IBM has boosted its growing stable of quantum computers with a new 53-quantum bit (qubit) device, the most powerful ever offered for commercial use.
Google announced a more powerful 72-qubit ‘Bristlecone’ model last year, but that was for its internal techies only. IBM’s, by contrast, feels significant because it can be used by absolutely anyone who can find a use for such a computer.
The new and still-to-be-named computer will sit in the company’s Quantum Computation Center in Poughkeepsie, New York State, which has recently turned into a hotbed for commercial development.
Researchers at TU Delft in the Netherlands have recently developed a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model to reconstruct drawings that have deteriorated over time. In their study, published in Springer’s Machine Vision and Applications, they specifically used the model to reconstruct some of Vincent Van Gogh’s drawings that were ruined over the years due to ink fading and discoloration.
It’s getting easier and easier to use AI to generate convincing-looking, yet entirely fake, pictures of people. Now, one company wants to find a use for these photos, by offering a resource of 100,000 AI-generated faces to anyone that can use them — royalty free. Many of the images look fake but others are difficult to distinguish from images licensed by stock photo companies.
The project’s Product Hunt page lists the team at Icons8, a designer marketplace for icons and photographs, as the creator of the project. The AI-produced images are intended to be used as design elements in anything from presentations to websites and mobile apps. Everything is free to use with link attribution back to generated.photos.
As AI and machine learning transform industries by automating much of the work currently done by humans, women’s careers will be disproportionately affected. That’s according to a McKinsey Global Institute report published earlier this year (“The future of women at work: Transitions in the age of automation“), which found that women predominate in occupations that’ll be adversely impacted. About 40% of jobs where men make up the majority in the 10 economies (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., the U.S., China, India, Mexico, and South America) contributing over 60% of GDP collectively could be displaced by automation in our 2030, compared with the 52% of women-dominated jobs with high automation potential.
The process of refilling your prescription at the local pharmacy just got a lot more futuristic.
Wing — which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet — just announced a partnership with FedEx and Walgreens, a national grocery store chain, to start making drone deliveries in Virginia as soon as October.
Wing claims the “first-of-its-kind trial” will explore “ways to enhance efficiency of last-mile delivery services,” according to a press release.
A single tree burns in southwest New Mexico after a lightning strike. For more than 100 years, the U.S. Forest Service has been posting men and women atop mountains and trees, and in other hard-to-reach places, to wait and watch for smoke.
Can you see it? The fire in the photo above?
A single tree burning doesn’t put up much smoke.
There’s a flash of lightning, sizzling across the sky. Then a pause as bark smolders and flames creep, building heat until poof: a signal in the sky.
Philip Connors, gazing outward from a tower, sees it as a new dent on the crest of a distant ridge. He’s spent thousands of hours contemplating the contours of southwest New Mexico. The fuzzy smudge is out of place.
On its surface, the plan was simple: gene-hack mosquitoes so their offspring immediately die, mix them with disease-spreading bugs in the wild, and watch the population drop off. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite pan out.
The genetically-altered mosquitoes did mix with the wild population, and for a brief period the number of mosquitoes in Jacobino, Brazil did plummet, according to research published in Nature Scientific Reports last week. But 18 months later the population bounced right back up, New Atlas reports — and even worse, the new genetic hybrids may be even more resilient to future attempts to quell their numbers.
The Chinese government will end bitcoin mining operations in the coming months, Bloomberg reported over this January, a move that could have a massive impact on the price of the world’s biggest digital currency.
China has been a central player in the development of bitcoin in recent years, but Beijing has spent the last six months cracking down on the cryptocurrency industry — shutting down local exchanges and banning initial coin offerings.
Leaked documents suggest the Chinese government plans an “orderly exit” for bitcoin mining operations in the coming weeks and months.
Anastasia is expecting her boyfriend Sergei to be waiting for her when her flight arrives at St Petersburg airport.
But as she lands he texts to say that, due to unforeseen work commitments, a friend will be picking her up instead.
So far, so normal.
Later, as Anastasia is approaching her apartment building in the friend’s car, a minibus with blacked-out windows screeches into their path. Armed men in masks jump out and take her driver friend away.
Anastasia is led to the back of the car she was travelling in. The men begin rifling through her things in the boot and discover a small packet full of white powder.
Surrounded by men clad in black special ops uniforms, a female plain-clothes detective turns to her: “You’re suspected of supplying banned substances.”
The colour in Anastasia’s face swiftly drains away.
“You must be mistaken. That’s not mine,” she says, smiling nervously.
“Then whose is it? Enough of the games!” a man barks.
The questions continue, until the man opens the packet to reveal a small pink box.
“And what’s this?” he asks.
“No idea!” she replies, her voice breaking.
Suddenly the man gets down on one knee, rips off his mask and shouts: “Marry me!”
It’s Sergei, and it turns out he’s the only one here who actually works in law enforcement. The others work for an “extreme proposal” service – part of an industry established in Russia in recent years.
It’s 10:00 am. Do you know where your employee is? No doubt they are working—somewhere.
Thanks to greatly improved internet connectivity and workforce applications, employees in an increasing number of professions can work just about anywhere they want—in their home, at a coffee shop, on a plane. And chances are they’re more productive and more engaged than they would be if they were in the office. They may even be planning to stay in their job longer because of their flexible work location. In 2017, Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom, in a TED Talk, went so far as to call work-from-home potentially as innovative as the driverless car.
Now, work-from-home is itself about to be disrupted, by the coming of 5G and its ability to enable virtual reality (VR) anywhere through what’s known as XR, the combination of extended, augmented, virtual, and mixed reality technologies. Fifth-generation (5G) communications networks, with their exponentially faster connection speeds, capacity, and communication response times (known as latency), will make possible an astonishing range of innovative new products and services.
The thermoelectric generator uses a black aluminum disk to radiate heat into the atmosphere, and a polystyrene enclosure to keep the air inside warm.Aaswath Raman
As effective as solar panels are, one of their major downsides is that they only produce power during the day, so excess energy needs to be stored for use overnight. But now, engineers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) have developed a prototype device that works almost the opposite way, harvesting energy from the cold night sky to passively power an LED.
The device works on the thermoelectric principle, where an electric current is created through the temperature difference between two surfaces. This idea could ultimately end up making for thermoelectric exhaust pipes that help charge a vehicle’s battery, camp cooking gear that tops up phones, and clothes that use body heat to power wearable electronics.
In this case, the thermoelectric device also made use of another odd phenomenon called radiative cooling. This process is often seen in surfaces that face the sky – at night, they can become colder than the surrounding air because they radiate heat straight into space, since the atmosphere doesn’t block infrared energy. Past experiments with radiative cooling have shown promise as a way to cool buildings without needing to use energy.
Waymo, Cruise, and others call on the NHTSA to take action on human controls
The federal government should rewrite the safety rules for automobile manufacturing so self-driving carmakers can deploy vehicles without traditional controls like steering wheels and pedals, according to public comments submitted by top car and tech companies.
And they should be quick about it.
“We urge [the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration] to move ahead promptly to remove the regulatory barriers the agency has identified,” David Quinalty, head of federal policy and government affairs at Waymo, wrote in a letter posted online on Thursday.
