Revolutions

Because it's Friday: A timeline of the elements

A few chemical elements: copper, iron, sulphur, and a few others have been known since the dawn of time. This animated timeline, created by Dr Jamie Gallagher, shows the year of discovery (or in some cases, the creation) of the rest of them:

That's all from the blog for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll see you next week!

Because it's Friday: Synthetic faces, styled to your specifications

If you need someone's face to use in an application or some marketing materials, you might search one of the stock photography vendors for people of a given gender, skin tone, hairstyle, etc. Or, you could just ask the Generative Adversarial Network described in this paper by NVIDIA researchers to generate a brand new face for you. See it in action in the video below:

That's all for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back with more from the blog next week.

Because it's Friday: Happy Holidays

🎵 He'd better watch out // he'd better comply 🎵:

This is my favourite festive GDPR gag of Christmas 2018 so far. pic.twitter.com/2HheWIkviV

— Charlie King (@charlietheking) November 7, 2018

With the holiday season upon us, we'll be taking a little break here at the blog to relax and spend time with the family. We hope you get to do the same, and best wishes to all our readers for the season. We'll be back early in the new year: Happy New Year to all!

Because it's Friday: CGI you never knew was CGI

Computer-generated imagery in movies has gotten so good these days, much of the time you don't even realize it's there. You probably never noticed how Michael Cera's physique had been altered, or how Lost in Translation used motion capture technology from the future.

That's all from the blog team for this week. Have a great weekend, and see you next week!

Because it's Saturday: Go Your Own Way

I was delivering a workshop for AI Live yesterday so I didn't get the chance to do my Friday post, but I'm here at SatRDays DC and the playlist on the audio while we're waiting for things to start is amazing. Fleetwood Mac's Go Your Own Way just came on, which reminded me of this fascinating episode of Song Exploder where Lindsey Buckingham relates the story behind the song and how the musical components were layered together to crate the 1976 classic. 

We'll be back next week -- have a great weekend!

Because it's Friday: If planets were as close as the moon

What would the sky look like if Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, or Neptune were as close to us as the Moon is now? Well, other than the global calamity caused by extreme tides and general astrophysical disruption, it looks quite pretty.

If Planets were as close as the Moon pic.twitter.com/bBwIPtRQ1J

— Physics & Astronomy Zone (@ZonePhysics) November 25, 2018

That's all for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll be back next week.

Because it's Friday: Pavarotti v Mercury

This is Canadian performer Marc Martel, performing both parts of this "duet" between Freddy Mercury and Luciano Pavarotti. (Stay through the credits for a surprise about how the video was made.)

Martel provided vocals for some of the tracks in the recent Queen biopic, and his uncanny rendition of Mercury's part in Bohemian Rhapshody shows why.

That's all for us for this week. Have a great weekend, and we'll see you next week.

Because it's Friday: The physics of The Expanse

For a science fiction show set hundreds of years in the future, The Expanse is unusual in that it takes very few liberties with Science as we understand it today. The solar system is made up of the familiar planets we know (other than the colonists and space stations spread throughout the system), communication is limited by the speed of light, and and spaceships operate under standard Newtonian principles. You can get a good sense in this highlight reel of the visual effects of the show:

The series was recently saved from cancellation by Amazon: the first three series are streaming on Amazon Prime now (in the US at least) and I can't wait for the fourth season and the continuation of the excellent story, which hews closely to the source novels.

That's all from from the blog for this week. Next week will be a short week for us with US Thanksgiving coming up: if you're celebrating, have a great holiday!

 

Because it's Friday: Do the Robot

The engineers at Boston Dynamics are at it again. Here's one of the dog robots, dancing (and moonwalking!) to Uptown Funk (play with sound for best effect):

I assume this robot was programmed directly, but it won't be long before we're able to observe a professional dancer and automatically replicate their moves with a robot. It's already possible digitally: in the video below, the dancer on the right a synthetically animated based on a real dancer's moves:

That's all from the blog for this week. We'll be back next week: have a great weekend!

Because it's Friday: What does the cat say?

In Greek, it says "tsiou tsiou". In Danish, it says "pip-pip". In English, it says "cheep". At Derek Abbot's Animal Noise page, you can learn what a small bird sounds like according to 20 different languages, and for dozens of other animals, too. (The fox, however, is sadly absent.) It also lists common pet names by animal and country, and the different commands used to direct animals in different places.

That's all from the blog for this week. We'll be back next week and in the meantime, have a great weekend!