LP 40–365 will probably leave the galaxy at some point, scientists say.
A strange metal-rich star is speeding through the Milky Way at almost 2 million mph (3 million kph). The cosmic shrapnel probably leave the galaxy at some point.
Some kinds of water pollution, such as algal blooms and plastics that foul rivers, lakes, and marine environments, lie in plain sight. But other contaminants are not so readily apparent, which makes their impact potentially more dangerous. Among these invisible substances is uranium. Leaching into water resources from mining operations, nuclear waste sites, or from natural subterranean deposits, the element can now be found flowing out of taps worldwide.
In the United States alone, “many areas are affected by uranium contamination, including the High Plains and Central Valley aquifers, which supply drinking water to 6 million people,” says Ahmed Sami Helal, a postdoc in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. This contamination poses a near and present danger. “Even small concentrations are bad for human health,” says Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering.
Now, a team led by Li has devised a highly efficient method for removing uranium from drinking water. Applying an electric charge to graphene oxide foam, the researchers can capture uranium in solution, which precipitates out as a condensed solid crystal. The foam may be reused up to seven times without losing its electrochemical properties. “Within hours, our process can purify a large quantity of drinking water below the EPA limit for uranium,” says Li.
Drones are neat and fun and all that good stuff (I should probably add the caveat here that I’m obviously not referring to the big, terrible military variety), but when it comes to quadcopters, there’s always been the looming question of general usefulness. The consumer-facing variety are pretty much the exclusive realm of hobbyists and imaging.
We’ve seen a number of interesting applications for things like agricultural surveillance, real estate and the like, all of which are effectively extensions of that imaging capability. But a lot can be done with a camera and the right processing. One of the more interesting applications I’ve seen cropping up here and there is the warehouse drone — something perhaps a bit counterintuitive, as you likely (and understandably) associate drones with the outdoors.
Looking back, it seems we’ve actually had two separate warehouse drone companies compete in Disrupt Battlefield. There was IFM (Intelligent Flying Machines) in 2016 and Vtrus two years later. That’s really the tip of the iceberg for a big list of startups effectively pushing to bring drones to warehouses and factory floors.
A couple people from TRIM are in TRIM-X to see how it works a second time.
In this video Dr. Fahy discusses what we can do to make the most of our thymus without the growth hormone treatment, what the timing makes sense for rejuvenation of the thymus and whether the thymus is tied to the other hallmarks of aging.
Continue reading “How To Improve On Our Thymus Health | Dr Greg Fahy Episode 5” »
Can we ever reverse-engineer our thinking? This is one of the questions addressed in my new cinematic documentary Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind making a splash around the world. The film is now available for viewing on demand on Vimeo, Plex, Tubi, Social Club TV and other global networks with its worldwide premiere aired on June 8, 2021. This is my take on the nature of consciousness and reverse engineering of our mental faculties in order to create AGI. Enjoy!
#Consciousness #Evolution #Mind #Documentary #Film #Introduction
Continue reading “Consciousness: Evolution of the Mind, Documentary” »
Honda may have dragged its feet for years when it came to electric two-wheelers, but the company has now released a number of new and interesting designs. The latest is the ultra-affordable Honda U-GO electric scooter.
Honda launched the U-GO through its Chinese arm Wuyang-Honda as a follow-up to its other low-cost Chinese electric scooters designed purely for urban riding.
The company announced two versions of the U-GO with different speeds and power levels.
Transformer-based deep learning models like GPT-3 have been getting much attention in the machine learning world. These models excel at understanding semantic relationships, and they have contributed to large improvements in Microsoft Bing’s search experience. However, these models can fail to capture more nuanced relationships between query and document terms beyond pure semantics.
The Microsoft team of researchers developed a neural network with 135 billion parameters, which is the largest “universal” artificial intelligence that they have running in production. The large number of parameters makes this one of the most sophisticated AI models ever detailed publicly to date. OpenAI’s GPT-3 natural language processing model has 175 billion parameters and remains as the world’s largest neural network built to date.
Microsoft researchers are calling their latest AI project MEB (Make Every Feature Binary). The 135-billion parameter machine is built to analyze queries that Bing users enter. It then helps identify the most relevant pages from around the web with a set of other machine learning algorithms included in its functionality, and without performing tasks entirely on its own.
Stanford is looking to democratize research on artificial intelligence and medicine by releasing the world’s largest free repository of AI-ready annotated medical imaging datasets. This will allow people from all over the world to access specific data that they need for their respective projects, which could lead to potentially life-saving breakthroughs in these fields.
The use of artificial intelligence in medicine is becoming increasingly pervasive. From analyzing tumors to detecting a person’s pumping heart, AI looks like it will have an important role for the near future.
The AI-powered devices, which can rival the accuracy of human doctors in diagnosing diseases and illnesses, have been making strides as well. These systems not only spot a likely tumor or bone fracture but also predict the course of an illness with some reliability for recommendations on what to do next. However, these systems require expensive datasets that are created by humans who annotate images meticulously before handing them over to compute power, so they’re rather costly either way you look at it given their price tags–millions even if your data is purchased from others or millions more if one has created their own dataset painstakingly through careful annotation of images such as CT scans and x-rays along with MRI’s etcetera depending upon how advanced each system needs be.
Bear Flag Robotics, a developer of autonomous driving technology for tractors, is being acquired by John Deere for $250 million.
Let’s face it. Software has holes. And hackers love to exploit them. New vulnerabilities appear almost daily. If you have software — we all do — you need to keep tabs on the latest vulnerabilities.
