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This Invention Will Keep Water Running After a Caribbean Hurricane Hits

Now, another hurricane season is already underway in the Caribbean.

Our research on rainwater harvesting — a low-cost, low-tech way to collect and store rainwater — suggests this technique could be deployed across the Caribbean to improve these communities’ access to water both after storms and in everyday life.

Even before hurricanes Maria and Irma hit last September, some Caribbean islands were unable to provide reliable clean water for drinking and washing to all residents.

Nvidia’s new Turing architecture is all about real-time ray tracing and AI

In recent days, word about Nvidia’s new Turing architecture started leaking out of the Santa Clara-based company’s headquarters. So it didn’t come as a major surprise that the company today announced during its Siggraph keynote the launch of this new architecture and three new pro-oriented workstation graphics cards in its Quadro family.

Nvidia describes the new Turing architecture as “the greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006.” That’s a high bar to clear, but there may be a kernel of truth here. These new Quadro RTx chips are the first to feature the company’s new RT Cores. “RT” here stands for ray tracing, a rendering method that basically traces the path of light as it interacts with the objects in a scene. This technique has been around for a very long time (remember POV-Ray on the Amiga?). Traditionally, though, it was always very computationally intensive, though the results tend to look far more realistic. In recent years, ray tracing got a new boost thanks to faster GPUs and support from the likes of Microsoft, which recently added ray tracing support to DirectX.