Everybody knows the best way to get back at an adult is buying their kids a drum set. But what if we told you there was something that could annoy your friends even more this holiday season? Like maybe a toy that encourages their kids to yell at the top of their lungs? Yellies! are a toy made by Hasbro and they are exactly what they sound like.
"The louder you yell, the faster they go," the Hasbro website says. According to the website, Yellies! respond to sound. You can talk loudly or softly to get the Yellies! moving. You can also clap, play music or sing. 12 Yellies! are available to collect in 2018 with hints that more are coming in 2019. Yellies! retail for $14.99 on the Hasbro toy shop site.
Comparing data from different instruments aboard the trailblazing spacecraft, mission scientists determined the probe crossed the outer edge of the heliosphere on Nov. 5. This boundary, called the heliopause, is where the tenuous, hot solar wind meets the cold, dense interstellar medium. Its twin, Voyager 1, crossed this boundary in 2012, but Voyager 2 carries a working instrument that will provide first-of-its-kind observations of the nature of this gateway into interstellar space.
The most compelling evidence of Voyager 2's exit from the heliosphere came from its onboard Plasma Science Experiment (PLS), an instrument that stopped working on Voyager 1 in 1980, long before that probe crossed the heliopause. Until recently, the space surrounding Voyager 2 was filled predominantly with plasma flowing out from our Sun. This outflow, called the solar wind, creates a bubble - the heliosphere - that envelopes the planets in our solar system. The PLS uses the electrical current of the plasma to detect the speed, density, temperature, pressure and flux of the solar wind. The PLS aboard Voyager 2 observed a steep decline in the speed of the solar wind particles on Nov. 5. Since that date, the plasma instrument has observed no solar wind flow in the environment around Voyager 2, which makes mission scientists confident the probe has left the heliosphere.
Keeping a houseplant alive isn't always easy, especially for those who don't have a green thumb or can't be bothered to move plans around to keep them in the sun. Perhaps this plant-robot hybrid from MIT Media Lab is the answer to needless plant deaths. Called Elowan, the cyborg plant is equipped with electrodes, light detectors and wheels and uses its own internal electrical signals to communicate with a robotic extension that drives it toward light. Elowan acts as a new kind of cybernetic life form, where a plant "talks" to a machine.
Plants already generate natural bio-electrochemical signals in response to changes in light, gravity, soil conditions, temperature and other environmental conditions that affect their health. The idea of combining these electrical reactions with robotics to let plants save themselves is rather ingenious. The signals are routed to a wheeled robot base that holds the plant. The base then moves the plant to a spot with better light to help ensure its survival. This new kind of cyborg botany has interesting potential. "Instead of building completely discrete systems, the new paradigm points toward using the capabilities that exist in plants (and nature at large) and creating hybrids with our digital world," MIT Media Lab suggests.
Daimler AG is a German automotive company and one of the world’s largest commercial vehicle manufacturers. The 133-year-old company is perhaps best known for producing Mercedes-Benz and Smart cars, but they’re also running some rad experiments in the realm of self-driving trucks. It began last year when Daimler publicly launched their “Inspiration Truck,” an 18-wheeler semi-autonomous truck. Now it will be testing this truck in Nevada. Nevada is one of four states that permits self-driving vehicles on public roads.
These trucks use platooning technology, which allows trucks to connect wirelessly to each other. Daimler tested out this technology with three trucks traveling along Germany’s autobahn, which at more than 8,000 miles, ranks as one of the most dense and longest highways in the world. This was the first time platooning technology was tested with driverless vehicles. The trucks drove 80 kilometres an hour at about 15 meters apart. Daimler wanted to prove how self-driving technology could improve the efficiency of long-haul trucks traveling on freeways. The company predicts autonomous trucks could improve fuel efficiency by 5%, and also reduce the space used on the highway by almost half. Usually big rigs require a spacing of 150 feet, but this test proved it was possible to decrease it to 50 feet.
Campaign officials for the US Republican Party had their email accounts hacked ahead of this year's mid-term elections, it has emerged. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) said it was the victim of a cyber intrusion by an "unknown entity", and the FBI had been informed. Party officials said none of the emails had been made public. News website Politico, which first reported the hack, said the accounts of four senior aides had been targeted. It said the accounts were compromised for several months until the intrusion was spotted in April by an NRCC official who alerted the committee.
The NRCC co-ordinates election campaigns for Republican candidates running for the US House of Representatives, the lower house of Congress. Politico, citing senior party officials, said the NRCC had kept details of the hack hidden from the party's leadership, as well as its house members, saying it feared it would make it harder to find the culprit. NRCC spokesman Ian Prior said: "The NRCC can confirm that it was the victim of a cyber intrusion by an unknown entity. The cybersecurity of the Committee's data is paramount, and upon learning of the intrusion, the NRCC immediately launched an internal investigation and notified the FBI, which is now investigating the matter."
