian lab worked with Dr. Looger”s team and the lab of Viviana Gradinaru, Ph.D., Caltech, Pasadena, California, to show that they needed the added help of artificial intelligence to completely redesign OpuBC as a serotonin catcher.

The researchers used machine learning algorithms to help a computer ”think up” 250,000 new designs. After three rounds of testing, the scientists settled on one. Initial experiments suggested that the new sensor reliably detected serotonin at different levels in the brain while having little or no reaction to other neurotransmitters or similarly shaped drugs.

Experiments in mouse brain slices showed that the sensor responded to serotonin signals sent between neurons at synaptic communications points. Meanwhile, experiments on cells in petri dishes suggested that the sensor could effectively monitor changes in these signals caused by drugs, including cocaine, MDMA (also known as ecstasy) and several commonly used antidepressants.

Finally, experiments in mice showed that the sensor could help scientists study serotonin neurotransmission under more natural conditions. For instance, the researchers witnessed an expected rise in serotonin levels when mice were awake and a fall as mice fell asleep.

They also spotted a greater drop when the mice eventually entered the deeper, R.E.M. sleep states. Traditional serotonin monitoring methods would have missed these changes. In addition, the scientists saw serotonin levels rise differently in two separate brain fear circuits when mice were warned of a foot shock by a ringing bell.

In one circuit – the medial prefrontal cortex – the bell triggered serotonin levels to rise fast and high whereas in the other – the basolateral amygdala – the transmitter crept up to slightly lower levels.

In the spirit of the BRAIN Initiative, the researchers plan to make the sensor readily available to other scientists. They hope that it will help researchers gain a better understanding of the critical role serotonin plays in our daily lives and in many psychiatric conditions.

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A new Chinese carrier rocket made its first flight on Tuesday under a long-term plan to develop reusable launch vehicles aimed at reducing mission costs and speed up launch schedules for commercial clients.

The medium-lift Long March 8 Y-1 blasted off at 12:37pm (10:07am IST) from the southern Chinese island of Hainan carrying five satellites, state media reported.

China plans to develop reusable rockets under the Long March 8 series in the coming years, similar to the Falcon range already produced by U.S. private aerospace firm SpaceX.

State media did not say if the Long March 8 Y-1 itself was reusable, but future variants are expected to be capable of vertical takeoff and vertical landing (VTVL), allowing them to be used for more than one launch.

China will develop its first VTVL vehicle around 2025, an official at the China Aerospace Science and Technology, the country’s main space contractor, told a local conference in November.

The Long March 9 Y-1 launch wrapped up a hectic year for China’s space programme.

Earlier this month, China brought back rocks and soil from the moon in the first lunar sample retrieval since 1976. In July, China launched its first independent mission to Mars.

Around 2022, China aims to complete a multi-module, inhabited space station.

By 2045, it hopes to establish a programme operating thousands of flights a year and carrying tens of thousands of tonnes of cargo and passengers.

© Thomson Reuters 2020

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Winter Solstice this year will see a rare astronomical event – the Great Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. True to the saying that ‘every cloud has a silver lining,’ the pandemic-ridden 2020 is bringing a year-end treat for all of us. Google is also celebrating the Winter Solstice and the Great Conjunction with its latest doodle. You might be able to catch a glimpse of the Great Conjunction, happening for the first time in 400 years today, without any special equipment.

December 21 marks the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, which is the shortest day and longest night of the year, also when the sun is at its lowest daily maximum elevation. The exact opposite happens in the southern hemisphere today, where it is called the December Solstice or Summer Solstice. The Great Conjunction occurs when Jupiter and Saturn align from the perspective of the Earth. This vibrant planetary conjunction set to occur tonight is also being referred to as the ‘Christmas Star’.

What is the Great Conjunction?

