Posted in computing, innovation
Fujifilm announced a technological breakthrough that will allow it to construct a massive 400 terabyte tape cartridge by the end of the decade.
Tape drives currently top out at about 12 terabytes of storage.
The Blocks and Files web site reported that Fujifilm says it can achieve the newer, greater capacities by switching from the standard Barium Ferrite (BaFe) tape coatings to Strontium Ferrite (SrFe).
Could a mathematical model help predict future mutations of the coronavirus and guide scientists’ research as they rush to develop an effective vaccine? This is a possibility being considered by researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering—Ph. D. students Ruochen Yang and Xiongye Xiao and Paul Bogdan, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.
Over the past year, Yang and Bogdan have worked to develop a model that could be used to investigate the relationship between a network and its parts to find patterns and make predictions. Now, Xiao is applying that successful model to the current pandemic. He is examining the RNA sequence of SARS-CoV-2, also known as coronavirus, to determine whether accurate predictions can be made about how its genetic code might change in the future based on past mutations. This research is still in progress and no conclusions have been reached yet.
Published in Nature Scientific Reports, a sister journal of Nature, Yang and Bogdan’s work is detailed in their paper, “Controlling the Multifractal Generating Measures of Complex Networks.”
Sable co-created the story with artist Kristian Donaldson (Unthinkable, The Guild) and Mey Rude, a transgender woman who served as a consulting editor on the project. Sable took some time to talk to SYFY WIRE about biohacking, transhumanism, and how science fiction often predicts the future.
The Dark, by screenwriter and playwright Mark Sable (Unthinkable, Godkillers), is a graphic novel about a world plunged into chaos when a biotech virus pulls everything offline. The plot twists around government conspiracies, techno warfare, biohacking, and the unlikely pair out to stop it before another world war breaks loose. To make it all the scarier, Sable bases his fiction on fact. As a futurist who has consulted with think tanks and The Art of Future Warfare Project, he is well versed in techno warfare scenarios.
The Dark begins in 2035 and follows Master Sergeant Robert Carter, a N.E.O. (Networked Exoskeleton Operator) Marine whose power armor links him to the world’s technology, and whose implants mentally connect him to his unit. He feels what they feel, which proves torturous when his unit is attacked. The Dark takes on a double meaning as the experience leaves him both physically and technologically blind as the world’s tech crashes.
His world changes when he is sent after Camille — a skilled biohacker and analyst for NSA’s Bumble Hive — who is on a mission to expose the government’s use of bio-hacked surveillance. But she’s also attempting to recode herself in the process. You see, Camille is a trans woman and has discovered a way to change her gender at the molecular level. Camille’s quest to expose the truth and Carter’s pursuit of that very truth throw them together in a race against time to save the world.
NEW DELHI: NASA’s Moon mission — Artemis — will land the first woman on the Moon by 2024. The Artemis programme is part of America’s broader Moon to Mars exploration approach, in which astronauts will explore the Moon and experience gained there to enable humanity’s next giant leap, sending humans to Mars.
Here is all you need to know about the mission:
What is Artemis?
Researchers from the UK and Switzerland have found a mathematical means of helping regulators and business police Artificial Intelligence systems’ biases towards making unethical, and potentially very costly and damaging choices.
The collaborators from the University of Warwick, Imperial College London, and EPFL – Lausanne, along with the strategy firm Sciteb Ltd, believe that in an environment in which decisions are increasingly made without human intervention, there is a very strong incentive to know under what circumstances AI systems might adopt an unethical strategy—and to find and reduce that risk, or eliminate entirely, if possible.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly deployed in commercial situations. Consider for example using AI to set prices of insurance products to be sold to a particular customer. There are legitimate reasons for setting different prices for different people, but it may also be more profitable to make certain decisions that end up hurting the company.
Elon Musk said Tesla is building “RNA microfactories” for CureVac and other coronavirus vaccine makers.
Astronomers have found a way to pinpoint our solar system’s center of mass to within a mere 330 feet (100 meters), a recent study reports.
Such precision — equivalent to the width of a human hair on the scale of a football field — could substantially aid the search for powerful gravitational waves that warp our Milky Way galaxy, study team members said.
Supernovae are some of the most energetic events in the universe, and the resulting nebulas are a favorite for stargazers. To better understand the physics behind them, researchers at Georgia Tech have created a “supernova machine” in the lab.
Stars are basically big volatile balls of gas, sustained for millions of years by a delicate balancing act. Intense gravity wants to pull the matter towards the center, but nuclear fusion in the core is pushing outwards at the same time. Eventually though, the core inevitably runs out of nuclear fuel, and gravity wins the battle.
The star then collapses inwards very quickly, and the resulting shock wave sends material flying outwards at extreme speeds. The event is a supernova, the swirling gas and matter is a nebula, and the dense object formed in the center is a neutron star or a black hole.
But lasers also show promise to do quite the opposite — to cool materials. Lasers that can cool materials could revolutionize fields ranging from bio-imaging to quantum communication.
In 2015, University of Washington researchers announced that they can use a laser to cool water and other liquids below room temperature. Now that same team has used a similar approach to refrigerate something quite different: a solid semiconductor. As the team shows in a paper published June 23 in Nature Communications, they could use an infrared laser to cool the solid semiconductor by at least 20 degrees C, or 36 F, below room temperature.
The device is a cantilever — similar to a diving board. Like a diving board after a swimmer jumps off into the water, the cantilever can vibrate at a specific frequency. But this cantilever doesn’t need a diver to vibrate. It can oscillate in response to thermal energy, or heat energy, at room temperature. Devices like these could make ideal optomechanical sensors, where their vibrations can be detected by a laser. But that laser also heats the cantilever, which dampens its performance.
A new Russian-German space observatory produces the most detailed ever all-sky image seen in X-rays.