Most of us have fond memories of the Etch-a-Sketch from childhood. [Potent Printables] wanted to update the designs so he 3D printed an XY carriage for a stylus that works with a cell phone drawing program. You can see the video below and the 3D model details on Thingiverse. The design is fun all by itself, but it also gave us a few ideas. For one thing, if you motorized it you could make some pretty clever drawing toys. But there could be a more practical use, too.
You’d have to automate the Z-axis as well, but if you did, this wouldn’t be a bad test jig for mobile application developers. The stylus could simulate finger poking and dragging while screen captures verified proper operation. Of course, there are other ways to do this, but it would be pretty neat to see a mechanized finger tracing out tests on a new user interface. Besides that, it’s just a fun project that should be easy enough to scale up to use an old tablet that’s gathering up dust and make it useful again. In addition, the first part of the video shows how the real McCoy works, which is always fun.
The Marriott hotel chain asked guests checking in for a treasure trove of personal information: credit cards, addresses and sometimes passport numbers. On Friday, consumers learned the risk. Marriott International revealed that hackers had breached its Starwood reservation system and had stolen the personal data of up to 500 million guests. The assault started as far back as 2014, and was one of the largest known thefts of personal records, second only to a 2013 breach of Yahoo that affected three billion user accounts and larger than a 2017 episode involving the credit bureau Equifax.
The Starwood’s data has not popped up on the so-called dark web, according to Recorded Future, a cybersecurity firm, and Coalition, a cyber insurance provider, which suggested that the hotel attackers weren’t looking to sell what they took. “Usually when stolen data doesn’t appear, it’s a state actor collecting it for intelligence purposes,” said James A. Lewis, a cybersecurity expert at the Center for Strategic Studies in Washington. The names, addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, email addresses and encrypted credit card details of hotel customers were stolen. The travel histories and passport numbers of a smaller group of guests were also taken. Marriott said it had set up a dedicated website and call center to deal with guests and said it would try to reach affected customers on Friday to inform them of the breach. The site was having problems staying online shortly after the attack was announced.
Senator Chuck Schumer has suggested that the Marriott Corporation should pay to replace all passports of everyone who shared their passport number on the Marriott site.
NASA has invited nine companies to bid on delivery services to the moon as part of its greater Moon to Mars mission. The new commercial partners, announced Thursday at a Washington, D.C. press conference, will compete for Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) contracts that the space agency says could total $2.6 billion over the next 10 years. Technical feasibility, price, and schedule will determine which companies are chosen to deliver science and technology payloads to the moon for NASA, with missions potentially flying as early as next year.
The initial payloads only need to weigh at least 22 pounds, Geek Wire reports, but NASA plans to eventually fly shipments as much as several tons for lunar development. The space program has also reportedly floated the idea of selling tourists tickets to space. In announcing the commercial partners, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the move “marks tangible progress in America’s return to the Moon’s surface to stay.”
Uber users have to allow the company to have access to a lot of person information: names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, credit card info, ride information -- including locations. The app needs this information for ridesharing to work. However hackers were able to access and download information from 57 million users. What did Uber do when they found out? Nothing. Rather than announce the hack, the previous CEO of Uber kept the hack quiet. They were able to contact the hackers and paid them off to delete the data they stole. There is no evidence whether or not the hackers did this.
Hackers have stolen personal data for 57 million Uber customers and drivers, the ride-hailing company said Tuesday. The stolen information includes names, home addresses, mobile phone numbers and emails of 50 million people who have used Uber around the world. The breach also exposed the driver's licenses and other information for roughly 7 million drivers for the company, including 600,000 in the U.S. No Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, birth dates or trip location data were taken, Uber said, adding that it hasn't seen evidence of fraud related to the breach. The company said it is monitoring affected accounts for signs of misuse.
NASA has studied the surface of Mars with various rovers, some small and some big. It is currently studying the atmosphere of Mars with the MAVEN satellite which is orbiting the Red Planet. Now NASA is going to study the interior of Mars with the landing yesterday of Insight. This probe will not move around the surface of Mars; in fact it's job is to stay incredibly still. All the while the probe will perform numerous tasks to learn more about the planet and how it may have formed.
NASA’s InSight lander completed its seven-month interplanetary journey of nearly 500 million kilometers in dramatic style on Monday, slamming into the Martian atmosphere at a speed of nearly 20,000 kilometers per hour. Only six-and-a-half harrowing minutes later, after ejecting its heatshield, deploying a supersonic parachute and firing retrorockets, its speed had dramatically slowed to a jogging pace after traversing the 130 kilometers between Mars’s upper atmosphere and the planet’s arid surface.