According to Henry Throop, astronomer at NASA, “You can imagine the solar system to be a racetrack, with each of the planets as a runner in their own lane and the Earth toward the centre of the stadium. From our vantage point, we’ll be able to be to see Jupiter on the inside lane, approaching Saturn all month and finally overtaking it on December 21.”

The planets regularly pass each other in the solar system. The positions of Jupiter and Saturn are aligned in the sky about once every 20 years. But this year’s celestial spectacle is especially rare for a few reasons – it has been nearly 400 years since both the planets passed this close to each other in the sky. The last time it happened was in 1623, 13 years after Galileo Galilei built his first telescope, when it was given the name ‘The Great Conjunction.’

It has also been nearly 800 years since the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter occurred at night. The Great Conjunction is taking place at night this year, allowing many around the world to witness the extraordinary event of the alignment of these bright planets in our night sky.

The Google doodle

Google has dedicated a doodle celebrating this sparkling celestial episode. The animated doodle shows the alphabets of Google snow-capped, with the double O’s illustrated as Jupiter and Saturn respectively. In the doodle, Saturn hi-fives Jupiter as an excited Earth with a cute white winter cap watch on. On scrolling the mouse over the doodle, it reads, ‘Celebrating Winter 2020 and The Great Conjunction!’. You can click the doodle to see search results for “Winter solstice and the Great Conjunction.” The doodle is visible in India, Cambodia, Russia, most of Europe, part of Africa, and North America. A ‘Celebrating Summer 2020 and The Great Conjunction’ doodle is visible in the southern hemisphere, with the same animated doodle.

How to watch the Great Conjunction

As per NASA, Jupiter and Saturn would be appearing so close in the sky that a ‘pinkie finger at arm’s length’ will easily cover both the planets in the sky. You don’t even have go an extra mile to watch the Great Conjunction.

For those who would like to see this phenomenon for themselves, here’s what to do:

• Find a spot with an unobstructed view of the sky like a park or a field. Jupiter and Saturn are bright, so they can be seen even from most cities. Of course, parts of the world where the sun is out at the time of the conjunction (West of the Atlantic) will not be able to view the event easily.
• For the rest of us, including India, look to the southwestern sky an hour after sunset, just above the horizon. Jupiter will look like a bright star and be easily visible. Saturn will be slightly fainter.
• Keep a compass app installed in your phone so that you won’t be confused with the directions at the last minute. If you have a real compass with you, great!
• You can alternatively download an augmented reality sky watching app, such as Sky View Lite Android | iOS or and Star Walk 2 Android | iOS.
• The planets can be seen with the unaided eye, but if you have binoculars or a small telescope, you may be able to see Jupiter’s four large moons orbiting the giant planet too.

When to watch the Great Conjunction

Planetary Astronomer and observer of Jupiter and Saturn, Dr. James O’Donoghue has tweeted the “moment Jupiter and Saturn are closest in the sky” on December 21.”

According to Dr. James O’Donoghue the Great Conjunction will take place in India at 11:13pm IST. NASA has some photography tips for all of the sky-gazers who are looking to capture great shots of Saturn and Jupiter tonight.

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India successfully launched its latest communication satellite CMS-01 on board its Polar rocket from the spaceport here on Thursday, the second and last launch this year amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

ISRO’s trusted polar satellite launch vehicle, PSLV-C50, injected the satellite into the predefined orbit around 20 minutes after the lift-off from the second launch pad at the spaceport of Sriharikota.

CMS-01 is the 42nd communication satellite of the space agency and it is envisaged for providing services in Extended-C Band of the frequency spectrum covering India, Andaman and Nicobar, and Lakshadweep islands.

The satellite is functioning “very well”, ISRO Chairman K Sivan said. The solar panels of the satellite, a crucial operation, have been deployed, he said,addressing scientists from the Mission Control Centre.

“I am extremely happy to declare that the PSLV-C50 successfully injected CMS-01 communication satellite precisely into the predefined sub-Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit. In another four days from now, the satellite will be placed into the specified slot into the GTO,” he said.

