It’s a relatively cheap and remarkably effective fix.
As every cyclist knows, the blind spots caused by a car’s roof pillars can be extremely dangerous. Although companies are working on various high-tech solutions for this problem, a 14-year-old from Pennsylvania has taken a more low-tech approach to create an ingenious fix for the issue.
Alaina Gassler of West Grove came up with the idea for the project after seeing her mother struggle with blind spots while driving. Gassler decided to put a webcam on the outer roof pillar of a car which could record everything that was masked from the driver’s view. Then, she used a projector to display the live feed from the webcam onto the interior pillar, with 3D-printed parts aligning the image exactly between the window and the windshield.
Blockchain is undisputedly an ingenious invention. It’s a technology that began as underpinning for virtual currencies but it is quickly becoming obvious that blockchain is more than just bitcoin.
The encrypted ledger technology that powers bitcoin is primed to reshape the future of many industries. Be it healthcare, finance, media, or the government, the blockchain technology will bring about a revolutionary change across many industries.
The technology is sure to disrupt every industry, including education. There is no denying the fact that the education system is far from where it needs to be. Using this technology, a lot of improvements can be made in the education sector.
The edtech sector is huge. It is estimated that it will reach $93.76 billion by 2020. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality are already making their way into the education sector. It’s only a matter of time before the blockchain technology becomes mainstream too.
Let’s see how this disruptive technology can revolutionize the education sector.
San Francisco (CNN)The next time you go to the bathroom, a couple startups are hoping you’ll snap a photo before you flush. For scientific reasons, of course.
No, really. Two companies — Auggi, a gut-health startup that’s building an app for people to track gastrointestinal issues, and Seed Health, which works on applying microbes to human health and sells probiotics — are soliciting poop photos from anyone who wants to send them.
The companies began collecting the photos online on Monday via a campaign cheekily called “Give a S–t” (you can imagine what the dashes stand for) with the goal of creating one of the first known data sets of human poop images. These pictures — the companies hope to collect 100,000 photos in total — can then be used to build AI for research into gut-related diseases and to help people with such health conditions more easily track their own bowel movements.
Science-fiction movies are pretty goddamn awesome because it goes beyond the restrictions of realism and predicts what can or cannot happen in the future. Netflix’s Black Mirror is likely everyone’s hot favourite now because it’s showing us the deranged situation we’ll be in 15-20 years from now. But what if I say that we are already living in a future that was foreseen by a movie from the 80’s? What if I say that the predictions made in it were pretty accurate and that we need to pull our socks up and start making amends? Yes, I am talking about Blade Runner.
Blade Runner is a 1982 sci-fi film directed by Ridley Scott, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. It is loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The movie is set in a dystopian (Well, not dystopian any more) future Los Angeles of 2019 in which synthetic humans (replicants) are revolting against the people who are building them and using them as slaves. That’s where Ford’s Rick Deckard comes in who’s tasked with hunting down replicants and it is through his eyes we get to see what Scott (And Dick) thinks November 2019 will look like.
New York City fired the latest salvo in the war against automobiles Wednesday.
The City Council passed a $1.7 billion plan that will fundamentally change how the citizens of the Big Apple bike, bus, and walk through Manhattan, Queen, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. The five boroughs in the next five years will see the building of 250 miles of protected bike lanes, 150 miles of dedicated bus lanes and create additional pedestrian plazas.
Two weeks ago, San Francisco unveiled a $604 million project to ban cars from their busiest thoroughfare, Market Street, where a half-million pedestrians walk on what is one of the most dangerous streets for traffic accidents, executive director of Walk San Francisco Jodie Medeiros recently told Curbed San Francisco
“It’s a war on cars, number one, bottom line,” Car Coach and automotive industry expert Lauren Fix told FOX Business. “It’s what’s called a road diet, restricting roads to force people to use mass transit, which is horrible! It’s filthy, never not on time, not in the U.S. at least, and it’s not safe. The city allows pan handlers and drug addicts to sleep on the trains and beg for money. I’ll take an Uber or a cab before I take public transportation.”
Prisoners participating in Bard College initiative to provide them a liberal arts education beat Ivy League students who won national title only months ago
Months after winning a national title, Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates.
The showdown took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club. Last month they invited the Ivy League undergraduates and this year’s national debate champions over for a friendly competition.
Over 1 million knowledge-work jobs will be replaced in 2020 by software robotics, RPA, virtual agents and chatbots, and machine-learning-based decision management. So predicts research firm Forrester in a new report published today, “Predictions 2020: Automation.” It also estimates that 331,500 net jobs will be added to the US workforce next year, human-touch jobs that require intuition, empathy, and physical and mental agility.