Replacing parts on a lunar base could pose a major challenge, since resupplying missions will likely be massively expensive and time consuming. That’s why a group of scientists led by the European Space Agency are exploring ways to 3D print anything from screws to coins using artificial lunar regolith — a simulation, essentially, of moon dust.
The scientists partnered with Austrian company Lithoz to develop a 3D printing technology that first mixes the regolith with a special kind of glue that hardens when exposed to light. Then they 3D print it into a particular shape and bake it inside an oven — similarly to how ceramics are hardened inside a kiln. “If one needs to print tools or machinery parts to replace broken parts on a lunar base, precision in the dimensions and shape of the printed items will be vital,” says Advenit Makya, an ESA engineer working on the project in an ESA blog post.
Using artificial intelligence and their own smarts, two Cupertino teens are working on identifying and predicting areas in a forest that are ripe for wildfires, with the hopes of providing early warnings to fire agencies. The Smart Wildfire Sensor device by the Monta Vista High School seniors has gotten the attention of Google, and the students have submitted it to Cal Fire for review.
The device uses a camera to take photos in a forest — the students often went to Rancho San Antonio nearby, and sometimes Big Basin Redwood State Park, Sanjana said. Using Google’s TensorFlow machine-learning system, which can process a massive amount of images, the device can then determine the moisture content of the dead fuel — consisting of dead branches and fallen leaves — in a forest. If the moisture content is low, that forest is susceptible to wildfire. The device would then use a wide area network connection to contact fire authorities, the students said
Google is giving users access to data controls from directly within its most-used product: Search. Starting on November 1st, users be able to review and delete their recent Search activity, get quick access to relevant privacy controls in their Google Account, and be able to learn more about how Search works with their data. These options will be available from within Search on desktop and mobile, and in the Google app for iOS and Android in the coming weeks. Thousands of engineers and product specialists spend countless hours here at Google’s sprawling complex and its offices worldwide trying to solve search’s most complex problem: language.
Google is simplifying that process in a big way. Instead of hitting up your account, you’ll be able to see your history every time you search for something. Once you search for a term in Chrome, you’ll be able to manage your entire search history without leaving the browser or interrupting what you were doing. Google is rolling out this change in Chrome and other desktop and mobile browsers today, and will be pushing the change to the Google app on iOS and Android “in the moving weeks.” And Google also promises to expand the feature to Maps in 2019, as well as “many other Google products.”
During California’s record drought conditions of 2014, FIRESafe MARIN, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), and Marin County Fire Department collaborated on the installation of a high-tech, remote wildfire detection system on four critical peaks in Marin county. FIRESafe MARIN donated the $207,000 system, funded through a partnership with PG&E, installing the special cameras, support software, servers, and panoramic monitoring displays in the Emergency Command Center in Woodacre, where dispatchers will have access to the system 24-hours a day during fire season. The effort is part of an ongoing partnership between PG&E and private, public and community organizations to prevent additional fires from sparking during the California wildfire season, which typically reaches its peak in late fall.
The remote fire detection system will enable Marin County Fire Department to monitor and detect wildfires around the clock, covering a larger land area than is currently visible from the two fire lookouts at Mt. Tamalpais and Mt. Barnabe. The system will be installed October 20-22, 2014, with cameras and networking equipment at the Gardner Fire Lookout on Mt. Tamalpais’ East Peak, the Dickson Fire Lookout on Mt. Barnabe near Lagunitas, Big Rock Ridge, and Point Reyes Hill. The system will be operable immediately, providing for enhanced fire protection for residents and businesses during the critical period late in the 2014 fire season. The ForestWatch® camera system, developed by EnviroVision Solutions of Roseburg, Oregon, and South Africa, will help with early fire detection, mapping the exact location of wildfires, and providing GIS information to fire personnel responding to early reports of fires.
GPS technology is so ubiquitous now that it can be hard to remember a day when you couldn’t just take out your phone and find out exactly where you are in the world. However, that’s actually a very recent development and one that could be denied to us in the future. GPS relies on a network of satellites that could be damaged, blocked, or destroyed. You also can’t get a good GPS lock when you’re underground or around tall buildings. There may be an alternative, though. Imperial College London and engineering firm M Squared have developed a new “quantum accelerometer” that can provide precise locations without any external system.
The quantum accelerometer from Imperial College London could solve that problem because it’s stupendously accurate. While the device is nominally portable, it’s not exactly compact or simple to use. Quantum mechanics tells us that all matter has a wave property, but that’s very difficult to observe in daily life. Ultra-cool atoms display their wave properties more prominently, and that’s the key to the quantum accelerometer. S0, the accelerometer knows when it moves with a high degree of accuracy, and it, therefore, knows where it is at all times based on where it started. Currently, the system measures movement on a single axis, but it should be possible to scale the design up to measure all three axes and three rotational directions for full navigation.
