Tesla Model X

THE WORLD’S FIRST luxury electric SUV is gorgeous. It’s futuristic. And once again, Tesla Motors is redefining the electric vehicle. The Silicon Valley automaker has teased us for years with the Model X, but yesterday it finally gave the world its first look at the production model, then handed six customers the keys.

Those people now own a $130,000 electric vehicle that will go 250 miles on a charge, carry seven people and haul more stuff than anyone but a hoarder might want with him. And although the X shares much of its DNA with the impressive Model S P90D sedan, in many ways it eclipses that phenomenal car. It’s not just the design, which is futuristic without being weird. It’s not just the performance, which is incredibly fast. And it’s not even the dramatic “falcon” doors that lift like the wings of a bird. It’s how all of those features come together in a vehicle that somehow makes an SUV not just cool, but desirable.

Click here for the video

Credits

http://www.cnet.com/videos/tesla-model-x-first-drive-of-the-all-electric-suv/

NASA Finds Running Water Flows on Mars

Mars appears to have flowing rivulets of water, at least in the summer, scientists reported Monday in a finding that boosts the odds of life on the red planet. "Mars is not the dry, arid planet that we thought of in the past," said Jim Green, director of planetary science for NASA. Scientists in 2008 confirmed the existence of frozen water on Mars. Now instruments aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have yielded what researchers said is the strongest evidence yet that water in liquid form trickles down certain Martian slopes.

The rivulets — if that's what they are, since the evidence for their existence is indirect — are about 12 to 15 feet wide and 300 feet or more long, scientists said. They apparently consist of wet soil, not standing water. The water is believed to contain certain salts — not ordinary table salt, but magnesium perchlorate, magnesium chlorate and sodium perchlorate. Like road salt used to melt ice and snow on Earth, such compounds can prevent water from freezing at extremely low temperatures. That would explain how water could exist in liquid form on Mars, which has an average temperature of minus 81 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition to supporting life, the presence of liquid water could make things easier for astronauts visiting or living on Mars. Water could be used for drinking and for creating oxygen and rocket fuel. NASA's goal is to send humans there in the 2030s.

https://youtu.be/kf9phc4icMs 

Credits:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-mars-water-20150928-story.html

Super Moon Eclipse

a supermoon combines with a lunar eclipse for the first time since 1982. The supermoon eclipse will last 1 hour and 11 minutes, and will be visible to North and South America, Europe, Africa, and parts of West Asia and the eastern Pacific, according to NASA. Weather permitting, the supermoon will be visible after nightfall, and the eclipse will cast it into shadow beginning at 8:11 p.m. ET. The total eclipse starts at 10:11 p.m. ET, peaking at 10:47 p.m. ET.

A rare phenomenon, there have only been five supermoon eclipses since 1900 (in 1910, 1928, 1946, 1964 and 1982). After Sunday, the next supermoon eclipse will occur in 2033. A supermoon occurs when a new or full moon is at its closest to the Earth. "Because the orbit of the moon is not a perfect circle, the moon is sometimes closer to the Earth than at other times during its orbit," said Noah Petro, deputy project scientist for the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. "When the moon is farthest away it’s known as apogee, and when it’s closest it’s known as perigee. On Sept. 27, we’re going to have a perigee full moon—the closest full moon of the year."



Credits:
http://www.space.com/30670-supermoon-lunar-eclipse-weather-forecast.html

New bike design

Ever wonder why all the bikes in the Tour de France all look the same? Well it's because the International Cycling Union (UCI) puts stringent controls on bikes. And bike manufacturers don't like producing products that don't meet their standards. Yet there are lots of different ways to design and construct a bike. The lead designer from bike manufacturer Specialized, Robert Eggers, is fed up. So he designed a completely new type of bike -- one with a motor no less. Eggers almost looked to violate as many UCI rules as he could. And he ended up with his new bike, the fUCI. 