Forrester highlights what it calls “the automation paradox,” predicting that after years of falling, MTTR or Mean-Time-To-Resolution (the time it takes to resolve an IT failure, for example) will increase. This is the result of automating the “low-hanging fruit,” the repetitive tasks and incidents, leaving the more complex and time-consuming problems for humans to fix.
Researchers harness Cas13 as an antiviral and diagnostic for RNA-based viruses
Researchers have now turned a CRISPR RNA-cutting enzyme into an antiviral that can be programmed to detect and destroy RNA-based viruses in human cells.
Many of the world’s most common or deadly human pathogens are RNA-based viruses — Ebola, Zika and flu, for example — and most have no FDA-approved treatments. A team led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has now turned a CRISPR RNA-cutting enzyme into an antiviral that can be programmed to detect and destroy RNA-based viruses in human cells.
Researchers have previously adapted the Cas13 enzyme as a tool to cut and edit human RNA and as a diagnostic to detect the presence of viruses, bacteria, or other targets. This study is one of the first to harness Cas13, or any CRISPR system, as an antiviral in cultured human cells.
The porous polymer coatings, which switch from white to transparent when wetted, can be put into plastic enclosures to make panels that control light and temperatures of buildings. Credit: Jyotirmoy Mandal/Columbia Engineering
Buildings devote more than 30% of their energy use to heating, cooling, and lighting systems. Passive designs such as cool roof paints have gone a long way toward reducing this usage, and its impact on the environment and climate, but they have one key limitation—they are usually static, and thus not responsive to daily or seasonal changes.
Columbia Engineering researchers have developed porous polymer coatings (PPCs) that enable inexpensive and scalable ways to control light and heat in buildings. They took advantage of the optical switchability of PPCs in the solar wavelengths to regulate solar heating and daylighting, and extended the concept to thermal infrared wavelengths to modulate heat radiated by objects. Their work is published on October 21, 2019 by Joule.
The skies of Syria, Yemen, and Libya swarm with armed and dangerous unmanned aerial vehicles. And the technology is spreading farther and farther afield.
The Kurdish fighters emerged from a tunnel and were spotted by a Turkish reconnaissance drone. As they were loading ammunition onto a truck in a parched Syrian landscape, the drone fed their coordinates to an F-16. It attacked seconds later, sending a huge ball of flames into the air. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing left but a crater—a success, Turkey’s defense ministry declared, as it released a video of the strike.
Turkey’s use of drones in such operations is highlighting the changing face of war in one of the world’s most volatile regions. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) turned the tide in Ankara’s decades-old counterinsurgency against the separatist Kurdistan Workers’ Party in the country’s southeast, northern Iraq, and Syria. In addition, the deployment of drones has saved the lives of Turkish soldiers and money for the defense ministry. Now it’s using UAVs to gain the upper hand against the Kurdish party’s sister organization, the People’s Protection Units. After U.S. troops began withdrawing on Oct. 9, Turkish drones, in tandem with fighter jets, started pounding a strip of land along the border with Syria to clear the way for its troops. “In most cases, they reach the scene of the attack and confirm the enemy was totally destroyed,” says Nihat Ali Ozcan, a strategist at the Economic Policy Research Foundation in Ankara. Altogether, at least three different types of drones have been deployed: mini drones used for surveillance and photography, the much larger Anka-S surveillance drone, and the Bayraktar TB-2, Turkey’s only armed drone. Continue reading… “The drone wars are already here”
On one day in September, people from over 50 countries decided to do something about our plastic problem.
Together, they picked up almost half a million pieces of plastic garbage littering the planet. Over 40 percent of this mountain of trash was still clearly identifiable by brand, and one producer’s trash in particular was picked up much more than any other: Coca-Cola.
An audit of the 476,423 pieces of plastic waste picked up by over 70,000 volunteers on World Clean Up Day suggests that Coca-Cola is the world’s biggest plastic polluter, responsible for 11,732 of the pieces of plastic trash retrieved during the global event.
50 years ago today, the internet was born in Room 3420
Here’s the story of the creation of ARPANET, the groundbreaking precursor to the internet—as told by the people who were there.
When I visited UCLA’s Boelter Hall last Wednesday, I took the stairs to the third floor, looking for Room 3420. And then I walked right by it. From the hallway, it’s a pretty unassuming place.
But something monumental happened there 50 years ago today. A graduate student named Charley Kline sat at an ITT Teletype terminal and sent the first digital data transmission to Bill Duvall, a scientist who was sitting at another computer at the Stanford Research Institute (now known as SRI International) on the other side of California. It was the beginning of ARPANET, the small network of academic computers that was the precursor to the internet.
