Are there any insects and animals in the world of genies?
SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) -- Although we do not see genies and may not be able to prove their existence through scientific and philosophical arguments, we must believe in them because the Holy Quran, the Messenger of Allah (pbuh) and Infallible Imams (a.s) have confirmed their existence. In the Holy Quran, the word “Jaan” has been mentioned seven times, the word “Jen” twenty two times, the word “Jennah” five times and the words “Shaitan”, “Shayatin” and “Iblis” ten times.[1]
For more details about the meaning of “Jen”, refer to question 138 on our website and for information about the features and specifics of “Jen”, refer to questions 5939, 729 and 15915.
What is inferred concerning the above question from the verses, traditions and different books in this regard is that genies, like human beings, live on earth and in this planet and they have no realm or world other than that which is inhabited by human beings. Therefore, what is assumed of trees, plants and other things in the world of genies are the same big and small entities which exist on planet earth.”
The only point that has something to do with the foregoing question is a narration in which Imam Sadiq (a.s.) reports from the Holy Prophet (pbuh) that he said:
“God, the Exalted, created five groups of genies: The first group is like wind in the air. The second group is like snakes. The third group is like scorpions. The fourth group is like insects of the earth and the fifth group is like human beings.”[2]
Hence, genies have been created in the form of insects and other animals and it is not true to say that they live in a world other than the world of human beings with insects and other animals created with them.
It can be said, therefore, that the animals which have been assumed in the world of genies are the genies themselves not other animals. In fact, according to God’s saying, all the genies have been created from fire because God, the Almighty, has said categorically that He created genies from fire.[3] The statement is absolute and unrestricted in the same way as God’s saying about man’s creation where He says that He created man from clay.[4]
[1] - Qarashi, Sayyid Ali Akbar, Tafsir Ahsanul Hadith, vol.11, p. 378, Be’athat Foundation, Tehran, 3rdedition, 1377 (1998).
[2] - Majlisi, Muhammad Baqir, Behar al-Anwar, vol.60, p. 267, vol.87, p. 224; Husseini Shah Abdul Azimi, Hussein bin Ahmad, Tafsir Ithna Ashari, vol. 13, p. 340; Miqat Publications, Tehran, first edition, 1363 (1984).
[3] - Al-Hijr, 27: «وَ الجْانَّ خَلَقْنَاهُ مِن قَبْلُ مِن نَّارِ السَّمُوم» (And We created Jaan earlier from hot and burning fire.)
[4] - Al-Momenoon, 12: «وَ لَقَدْ خَلَقْنَا الْانسَنَ مِن سُلَالَةٍ مِّن طِین» (And certainly We created man of an extract of clay.)
Introducing a robot that's smarter than a buzzing insect
SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) — The latest advances in robotics include bee-brained drones and the James Bond theme played by quadrocopters. Hear that, Adele?
Bot Vid: Quadrocopters Play Catch
Precision quadrocopter aerobatics are always eye-pleasing, but the amazing display can distract us from remembering why someone bothered to do that. Now ETH Zurich has a new video of three quadrocopters cooperating to toss a ball in the air and catch it in a net--it's impressive. But it also demonstrates incredible coordination and advanced processing in each machine to keep its balance in the air as it experiences complex dynamic forces from the net. It's all about improving the utility of these amazing machines, which will eventually help their use as drones.
Bot Vid: PR2 Learns To Butler
PR2 from Willow Garage is already one of the most promising research robots because of his widespread use in universities--enabling scientists and engineers to refine algorithms for making robots work alongside humans. Now the Automaton blog reports a PR2 at Georgia Tech has been programmed to carry trays around without spilling the contents. This is a surprisingly tricky task that you take for granted, thanks to practice and acute awareness of the balance of a tray. But it's a hard task for robots, and one that they must master if they're to be useful as robot butlers or in medicine (because as well as tray-carrying it's useful to be able to balance complex objects).
