Lifeboat Foundation

Using scintillating fiber to detect particles

After five years of work, EPFL’s physicists, together with some 800 international researchers involved in the LHCb project, have just taken an important preliminary step towards significantly enhancing their experimental equipment. They have decided to build a new detector — a scintillating fiber tracker dubbed SciFi.

Construction of the tracker, which incorporates 10,000 kilometers of scintillating fibers each with a diameter of 0.25mm, has already begun. When particles travel through them, the fibers will give off light signals that will be picked up by light-amplifying diodes. The scintillating fibers will be arranged in three panels measuring five by six meters, installed behind a magnet, where the particles exit the LHC accelerator collision point. The particles will pass through several of these fiber ‘mats’ and deposit part of their energy along the way, producing some photons of light that will then be turned into an electric signal.

Unable to accept his own end, he decides to freeze his body. Sixty years later, in the year 2084, he becomes the first cryogenically frozen man to be revived in history. Marc discovers a startling future, but the biggest surprise is that his past has accompanied him in unexpected ways.

How can we tell if a drink is beer or wine? Machine learning, of course! In this episode of Cloud AI Adventures, Yufeng walks through the 7 steps involved in applied machine learning…

The world is filled with data. Lots and lots of data. Everything from pictures, music, words, spreadsheets, videos and more. It doesn’t look like it’s going to to slow down anytime soon. Machine learning brings the promise of deriving meaning from all of that data.

Continue reading “The 7 Steps of Machine Learning” »

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It has long been accepted that people and other primates are born with the ability to recognize faces; however, a new study at Harvard Medical School has brought that into question.

The study findings suggest that facial recognition is not innate but is learned

The new study published in Nature Neuroscience worked with macaques that had been temporarily prevented from seeing faces while growing up[1]. The researchers discovered that areas of the brain involved in facial recognition form due to experience and are not present in primates who do not see faces while they grow up. This brings into question the long-held idea that we are simply born with the ability to recognize faces.

More films about China: https://rtd.rt.com/tags/china/
- Technology and innovation hub, Shenzhen is known as China’s “silicon valley” and “the city of the future”.
- Once a fishing village, in just 50 years it grew into a megacity packed with skyscrapers.
- It hosts international technology exhibitions and forums and attracts creators and investors from around the world, contributing to its population boom.
- Inventors and engineers working here, create helpful robots, hybrid cars and smart car parks.

China has a saying; to see the past, visit Beijing, to see the present, go to Shanghai but for the future, it’s Shenzhen. Shenzhen has transformed itself from a tiny fishing village to a megacity in just 50 years, its population tripling since the 1990s. The city is a magnet for tech-savvy and inventive dreamers from all across China and the world, because of them Shenzhen has become the “silicon valley” of China, a true technology and innovation hub.

Continue reading “Shenzhen: City of the Future. The high-tech life of China’s Silicon Valley” »

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Security guard Eric Leon watches the Knightscope K5 security robot as it glides through the mall, charming shoppers with its blinking blue and white lights. The brawny automaton records video and sounds alerts. According to its maker, it deters mischief just by making the rounds.

Leon, the all-too-human guard, feels pretty sure that the robot will someday take his job.

“He doesn’t complain,” Leon says. “He’s quiet. No lunch break. He’s starting exactly at 10.”

Continue reading “VIDEO: San Francisco official pushes robot tax to battle automation” »

Researchers for the U.S. military are studying salamanders and other animals to discover how they can regrow lost body parts.

Turns out, organisms may be using quantum mechanics to gain evolutionary advantages.