Lifeboat Foundation

AI that identifies people in crowds is already pervasive in China—and now it’s augmenting police officers’ eyes, too.

Smart specs: The Wall Street Journal says the hardware, made by LLVision, sends data from its camera to a handheld device, where AI software crunches through an offline database of 10,000 pictures of suspects in about 100 milliseconds to help officers spot criminals. It’s unclear how accurate it is.

How they’re used: The glasses will be used to monitor busy crowds in China as citizens travel for next week’s Lunar New Year. But the People’s Daily newspaper says they’ve already been tested in Zhengzhou railway station, catching seven wanted criminals and 26 people travelling on fake ID.

Continue reading “Chinese cops are wearing glasses that can recognize faces” »

Soon, your phone can wirelessly charge from across the room.

JPL’s Deep Space Atomic Clock is finally ready for testing after two decades in the making.

Spin a merry-go-round fast enough and the riders fly off in all directions. But the spinning particles in a Rice University lab do just the opposite.

Experiments in the Rice lab of chemical engineer Sibani Lisa Biswal show micron-sized spheres coming together under the influence of a rapidly spinning magnetic field. That’s no surprise because the particles themselves are magnetized.

Continue reading “Fast-spinning spheres show nanoscale systems’ secrets” »

New research from the University of Southern California has shed light on how the decline of the brain’s vascular system precedes the build-up of the plaques and tau tangles associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

A leaky blood-brain barrier sets the scene for dementia

Traditionally, many researchers have focused their efforts on the amyloid and tau proteins that accumulate in the brain and are typical of Alzheimer’s disease progression. However, the researchers in this new study suggest that the problem begins before this due to a leaking blood-brain barrier [1].

Continue reading “Failure of the Blood-Brain Barrier Proceeds Dementia” »

Ionity, the new ‘ultra-fast’ joint electric car charging network by BMW, Mercedes, Ford and Volkswagen, is slowly starting to take shape in Europe and now we get to see the map of their planned stations for the first time. This new network is believed by many to be the most important electric vehicle charging infrastructure effort since Tesla’s Supercharger network. They are planning 400 stations with a capacity of up to 350 kW across Europe by 2020. They started work on the first 20 stations last year and they plan to hit a total of 100 stations this year. Now we get to see what that netwo…

Deeper space.

Electrical and optical engineers in Australia have designed a novel platform that could tailor telecommunication and optical transmissions. They experimentally demonstrated their system using a new transmission wavelength with a higher bandwidth capacity than those currently used in wireless communication. Reported this week in APL Photonics, these experiments open up new horizons in communication and photonics technology. Here, a schematic of the problem: Aperture in a metallic screen with a dielectric fiber placed on top acting as a magnetic dipole emitter when excited by a wave incident…