The ‘primer v2’ robot by masahiko yamaguchi rides a bicycle using the same techniques that a human does. Developed by japanese roboticist Masahiko Yamaguchi, this robotic bicyclist may be the world’s first to ride its miniature fixed gear bike in exactly the same manner as a human: cycling on the pedals, maintaining its own balance via steering, and braking by dragging his feet along the ground. In these attributes, ‘primer v2’ advances beyond the previous version which could ride a bicycle but was affixed to the pedals and handlebars. ‘primer v2’ was demoed at the Rex international robot exhibition in tokyo.
Yamaguchi utilized a mass produced two-legged robot which he modified with special joints. A gyroscope records the tilt of the robot’s body, which is then used to calculate how far to turn the handlebars in order to remain balanced. A backpack worn by ‘primer v2’ contains a control unit assembled by yamaguchi himself to ensure high processing speed. Designed as an exploration of the possibility of technology to mimic human skills, the project interestingly draws attention to the complexity of the mental processes involved in what we find to be relatively simple actions. For example, although we think nothing of lowering our feet in order to manually stop a bicycle, in reality in order to brake properly, the angle between the ground and the leg and hip as well as the current velocity must all be taken into account.
After 11 years in space, the Dawn spacecraft has run out of fuel, and the mission is over. The craft was sent to visit the two largest objects in the main asteroid belt. At the end of the last of the mission, it’s been in orbit around the dwarf planet Ceres, where it will remain for decades. On it's voyage, the spacecraft achieved many firsts along the way. In 2011, when Dawn arrived at Vesta, the second largest world in the main asteroid belt, the spacecraft became the first to orbit a body in the region between Mars and Jupiter. In 2015, when Dawn went into orbit around Ceres, a dwarf planet that is also the largest world in the asteroid belt, the mission became the first to visit a dwarf planet and go into orbit around two destinations beyond Earth.
The data Dawn beamed back to Earth from its four science experiments enabled scientists to compare two planet-like worlds that evolved very differently. Among its accomplishments, Dawn showed how important location was to the way objects in the early solar system formed and evolved. Dawn also reinforced the idea that dwarf planets could have hosted oceans over a significant part of their history – and potentially still do. Dawn’s data sets will be deeply mined by scientists working on how planets grow and differentiate, and when and where life could have formed in our solar system. Ceres and Vesta are important to the study of distant planetary systems, too, as they provide a glimpse of the conditions that may exist around young stars.
As early voters head to the polls for the midterm elections, the federal government is stepping up cyber security. "The 2018 midterm elections remain a potential target for state and non-state actors and we remain prepared to respond," said Matthew Masterson, senior cybersecurity advisor for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. DHS is rolling out a new federal cyber attach detection system, called ALBERT Sensors, designed to detect hackers before they get into the election system. Every county in Florida now has an ALBERT, which alerts officials to suspicious computer IP addresses that are trying to get into the election system.
“In Seminole county we call it building a cyber mote around our office, but every county in Florida has this similar cyber mote blocking against any cyber intrusion that shouldn’t be happening,” said Seminole County Supervisor of Elections Mike Ertel. According to a recent Pew Research Center Poll, 67 percent said it’s “somehwhat” or “very” likely that Russia or som other foreign agency is trying to influence voting. Just 8 percent of respondents were confident in the election system. The ALBERT sensors aren’t 100-percent effective. The system’s only capable of blocking known threats that it’s programmed to identify.
GM made a fun surprise announcement at this past week’s Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) trade show: an all-electric Chevrolet Camaro concept with 700 horsepower meant to bust out a quarter mile run in about nine seconds. And unlike EV performance cars like the NIO EP9 or the upcoming second-generation Tesla Roadster, which are purpose-built, the Camaro concept appears to be a beautiful, cobbled-together Frankenstein’s monster of a car. The car, dubbed the eCOPO Concept (after the original COPO Camaro special order performance models from the late 1960s) looks like any other modern Camaro from the outside, even in electric blue paint. Inside is much different. For instance, the eCOPO is powered by a combination of BorgWarner electric motors, which are the same ones used in these Daimler electric trucks.
The motors draw power from an 800-volt battery pack, which is twice as much as you’d find in a Chevy Bolt. But the eCOPO doesn’t use a “skateboard” style battery pack that takes up the whole floor of the car, which is pretty much the standard for EVs these days. Instead, the pack is split into four 200-volt modules that are tucked into different spots around the car’s frame: two sit in the rear-seat area, and two are in the trunk, with one over the rear axle and one taking up the spot where the spare tire usually goes. GM says distributing the mass of the batteries like this helps improve performance on a drag strip, as it gives the car a 56 percent rear weight bias, which helps on launch. But it also shows how much of a sort of clever workaround effort this was on the part of Hancock and Lane, an electric drag racing team that helped Chevy build the car.
