Google Cloud expands its edge computing services by partnering with 200 developers to put their applications closer to enterprise customers.
Being able to see, move, and exercise independently is something most of us take for granted. [Thomas Panek] was an avid runner before losing his sight due to a genetic condition, and had to rely on other humans and guide dogs to run again. After challenging attendants at a Google hackathon, Project Guideline was established to give blind runners (or walkers) independence from a cane, dog or another human, while exercising outdoors. Using a smartphone with line following AI software, and bone conduction headphones, users can be guided along a path with a line painted on it. You need to watch the video below to get a taste of just how incredible it is for the users.
Getting a wheeled robot to follow a line is relatively simple, but a running human is by no means a stable sensor platform. At the previously mentioned hackathon, developers put together a rough proof of concept with a smartphone, using its camera to recognize a painted line on the ground and provide left/right audio cues. As the project developed, the smartphone was attached to a waist belt and bone conduction headphones were used, which don’t affect audio situational awareness as much as normal headphones.
The shaking and side to side movement of running, and varying light conditions and visual obstructions in the outdoors made the problem more difficult to solve, but within a year the developers had completed successful running tests with [Thomas] on a well-lit indoor track and an outdoor pedestrian path with a temporary line. For the first time in 25 years, [Thomas] was able to run independently.
But can brain scans really answer these questions? Many scientists are now rethinking the value of brain scan research and whether its findings are true.
Brain scan studies have been criticized for several things. Criticisms include using too few subjects and incorrectly reading results.
Researchers have also come to understand that a person’s brain scan results can be different from day to day, even when all the conditions stay the same. Now they admit that brain scan findings are limited. Some are studying these limitations. Others are using different methods to study the brain.
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates believes a return to “normal” life is further down the road for the US than people expect, despite a Covid-19 vaccine being approved and distributed this week.
Conceding that by the summer of 2021, the US should be “way closer to normal than we are now,” Gates, who has donated millions to vaccination efforts through his foundation, believes a full return to normal will likely not be possible until after 2022.
The billionaire told CNN on Sunday that “unless we help other countries get rid of this disease” and see “high vaccination rates” within the US, the “risk of reintroduction” will be possible.
Researchers have observed three-dimensional magnetic vortex rings in a real-world magnetic material for the first time. Contrary to theoretical predictions, these rings – which are spin configurations within the material’s bulk – are remarkably stable and could move through the material like smoke rings move through air. If such movement can be controlled, they might have applications in energy-efficient 3D data storage and processing.
In a ferromagnetic material, the spatial distribution of the local magnetization is responsible for the material’s magnetic properties. These spatial distributions can be very complex, and intricate magnetic “textures” are behind many modern technologies, including hard disk drives. A vortex is one such distribution, and it forms when the material’s magnetization circulates around a central core.
Vortex rings are more sophisticated still, and occur naturally in physical systems such as fluids, plasmas and turbulent gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. However, while they have long been predicted to exist in ferromagnets, they have never been observed there until now.
New technique could be useful for quantum information processing.
A new technique to cool reactive molecules to temperatures low enough to achieve quantum degeneracy – something not generally possible before – has been created by researchers in the US. In this temperature regime, the dominance of quantum effects over thermal fluctuations should allow researchers to study new quantum properties of molecules. As a first example, the researchers demonstrated how a slight change in applied electric field can alter the reaction rate between molecules by three orders of magnitude. The researchers hope their platform will enable further exploration of molecular quantum degeneracy, with potential applications ranging from quantum many body physics to quantum information processing.
When atoms are cooled close to absolute zero, the blur created by thermal effects that govern their behaviour in the classical world around us is removed, making their quantum nature clear. This has led to some fascinating discoveries. In ultracold quantum bosonic or fermion-pair quantum gases, for example, all the atoms in a trap can simultaneously occupy the quantum ground state, resulting in a wavefunction that is macroscopic.
Cooling and trapping molecules is much trickier because they are inherently more complex than atoms. Whereas atoms can only contain quanta of energy in electronic excitations, the chemical bonds in molecules can stretch, rotate and bend – and cooling molecules involves removing energy from all of these degrees of freedom. Moreover, the complexity of molecules increases the complexity of their collisions. Although elastic collisions are necessary to knock the fastest-moving molecules out of a trap and cool it, inelastic collisions dissipate heat in the trap.
Microsoft’s new write-once storage medium is constructed from quartz glass, stores data using lasers, and uses machine learning algorithms for decoding.
“What our technology does is it improves range and lowers vehicle cost,” Campbell said. “It’s as simple as that.”
As the name of his company suggests, Campbell thinks the key is a more-solid electric car battery. The lithium-ion batteries powering almost all of today’s electric vehicles rely on a liquid electrolyte, which ferries charged ions from a cathode to an anode. While the technology makes it practical to charge and recharge, the liquid can catch fire if overloaded.
For decades, scientists have seen a potential answer in solid electrolytes, which could allow a battery to soak up more energy without overheating.
Like the previous total solar eclipse in 2019, the Dec. 14, 2020 event will happen over the Southern Cone of South America.
When one mentions the topic of “head transplantation” (or a related topic – the “brain transplant”), for most people, it remains a topic purely in the context and sphere of science fiction.
Yet most people are unaware of the following history:
In 1908, Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon who had developed surgical methods to connect blood vessels in the context of organ transplantation, collaborated with the American Charles Claude Guthrie perform the first head grafts between dogs.
In 1954, Vladimir Demikhov, a Soviet surgeon who conducted important work to improve coronary bypass surgery, performed experiments in which he grafted a dog’s head and upper body, onto another dog; the effort was focused on how to provide blood supply to the donor head and upper body.