Worlds first spherical display drone.
This is coolest looking thing I’ve seen today! 
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World’s First Spherical Display Drone
Posted in drones
Google Unveils New Google Earth
Posted in futurism
Physicists at the University of California, Irvine and elsewhere have fabricated new two-dimensional quantum materials with breakthrough electrical and magnetic attributes that could make them building blocks of future quantum computers and other advanced electronics.
In three separate studies appearing this month in Nature, Science Advances and Nature Materials, UCI researchers and colleagues from UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Princeton University, Fudan University and the University of Maryland explored the physics behind the 2-D states of novel materials and determined they could push computers to new heights of speed and power.
The common threads running through the papers are that the research is conducted at extremely cold temperatures and that the signal carriers in all three studies are not electrons — as with traditional silicon-based technologies — but Dirac or Majorana fermions, particles without mass that move at nearly the speed of light.
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Robots may soon be more sensitive than humans—at least when it comes to their skin. Researchers from Glasgow University have developed a type of artificial skin that is more sensitive than our own. Just add this to all the ways robots are taking over the world.
Related: A Robot Performed Soft-Tissue Surgery By Itself
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Exponential Growth of Computing
Posted in computing
Orchard owners say they need automation because seasonal farm labor is getting harder to come by.
Tom Simonite
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I came up with a neat idea for a multiplication grid visual the other day, and stuck it up on Twitter where it has been doing the rounds with unprecedented alacrity:
I’ve loved reading comments and seeing how people are using the grids already, with fellow teachers, students and your own kids (I’m making one on A1 squared paper for my son this weekend – here’s one 3-year-old who will know what multiplication means before he learns his tables, if I can manage it!) A few of you came up with ideas for variations I could do, including starting the grid from the bottom-left to mimic a Cartesian coordinate grid, and emphasizing square numbers. I’ve also done one with the prime factorization of numbers on one side of the diagonal, which I quite like. I’ve put all the images together into a single pdf document to make it easier to access. It’s on my website at www.thechalkface.net/resources/true_scale_multiplication_grid.pdf:
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SAN FRANCISCO A U.S. judge on Wednesday said he had not seen clear evidence that Uber Technologies Inc had conspired with an engineer on its self driving car program to steal trade secrets from Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Waymo, and that he was wrestling with whether to issue an injunction against the ride service.
At a hearing in San Francisco federal court, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said it was undisputed that the engineer, Anthony Levandowski, downloaded about 14,000 documents shortly before he stopped working for Waymo.
If it were proven that Levandowski and Uber conspired in taking Waymo’s information, that could have dire consequences for Uber, say legal and ride-hailing industry experts.
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