Lifeboat Foundation

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – The seats in Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship are like a dentist’s chair that’s fully extended, with a big difference. You can float out of this one when weightlessness sets in.

Of course, we couldn’t get the zero-G experience when we tried out the seats in a mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule, on display here at the 33rd Space Symposium. But we did get a condensed version of the 11-minute flight scenario, from launch to landing.

Four years ago, Google started to see the real potential for deploying neural networks to support a large number of new services. During that time it was also clear that, given the existing hardware, if people did voice searches for three minutes per day or dictated to their phone for short periods, Google would have to double the number of datacenters just to run machine learning models.

The need for a new architectural approach was clear, Google distinguished hardware engineer, Norman Jouppi, tells The Next Platform, but it required some radical thinking. As it turns out, that’s exactly what he is known for. One of the chief architects of the MIPS processor, Jouppi has pioneered new technologies in memory systems and is one of the most recognized names in microprocessor design. When he joined Google over three years ago, there were several options on the table for an inference chip to churn services out from models trained on Google’s CPU and GPU hybrid machines for deep learning but ultimately Jouppi says he never excepted to return back to what is essentially a CISC device.

We are, of course, talking about Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), which has not been described in much detail or benchmarked thoroughly until this week. Today, Google released an exhaustive comparison of the TPU’s performance and efficiencies compared with Haswell CPUs and Nvidia Tesla K80 GPUs. We will cover that in more detail in a separate article so we can devote time to an in-depth exploration of just what’s inside the Google TPU to give it such a leg up on other hardware for deep learning inference. You can take a look at the full paper, which was just released, and read on for what we were able to glean from Jouppi that the paper doesn’t reveal.

Continue reading “First In-Depth Look at Google’s TPU Architecture” »

Those in the life sciences industry have mixed feelings about Alphabet playing in their backyard.

London is testing out self-driving shuttles.

Using eight telescopes scattered across the globe, astronomers will collect data at a scale never attempted before in physics as they attempt to peer into a black hole for the first time. Event Horizon Telescope.

Big Dog marches again.

The US Marine Corps is preparing to resume testing on its four-legged robot, “Spot.”

A project of the Corps’ Warfighting Lab, the dog-sized device is slated to re-enter developmental testing in the fall.

Continue reading “See Spot Run, Again: Marines Resume Testing on Quadruped Robot” »

The solitary mountain on the dwarf planet Ceres may be slowly disappearing, following in the footsteps of earlier peaks.

New research suggests that the outer layer of the icy world may be slowly shifting over time, allowing the peak to gradually stretch out and sink into the crust. Similar mountains may have peppered the planet in the past and flattened out over time.

“It’s sort of like if you spill some syrup or honey on a plate and you watch it spread out over time, not instantaneously like water does but a little more slowly, it eventually gets to a flatter, broader shape; it’s the same process,” Michael Sori, a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona, told Space.com. [NASA Probe Snaps Stunning New Pics of Dwarf Planet Ceres].

Continue reading “Dwarf planet Ceres and the case of the vanishing ice volcanoes” »

Taking a cue from the Marvel Universe, researchers report that they have developed a self-healing polymeric material with an eye toward electronics and soft robotics that can repair themselves. The material is stretchable and transparent, conducts ions to generate current and could one day help your broken smartphone go back together again.

The researchers will present their work today at the 253rd National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

“When I was young, my idol was Wolverine from the X-Men,” Chao Wang, Ph.D., says. “He could save the world, but only because he could heal himself. A self-healing material, when carved into two parts, can go back together like nothing has happened, just like our human skin. I’ve been researching making a self-healing lithium ion battery, so when you drop your cell phone, it could fix itself and last much longer.”

Continue reading “Materials may lead to self-healing smartphones” »

A new basement-scale neural network study has taught an A.I. how to cobble together knock-knock jokes. Just don’t expect them to become classics.