NASA is preparing technology for use on its Mars 2020 rover mission, due to land on the Red Planet in February 2021 — and it's breaking world records along the way. Landing on Mars is notoriously challenging because of the planet's thin atmosphere, which makes it difficult to slow down a spacecraft enough to land gently on its surface. In order to land their heaviest yet rover on Mars, NASA had to redesign an existing landing-parachute design — the same one that protected the Curiosity rover — with even stronger materials, including the Kevlar traditionally found in bulletproof vests.
Last month, the 180-pound parachute, plus a camera designed to watch it deploy, was launched on a sounding rocket from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The agency conducted its final test of its new parachute in September as part of its Advanced Supersonic Parachute Inflation Research Experiment (ASPIRE) project. The results are in and the parachute has been approved for the 2020 launch. During the test, the parachute deployed completely in just four-tenths of a second, the fastest inflation of such a large parachute, according to NASA. That will mark the end of the parachute tests, but not the end of Mars 2020 preparations.
On Tuesday, many CUSD staff received two emails one coming from "Rick Lopez" and another, somewhat disturbing email from the CUSD technology department.
Personal information of around 75,000 individuals is at risk from a health data breach that affected a Healthcare.gov portal for agents and brokers, CMS announced Oct. 19. The breached portal, called the Direct Enrollment pathway, allows agents and brokers to complete consumer applications for coverage on the federal facilitated healthcare exchanges. Consumers are required to provide Social Security numbers, income, health insurance status, and citizenship or legal immigration status when applying for healthcare insurance on the portal.
Early on, the Healthcare.gov portal, launched in 2013, was plagued with cybersecurity issues. According to a 2016 report by GAO, Healthcare.gov had 316 security incidents between October 2013 and March 2015, with 41 of those incidents involving possible breaches of personally identifiable information. GAO identified weaknesses in Healthcare.gov’s technical controls protecting data, including insufficiently restricted administrator privileges for data hub systems, inconsistent application of security patches, and insecure configuration of an administrative network. The report acknowledged that CMS had taken steps to improve data security on Healthcare.gov, such as developing required security program policies and procedures, establishing interconnection security agreements with its federal and commercial partners, and instituting required privacy protections.
For spectators, Menlo School’s football games are as traditional as autumn leaves, apple cider and crisp air. But the young athletes are wearing something high-tech and hidden: custom-designed mouth guards with motion sensors, collecting data that reveals what happens to the brain in the moments after a hit. The new Stanford research project is the nation’s first study in youth to measure rotation and full motion of the head during impacts, according to co-principal investigator and concussion expert David Camarillo, assistant professor of bioengineering.
While his team previously has studied concussion in Stanford athletes and National Football League players, they sought to learn more about the consequences in the developing brain. An estimated 4 million teenagers and children play the sport, raising concerns about long-term cognitive impact. About 100 football players in three private schools — Menlo School and Sacred Heart Preparatory in Atherton and Archbishop Mitty High School in San Jose — are volunteers in the first year of the study, which will continue through the 2018 football season. It aims to expand to more schools in 2019. Embedded in the front, next to the incisor teeth, are gyroscopic sensors and accelerometers that measure the mouth guard’s position in space, as well as the forces that are acting upon it. In essence, it documents how the head is moving.
A tiny Android smartphone designed to be a "companion phone" to a full-sized device has been launched in the US - using the brand name Palm. The handset is the size of a credit card and has two cameras but no headphone jack or wireless charging. It aims to help people take a break from their main phone, the firm said, despite being a fully functioning smartphone in its own right. It has been greeted with bemusement by tech commentators and on social media. The device will cost $349 and will be available in the US, on the Verizon network only, from November. It is described in its marketing material as "a fully connected product that is in sync with your existing smartphone, so all of your connectivity can go where your smartphone can't". It has the support of US basketball player Steph Curry who tweeted that he was "hyped to bring Palm back".
What’s longer than a football field, heavier than a blue whale and powered by six Boeing 747 engines? The Stratolaunch, a rocket-launching airplane that left its hangar and taxied down the runway for a test this weekend. The Stratolaunch is designed to carry space rockets to high altitude, where they’re then launched into orbit. The company behind the aircraft, founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says such airborne rocket launches “significantly reduce the risk of costly delays or cancellations.” It's first scheduled flight is in early 2019. Based on a development plan laid out this spring, future rounds of taxi tests should reach on-the-ground speeds of roughly 100 mph, and then 140 mph. A speed of 140 mph, or 120 knots, is roughly what it’ll take for takeoff of the twin-fuselage plane, which has a record-setting wingspan of 385 feet.