A concept bike that allows you to disable the entire system when locking up as well as generate power and offer routes while you pedal is being developed. And while the fUCI bike won’t abide by the official rules for racing bikes, it offers a tantalising glimpse into the future of cycling. The fUCI is an e-bike powered by a lithium battery to enable super-fast acceleration. It also uses a fly-wheel - a device that can provide energy even when you're not pedalling - to increase efficiency. Robert Egger, creative director of California-based bike manufacturer Specialized, built the concept bike to revolutionises the design of the bicycle from the ground up, reimagining everything from the aerodynamics to streamlined integration using the latest technology. Using the smartphone as its central hub, the bike would know when it is day or night and be able to switch lights on or off accordingly, and use proximity sensors like in modern cars to give cyclists a warning when other vehicles approach. Egger said the fUCI would utilize GPS and route suggestions to modernise the whole cycling experience.

click here for the video.

Credits:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3218037/The-bicycle-future-FUCI-concept-bike-boasts-smartphone-docking-station-solar-panels-motion-sensors-built-lock.html

11 year builds a planner

For families where the children spend time commuting back and forth between parents’ houses, keeping track of everyone’s schedule can be a challenge for moms, dads and kids alike. That’s a problem that Alex Jordan, age 11, has faced firsthand, which is why she returned this weekend to the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon to work on Famtastic, a combination family organizer and private social network for families and other caregivers, like grandparents and nannies.

This is Alex’s second time competing at the TechCrunch Hackathon. In 2013, she worked on Super Fun Kid Time – a playdate finder.

“I would be having a sleepover with my friends,” Alex explains. “[And I’d have to ask my parents] ‘are you picking us up? When are you coming?’,” she says. “You feel like you’re always bugging them.” Along with dad Richard, who works at Ron Johnson’s e-commerce startup Enjoy, a concierge service for gadget owners, the team of two built a basic family organizer website over the course of the weekend. Alex says she did some of the HTML templates for Famtastic, and has been practicing her Ruby coding.

Credits: 

http://techcrunch.com/2015/09/20/eleven-year-old-alex-jordan-shows-off-famtastic-an-online-family-planner-at-the-disrupt-sf-hackathon

Catholic Pastor Builds A Tribute to the Pope -- In Legos

To some, Legos are like a religion. When you're done with a project, it can feel like a religious experience. But for the Rev. Bob Simon creating something cool out of Lego bricks is more than just a fun way to pass the time. The pastor from St. Catherine of Siena Church in Moscow, Pennsylvania, used over half a million Lego bricks and minifigures to re-create this impressively-detailed Lego replica of the Vatican for the pope's visit to the US this week.

The awe-inspiring Lego model features St. Peter's Basilica and includes the statues that line the square, along with minifigures of the pope, nuns, priests, and various tourists. There's even a nun taking photos of herself with a tiny selfie stick. Plus Simon made sure to add a Lego minifigure version of himself. "It was an exercise in patience," Simon said. "I was thrilled with the way that everything came out. It was daunting." Considering that an average Lego piece costs 10 cents, this amazing Lego model of the Vatican is estimated to have cost $50,000 to make, according to Fortune magazine.



Credits:
http://www.cnet.com/news/pastor-re-creates-the-vatican-in-lego-for-the-popes-visit/#ftag=CAD590a51e

Zombie Servers Sucking Up Huge Amounts of Electricity

A zombie server is one that is running but is either not actually configured to a network, or one that hasn't been accessed and used for over six months. These servers — and there are millions of them, by one estimate — are sucking up lots of power while doing absolutely nothing. It is a lurking environmental problem that doesn’t get much discussion outside of the close-knit community of data-center operators and server-room geeks. Think of Facebook, Google, Instagram, and other social media. These companies have huge data storage centers. In 2010, the latest year for which there are estimates, data centers burned about 2% of all electricity used in the U.S. By one study’s calculation, there are more than 3.6 million comatose servers in the U.S. Keeping them powered up requires the services of an estimated 1.44 gigawatts of generating capacity—equivalent to three big power plants.

