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William Falconer-Beach has rendered some images of the SpaceX Starship with a mirror polished stainless steel body.

Elon Musk has reported that SpaceX is building the body of the Starship out of stainless steel and that it will be polished to a mirror finish.

A hopper version of the Starship should have its first test flights by April 2019. The Super Heavy should reach orbit in 2020.

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Just like last year, this year’s 60 predictions reveal the state-of-mind of key participants in the cybersecurity industry (on the defense team, of course) and cover all that’s hot today. Topics include the use and misuse of data; artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning as a double-edge sword helping both attackers and defenders; whether we are going to finally “get over privacy” or see our data finally being treated as a private and protected asset; how the cloud changes everything and how connected and moving devices add numerous security risks; the emerging global cyber war conducted by terrorists, criminals, and countries; and the changing skills and landscape of cybersecurity.

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On his 125th birth anniversary, ThePrint celebrates one of India’s greatest physicists.

New Delhi: Bose-Einstein statistics, Bose-Einstein Condensate, Bosons — these are terms that even casual observers of physics have heard regardless of whether they actually know about them or not. These nomenclatures, based upon Satyendra Nath Bose’s surname (along with Einstein’s in the first two cases), both commemorate and signify his immense contribution to physics.

Bose’s novel derivation of Planck’s formula without relying upon classical electrodynamics resolved a conceptual inconsistency which had troubled all famous scientists of the day.

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Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife Priscilla Chan have sold close to 30 million shares of Facebook to fund an ambitious biomedical research project, called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), with a goal of curing all disease within a generation. A less publicized component of that US$5 billion program includes work on brain-machine interfaces, devices that essentially translate thoughts into commands.

From a report: One recent project is a wireless brain implant that can record, stimulate and disrupt the movement of a monkey in real time. In a paper published in the highly cited scientific journal Nature on Monday, researchers detail a wireless brain device implanted in a primate that records, stimulates, and modifies its brain activity in real time, sensing a normal movement and stopping it immediately. Those researchers are part of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, a non-profit medical research group within the CZI. Scientists refer to the interference as “therapy” because it is designed to be used to treat diseases like epilepsy or Parkinson’s by stopping a seizure or other disruptive motion just as it starts.

“Our device is able to monitor the primate’s brain while it’s providing the therapy so you know exactly what’s happening,” Rikky Muller, a co-author of the new study, told Business Insider. A professor of computer science and engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, Muller is also a Biohub investigator. The applications of brain-machine interfaces are far-reaching: while some researchers focus on using them to help assist people with spinal cord injuries or other illnesses that affect movement, others aim to see them transform how everyone interacts with laptops and smartphones. Both a division at Facebook formerly called Building 8 as well as an Elon Musk-founded company called Neuralink have said they are working on the latter.

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A Cafe in Tokyo uses an all-robot staff, though some of its employees that control these servers do so remotely, under special circumstances.

As reported by NextShark, these employees have debilitating conditions like ALS and similar spinal chord injuries, and operate the robot servers from home. They operate an OriHime-D: a 4-foot-tall robot that moves, handles objects, and communicates with patrons at Tokyo’s Cafe DAWN (Diverse Avatar Working Network). Cafe DAWN is intended to resemble the robot-centric cafe featured in the 2008 anime Time of Eve.

The technology is facilitated by Ory, an institute that is looking to solve issues of social and physical isolation by using technological advances along with human interaction.

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