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Jun 7, 2017

Twin Strangers

Posted by in category: futurism

Apparently there are 6–8 people in the world who look exactly like you.

Via Twinstrangers.com

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Jun 7, 2017

Study estimates amount of water needed to carve Martian valleys

Posted by in categories: climatology, satellites

A new study led by Northern Illinois University geography professor Wei Luo calculates the amount of water needed to carve the ancient network of valleys on Mars and concludes the Red Planet’s surface was once much more watery than previously thought.

The study bolsters the idea that Mars once had a warmer climate and active hydrologic cycle, with water evaporating from an ancient ocean, returning to the surface as rainfall and eroding the planet’s extensive network of valleys.

Satellites orbiting Mars and rovers on its surface have provided scientists with convincing evidence that water helped shape the planet’s landscape billions of years ago. But questions have lingered over how much water actually flowed on the planet, and the ocean hypothesis has been hotly debated.

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Jun 7, 2017

Research alliance builds new transistor for 5nm technology

Posted by in categories: computing, engineering, internet, mobile phones, nanotechnology

IBM, its Research Alliance partners Globalfoundries and Samsung, and equipment suppliers have developed an industry-first process to build silicon nanosheet transistors that will enable 5 nanometer (nm) chips. The details of the process will be presented at the 2017 Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits conference in Kyoto, Japan. In less than two years since developing a 7nm test node chip with 20 billion transistors, scientists have paved the way for 30 billion switches on a fingernail-sized chip.

The resulting increase in performance will help accelerate cognitive computing, the Internet of Things (IoT), and other data-intensive applications delivered in the cloud. The power savings could also mean that the batteries in smartphones and other mobile products could last two to three times longer than today’s devices, before needing to be charged.

Scientists working as part of the IBM-led Research Alliance at the SUNY Polytechnic Institute Colleges of Nanoscale Science and Engineering’s NanoTech Complex in Albany, NY achieved the breakthrough by using stacks of silicon nanosheets as the device structure of the transistor, instead of the standard FinFET architecture, which is the blueprint for the semiconductor industry up through 7nm node technology.

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Jun 7, 2017

Skydiving Just Reached a New Level

Posted by in category: drones

Watch the world’s first drone skydive!

Credit: Explorist

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Jun 7, 2017

Lean Into Ambiguity With Ethan Hawke

Posted by in category: futurism

The subconscious communicates truths better than intellect.

Actor Ethan Hawke on ambiguity.

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Jun 7, 2017

How obsessive artists colorize old photos

Posted by in category: futurism

How old, black and white photos get colorized — and why artists do it despite criticism.

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Jun 7, 2017

Human/animal DNA ban lifted

Posted by in categories: bioengineering, ethics

A ban on human-animal hybrids was just lifted.


ICYMI: A ban on human/animal hybrids has been lifted.

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Jun 7, 2017

China is building a 50km bridge to Hong Kong

Posted by in category: futurism

It will be the longest sea crossing in the world.

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Jun 7, 2017

Foldable Bike Helmet

Posted by in category: transportation

This foldable bike helmet can fit into a water bottle.

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Jun 7, 2017

Scientists slash computations for deep learning

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, transportation

Rice University computer scientists have adapted a widely used technique for rapid data lookup to slash the amount of computation — and thus energy and time — required for deep learning, a computationally intense form of machine learning.

“This applies to any deep-learning architecture, and the technique scales sublinearly, which means that the larger the deep neural network to which this is applied, the more the savings in computations there will be,” said lead researcher Anshumali Shrivastava, an assistant professor of computer science at Rice.

The research will be presented in August at the KDD 2017 conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It addresses one of the biggest issues facing tech giants like Google, Facebook and Microsoft as they race to build, train and deploy massive deep-learning networks for a growing body of products as diverse as self-driving cars, language translators and intelligent replies to emails.

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