Lifeboat Foundation

The New York City subway system is gearing up for a major overhaul meant to bring a “modernized look and feel” to lighting, wayfinding and subway cars by the year 2020. At a press conference on Monday, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s $27 billion, five-year plan to add 1,025 new subway cars, more informative digital screens, better security features and — most importantly for anyone who needs to get some work done underground – WiFi and USB charging ports in the cars and stations.

“People want to work, and they want their device to work 24 hours a day,” Governor Cuomo during the event at the New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn. “They don’t want to have to look up. There has to be WiFi, and there need to be charging ports.”

In addition to free juice and an internet connection, the new subway cars will sport “full color digital customer information displays,” as well as new digital ad space. On a practical level, the cars will offer wider doors to expedite boarding times and up to 750 of new cars will feature an open-ended design that allows for more passenger space.

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X literally marks the spot in the center of the Milky Way, a phenomenon that offers clues about the galaxy’s formation.

Bryan Nelson

Facebook plans to use solar-powered drones to extend internet access to remote parts of the planet.

Read the latest on these ambitious plans: http://bbc.in/29WgEvF

So far the system can be used to receive signals carrying data at rates of up to 2.1 gigabits per second, though the team claims it could go faster if it were built to absorb infrared, rather than blue, light.

It’s worth pointing out that this isn’t the first piece of hardware to emerge from the Connectivity Lab. Famously, it’s been working on a solar-powered drone to deliver Internet access. That particular project is progressing slowly, though, so despite the fact that the team behind the new laser device plans to test it in a real-world setting, there’s likely still much development ahead before it’s used widely.

The social network is, however, busy pursuing plenty of other projects to take data to the sticks. Most notably, its Telecom Infra Project will use open-source cellular networks to achieve similar results. That way, you see, anyone will be able to sign up on Facebook.

Continue reading “Facebook plans to beam fast Internet to remote areas using lasers” »

Have you wondered how Facebook might offer high-speed internet access using lasers? The company’s Connectivity Lab is happy to show you. It just published a research paper explaining laser beam technology can deliver up to 2Gbps to remote places. The trick, it says, is to use fluorescent optical fibers to collect the light instead of relying on traditional optics. Since the fibers don’t emit the same color that they’re absorbing, you can shine a brighter light at them (similar to a solar concentrator) and manage an extremely quick turnaround time of under 2 nanoseconds. Combine that with multi-stream data encoding and you get the ample bandwidth that’s normally reserved for WiFi and wired networks.

Facebook says it’s “investigating the feasibility” of shipping laser internet hardware based on this technology, but that may be more realistic than you think. The social network managed this feat using readily available materials that weren’t even meant for the purpose. It’s hoping that other organizations will craft optimized materials that are better-suited, and notes that an infrared-based system might hit speeds of up to 10Gbps. As important as Facebook’s findings might be, they’re only just the beginning.

Google announced on Wednesday that it has been using a DeepMind-built AI system to control certain parts of its power-hungry data centres over the last few months as it looks to make its vast server farms more environmentally friendly.

Last year, a Greenpeace report predicted that the electricity consumption of data centres is set to account for 12% of global electricity consumption by 2017 and companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple have some of the biggest data centres in the world.

Google said it has been able to reduce the energy consumption of its data centre cooling units — used to stop Google’s self-built servers from overheating — by as much as 40% with the help of a DeepMind AI system.

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It was 47 years ago that NASA won the space race against the Soviet Union, and Apollo 11 astronauts first walked on the Moon.

And now American companies have pitched a series of new plans that would see the country finally return to the lunar surface… this time, alongside the Russians.

The collaboration between the two countries isn’t entirely surprising — Russia and America have been working together in space since their association on the International Space Station (ISS) first began in 1993.

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Data from 1,200 brain scans performed as part of the Human Connectome Project allowed researchers to unveil the brain’s hidden geography.