Lifeboat Foundation

Purdue University scientists led a comprehensive analysis of research concerning the effects of microplastics on aquatic life, with the results showing widely different impacts among different types of animals. Strong negative effects were particularly apparent for small animals, such as larval fish and zooplankton, a source of food for many species, suggesting serious potential consequences that could ripple throughout the food web.

Tomas Höök, an associate professor in Purdue University’s Department of Forestry and Natural Resources and director of the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program, led a team that designed a meta-analysis of research related to the effects of microplastics on aquatic life. The analysis, published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, used results from 43 other studies that each considered the effects of microplastics on consumption of food, growth, reproduction, and/or survival of aquatic animals. The analysis mathematically calculated one or more effect size(s) for each study, then those effects were combined statistically to understand the big-picture effect on animals. The animals included in this study were all aquatic but ranged from fish to mussels to sea urchins to worms.

The most significant findings included:

Continue reading “Most microplastic harm done at lowest levels of food web, according to analysis” »

A new technique integrates optical components into general purpose chips using standard manufacturing processes and materials. Light carries data faster and generates little heat compared to electronics, which makes it attractive to chipmakers eager to boost device speeds.

Even more importantly, it will have wider repercussions on the overall development of China itself. Inevitably, it will hinder the country’s ambition to narrow the technology gap with the developed West.

China’s reliance on key technologies from the West shows it still needs the developed economies much more than they need China.

By Cary Huang

Continue reading “US tech ban on ZTE exposes China’s Achilles’ heel” »

Rough translation: Blue Origin doesn’t give a damn about SpaceX’s media circus. It’s not trying to outdo competitors with each subsequent project — the company is working on just two rockets (New Shepard and New Glenn) with hopes to launch a manned flight before the end of 2018. Blue Origin is worrying about Blue Origin. That’s it.

It’s a bit too early to tell whether Blue Origin’s strategy is any better than SpaceX’s, or vice versa. Competition is a powerful force for innovation. But with the commercial space industry quickly growing (and SpaceX threatening to monopolize it), it’s easy enough to keep innovating in an effort to one-up the competition, losing sight of the main goal in the process.

One way to judge who wins? Whoever sends humans farther than they’ve ever gone. In that sense, the companies are striving for the same goal in the long term, and those that keep their eyes on the prize might fare best. In her interview with Engadget, Blue Origin’s Dietrich said that the company’s vision of millions of people living and working in space meant that they “are applauding all launch operators that are building new and more capable systems.”

Scientists say the South Atlantic Anomaly, a disturbance in Earth’s magnetic field, doesn’t indicate that it’s about to reverse polarity. By studying past geological scenarios, researchers conclude that the current weirdness in Earth’s magnetic field most likely won’t result in an excursion or even a full reversal.

The United States trails key global players in preparing its workers for the upcoming artificial intelligence takeover. It’s time to get to work.

Virgin Hyperloop One and trade logistics company DP World have created a new cargo brand “built for an on-demand world.”

Looking deep into the observable Universe – and hence, back to the earliest periods of time – is an immensely fascinating thing. In so doing, astronomers are able to see the earliest galaxies in the Universe and learn more about how they evolved over time. From this, they are not only able to see how large-scale structures (like galaxies and galaxy clusters) formed, but also the role played by dark matter.

Most recently, an international team of scientists used the Atacama Large Millimeter-submillimeter Array (ALMA) to observe the Universe when it was just 1.4 billion years old. What they observed was a “protocluster”, a series of 14 galaxies located 12.4 billion light-years away that were about to merge. This would result in the formation of a massive galaxy cluster, one of the largest objects in the known Universe.

The study which described their findings, titled “A massive core for a cluster of galaxies at a redshift of 4.3”, recently appeared in the journal Nature. The study was led by Tim Miller – an astronomer from Dalhousie University, Halifax, and Yale University – and included members from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the European Southern Observatory (ESO), Canada’s National Research Council, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and multiple universities and research institutions.

Continue reading “Astronomers See a Pileup of 14 Separate Galaxies in the Early Universe” »

Deepcric is a deep learning system for cricket. It looks at cricket video and does scene segmentation, scene classification, automatic commentary generation, targeted highlights generation, player identification, and player stats extraction.

Deep learning has been applied everywhere. From imagenet [1] to disease identification [2] to large-scale video classification [3] to text classification [4], there are barely any areas where people have not applied deep learning. But interestingly, there has been very little work in applying data science and deep learning to the game of cricket. This post is a detailed overview of my final year project at the FAST National University. We have developed a deep learning based system that is able to do many tasks in cricket in an automated way. Some of these tasks are: