Menu

Blog

Page 9504

Dec 17, 2018

Next-generation of GPS satellites are headed to space

Posted by in categories: government, satellites

DENVER, United States — After months of delays, the U.S. Air Force is about to launch the first of a new generation of GPS satellites, designed to be more accurate, secure and versatile.

But some of their most highly touted features will not be fully available until 2022 or later because of problems in a companion program to develop a new ground control system for the satellites, government auditors said.

The satellite is scheduled to lift off Tuesday from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. It’s the first of 32 planned GPS III satellites that will replace older ones now in orbit. Lockheed Martin is building the new satellites outside Denver.

Continue reading “Next-generation of GPS satellites are headed to space” »

Dec 17, 2018

10 mysteries of the universe: Is Earth in a special place?

Posted by in category: space

The BOSS Great Wall is the hugest object ever found – and at one billion light years across it spells big trouble for our cosmic theories.

Read more

Dec 17, 2018

NASA solar spacecraft snaps first image from inside sun’s atmosphere

Posted by in category: space travel

Just look at it…it’s a photo basically from the inside of the sun!

Read more

Dec 17, 2018

Amazon’s Homegrown Chips Threaten Silicon Valley Giant Intel

Posted by in categories: internet, robotics/AI

In recent years, Google has designed specialized chips for artificial intelligence technology. Facebook and Microsoft, which like most internet companies are major buyers of chips from Intel, have indicated that they are working on similar A.I. chips.


The retailer is now making its own server chips. It’s the latest sign that big internet outfits are willing to cut out longtime suppliers.

Read more

Dec 16, 2018

Shrinking objects to the nanoscale

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, nanotechnology, quantum physics

Researchers have invented a new way to fabricate nanoscale 3D objects of nearly any shape. They can also pattern the objects with a variety of useful materials, including metals, semiconducting quantum dots, and DNA.

Read more

Dec 16, 2018

Sophia Robot Creator: We’ll Achieve Singularity in Five to 10 years

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, singularity

By Kate Gill

A.I. robot Sophia is getting a software upgrade, one that will inch her ー and perhaps A.I. ー even closer to humanity. According to her creator, not only will Sophia earn her citizenship in Malta, she will reach a level of advancement equal to human beings in roughly five to 10 years.

“In the long run, I think the broader implications are pretty clear,” Dr. Ben Goertzel, the CEO of SingularityNET and chief scientist at Hanson Robotics, told Cheddar Friday.

Continue reading “Sophia Robot Creator: We’ll Achieve Singularity in Five to 10 years” »

Dec 16, 2018

Elon Musk plans for Tesla to make supersonic electric planes

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation

Elon Musk said that he would like for Tesla, the electric car maker, to be able to produce a supersonic plane.

Read more

Dec 16, 2018

MIT Scientists Just Used a Biological Virus to Make Faster Computers

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing

When your computer stores data, it has to pause while the information moves from one piece of hardware to another.

But that may soon stop being the case, as scientists from MIT and the Singapore University of Technology and Design uncovered a new manufacturing trick that should let them build computers that don’t have those annoying delays.

The key is to sit back and let a virus — the biological kind — handle the assembly work.

Continue reading “MIT Scientists Just Used a Biological Virus to Make Faster Computers” »

Dec 16, 2018

Drug ‘reverses’ ageing in animal tests

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Mice had more stamina, hair and improved organ function with the drug.

Read more

Dec 16, 2018

How DeepMind’s AlphaZero Mastered Complex Games With No Human Input

Posted by in categories: entertainment, robotics/AI

As impressive as all these feats were, game-playing AI typically exploit the properties of a single game and often rely on hand-crafted knowledge coded into them by developers. But DeepMind’s latest creation, AlphaZero, detailed in a new paper in Science, was built from the bottom up to be game-agnostic.

All it was given was the rules of each game, and it then played itself thousands of times, effectively using trial and error to work out the best tactics for each game. It was then pitted against the most powerful specialized AI for each game, including its predecessor AlphaGo, beating them comprehensively.

“This work has, in effect, closed a multi-decade chapter in AI researchers need to look to a new generation of games to provide the next set of challenges, ”IBM computer scientist Murray Campbell, who has worked on chess-playing computers, wrote in an opinion for Science.

Read more