A major internet outage has affected the websites of major retail, financial, logistics and travel websites, while 911 service in several Virginia cities appears to be affected by a cut fiber optic cable.
Down Detector, a service that detects whether websites are working properly or not, began reporting a series of at least 50 major website outages shortly before 12pm EST on Thursday.
The websites of UPS, Delta Air Lines, Costco, American Express and Home Depot were down, displaying domain name system (DNS) service errors.
As renewable forms of power like wind and solar continue to gain prominence, there will be a need for creative solutions when it comes to storing energy from sources that are intermittent by nature. One potential solution is known as a molten salt battery, which offers advantages that lithium batteries do not, but have their share of kinks to iron out, too. Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have come up with a new design that addresses a number of these shortcomings, and demonstrated a working molten salt battery that can be constructed far more cheaply, while storing more energy, than currently available versions.
Storing vast amounts of energy in a cheap and efficient manner is the name of the game when it comes to powering whole cities with renewable energy, and despite its many strengths, this is where expensive lithium battery technology falls short. Molten salt batteries shape as a more cost-effective solution, which use electrodes kept in a molten state with the help of high temperatures. This is something that the Sandia scientists have been working to change.
“We’ve been working to bring the operating temperature of molten sodium batteries down as low as physically possible,” says Leo Small, the lead researcher on the project. “There’s a whole cascading cost savings that comes along with lowering the battery temperature. You can use less expensive materials. The batteries need less insulation and the wiring that connects all the batteries can be a lot thinner.”
For decades, researchers around the world have searched for ways to use solar power to generate the key reaction for producing hydrogen as a clean energy source—splitting water molecules to form hydrogen and oxygen. However, such efforts have mostly failed because doing it well was too costly, and trying to do it at a low cost led to poor performance.
Now, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin have found a low-cost way to solve one half of the equation, using sunlight to efficiently split off oxygen molecules from water. The finding, published recently in Nature Communications, represents a step forward toward greater adoption of hydrogen as a key part of our energy infrastructure.
As early as the 1970s, researchers were investigating the possibility of using solar energy to generate hydrogen. But the inability to find materials with the combination of properties needed for a device that can perform the key chemical reactions efficiently has kept it from becoming a mainstream method.
It’s reported the Pegasus spyware can capture a user’s keystrokes, intercept communications, track their device and tap into their camera and microphone.
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Spain will host the next world futurist summit on October 8, 9 and 10, 2021. Humanity+ will be the main international organizer of this international congress. Afterwards, during October 11 and 12, we will continue with informal conversations while traveling to UNESCO World Heritage Sites around Madrid: Aranjuez, Ávila, El Escorial, Segovia y Toledo. Every night will finish with optional cocktails in beautiful places for networking and meeting the participants and speakers.
With help from Microsoft’s artificial intelligence systems, the BeachBot learns how to better find the strewn filters, even if they’re partially buried in the sand. It then scoops these cigarette butts up from the sand and disposes of them in an internal bin. Later, people empty that bin into a trash container. Rolling atop the sand on four puffy-looking wheels, the beach-cleaning robot uses two onboard cameras to look ahead (to avoid people and objects) and to look down.
The BeachBot is still in early learning via the software giant’s Trove AI system, which helps provide image sets for this kind of machine learning task. Teaching the bot how to find its prey requires a lot of people. TechTics must show the beach rover (and, specifically, the AI system) thousands of photos of cigarette butts, all lying about in various states, such as partially hidden, so it can recognize and remember them.
The Trove app connects AI developers with photo takers through a transparent data marketplace. In this case, people can submit their photos, and TechTics directly pays contributors 25 cents per accepted image. TechTics is seeking to eventually collect 2000 photos of cigarette butts on the beach via Trove to help the robot fully understand what it’s looking for. To date, it has obtained about 200 useful images, but BB is already able to seek out waste with two onboard cameras, use its robotic arms, and put cigarette butts into an onboard bin.
A new wearable brain-machine interface (BMI) system could improve the quality of life for people with motor dysfunction or paralysis, even those struggling with locked-in syndrome—when a person is fully conscious but unable to move or communicate.
A multi-institutional, international team of researchers led by the lab of Woon-Hong Yeo at the Georgia Institute of Technology combined wireless soft scalp electronics and virtual reality in a BMI system that allows the user to imagine an action and wirelessly control a wheelchair or robotic arm.
The team, which included researchers from the University of Kent (United Kingdom) and Yonsei University (Republic of Korea), describes the new motor imagery-based BMI system this month in the journal Advanced Science.
One of the scientists prodding and poking the Kelly brothers is Prof Christopher E Mason, the lead geneticist on the Twins Study. Mason’s lab at Cornell University is nothing if not ambitious. Its work centres on a “500-year plan for the survival of the human species on Earth, in space, and on other planets.”
As well as studying what happens to astronauts, it involves laying the genetic groundwork for humans to live among the stars. Mason envisions a future in which the human genome can be bioengineered to adapt to almost any environment, augmented with genes from other species that allow us to explore and settle the farthest corners of the Universe.
