Lifeboat Foundation

Glasgow University has taken delivery of Scotland’s most powerful magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner.

The £10m device was lifted into place at the new Imaging Centre of Excellence (ICE) at the city’s Queen Elizabeth University Hospital (QEUH).

A giant crane eased the 18-tonne scanner down an alleyway with inches to spare on each side, then through a hole in the wall of the new building.

New technology has been developed that uses nuclear waste to generate electricity in a nuclear-powered battery. A team of physicists and chemists from the University of Bristol have grown a man-made diamond that, when placed in a radioactive field, is able to generate a small electrical current.

Shift 2: Open-source code, Node, and frameworks

Once widely considered a toy language, Node has quickly taken over the web and fostered an incredible open-source community. For those who are unfamiliar, Node is a way for JavaScript to run on a server. What’s so incredible about Node is that the same developers who were only writing client-side code (front-end web development) can now write backend code without switching languages.

In addition, there is an incredible community that rallies around and thrives off of open-source contributions. The infrastructure and open-source packages are very powerful, allowing developers to not just solve their own problems, but also to build in a way that solves problems for the entire community. Building a software product with Node today is like playing with Lego blocks; you spend most of your time simply connecting them.

Continue reading “What happens when bots start writing code instead of humans” »

Intel is making a huge push into AI and deep learning, and intends to build custom variants of its Xeon Phi hardware to compete in these markets. Several months ago, the Santa Clara corporation bought Nervana, an AI startup, and this new announcement is seen as building on that momentum. AI and deep learning have become huge focuses of major companies in the past few years — Nvidia, Google, Microsoft, and a number of smaller firms are all jockeying for position, chasing breakthroughs, and building their own custom silicon solutions.

The upcoming Knights Mill is still pretty hazy, but Intel has stated that the chip will be up to 4x faster than existing Knights Landing hardware. Right now, the company is working on three separate forays into the AI / deep learning market. First up, there’s Lake Crest. This product is based on Nervana technology that existed prior to the Intel purchase. Nervana was working on an HBM-equipped chip with up to 32GB of memory, and that’s the product Intel is talking about rolling out to the wider market in the first half of 2017. Lake Crest will be followed by Knights Crest, a chip that takes Nervana’s technology and implements it side-by-side along with Intel Xeon processors.

“The technology innovations from Nervana will be optimized specifically for neural networks to deliver the highest performance for deep learning, as well as unprecedented compute density with high-bandwidth interconnect for seamless model parallelism,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich wrote in a recent blog post. “We expect Nervana’s technologies to produce a breakthrough 100-fold increase in performance in the next three years to train complex neural networks, enabling data scientists to solve their biggest AI challenges faster.”

Continue reading “Intel announces major AI push with upcoming Knights Mill Xeon Phi, custom silicon” »

Plus, a perfume that can cover your genetic tracks.

Since the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) needs to be in tip-top shape to discover new particles, it has two inspectors making sure everything’s in working order. The two of them are called TIM, short not for Timothy, but for Train Inspection Monorail. These mini autonomous monorails that keep an eye on the world’s largest particle collider follow a pre-defined route and get around using tracks suspended from the ceiling. According to CERN’s post introducing the machines, the tracks are remnants from the time the tunnel housed the Large Electron Positron instead of the LHC. The LEP’s monorail was bigger, but not quite as high-tech: it was mainly used to transport materials and workers.

As for what the machines can do, the answer is “quite a few.” They can monitor the tunnel’s structure, oxygen percentage, temperature and communication bandwidth in real time. Both TIMs can also take visual and infrared images, as well as pull small wagons behind them if needed. You can watch them in action below — as you can see, they’re not much to look at with their boxy silver appearance. But without them, it’ll be tough monitoring a massive circular tunnel with a 17-mile circumference.

Continue reading “CERN introduces Large Hadron Collider’s robotic inspectors” »

Forget the LHC – from squished electrons to self-destructing protons, careful scrutiny of everyday particles acting strangely may refresh our picture of reality.

By Lisa Grossman

FOR a few heady months last year, the door to an unknown world was nudged ajar. An anomaly in data from the Large Hadron Collider, based at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, indicated the presence of a peculiar new particle, a visitor so unexpected that it promised to transform our picture of how nature works. Then, with more data, the anomaly disappeared. The door creaked shut again.

Continue reading “5 Deviant Particles That Could Spark a Revolution in Physics” »

The birth of the first baby born using a technique called mitochondrial replacement, which uses DNA from three people to “correct” an inherited genetic mutation, was announced on Sept. 27.

Mitochondrial replacement or donation allows women who carry mitochondrial diseases to avoid passing them on to their child. These diseases can range from mild to life-threatening. No therapies exist and only a few drugs are available to treat them.

There are no international rules regulating this technique. Just one country, the United Kingdom, explicitly regulates the procedure. It’s a similar situation with other assisted reproductive techniques. Some countries permit these techniques and others don’t.

Continue reading “The next frontier in reproductive tourism? Genetic modification” »

Scientists have developed a new type of artificial muscle fibre based on nylon, which could one day render our future robot companions more realistic than ever.

Unlike previous synthetic muscles, this technology is cheap and simple to produce, which makes it a better option if we want our droids to be able to flex, move, and repair themselves in much the same way as flesh-and-blood people.

Continue reading “Artificial Humans Could Be Even More Realistic With These New Nylon Muscles” »