Sivan said the satellite is going to function as a replacement for communication satellite GSAT-12 which was launched 11 years ago. CMS-01 will have a lifespan of over seven years, according to ISRO.

Congratulating the space agency’s launch and satellite vehicle teams, the chairman said “I am sure that this satellite will be doing all the functions as planned successfully.” Outlining ISRO’S future missions, Chandrayaan-3, flagship mission Aditya L-1, and Gaganyaan, he said they were planning to have missions at the earliest.

These included the much awaited GSLV (Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle) and SSLV (Small Satellite Launch Vehicle) missions. “Series of missions are on hand and as usual team ISRO will rise to the occasion..,” he said.

PSLV-C50 is the 22nd flight of PSLV in ”XL” configuration (equipped with six strap-on motors), and it was the 77th launch vehicle mission from Sriharikota, about 120 km from Chennai.

It follows the successful launch of PSLV-C49 (EOS-01) earth observation satellite and nine customer spacecraft on November 7 which was ISRO’s first mission of the year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Today’s launch is the last one of 2020 for ISRO.

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China will share data and samples from the moon obtained by its Chang’e 5 probe on the basis of international conventions though “unfortunate” US restrictions on cooperation might prevent it getting any, the deputy head of its space agency said.

The probe landed in the northern region of Inner Mongolia in the early hours of Thursday, bringing back the first lunar rocks and soil retrieved by any country since the 1970s and making China the third country ever to obtain lunar samples.

The material collected during the Chang’e 5 mission, named after the mythical Chinese goddess of the Moon, will further scientists’ understanding of the Moon’s origins.

The mission also tested China’s ability to remotely acquire samples from space, ahead of more complex missions in the solar system.

“In accordance with international cooperation conventions and multilateral and bilateral cooperation pacts, we will issue rules on managing the Moon samples and data,” said Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the China National Space Administration.

“We will share with the relevant countries and scientists overseas, and some of them may be given as national gifts in accordance with international practices.”

When asked if China would share any samples with the United States, which limits its NASA space agency from directly cooperating with China, Wu said existing US restrictions were “unfortunate”.

“The Chinese government is willing to share lunar samples with like-minded institutions and scientists from various countries,” Wu said.

“To be able to cooperate or not depends on US policy,” Wu said.

China was willing to cooperate with US agencies and scientists on the basis of equal benefit and win-win cooperation, he said.

China has not disclosed the amount of samples that it had retrieved. The plan was to collect 2 kg (4.41 lb) of rocks and soil.

“We will announce this soon,” Hu Hao, chief designer of the third phase of China’s lunar exploration programme, told Reuters on the sidelines of the briefing.

“We have not taken them out (of the probe) yet.”

© Thomson Reuters 2020

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A Canadian astronaut will take part in a lunar mission for the first time in 2023, as part of the NASA-led Artemis project, the minister for innovation, science and industry announced Wednesday.

“I am proud to announce another first: Canada will join the US on the first crewed mission to the Moon since the Apollo mission,” the minister, Navdeep Bains, told a press conference.

“This will make Canada only the second country after the US to have an astronaut in deep space.”

The mission, Artemis II, will see a crewed test flight sent into orbit in 2023 but will not involve an actual landing on the Moon, according to the US space agency.

Bains did not identify the Canadian astronaut chosen for the mission, the first to the Moon since 1972.

Eight nations, Australia, Canada, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the United Arab Emirates, Britain, and the United States, have signed a treaty to participate in NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to return humans to Earth’s nearest neighbour by 2024.

It also plans to establish a space station in lunar orbit, called Gateway.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said that Canada’s participation in the Artemis program is part of the country’s new space strategy, which includes an investment of CAD 2.05 billion (roughly Rs. 11,800 crores) over 24 years.

NASA hopes to build Gateway by 2026. It would serve as a landing point for missions to the Moon.

Artemis III is to send astronauts, including the first woman, to the Moon in 2024.

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