The plane was built for Stratolaunch by Mojave-based Scaled Composites, the same company that built the carbon-composite SpaceShipOne rocket plane and its White Knight carrier airplane more than 15 years ago for the Allen-backed effort that won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight. Stratolaunch’s air-launch system is a dramatically scaled-up version of SpaceShipOne, Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, and Virgin Orbit’s LauncherOne system. The massive airplane — which has been nicknamed Roc after a mythical giant bird — is designed to drop and launch rockets from an altitude of 30,000 feet. Such a system basically gives the rockets a head start on their path to orbit, and also makes it possible to launch payloads into any orbital inclination from any location within range of a suitably large runway. If the weather isn’t acceptable for launch at one location, Roc theoretically could fly to a more suitable location.
Scott Blew, an entrepreneur and engineer, recalled an article he’d recently read in WIRED about a new kind of film that blocked the light emitted from screens. Plaster it on the glass walls of fishbowl conference rooms and other people could see in—but they couldn’t see what was on someone's laptop. Blew wondered if the same technology might work on a pair of glasses, to block the screens that seemed to be everywhere. He contacted Steelcase, the company that made the Casper screen-blocking film, and ordered a sample. Then he popped out the lenses in a pair of cheap sunglasses and replaced them with the film. Amazingly, it worked: Blew could look through the lenses and see everything—except for screens, which turned black.
Blew brought the prototype to others who thought the glasses were brilliant. Now a small team are turning that concept into a real product. Their IRL Glasses, which launched on Kickstarter this week, block the wavelengths of light that comes from LED and LCD screens. Put them on and the TV in the sports bar seems to switch off; billboards blinking ahead seem to go blank. Within three days of launch, the project had surpassed its funding goal of $25,000. (Like all Kickstarters, this one comes with the usual caveats.)
Julian Voss-Andreae is a German sculptor based in Portland, Oregon. Starting out as a painter he later changed course and studied physics, mathematics, and philosophy at the Universities of Berlin, Edinburgh and Vienna. Voss-Andreae pursued his graduate research in quantum physics, participating in an experiment considered one of the modern milestones of unifying our everyday intuition with the famously bizarre world of quantum physics. He moved to the United States to study Sculpture at the Pacific Northwest College of Art from where he graduated in 2004. The sculpture creates a visual illusion that is very much part of Andreae’s art aesthetic. Strips of stainless steel are engineered to shape a silhouette of a woman posing on her side, but a glance on another angle, the statue disappears.
Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, or AIST, has developed a humanoid robot that can carry out simple construction tasks, like installing drywall. You can watch in the video above how the HRP-5P robot steps up to a piece of drywall, uses hooks to maneuver it into its rotating hands, and nails it into the wall. First spotted by TechCrunch, the robot works about as fast as a teen doing Habitat for Humanity, but still, it gets the job done. AIST imagines the HRP-5P being used on construction sites in response to Japan’s aging population and labor shortages. The research institute is aiming for autonomous replacement of labor at assembly sites for large structures, such as buildings, houses, aircrafts, and ships.
This development makes true a couple of predictions that have been years in the making. According to a 2013 Oxford University study that quantifies the likelihood of job automation, it actually places the extremely specific job of ‘Drywall Installer’ at a 79 percent chance of being replaced by robots. The construction industry has long been wary of outsourcing labor to robots, and there’s already quite a few (non-humanoid) robots that can carry out tasks like bricklaying, carpentry, and tile-setting. The second prediction is one that’s been right in front of our faces all along: all of these stock photos of robot contractors installing drywall, which exist for some reason.
On a smoggy afternoon, huge log carriers and oil tankers thundered down a highway and hurtled around a curve at the bottom of a hill. Only a single, unreinforced guardrail stood between the traffic and a ravine. The route could make for tough driving under any conditions. But experts are watching it for one feature in particular: The highway curve is paved with solar panels. “If it can pass this test, it can fit all conditions,” said Li Wu, the chairman of Shandong Pavenergy, the company that made the plastic-covered solar panels that carpet the road. If his product fares well, it could have a major impact on the renewable energy sector, and on the driving experience, too.
The experiment is the latest sign of China’s desire to innovate in, and dominate, the increasingly lucrative and strategically important market for renewable energy. The country already produces three-quarters of the solar panels sold globally, and its wind-turbine manufacturing industry is also among the world’s largest. The potential appeal of solar roads — modified solar panels that are installed in place of asphalt — is clear. Generating electricity from highways and streets, rather than in fields and deserts packed with solar panels, could conserve a lot of land. Those advantages are particularly important in a place like China, a heavily populated country where demand for energy has risen rapidly.
