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Sep 24, 2020

World’s largest cement maker pledges carbon neutrality

Posted by in category: futurism

Swiss multinational company, LafargeHolcim, is planning its first “net zero” cement production facility by 2030 and has pledged to go carbon neutral by 2050.

Sep 24, 2020

The Massive ‘Blob’ Anomaly Has Our Fingerprints All Over It, Study Finds

Posted by in category: futurism

In 2013, a suffocatingly hot blob of water brewed in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of North America. It then decimated marine life.

Thousands of seabirds washed up dead on shores, along with starving baby sea lions. Salmon, krill, and other marine animals vanished as the warmth fuelled a massive toxic algal bloom that also shut down crab fisheries.

Continue reading “The Massive ‘Blob’ Anomaly Has Our Fingerprints All Over It, Study Finds” »

Sep 24, 2020

Microsoft licenses the breakthrough natural language AI GPT-3

Posted by in categories: business, robotics/AI

Microsoft announced that it has “exclusively licensed” OpenAI’s sophisticated GPT-3 language model that can generate disturbingly human-like text in applications ranging from commercial bots to creative writing. After investing $1 billion in the San Francisco startup last year to become OpenAI’s exclusive cloud partner, Microsoft will get access to the language tech for itself and its Azure cloud customers.

OpenAI released GPT-3 just a couple of months ago to a limited group of developers, but its capabilities have already generated massive amounts of buzz. It’s the largest language model ever trained, and is capable of not just mundane tasks like auto-generating business correspondence, but also creative or technical chores like poetry, memes and computer code.

Sep 24, 2020

The strange storms on Jupiter

Posted by in categories: climatology, mathematics, space

At the south pole of Jupiter lurks a striking sight—even for a gas giant planet covered in colorful bands that sports a red spot larger than the earth. Down near the south pole of the planet, mostly hidden from the prying eyes of humans, is a collection of swirling storms arranged in an unusually geometric pattern.

Since they were first spotted by NASA’s Juno space probe in 2019, the storms have presented something of a mystery to scientists. The storms are analogous to hurricanes on Earth. However, on our planet, hurricanes do not gather themselves at the poles and twirl around each other in the shape of a pentagon or hexagon, as do Jupiter’s curious storms.

Now, a research team working in the lab of Andy Ingersoll, Caltech professor of planetary science, has discovered why Jupiter’s storms behave so strangely. They did so using math derived from a proof written by Lord Kelvin, a British mathematical physicist and engineer, nearly 150 years ago.

Sep 24, 2020

SpaceX’s Starlink Could Lower Internet Prices by Up to 40%

Posted by in categories: internet, satellites

From the beginning, SpaceX has had a goal of bringing high speed internet service to underserved locations, creating competition in areas that currently have limited options or, in many cases, monopolies causing higher prices.

With its constellation of low orbit satellites, Starlink will be able to shake up the broadband industry by offering a new category of broadband. Without the need to place expensive infrastructure like underground or pole-based wiring required for current broadband options, SpaceX could more easily reach rural areas and begin to close the digital divide.

A study from Broadband Now shows that, in addition to working toward closing that gap, introducing a new internet provider could reduce the price of internet service by up to 40%. The chart below shows how adding additional providers in an area significantly reduces the average monthly cost of internet service.

Sep 24, 2020

Google Approaches Bert-Level Performance Using 300x fewer Parameters with Extension of Its New NLP model PRADO

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

The trimmed-down pQRNN extension to Google AI’s projection attention neural network PRADO compares to BERT on text classification tasks for on-device use.

Sep 24, 2020

Possible Detection of a Black Hole So Big It ‘Should Not Exist’

Posted by in category: cosmology

Researchers have confirmed rumors of a black hole collision that challenges our ideas about how black holes form.

Sep 24, 2020

Microsoft’s camera-based AI app solves your math problems

Posted by in categories: information science, mathematics, robotics/AI

Microsoft has made several quirky and useful apps that can help you with daily problems and its new app seeks to help you with math.

Microsoft Math Solver — available on both iOS and Android — can solve various math problems including quadratic equations, calculus, and statistics. The app can also show graphs for the equation to enhance your understanding of the subject.

Sep 24, 2020

Close look at Tesla Cyberquad electric ATV prototype [Gallery]

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation

Tesla’s Cyberquad electric ATV prototype had its first public outing this week since the unveiling last year, and here we bring you a closer look with a gallery of pictures.

When Tesla unveiled the Cybertruck last year, CEO Elon Musk had a little “one more thing” moment on stage when they brought the Tesla Cyberquad, an electric ATV, to show the loading capacity of Cybertruck’s bed.

At the time, it wasn’t clear whether Tesla planned on making the electric ATV available, but Musk later confirmed that it will be an option for Cybertruck buyers.

Sep 24, 2020

SLAC invention could make particle accelerators 10 times smaller

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, chemistry

Particle accelerators generate high-energy beams of electrons, protons and ions for a wide range of applications, including particle colliders that shed light on nature’s subatomic components, X-ray lasers that film atoms and molecules during chemical reactions and medical devices for treating cancer.

As a rule of thumb, the longer the accelerator, the more powerful it is. Now, a team led by scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory has invented a new type of accelerator structure that delivers a 10 times larger energy gain over a given distance than conventional ones. This could make accelerators used for a given application 10 times shorter.

The key idea behind the technology, described in a recent article in Applied Physics Letters, is to use to boost particle energies.