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Jul 14, 2018

The AI revolution has spawned a new chips arms race

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

There’s no x86 in the AI chip market yet—” People see a gold rush; there’s no doubt.”

A lot has changed since 1918. But whether it’s a literal (like the City of London School athletics’ U12 event) or figurative (AI chip development) race, participants still very much want to win.

For years, the semiconductor world seemed to have settled into a quiet balance: Intel vanquished virtually all of the RISC processors in the server world, save IBM’s POWER line. Elsewhere AMD had self-destructed, making it pretty much an x86 world. And Nvidia, a late starter in the GPU space, previously mowed down all of it many competitors in the 1990s. Suddenly only ATI, now a part of AMD, remained. It boasted just half of Nvidia’s prior market share.

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Jul 14, 2018

Mining Moon Ice: Prospecting Plans Starting to Take Shape

Posted by in category: space

GOLDEN, Colorado — A diverse range of scientists, engineers and mining technologists have begun blueprinting what hardware and missions are required to explore and establish a prospecting campaign for water ice at the poles of Earth’s moon.

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Jul 14, 2018

Drug boosts immune system in elderly people

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

Drugs were created to block a protein called the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) and it boosted the immune system by about 40% in elderly people.

They safely reducing infections in elderly volunteers around 40% by enhancing the immune system.

In 2004, tests that blocked a similar enzyme in fruit flies gave them a longer lifespan.

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Jul 14, 2018

Room temperature superconductivity evidence with graphene in contact with alkanes

Posted by in category: materials

Arxiv – Observation of the Meissner effect at room temperature in single-layer graphene brought into contact with alkanes

There are claims of synthesis of a room temperature superconductor. However, these claims have not been officially accepted by scientific communities. Currently, the highest transition temperature (Tc) recognized in scientific articles is 135 K at 1 atm of Hg-Ba-Ca-Cu-O system which is a copper oxide superconductor. We packed graphite flakes into a ring-shaped polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) tube and further injected heptane or octane. Then we generated circulating current in this ring tube by electromagnetic induction and showed that this circulating current continues to flow continuously at room temperature for 50 days. This experiment suggests that bringing alkane into contact with graphite may result in a material with zero resistance at room temperature.

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Jul 14, 2018

First color images of Earth

Posted by in category: space

This was what it was like to see Earth from space in color for the first time.

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Jul 14, 2018

Wall Street’s Big Banks Are Waging an All-Out Technological Arms Race

Posted by in category: finance

But constraints brought about by the financial crisis ended the leverage that had fueled the boom. Fixed-income traders felt the brunt of the changes, and in the years since, equities traders —especially those with a technology background—have enjoyed a renaissance. Their rise has touched off a battle for supremacy that’s come down to only three companies: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorgan Chase. These rivals are now locked in a technological arms race to control a $58 billion-a-year industry. As they each jockey for an edge over the other, no one who trades on Wall Street is safe.


Dimon, Blankfein, Gorman: Three great rivals are battling to control the $58 billion-a-year equities industry.

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Jul 13, 2018

Nuclear excitation by electron capture seen at long last

Posted by in categories: innovation, nuclear energy

Breakthrough could lead to new type of energy source.

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Jul 13, 2018

First global maps of Pluto and Charon show the worlds’ highs and lows

Posted by in category: space

New charts of Pluto and its moon Charon, compiled using New Horizons’ data, reveal high peaks, deep depressions and strange ridges.

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Jul 13, 2018

Method of making oxygen from water in zero gravity raises hope for long-distance space travel

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, space travel

In the new study, the researchers dropped the full experimental set up for photocatalysis down a 120m drop tower, creating an environment similar to microgravity. As objects accelerate towards Earth in free fall, the effect of gravity diminishes as forces exerted by gravity are cancelled out by equal and opposite forces due to the acceleration. This is opposite to the G forces experienced by astronauts and fighter pilots as they accelerate in their aircraft.

The researchers managed to show that it is indeed possible to split water in this environment. However, as water is split to create gas, bubbles form. Getting rid of bubbles from the catalyst material once formed is important – bubbles hinder the process of creating gas. On Earth, gravity makes the bubbles automatically float to the surface (the water near the surface is denser than the bubbles, which makes them buyonant) – freeing the space on the catalyst for the next bubble to be produced.

In zero gravity this is not possible and the bubble will remain on or near the catalyst. However, the scientists adjusted the shape of nanoscale features in the catalyst by creating pyramid-shaped zones where the bubble could easily disengage from the tip and float off into the medium.

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Jul 13, 2018

Can We Measure Our Own Galaxy Speeding Through Space?

Posted by in categories: physics, space, transportation

You’re probably sitting still, right? Wrong, absolutely wrong. Not only are you on a spinning orb, but you’re also traveling around 70,000 miles per hour around a star, in a galaxy that, observations imply, is sailing through space at over a million miles per hour.

If the above numbers seem shocking, they shouldn’t be. The laws of physics look and feel the same for any object so long as it’s not accelerating, the way you can’t feel that a car is traveling at a steady 60 miles per hour unless you look out the window. But that also makes our galactic speed hard to measure from here on Earth. The million-plus mile per hour number is based on measurements of how the most distant objects in the Universe appear to move in comparison to us, but scientists want to try to measure our acceleration by looking at more nearby objects.

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