Lifeboat Foundation

Solar power is on the rise. You can see the evidence on rooftops and in the desert, where utility-scale solar plants are popping up. The picture is not all rosy, but if the recent past is any indication, solar power is going to help lead the transition to a carbon-free future, and it might do it faster than we all expected.

Elon Musk and Tesla promised solar roof tiles in 2016, but the industry might not need an upgrade as its grown significantly with the solar panels currently available. You can see the evidence both on individual rooftops and in the utility-scale solar plants increasingly popping up in deserts across the country. In the United States, of all about 30% of the new power capacity added to the grid in 2018 was from solar.

Continue reading “The Rise Of Solar Power” »

(Bloomberg) — For years, wind and solar power were derided as boondoggles. They were too expensive, the argument went, to build without government handouts.

Today, renewable energy is so cheap that the handouts they once needed are disappearing.

On sun-drenched fields across Spain and Italy, developers are building solar farms without subsidies or tax-breaks, betting they can profit without them. In China, the government plans to stop financially supporting new wind farms. And in the U.S., developers are signing shorter sales contracts, opting to depend on competitive markets for revenue once the agreements expire.

A new technology using artificial intelligence detects depressive language in social media posts more accurately than current systems and uses less data to do it.

The technology, which was presented during the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases, is the first of its kind to show that, to more accurately detect depressive language, small, high-quality data sets can be applied to deep learning, a commonly used AI approach that is typically data intensive.

Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that the words we use in interaction with others on a daily basis are a good indicator of our mental and emotional state.

This is the final part in a series of in-depth articles examining China’s efforts to build a stronger domestic semiconductor industry amid rising trade tensions.

Some in China see custom AI chips, which can offer superior performance to conventional integrated circuits even when manufactured using older processes, as helping the country loosen its dependence on the US in core technology.

Photo: iStock.

In a new scientific paper, Google researchers claim for the first time to have demonstrated “quantum supremacy,” where a quantum computer outperforms a traditional one.

This developing branch of synthetic media technology has commercial applications—but also has the potential to disrupt elections and spread disinformation.

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Saudi Arabia has called its giga-project Neom, a new city 33 times the size of New York City, “the world’s most ambitious project” — and it sounds it.

Combining new classes of nanomembrane electrodes with flexible electronics and a deep learning algorithm could help disabled people wirelessly control an electric wheelchair, interact with a computer or operate a small robotic vehicle without donning a bulky hair-electrode cap or contending with wires.

By providing a fully portable, wireless brain-machine interface (BMI), the wearable system could offer an improvement over conventional electroencephalography (EEG) for measuring signals from visually evoked potentials in the human brain. The system’s ability to measure EEG signals for BMI has been evaluated with six human subjects, but has not been studied with disabled individuals.

The project, conducted by researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Kent and Wichita State University, was reported on September 11 in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.