Charge your phone while you heat your dinner.
Rolls-Royce’s pricey paint job
Posted in futurism
Lego Robot Battle
Posted in robotics/AI
George Church is very interested in your memories now.
Harvard researcher George Church is looking for people with exceptionally good memory to take part in a study aimed at finding genetic mechanisms that boost memory in research that could one day result in better drugs or diagnostic tests.
Church and other researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School’s Personal Genome Project, in collaboration with Lumos Labs — the makers of the brain-training game Lumosity — will look for common genetic markers in individuals with exceptional memories, attention and reaction speeds.
The chief executive of listed accounting software business Xero has claimed machine learning-based automation will be a bigger change than the advent of cloud computing, as it starts to offer options to automate accounting tasks.
Xero boss Rod Drury said the company would unveil a new feature to its software this week which would automate the coding of invoices and bank transactions for its small business customers, work that has been conducted personally by business owners or accountants until now.
The process was targeted for automation after Xero’s Find & Recode feature showed 3.1 million invoices had been incorrectly recorded by its 862,000 subscribers in the 18 months to September 2016. It is the first introduction of machine learning automation at Xero since it shifted its infrastructure to run on Amazon Web Services in 2016.
Words and promises of action in some far off future election will not save the once great natural wonder of the Great Barrier Reef from death.
If most of the world’s coral reefs die, as scientists fear is increasingly likely, some of the richest and most colorful life in the ocean could be lost, along with huge sums from reef tourism. In poorer countries, lives are at stake: Hundreds of millions of people get their protein primarily from reef fish, and the loss of that food supply could become a humanitarian crisis.
Liquid fuel for future computers
Posted in 3D printing, computing
Researchers at ETH Zurich and IBM Research Zurich have built a tiny redox flow battery. This means that future computer chip stacks — in which individual chips are stacked like pancakes to save space and energy — could be supplied with electrical power and cooled at the same time by such integrated flow batteries (Energy & Environmental Science, “3D-printed fluidic networks for high-power-density heat-managing miniaturized redox flow batteries”).
In a flow battery, an electrochemical reaction is used to produce electricity out of two liquid electrolytes, which are pumped to the battery cell from outside via a closed electrolyte loop.