For example, an audit of AOL's servers found that a third of its servers simply weren’t needed, and another third ran software that could be moved to the cloud. The company ended up decommissioning 14,000 servers and slashing its data-center power consumption 35%, according to Chris Blelloch, AOL vice president, global infrastructure and platform services. Comatose servers, he says, are “most definitely a real problem,” in particular for companies that are more than five years old. To a large extent, it is a management problem. On one side are the IT people, who set up the servers and keep them humming along. And then there are the operations folks, like Mr. Nally, who supply the cooling and the power and manage the electricity bill. The IT workers—those in the best position to know which computers are ready to be turned off—don’t have a strong incentive to decommission their comatose boxes.

Stanford, Toyota to collaborate on AI research effort

Artificial intelligence is integrated into daily life, although often in imperceptible ways, such as language translators or algorithms that provide shopping tips based on past purchases. The next wave of AI-enabled devices that interact with humans will be far more obvious – think intelligent robotics and autonomous cars – and will become a driving force in reshaping society and individual lives. In a critical step toward the future of robotic cars, last week Stanford announced the formation of the SAIL-Toyota Center for AI Research, a new research center funded by $25 million from Toyota to further the development of artificial intelligence technologies. The collaboration is part of a combined effort by Toyota, Stanford and MIT, where Toyota is also funding a parallel research center, to advance the state of autonomous systems, with a goal of reducing traffic casualties and assisting drivers in various ways.

The collaboration builds on decades of leading-edge AI research conducted at Stanford. In the 1960s, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, or SAIL, built some of the first chess-playing computers, and by the 1970s, the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Language was one of the predominant tools for programming AI platforms. More recently, Stanford researchers have built systems that have aced several autonomous driving competitions.



Credits:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2015/september/toyota-stanford-center-090415.html

Computer Chip that Self-Destructs

It sounds like something straight out of a spy movie, but Xerox PARC engineers have devised an innovative way to protect top-secret messages sent via computer. According to a report from Engadget, a new chip that explodes into thousands of pieces was developed under DARPA’s Vanishing Programmable Resources program. The chip uses Gorilla Glass instead of metal or plastic, which is ion-exchanged tempered to apply a heavy amount of stress. Glass treated with stress shatters easily, and would completely disable a computer chip made from the material. The research team that developed the chip displayed their work at DARPA’s “Wait, What?” event, triggering the self-destruction process with a high-powered laser. They filmed the process in slow motion, and you can see the chip explode and continue to shatter into tiny shards in all directions.

The chip could have widespread applications in the transmission of sensitive or classified information, like encryption keys and passwords. Once the recipient accesses the information, they can initiate the self-destruct process and prevent anyone from ever viewing it again. The engineers also demonstrated that the self-destruct sequence could be initiated by radio signals or a physical switch in addition to the laser. The chip could be triggered remotely, and could have widespread implications for privacy and the protection of sensitive data.

Credits:
http://www.engadget.com/2015/09/12/self-destructing-computer-chip-darpa/ 

Many Baby Monitors are Hackable.

A security company on Wednesday released a report on an assortment of new vulnerabilities in baby monitors from several manufacturers: predictable information leaks; backdoor credentials; reflective, stored XSS; direct browsing; authentication bypass; and privilege escalation. Backdoor credentials -- the vulnerability most frequently found -- showed up in five products from different manufacturers.News that a hacker had breached a baby monitor in a Houston family's home kicked off an uproar a couple of years ago -- but things haven't changed in the baby monitor industry.

What's wrong with the baby monitor vendors? "Vendors in the Internet of Things are still very much learning just how complex the devices and ecosystem really is to secure," said company president, Victor Stanislav. Also, many of the vendors in the baby market space are newer companies that leverage many third parties, he said, and firmware for the components in the devices is "often years old, contributing to the lack of security." In the race to market and bring products to consumers, inattention to security is likely to be an issue, said Craig Spiezle, executive director of the Online Trust Alliance.

