Some people ask what they’re supposed to do while waiting for their EV to charge. Tesla has just added a new option in Germany. It’s time for a swim.
Category: futurism – Page 608
Synchrotron analyses could be used to fast-track the development of novel high-strength steel designs
Knowing how strong a piece of steel is, especially the stainless steel used in everything from cars to buildings, is vitally important for the people who make and use it. This information helps to keep people safe during crashes and to prevent buildings from collapsing.
Accurately predicting the strength of a steel prototype based on its microstructure and composition would be indispensable when designing new types of steel, but it has been nearly impossible to achieve—until now.
“Designing/making the best-strength steel is the hardest task,” said Dr. Harishchandra Singh, an adjunct professor at NANOMO and the Centre for Advanced Steels Research at the University of Oulu in Finland.
Scientists Have Made Mice Partially Regrow Amputated Toes
Circa 2019
Scientists have identified two proteins that can partially stimulate growth in amputated toes in mice, a discovery that puts us one step closer to one day being able to replace amputated limbs in humans.
While bone growth has been achieved before, the new research demonstrates signs of joint growth as well — this shows a level of complexity we haven’t seen before. Both joints and bones are crucial if one is trying to bring back lost limbs.
Having previously regenerated bone in mice using the BMP2 protein, here the scientists added another to the mix: BMP9. When using the combination on mice with amputated toes, over 60 percent of the stump bones formed a layer of cartilage within three days. Without the proteins, the amputated toes would’ve healed over as normal.
20B-parameter Alexa model sets new marks in few-shot learning
To train AlexaTM 20B, we break with convention, training on a mix of denoising and causal-language-modeling (CLM) tasks. On the denoising task, the model is required to find dropped spans and generate the complete version of the input. This is similar to how other seq2seq models like T5 and BART are trained. On the CLM task, the model is required to meaningfully continue the input text. This is similar to how decoder-only models like GPT-3 and PaLM are trained.
Training on a mix of these two pretraining tasks enables AlexaTM 20B to generalize based on the given input and generate new text (the CLM task), while also performing well on tasks that seq2seq models are particularly good at, such as summarization and machine translation (the denoising task).
For example, we demonstrated that, given a single article-summarization pair, AlexaTM 20B can generate higher-quality summaries in English, German, and Spanish than the much larger PaLM 540B can (see example, below).
US solar sector prepares to meet smart inverter requirements
A handful of states already require new distributed resource installations to use smart inverters that meet a standard known as IEEE 1547–2018. As more devices that meet the standard become available, more states are evaluating such a requirement. The SunSpec Alliance expects that more than 30 states will set smart inverter requirements by April 2023 based on an examination of state regulatory dockets from the past year, said SunSpec Alliance Chair Tom Tansy in an email.
Most smart inverter manufacturers will be able to provide smart inverters to project developers and distributors sometime between March and August 2023, according to an analysis from the Interstate Renewable Energy Council (IREC) authored by IREC chief regulatory engineer Brian Lydic.
How the U.S. can remain competitive in global robotics industry
From top-left to bottom right: Joel Reed, Tom Ryden, Andra Keay, Jeff Burnstein, Matt Johnson-Roberson and Ritch Ramey joined Congressman Mike Doyle for a robotics roundtable discussion. | Source: Carnegie Mellon University.
Carnegie Mellon University held a robotics caucus virtual roundtable last week with leaders from the U.S. robotics industry. The roundtable discussed the future of the industry and how the U.S. can keep up with the pace of the global industry.
The following speakers took part in the roundtable:
The Difference Between Brushed and Brushless Motors
Circa 2020 Brushless motors are awesome some can reach 50,000 rpm or higher they seem to be the next generation after brushed motors.
Brushed or brushless motors? Which one would you choose and why?
Earth records its shortest ever day as 1.59 milliseconds was shaved off 24-hour spin
Blink and you miss it! 🌏
Planet Earth has recorded its shortest day since records began.
The 1.59 milliseconds shaved off the usual 24-hour spin on June 29 raises the prospect of a leap second having to occur to keep clocks aligned. This would be the first time global clocks have been sped up.
The Earth’s rotation has been known to slow down, with 27 leap seconds needed to keep atomic time accurate since the 1970s. The last was on New Year’s Eve 2016, when clocks paused for a second to allow the Earth to catch up.
The Kola Superdeep Borehole Is The Deepest Vertical Borehole In The World
Back in the 1970s, the Soviet Union began an ambitious project to drill down 15 km. Whilst they didn’t succeed, the Kole Superdeep Borehole is still the deepest vertical borehole in the world.
