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NEC has announced that it will be providing a large-scale facial recognition system for the 2020 Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo. The system will be used to identify over 300,000 people at the Games, including athletes, volunteers, media, and other staff. It’s the first time that facial recognition technology will ever be used for this purpose at an Olympic Games.

NEC’s system is built around an AI engine called NeoFace, which is part of the company’s overarching Bio-IDiom line of biometric authentication technology. The Tokyo 2020 implementation will involve linking photo data with an IC card to be carried by accredited people. NEC says that it has the world’s leading face recognition tech based on benchmark tests from the US’ National Institute of Standards and Technology.

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“When Stars Collide” sounds like the title track of Barry Manilow’s latest album.

Unfortunately, Barry hasn’t released a single since 2012.

But astronomers did make the first definitive detection of a radioactive molecule spilled from two colliding stars. So that’s something.

Spotted with the Atacama Large Millimeter/tarubmillimeter Array (ALMA) and Northern Extended Millimeter Array (NOEMA) radio telescopes, the form was apparently ejected into space by the collision of two Sun-like stars.

Billed as the Chinese answer to Dallas Buyers Club, the tear-jerking film Dying to Survive last week became Premier Li Keqiang’s new rallying cry for speeding up price cuts for cancer medications. It is an issue of such complexity that he has held two cabinet meetings about it in the past three months.


Li Keqiang has been trying to speed up price cuts for life-saving medication for months, and it’s a boon that the box-office hit has generated widespread awareness.

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Want a place to discuss science, futurism, technology and the impact of their applications on society? Join the ‘Singularity’ Discord server:


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