The laptop reads this and other hand signals instantly using the Cell, the supercomputer chip best known for powering the PlayStation 3. An Intel CPU performs most of the tasks on the G55, but a special version of the Cell tackles complex video-manipulation jobs by breaking them into bite-size chunks and parceling them out to four processors on the chip. The Cell also lets the computer scan videos and index every new face it finds....
One recent study published this month in Nature Communications shows that a serious chunk—we’re talking almost half—of the European Union’s food imports will be coming from locations with high and extremely high drought severity. By 2050, if emissions stay along the RCP 6.0 concentration pathway (a climate model where CO2 levels fall just below business-as-usual), a whopping 44 percent of imported agriculture for the EU will be at risk. Even with sharp greenhouse gas reductions, 37 percent is at risk within the next 25 or so years....
The study, published Monday in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, used data from 32,000 adults collected by the FDA and NIH as part of the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study (PATH). By using statistical modeling to parse out different lifestyle factors that might affect a person’s health, the researchers identified vaping as a clear cause of lung disease in adults, independent of whether or not the user also smoked....
In 1993, the new Formosa plant finally went online in Point Comfort, Texas. Diane Wilson, fired from the fish house, was shrimping as much as she could, but her nets kept coming up light. One day, she drifted in the SeaBee over the newly constructed 2,100-foot‐long pipe that ran from the plant into the bay, thinking about the nine million gallons of contaminated wastewater sloshing into the estuary each day through a diffuser at the end of the pipe, just north of where Alcoa’s mercury was interred in sediment....
Few innovations thrill us more than the ones we drive. When you consider an electric supercar that snaps back your head with acceleration or a set of tungsten-coated brakes that’ll have you straining against your seatbelt faster than you can say “internal combustion engine,” it’s easy to conclude 2018 was a heckuva year for road-going brilliance. See the entire list: The 100 greatest innovations of 2018
Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Find it here. Grand Award Winner: AR Beauty Tutorials on TikTok by Grace Choi: Filters that aim to educate, not manipulate Most TikTok filters let you play pretend and “try on” makeup—or, more insidiously, warp the shape of your face to fit an unattainable standard—but a new generation of augmented reality overlays aim to teach you something instead. Grace Choi, a Harvard MBA known for creating 2020 BOWN winner Mink’s makeup palette printer, changed the conversation this year with a digital brow stencil and contouring filter....
Looking for the complete list of 100 winners? Check it out here. Grand Award WinnerOrca Carbon by Taiga: A silent, safer emission-free joy ride Personal watercraft like Jet Skis are fun to ride, but this year’s winner makes them greener. Historically, personal watercrafts—or PWCs—operate on fossil fuel, emit noise up to 115 decibels, and leak unburned gasoline into the water. Enter the Taiga Orca Carbon, which takes electric vehicles aquatic....
In 2010, the U.S. spent a whopping $500 per second fighting the War on Drugs, and most people sent to prison for drug-related offenses are there for possession, not selling. The upshot? More than half of our prison system is filled with those drug-related offenders, which creates a huge bill for taxpayers. All told, it added up to more than $2 billion for 2009. This video infographic from Clarity Way breaks it all down....
Here’s what the mission has looked like so far.
The Dumbest Argument Paperback books come in a few different sizes. In the UK, that’s locked up down to the millimeter, which is very useful for the dumb purposes of this article, but I am not British and neither is the iPad so let’s set those nice numbers aside and look at good wholesome American books. American paperbacks come in two rough sizes: mass-market paperbacks and trade paperbacks. There’s no real standard of size for either of those, but, roughly, mass-market paperbacks are the little guys, about 4 x 7 inches....
Before I came along, only a few other researchers had tried to use the tools of neuroscience to study love. One reason for this is that it is an exceedingly difficult subject to tackle. The way the brain encoded the connection between two people was not something we could easily discover, much less measure or put into a mathematical equation. I felt a bit like Newton contemplating gravity, an invisible force that I knew existed but could not yet explain....
There’s some evidence that microbes living inside a rock could be blasted from their home planet, travel through space, and then crash-land on a new planet relatively unscathed. Throughout the ALH84001 debate, scientists assumed fossils could also withstand the grueling journey, but it looks like nobody actually set out to test it—until now. In a new study, physicists at University of Kent tested the hypothesis with a big gun. More specifically, they took powdered diatoms (a type of microscopic algae with a hard silica shell), packed them inside a nylon bullet, added water, and froze the sample....
That’s why legislators in the Philippines proposed a new graduation requirement: Before leaving elementary school, high school, and college, every student in the island nation must plant 10 trees. The bill passed the House of Representatives on May 15, but has no counterpart in the Senate, making its future uncertain. That hasn’t stopped proponents from making headlines around the world for their ambitious perennial planting goals. If the “Graduation Legacy for the Environment Act” passed into law, the government would be responsible for everything from producing seedlings to monitoring the growth of the trees....
The final image it took is a massive panorama that took 29 days to shoot. It gives us a view of the Perseverance Valley, where the rover now sits. The panorama itself contains image data from 354 individual photos that were “stitched” together using software. If you look carefully at the final photo, you’ll notice that a small piece in bottom left of it is still in black-and-white, while the rest is in color....
For Damian Evans and Bill Saturno, now surveying Lingapura from atop a crumbling 1,000-year-old tower, the mines don’t really matter. Evans and Saturno are among a growing group of archaeologists who use radar, satellite imagery and other advanced technologies to uncover the mysteries surrounding ancient civilizations. This young vanguard of scholars explores not only regions where violence rules out groundwork, but also sites previously invisible from the ground: the ocean floor, dense jungle, even buried cities....
Check out our animated fly through, below, then launch the gallery for the six top innovations in the stadium of the future.
These wacky instruments all rely on shape-memory polymers, a category of materials that can shapeshift on its own. Now, researchers at Stanford University have made a shape memory polymer that’s stronger and more capable than any of its counterparts that came before it. They published their work last week in the journal ACS Central Science. “[Shape-memory polymers] have been commercialized in our lives for a while,” says Shayla Nikzad, a graduate student at Stanford University and one of the paper’s lead authors....
“What [are] the most important 1s and 0s it needs to travel on very resource-constrained devices that move things from satellite, from ship to ship and all of the above? The Navy is really struggling with this, but there are organizations that have [been] stood up to look at all these problems,” said Chris Cleary, principal cyber advisor to the Navy, according to reporting by Inside Defense. Cleary’s remarks came at an event held by the Federal News Network While the specifics vary from vehicle to vehicle, a typical flying drone with cameras can, at a minimum, collect video, video in infrared, location data of the drone’s position, other flight information for the drone, as well as possibly the distance to an object filmed....
Alas, it would’ve been a boon to our military defense and national pride. But at least they made a good joke about it. Here’s the full response: This Isn’t the Petition Response You’re Looking For By Paul Shawcross The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons: The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000....
You may have already heard about burnout being included as a medical condition for the first time, which isn’t actually true at all. Not only is it not classified as a medical condition—it’s an occupational phenomenon, alongside dust exposure and problems with interpersonal relationships—but it was actually already in the last iteration of the ICD. The new ICD-11 simply updated the definition with more detail. But there are other, more significant changes in ICD-11 that you might want to know about (if you’re curious about the specific definitions, you can browse the codebook online)....