Bot Vid: Fire-fighting Bot
The Thermite RC robot is in the news this week because it's being heralded as the world's first production fire-fighting robot. It's a lot like a rugged caterpillar robot along the lines of iRobot's warbots, and it can be operated from a quarter of a mile away and shoot 600 gallons of water a minute onto a blaze. It has to tug a firehose behind it, of course, which is perhaps one weakness. But because it can be used in dangerous situations you wouldn't want a human fire-fighter going near (like a chemical fire or an uncontrolled forest fire) it's likely to be incredibly useful. It's also not going to be the last fire bot you hear about.
Bot Vid: Licensed To Thrill, Quadrocopters Play Bond
An oldie, but goodie. And how could we not show this now that James Bond is back on our screen in Skyfall? Plus it's another demonstration of how incredibly precise quadrocopter drones can be programmed to fly.
Bot News
Transporter turtle bots. As well as aerial drones, the students at ETH Zurich are also working on an incredible robot called Naro-Tartaruga. It's a seagoing robot, designed to loosely bio-mimic the swimming motion of turtles. These amazing creatures swim their bulky bodies through water with relative ease, maneuverability, and high efficiency--all things we guess might make a giant sea-swimming cargo robot a potentially useful alternative to giant transporter ships.
Nissan's car robot. At the CEATEC show this week the carmaker Nissan showed off its latest robot car development, and it's an eye-opener. The NSC-2015 is a very modified Nissan Leaf that can park itself, come when you call it via a smartphone, and alert you if someone tries to steal it--even delivering live 360-degree video footage of the car's exterior so you can see the thief. Some of this tech will be in production cars in 2015 and 2016, but in a limited form, and self-parking may only be enabled in dedicated lots.
Sweden's robot museum guide. A new robot has joined the fleet of machines helping guide visitors around museums, and in this case she's called Bib and she's working at the Technical Museum in Malmo, Sweden. She uses several tricks to make her more approachable, including being voiced by a Swedish comedienne in a local accent, and being able to ask for help if she falls over or gets lost.
Bot Futures: Smart Robots With Bee Brains, Soon To Be Your Co-Workers
Scientists in U.K. universities are taking biomimicry in robots to a totally weird and wonderful new level. Instead of learning how animals and plants move or adapt in nature, they're actually planning to upload a brain from an animal into a robot to give it a kind of neural-net smartness that may surpass other AI efforts in simple robotics.
Their animal of choice: A bee.
Speaking to PCPro.com, the scientists explained that a bee makes a great example because honeybees are very sophisticated insects capable of doing many tasks that much larger animals can also do. But where bigger animals have billions of neurons in their brains, honeybees have a far more manageable one million neurons. That's a scale that's much more easy to model in a powerful computer than a larger animal (humans, for example, have around 100 billion neurons that are connected by around 100 to 500 trillion synapses in adulthood). Bigger animals have bigger brains, in part, to control their bigger bodies--but bees are still capable of complex autonomous tasks as well as community interaction, which makes them a very useful model. The science team thinks any resulting robot drone aircraft may be smart enough to use its bee-like sense to search for survivors in post-disaster scenarios, and other simple tasks.
That's amazingly interesting, but perhaps the part of this news that will most surprise you is the hardware the team is using. The drone is the kind of quadrocopter you can buy to control with your iPhone for a couple of hundred dollars. The bee-brain simulation happens not in a supercomputer but in a PC that's equipped with some very fast GPU-accelerator cards that have sprung from the gaming industry's innovations. These are swift enough and capable of enough parallel computing calculations that they can realistically emulate how a bee's brain would react--at a speed that's fast enough to keep the quadrocopter stable while flying.
Essentially this is a biomimic robot drone that's made with off-the-shelf parts, and is as smart as a bee. Which is pretty smart. What kind of artificial intelligence would you be able to create if you used dedicated high-end computing power?
While you ponder the implications of that, other AI-capable flying robots are in the news thanks to the developments of assistant professor Chengyu Cao at the University of Connecticut. His team is using advanced processing and sensor networks to develop artificially intelligent helicopter drones, quadrocopter drones, and even undersea vehicles. By sensing their environment, and perhaps even working collaboratively as a fleet, Cao's machines are far from the limited remote-control drones we have now, or more sophisticated ones that can autonomously navigate to a set point--using limited straight-line flight or pre-programmed routes. Cao's drones can sense their environment and react adaptively, choosing to fly around a tree that they find in their path, for example.