Credits:
http://abc7chicago.com/news/some-top-baby-monitors-lack-basic-security-features-report-says/968884/

Computer Art

Computers: they make everything so easy these days. They check our spelling for us and help with maths, and now machines have added painting to the list of things they are better than us at. Researchers in Germany have found that an algorithm can accurately copy the painting style of artists as disparate as Pablo Picasso and Vincent Van Gogh – and in just 60 minutes.

The algorithm forms a “convolutional neural network” (CNN) which, in lay terms, uses object recognition to recreate the foundation image (which can be anything) in the style of a piece of specific art. In fine art, especially painting, humans have mastered the skill to create unique visual experiences through composing a complex interplay between the content and style of an image. Thus far the algorithmic basis of this process is unknown and there exists no artificial system with similar capabilities. However, in other key areas of visual perception such as object and face recognition near-human performance was recently demonstrated by a class of biologically inspired vision models called Deep Neural Networks. Here is an artificial system based on a Deep Neural Network that creates artistic images of high perceptual quality.

Credits:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/02/computer-algorithm-recreates-van-gogh-painting-picasso

USF Creates First Online Assault Reporting System

The University of San Francisco will become one of the first colleges in the nation to try a new online reporting system for victims of sexual assault. The website will launch in the fall for the USF students. It was designed with input from people who've been sexually assaulted and it will potentially help the university crack down on crime. For someone who's been sexually assaulted, reporting it to police can feel like an impossible and traumatizing next step.

The app, called Callisto, allows a victim to privately write up an account of what happened. "It asks trauma informed questions along the way and even when they answer a question, they can click on a button that says, why are we asking this question?" said USF vice provost of student life Peter Novak. The student can then choose to just save the file or send it to the university. The site also has a matching system if the victim knows their attacker. "They can put an identifying telephone number, or name, or email account into the system and if it's matched by somebody else, it automatically goes to the university and we can stop repeat offenders," Noval said.

Three Category 4 Storms in the Pacific

It was a historic moment in meteorology late last week, when three Category 4 storms were simultaneously spotted marching across the Pacific. As if that wasn’t ominous enough, a tropical depression has just added itself to the mix.

The Central Pacific Hurricane Center (CPHC) in Honolulu Hawaii is issuing advisories on all of the hurricanes. On Sunday, August 30, from west to east, Hurricane Kilo was located 1,210 miles west-southwest of Honolulu, Hawaii, Hurricane Ignacio was located 515 miles east-southeast of Hilo, Hawaii, and Hurricane Jimena was located 1,815 miles east-southeast of Hilo, Hawaii. Maximum sustained winds are near 140 mph (220 kph) with higher gusts. Kilo is a category four hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane wind scale. Little change is expected for the next 12 hours…then slight weakening through 48 hours. The estimated minimum central pressure is 940 millibars.

Google is Dead. Long Live Alphabet!

In a surprise move, Google co-founcers Larry Page and Sergey Brin, announced a radical shake-up of the company’s corporate structure and management. A new company named Alphabet will preside over a collection of companies, the largest of which will be Google. Even the site’s new address eschewed convention: https://abc.xyz/. The bulk of their business, search and the like, will be handled by the new Google CE0 Sundar Pichai.

“As Sergey [Brin, co-founder] and I wrote in the original founders letter 11 years ago, ‘Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one’,” wrote Page. Google has come under pressure as its founders have used the enormous success of its search engine to fuel riskier bets on autonomous cars, smart household devices, internet-delivering balloons and cutting-edge medical research. The major restructuring will ostensibly give investors greater insight into how the money is being spent.

All shares of Google will automatically convert into corresponding shares of Alphabet, which will continue to trade under the stock ticker symbols GOOG and GOOGL. Shares in Google soared 5% in after hours trading. The new structure is said to be similar to Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which wholly owns a number of diverse holdings and has stakes in several others. Page will become Alphabet’s CEO. Brin will be its president, and Eric Schmidt will be the executive chairman of Alphabet.

Credits:
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/aug/10/google-alphabet-parent-company