Nov 11, 2019
Kitty Hawk’s Extremely Quiet Flying Car Has a 100-Mile Range
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: transportation
It can reportedly cover the 55 miles between San Jose and San Francisco in just 15 minutes.
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Nov 11, 2019
New Platform Aims To Help Protect Power Grid From Cyber Threats
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: cybercrime/malcode
Fortress Information Security and AEP launched the Asset to Vendor (A2V) Network to help electric utility providers collaborate for more effective cybersecurity.
“Multiple products are affected globally”
Google Cloud down. Issue global in scale. Numerous services affected, including Kubernetes and IoT services like Nest.
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) says it is experiencing a “major issue” with services including Cloud Dataflow, AppEngine, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Dataflow, Dataproc, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Networking all failing today as of 9.14 am BST.
Nov 11, 2019
Quantum computing gets 10 billion qubits closer
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics
Oxford University researchers have, for the first time, generated a massive 10 billion entangled bits in silicon, taking an important step towards a real world quantum computer.
The researchers cooled a piece of phosphorus-doped silicon to within one degree of absolute zero and applied a magnetic field. This process lined up the spins of one electron per phosphorus atom. Then the scientists used carefully timed radio pulses to nudge the nuclei and electrons into an entangled state. Across the silicon crystal, this produced billions of entangled pairs.
Stephanie Simmons, researcher and lead author on the paper Entanglement in a solid-state spin ensemble — published in Nature, says that quantum computers really start to give classical computers a run for their money at a few dozen qubits, but her team is working to skip that stage altogether by going directly from a two-qubit system to one with 10 billion.
Nov 11, 2019
‘Water cloak’ uses electromagnetic waves to eliminate turbulence
Posted by Quinn Sena in categories: computing, materials
We could essentially control water at the coast lines with magnetism keeping it from eroding things.
Fuel-efficient ships that produce no wakes could soon be a reality thanks to computer simulations of “water cloaks” done by two researchers in the US. Yaroslav Urzhumov and Dean Culver of Duke University have shown that ions present in ocean water can be accelerated by electromagnetic waves in such a way that any turbulence created by sea-going vessels is cancelled out. Their work offers new opportunities for creating ships with greater propulsion efficiency – and could also be used to make vessels that are harder to detect.
“This cloaking idea opens a new dimension to create forces around an underwater vessel or object, which is absolutely required to achieve full wake cancellation,” says Urzhumov.
Continue reading “‘Water cloak’ uses electromagnetic waves to eliminate turbulence” »
Nov 11, 2019
A Satellite That Fires Fake Shooting Stars Is Ready to Launch
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: satellites
Burning Garbage
The satellite will launch centimeter-long pellets that will incinerate upon re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. From the ground, they’re expected to look similar to slow-moving shooting stars and will take anywhere from three to ten seconds to burn away, Space.com reports.
“With this launch, we are a step closer to realiz[ing] the man-made shooting star,” Astro Live Experiences CEO Lena Okajima said, per Space.com. “Please look forward to the world’s first demonstration we are aiming [for] in 2020, which will be a major milestone for ALE.”
Nov 11, 2019
There’s Growing Evidence That the Universe Is Connected by Giant Structures
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: space
Scientists are finding that galaxies can move with each other across huge distances, and against the predictions of basic cosmological models. The reason why could change everything we think we know about the universe.
Nov 11, 2019
Something Very Strange Seems to Be Synchronizing Distant Galaxies
Posted by Quinn Sena in category: space
Galaxies millions of light years away seem to be connected by an unseen network of massive intergalactic structures, which force them to synchronize in ways that can’t be explained by existing astrophysics, Vice reports. The discoveries could force us to rethink our fundamental understanding of the universe.
“The observed coherence must have some relationship with large-scale structures, because it is impossible that the galaxies separated by six megaparsecs [roughly 20 million light years] directly interact with each other,” Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute astronomer Hyeop Lee told the site.
Nov 11, 2019
SpaceX launches 60 more mini satellites for global internet
Posted by Vivek Jaiswal in categories: Elon Musk, internet, satellites
SpaceX launched 60 mini satellites Monday, the second batch of an orbiting network meant to provide global internet coverage.
The Falcon rocket blasted into the morning sky, marking the unprecedented fourth flight of a booster for SpaceX. The compact flat-panel satellites—just 575 pounds (260 kilograms) each—will join 60 launched in May.
SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk wants to put thousands of these Starlink satellites in orbit, to offer high-speed internet service everywhere. He plans to start service next year in the northern U.S. and Canada, with global coverage for populated areas after 24 launches.
Nov 11, 2019
The Space-Time Fabric of Brain Networks – Neuroscientists Decode Neuronal Activity
Posted by Mike Ruban in category: neuroscience
Neuroscientists at the Bernstein Center Freiburg (BCF) of the University of Freiburg and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have decoded a significant process in the brain that in part contributes to the behavior of living beings. “One of the basic requirements for meaningful behavior is that networks in the brain produce precisely defined sequences of neuronal activity,” says Prof. Dr. Ad Aertsen of the University of Freiburg. The researchers have published the results of the cooperation with Professor Dr. Arvind Kumar of the KTH and Sebastian Spreizer, a doctoral candidate at the BCF, in the scientific journal PLoS Computational Biology.
Experiments in recent years have shown that the behavior of animals is accompanied by sequential activity of neurons in different areas of the brain. In the context of that finding, researchers world-wide have developed several models of possible mechanisms to explain how these ordered sequences come into existence. They are based primarily upon methods of supervised learning, in which the desired sequential activity is generated by means of a learning rule. Within this process, it turned out that neuronal networks can be trained to produce sequences of activity. “At the same time, we know that not every behavior is learned. Innate behavior suggests that the brain generates certain sequences without learning or training,” says Arvind Kumar, who directed the study.
Based on that, the researchers addressed the question of how an untrained brain can generate well-ordered sequences of activity. They found this requires two conditions to be met: First, a small portion of the neurons’ projected output – their connections to downstream neurons – have to prefer a specific direction. Second, neighboring neurons need to share that preferred direction. “That means that the connections of nerve cells depend on directional preferences and are spatially linked to each other. This is the key to the generation of sequential activity in neuronal networks,” explains Sebastian Spreizer. If the network is wired according to these rules, it creates a type of activity landscape similar to geographic hills and valleys. In the context of this metaphor, the sequences of neuronal activity are like the rivers in a landscape. Small changes in the spatial fabric of the nerve cells generate certain temporal and spatial sequences of neuronal activity.