Facebook, already facing scrutiny over how it handles the private information of its users, said on Friday that an attack on its computer network had exposed the personal information of nearly 50 million users. The breach, which was discovered this week, was the largest in the company’s 14-year history. The attackers exploited a feature in Facebook’s code to gain access to user accounts and potentially take control of them.
In the conference call on Friday, Guy Rosen, a vice president of product management at Facebook, declined to say whether the attack could have been coordinated by hackers supported by a nation-state. Three software flaws in Facebook’s systems allowed hackers to break into user accounts, including those of the top executives Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, according to two people familiar with the investigation but not allowed to discuss it publicly. Once in, the attackers could have gained access to apps like Spotify, Instagram and hundreds of others that give users a way to log into their systems through Facebook.
For a professional musician, the smallest change in your motor skills could be detrimental, and that's particularly true for string players. When violinist Roger Frisch was diagnosed with essential tremors, which often causes one to lose control of muscle movements in the hands, he ultimately became a groundbreaking success story for a procedure called deep brain stimulation. Roger Frisch played his violin during deep brain stimulation so that doctors could see exactly how it affected his brain.
After some convincing, Frisch agreed to undergo deep brain stimulation surgery (DBS) to combat his condition. While DBS is still considered an experimental treatment by some in the medical field, it has proven to be successful in helping essential tremor patients regain control of their steady hands. For the surgery at the Mayo Clinic Neural Engineering Lab, main surgeon Kendall Lee and his team placed electrodes inside Frisch's brain to help regulate abnormal impulses. However, in Frisch's case, the tremor was so small, the doctors could not determine the best location to apply the electrodes. Then a lightbulb went off — what better way to pinpoint the exact spot on Frisch's brain than by having him perform a short concerto during the procedure.
You’ve heard that social media is screwing with your brain. Maybe you even read about it on social media. (So meta; so messed up.) The neurochemical culprit, dopamine, spikes when you like and get liked, share and are shared. You’ve probably also heard scientists compare the affliction to drug or alcohol addiction. That’s fair. The same part of the brain lights up.
Having your posts liked, and liking other people's posts, on social media activates your brain's reward center. This is one of the reasons why social scrolling can be so addictive. What's more, the more likes a post or photo has, the greater the reward. "Viewing photos with many (compared with few) likes was associated with greater activity in neural regions implicated in reward processing, social cognition, imitation, and attention," a study published in the journal Psychological Science revealed.
Now you can leave the star-searching to the smartphone-connected Stellina scope from the French company Vaonis. The companion app streamlines heavenly gazing by precisely aiming the robotic telescope—at, say, Pegasus—in as little as a few seconds. The system uses Wi-Fi to display the live view on your phone, where it’s easy to capture photographs and video, and it tracks the target across the sky long enough for everyone to get a look. For a mere $3,000, you can own a telescope that does not have an eye piece.
The scope, a backpack-size instrument that is the visual crossroads between Hal of "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Eve from "Wall-E," was admired and inspected by the crowd like a delicate sculpture. The artistic display seemed fitting, as Stellina has been featured by the MoMA Design Store for their "La French Tech au MoMA" event. The most shocking feature from this telescope seemingly plucked from the pages of a sci-fi screenplay: Stellina has no eyepiece.
In new research published today in Nature Medicine, scientists at New York University re-trained an off-the-shelf Google deep learning algorithm to distinguish between two of the most common types of lung cancers with 97 percent accuracy. This type of AI—the same tech that identifies faces, animals, and objects in pictures uploaded to Google’s online services—has proven adept at diagnosing disease before, including diabetic blindness and heart conditions. But NYU’s neural network learned how to do something no pathologist has ever done: identify the genetic mutations teeming inside each tumor from just a picture.
To do so, the NYU team started with Google’s Inception v3—an open-source algorithm that Google trained to identify 1000 different classes of objects. To teach the algorithm to distinguish between images of cancerous and healthy tissue, the researchers showed it hundreds of thousands of images taken from The Cancer Genome Atlas, a public library of patient tissue samples. Once Inception figured out how to pick out cancerous cells with 99 percent accuracy, the next step was teaching it to tell two kinds of lung cancers apart—adenocarcinoma from squamous cell carcinoma. Together, they represent the most prevalent forms of the disease, which kills more than 150,000 people a year. While they appear frustratingly similar under the microscope, the two cancer types are treated very differently. Getting it right can mean the difference between life and death for patients.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is now twice the size of Texas and contains 1.8 trillion pieces of trash floating in the ocean. The Ocean Cleanup is an ambitious non-profit committed to removing it, and on Saturday it launches its first system out to sea from the San Francisco Bay. Dutch entrepreneur Boyan Slat came up with the idea when he was 16 years old. System 001 is a 600 meter long float, with a 3 meter skirt and it's designed to corral plastic and debris. The collected garbage will then be removed by garbage truck-like ships. The initial contraption will be used for testing and aims remove about 50 tons of the garbage, but the goal is to launch 60 systems to reduce the floating garbage patch by 50 percent in the next five years.
