Lifeboat Foundation

For the first time, astronomers can investigate an orphan gamma-ray burst. Although the initial signal missed Earth, the interaction of the explosion with the gas and dust around it reveal the presence of the GRB.

Scientists believe they’ve discovered a new method to pin down just how fast our universe is expanding over time.

In a new study, a team of researchers from the University of Chicago found that studying the gravitational waves emitted by cosmic collisions could lead to more resolute predictions about how quickly the universe is expanding.

Continue reading “Gravitational waves could reveal how fast the universe is expanding” »

When you’ve been in operation since 1990, you need to hibernate things for seven years every once and awhile.

“Following the October 18 maneuvers, the team noticed a significant reduction in the high rates, allowing rates to be measured in low mode for brief periods of time,” NASA reports. “On October 19, the operations team commanded Hubble to perform additional maneuvers and gyro mode switches, which appear to have cleared the issue. Gyro rates now look normal in both high and low mode.”

Now, the space agency plans to test the gyro under conditions like those during routine science activities. Once these tests are done, the telescope should resume normal science observations.

Continue reading “NASA brings a Hubble gyro back to life after a seven-year hibernation” »

A shoutout to our country’s young visionaries!

One app allows users to contact each other when telecoms break down during disasters; the other gives fishermen information on weather conditions before fishing and where they should fish.

Salty water just below the surface of Mars could hold enough oxygen to support the kind of microbial life that emerged and flourished on Earth billions of years ago, researchers reported Monday. Current latest trending Philippine headlines on science, technology breakthroughs, hardware devices, geeks, gaming, web/desktop applications, mobile apps, social media buzz and gadget reviews.

Researchers at the Research Center for IT Innovation of Academia Sinica, in Taiwan, have recently developed a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) that has binary neurons at the output layer of the generator. This model, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, can directly generate binary-valued predictions at test time.

So far, GAN approaches have achieved remarkable results in modeling continuous distributions. Nonetheless, applying GANs to discrete data has been somewhat challenging so far, particularly due to difficulties in optimizing the model distribution toward the target data distribution in a high-dimensional discrete space.

Hao-Wen Dong, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore, “I am currently working on music generation in the Music and AI Lab at Academia Sinica. In my opinion, composing can be interpreted as a series of decisions—for instance, regarding the instrumentation, chords and even the exact notes to use. To move toward achieving the grand vision of a solid AI composer, I am particularly interested in whether deep generative models such as GANs are able to make decisions. Therefore, this work examined whether we can train a GAN that uses binary neurons to make binary decisions using backpropagation, the standard training algorithm.”

Continue reading “BinaryGAN: a generative adversarial network with binary neurons” »

China is planning to launch its own “artificial moon” by 2020 to replace streetlamps and lower electricity costs in urban areas, state media reported Friday. Current latest trending Philippine headlines on science, technology breakthroughs, hardware devices, geeks, gaming, web/desktop applications, mobile apps, social media buzz and gadget reviews.

Space could represent a new frontier for cloud infrastructure. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and Oracle battle for business from companies that are offloading their data center computing and storage needs.

The first study of its environmental impact suggests that extracting resources such as platinum from asteroids might be cleaner than doing so on Earth.