Professor Cao himself foresees a near future where machines cannot only navigate smartly from point to point by themselves, but will be able to react and adapt to their changing conditions without human interruption. That'll lead to situations where smart robots work autonomously alongside humans in scientific research, rescue situations, or even in environmental monitoring.
What these two pieces of research show is that drone robotics, in particular, is advancing at an incredible rate that may surprise you. Not only will near-future drones be more complex and reliable, but they'll also be smarter and able to think for themselves to a limited degree. That also implies that advances in AI and autonomous behavior may trickle down to other robots sooner rather than later--and that's a good thing. After all, if your dog can perform simple fetch tasks, why couldn't a butler bot with a neural net brain of about the same power help you around the home?— www.shafaqna.com/English
Source: Fastcompany
New insect discovered via photo-sharing site Flickr
SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) — A pretty picture of bug posted to a social media website led to the real-world discovery of a new species of green lacewing in the Malaysian rainforest.
Guek Hock Ping took photos of the green lacewing and posted them to photo-sharing site Flickr where entomologist Shaun Winterton from the California Department of Food and Agriculture stumbled upon them.
A network of black lines and flecks of blue were something the expert had never seen before. He shot Ping an email.
Unfortunately for science, Ping said he’d taken the pictures and let the bug fly away. No bug captured, no bug for analysis.
A year later, however, the photographer was back in the forest and found another green lacewing. This time he captured it for the sake of science and emailed Winterton with the news.
The entomologist arranged for the specimen to be sent to colleague Steve Brooks at the National History Museum of London, who found a matching unclassified specimen in the museum’s archives.
Working together via Google Docs, the trio wrote a paper describing the lacewing, which they named Semachrysa jade. The paper was published in the latest issue of the open-source biodiversity journal ZooKeys.
Given the number of photographers out there with high-quality camers and posting their work online for the world to see, Winterton told NPR that many more such discoveries are forthcoming.—www.shafaqna.com/english
Source: NBCNEWS.Futureoftech
US military developing insect surveillance drones
SHAFAQNA (Shia International News Association) — Reports indicate the US military has poured huge sums of money into surveillance drone miniaturization and is developing micro aircraft which now come in a swarm of bug-sized flying spies.
According to various internet sources, a team of researchers at the Johns Hopkins University in conjunction with the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Arlington, Virginia, is helping develop what they are calling a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) that will undertake various espionage tasks.
The robotic insect can effortlessly infiltrate urban areas, where dense concentrations of buildings and people, along with unpredictable winds and other obstacles make it impractical.
It can be controlled from a great distance and is equipped with a camera and a built-in microphone.
The new device has the capability to land precisely on human skin, use its super-micron sized needle to take DNA samples and fly off again at speed. All people feel is the pain of a mosquito bite without the burning sensation and the swelling of course.
The hard-to-detect surveillance drone can also inject a micro radio frequency identification (RFID) tracking device right under skin, and can be used to inject toxins into enemies during wars.
As early as in 2007, the US government was accused of secretly developing robotic insect spies when anti-war protesters in the United States saw some flying objects similar to dragonflies or little helicopters hovering above them.
The US is not alone in miniaturizing drones that imitate nature: France, the Netherlands and Israel are also developing similar devices.
France has developed flapping wing bio-inspired micro drones. The Netherlands BioMAV (Biologically Inspired AI for Micro Aerial Vehicles) has also built Parrot AR drones.
Meanwhile, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) has produced a butterfly-shaped drone, weighing just 20 grams, which can gather intelligence inside buildings.
The insect drone, with its 0.15-gram camera and memory card, is managed remotely with a special helmet. Putting on the helmet, the operator finds themselves in the “butterfly’s cockpit” and virtually sees what the butterfly sees in real time.—www.shafaqna.com/english
Source: WR NEWZ
