Science & Technology News – Page 248

Energy, Home Technology, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy, Solar Power

Home energy storage capacity breaks records in U.S.

September 28, 2019

Additions of new residential energy storage capacity in the United States reached a record high in the second quarter of the year, exceeding 30 MW, a new report by Wood Mackenzie says. The market for energy storage in the country is growing fast, the authors note, driven by customer interest and government incentives.

In May this year, IHS Markit forecast grid-connected energy storage capacity would jump twofold by the end of 2019, from 376 MW last to 712 MW. There may be a good chance of such an increase taking place: total new storage additions during the first half of the year were over 200 MW, with 148.8 MW deployed during the first quarter and 79.5 MW deployed during the second quarter.

According to Wood Mac, the reason for the slowdown in total storage capacity additions was due to a sizeable fall in front-of-the-meter storage additions. These, however, would pick up in the second half of the year, the consultancy said, with the pipeline for new FTM storage projects soaring 66 percent from a year earlier.

Continue reading… “Home energy storage capacity breaks records in U.S.”

2019 Predictions, Business, Economy, Employment, Science & Technology News

Co-working spaces pose threat to commercial real estate market, Fed official says

September 27, 2019

LaunchBio CEO Joan Siefert Rose leads a tour of life sciences co-working lab, BioLabs NC.

The growing popularity of co-working spaces like WeWork could pose a risk to the US economy in the next economic downturn, a Fed official warned on Friday.

Boston Federal Reserve Bank President Eric Rosengren, who has publicly dissented with the Fed’s recent interest rate cuts, said lower rates will boost risk in “unexpected places.”

“Evolving market models, along with low interest rates, are creating a new type of potential financial stability risk in commercial real estate,” he said at an event in New York City. “One such market model is the development of co-working spaces in many major urban office markets.”

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Computer Security, quantum computing, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News

IBM’s new 53-qubit quantum ‘mainframe’ is live in the cloud

September 27, 2019

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.

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AI, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

Using machine learning to reconstruct deteriorated Van Gogh drawings

September 27, 2019

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.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cutting edge, Science & Technology News

100,000 free AI-generated headshots put stock photo companies on notice

September 26, 2019

For all your royalty-free photo needs

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.

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AI, Automation, Employment, Science & Technology News, women

AI Weekly: Automation in the workplace could disproportionately affect women

September 26, 2019

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.

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Automation, Drone, Science & Technology News, Shopping

Walgreens will start making drone deliveries in October

September 26, 2019

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.

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drones, Environment, Historical Perspectives, Science & Technology News

A fire lookout on what’s lost in a transition to technology

September 25, 2019

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.

Continue reading… “A fire lookout on what’s lost in a transition to technology”

Biotech, Genes, Genetics, Science & Technology News

Gene-hacking mosquitoes to be infertile backfired spectacularly

September 25, 2019

Best-Laid Plans

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.

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Bitcoin, Blockchain, China, government, Science & Technology News

China plans to kill most of the world’s bitcoin mining operations

September 25, 2019

The price could spike again.

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.

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Crazy Stuff, Human Behavior, Science & Technology News

‘Freeze… and marry me!’ – Russians who propose at gunpoint

September 24, 2019

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.

Continue reading… “‘Freeze… and marry me!’ – Russians who propose at gunpoint”

communication, Employment, Internet, new technology, Science & Technology News

How 5G will reinvent “working from home”

September 24, 2019

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.

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