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Jun 12, 2021

Genetically engineered microbes convert waste plastic into vanillin

Posted by in categories: biological, genetics

Plastic bottle becomes industrially useful product thanks to biosynthetic transformation.

Jun 12, 2021

Photos show Chinas rover on the surface of Mars, ramping up its competition with NASA to explore the planet

Posted by in category: space

The photos include a 360 degree panorama of the terrain, a selfie of the rover, and a picture of the rover’s landing platform sporting a Chinese flag.

Jun 12, 2021

Google wants to train you to become a UX designer in 6 months — without a college degree. Heres how to make the most of the certificate program and potentially make $84,000 a year

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, education

Google wants to train you to become a UX designer in 6 months — without a college degree. Here’s how to make the most of the certificate program and potentially make $84000 a year.

The US unemployment rate sits at 6.7%. Thanks to COVID-19, millions of Americans are still out there looking for not just a new job but also an entire new career path.

Tech fields like UX design, data analysis, and project management are looking for promising candidates, and Google announced a new career-certificate program to help make them more accessible last summer.

Continue reading “Google wants to train you to become a UX designer in 6 months — without a college degree. Heres how to make the most of the certificate program and potentially make $84,000 a year” »

Jun 11, 2021

Electrified water lets cleaners ditch the bleach

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, business, food, law enforcement

Circa 2011


It sounds like a late-night infomercial: Kill germs and clean surfaces with nothing more than water and a few volts of electricity! Pay pennies a gallon! Strong enough to kill germs but gentle on your skin!

The use of electricity and water to clean and disinfect has been embraced by some food and hospitality businesses looking to save money and go green by swapping out conventional products.

Continue reading “Electrified water lets cleaners ditch the bleach” »

Jun 11, 2021

How to Deal with Infinity in Python

Posted by in category: futurism

Introducing ways of defining and working with Infinite values in Python.


∀ x ∈ ℝ, -∞ < x < ∞

Every number is smaller than positive infinity and bigger than negative infinity.

Continue reading “How to Deal with Infinity in Python” »

Jun 11, 2021

ZeRO-Infinity and DeepSpeed: Unlocking unprecedented model scale for deep learning training

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, supercomputing, transportation

Since the DeepSpeed optimization library was introduced last year, it has rolled out numerous novel optimizations for training large AI models—improving scale, speed, cost, and usability. As large models have quickly evolved over the last year, so too has DeepSpeed. Whether enabling researchers to create the 17-billion-parameter Microsoft Turing Natural Language Generation (Turing-NLG) with state-of-the-art accuracy, achieving the fastest BERT training record, or supporting 10x larger model training using a single GPU, DeepSpeed continues to tackle challenges in AI at Scale with the latest advancements for large-scale model training. Now, the novel memory optimization technology ZeRO (Zero Redundancy Optimizer), included in DeepSpeed, is undergoing a further transformation of its own. The improved ZeRO-Infinity offers the system capability to go beyond the GPU memory wall and train models with tens of trillions of parameters, an order of magnitude bigger than state-of-the-art systems can support. It also offers a promising path toward training 100-trillion-parameter models.

ZeRO-Infinity at a glance: ZeRO-Infinity is a novel deep learning (DL) training technology for scaling model training, from a single GPU to massive supercomputers with thousands of GPUs. It powers unprecedented model sizes by leveraging the full memory capacity of a system, concurrently exploiting all heterogeneous memory (GPU, CPU, and Non-Volatile Memory express or NVMe for short). Learn more in our paper, “ZeRO-Infinity: Breaking the GPU Memory Wall for Extreme Scale Deep Learning.” The highlights of ZeRO-Infinity include:

Jun 11, 2021

D-Wave announces 5,000-qubit fifth generation quantum annealer

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

D-Wave’s newest offering, available in mid-2020, offers two and a half times more connectivity between qubits than the 2000Q quantum computer.

Jun 11, 2021

Googles DeepMind Says It Has All the Tech It Needs for General AI

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Reward-seeking behavior drove evolution on Earth. Can it do the same in AI?

Jun 11, 2021

The rise of integrated quantum photonics

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Just as microelectronics transformed the modern world through the creation of the integrated circuit, which is now at the heart of most electronic devices, quantum photonics needs an equivalent platform to fulfil its application potential. In this special focus issue of Nature Photonics, we report on the progress in making this a reality with the developments in integrated quantum photonics (IQP).

In a Review Article, Jianwei Wang and colleagues provide a general overview and introduction to IQP circuits and summarize the present development of quantum hardware based on IQP chips. They remark that the challenge for measurement-based quantum computation may shift from the need for deterministic gates to constructing a generic entangled cluster-state, on which any quantum computation could be mapped by a sequence of measurements.

IQP circuits are also a desirable platform for chip-based quantum communications. However, fully integrated chip-based quantum communication has not yet been realized, largely because of the integration difficulties between silicon wafers that feature optical waveguides and other passive components and light sources and photodetectors that are made from different semiconductors. Key components such as transmitters and receivers for quantum key distribution and quantum random number generators are instead individually fabricated.

Jun 11, 2021

Presence of water on exomoons orbiting free-floating planets: a case study

Posted by in categories: alien life, chemistry

A free-floating planet (FFP) is a planetary-mass object that orbits around a non-stellar massive object (e.g. a brown dwarf) or around the Galactic Centre. The presence of exomoons orbiting FFPs has been theoretically predicted by several models. Under specific conditions, these moons are able to retain an atmosphere capable of ensuring the long-term thermal stability of liquid water on their surface. We model this environment with a one-dimensional radiative-convective code coupled to a gas-phase chemical network including cosmic rays and ion-neutral reactions. We find that, under specific conditions and assuming stable orbital parameters over time, liquid water can be formed on the surface of the exomoon. The final amount of water for an Earth-mass exomoon is smaller than the amount of water in Earth oceans, but enough to host the potential development of primordial life.