Want to go soaring through the air but lack things like, you know, a pilot's license and an airplane? Startup Kitty Hawk is ready to make that dream a reality with the Flyer, a new all-electric ultralight plane. The tiny Kitty Hawk Flyer seats just one person in a central pod, flanked by 10 propellers. Powered by batteries, it can fly up to 10 feet off the ground at speeds up to 20 miles per hour. Battery life is said to be 12 to 20 minutes, depending on speed and pilot weight. In the US, the Flyer falls under the FAA's rules for ultralight aircraft, meaning no pilot's license is needed so long as it's flown over water or "uncongested areas." Kitty Hawk says the Flyer is "easy to fly" but recommends professional training.
Because it's powered by motors rather than internal combustion engines, Kitty Hawk says the Flyer will be significantly quieter than other ultralight aircraft, promising that it's only as loud as a lawnmower from 50 feet away. The Flyer is a real product that interested parties can preorder through the company's website now. No price is listed publicly so far. Instead, Kitty Hawk says it wants to partner with companies to establish fleets of Flyers around the world for recreational users to enjoy. That probably points to some sort of rental scheme, such as at amusement parks or similar venues.
In only 22 lines of code, hackers took on the UK's largest airline and stole data from up to 380,000 people. But the hackers behind British Airways' data breach, which took place from late August into early September, left behind a trail of evidence showing just how the major airline had suffered its cyberattack, according to researchers from cybersecurity firm RiskIQ. Cybercriminal gangs represent a new, more potent threat to businesses because the organized efforts don't just steal from companies, but also the millions of customers paying for their services. While hackers can act alone, coordinated cyberattacks mean the potential to affect more people.
The group stashed some modified code in British Airways' baggage claim webpage, where customers would fill in their names, addresses, email and financial information. Looking through data logs, RiskIQ's researchers found a slight change on the page's code from mid-August. The baggage claim page contained a JavaScript library that sent all the data on the screen to the URL "baways.com." The hackers would obtain a copy of the data while the victim was sending that personal and financial information to the airliner, without realizing that anything was wrong. To an unsuspecting eye, "Baways" might look like short-hand for British Airways, but RiskIQ found that the URL was hosted in Romania and only registered on Aug. 15 -- just six days before Magecart started stealing data from the airliner.
Gov. Jerry Brown yesterday signed legislation that would put California on the path to eliminating fossil fuels from its energy sector. Senate Bill 100 speeds up the state’s timeline for moving to renewable energy sources like solar and wind, and requires that all retail electricity be carbon-free by 2045. California is the second state to adopt such a goal, after Hawaii. The governor said at a signing ceremony in Sacramento. “California is committed to doing whatever is necessary to meet the existential threat of climate change.” The bill was initially introduced last year, but stalled in the Legislature amid heavy resistance from electric utilities, oil companies and labor unions. Opponents argued that SB 100 would not make a substantial difference to global emissions as the planet continues to warm, while harming workers in fossil fuel industries and raising electricity prices for consumers.
SB 100 increases to 60 percent, from 50 percent, how much of California’s electricity portfolio must come from renewables by 2030. It establishes a further goal to have an electric grid that is entirely powered by clean energy by 2045, which could include other carbon-free sources, like nuclear power, that are not renewable. Brown has focused in his final years in office on making California a worldwide leader on climate policy. He has previously supported efforts to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030, and to shore up the cap-and-trade system that requires polluters to buy permits for their emissions.
Walmart this week was awarded a US patent for a new listening system for its stores that could raise serious privacy concerns from its shoppers and workers. According to the filing, the system would capture a variety of sounds in the store to figure out employees' performance and effectiveness at checkout. For instance, the system can be used to capture beeps produced by a scanner and the rustling of bags at checkout to find out the number of items in a transaction or even the number of bags used. In a statement, Walmart said the patent is a concept of theirs that would help to gather metrics and improve the checkout process. It is not, they pointed out, intended for any other use.
The patent for “sound sensors” that could be installed at checkout is the latest example of controversial workplace surveillance technology and automated systems that purport to quantify and increase employees’ productivity. The patent filed this week described a system of sensors “distributed throughout at least a portion of a shopping facility”. Audio of both workers and customers could potentially be used to determine “if employees are performing their jobs efficiently and correctly” and aid in increased “cost savings” and “guest satisfaction”, the document said.
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