DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge aims to make cave exploration a more robotic affair.
Outside its cavernous passageways, the mine’s entrance is emblazoned in red lettering that reads “Safety Research Coal Mine.” This site is just one of two mine systems at the Bruceton Research Center in Pittsburgh. They were once part of a full mine system but were split apart for research purposes after the U.S. Bureau of Mines leased 38 acres of land from the Pittsburgh Coal Company in 1910.
Nuclear energy produces carbon-free electricity, and the United States has used nuclear energy for decades to generate baseline power.
Nuclear energy, however, carries a dreaded stigma. After disasters such as Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and Fukishima, the public is acutely aware of the potential, though misguided, dangers of nuclear energy. The cost of nuclear generation is on the rise–a stark contrast to the decreasing costs of alternative energy forms such as solar and wind, which have gained an immense amount of popularity recently.
This trend could continue until market forces make nuclear technology obsolete. Into this dynamic comes a resurgence in nuclear technology: liquid fluoride thorium reactors, or LFTRs (“lifters”). A LFTR is a type of molten salt reactor, significantly safer than a typical nuclear reactor. LFTRs use a combination of thorium (a common element widely found in the earth) and fluoride salts to power a reactor.
Where did you find your last boyfriend or girlfriend, and the one behind that? Did they catch your eye while strolling through a park? Or did you find them perched on the edge of a barstool, sipping a Manhattan? Were you introduced through friends? Or was it a meet-cute situation?
Yeah, right. You know you totally met them online – on a dating website after filling out a meticulous profile, or just swiping right. A new study from Stanford sociologist and lead author Michael Rosenfeld shows that most heterosexual couples today meet on the internet (or smartphone). His research was just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
At 6:43 am US eastern time today, the Air Force’s mysterious X-37B space plane broke a new spaceflight record, surpassing the 717 days, 20 hours and 42 minutes its predecessor spent in orbit just a couple years prior.
The X-37B, explained: The Air Force is notoriously tightlipped about the X-37B program. The space plane itself, built by Boeing, is 29 feet long and 9.6 feet tall, boasting a wingspan of nearly 15 feet. It’s launched vertically aboard a rocket and lands horizontally on a runway. The current X-37B mission is the fifth of its kind (Orbital Test Vehicle 5 – OTV-5) and was launched in September 2017 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The world’s largest bicycle parking facility in Utrecht, the Netherlands. (Photo via CU2030/City of Utrecht)
UTRECHT, Netherlands (CN) – When your country has more bikes than people, you need somewhere to park them all.
On Monday, the Dutch city of Utrecht opened the world’s largest bicycle parking facility. The Netherlands has a population of 18 million people but 23 million bicycles.
Located beneath the central train station in the country’s fourth-largest city, the Stationsplein bicycle parking can hold 12,656 bikes. The previous record was held by Tokyo, Japan, which has a facility that can hold 9,400 bikes.
Consumer policy expert, BroadbandNow — Tyler has more than a decade of experience in IT and networking, and has been writing about broadband issues such as the digital divide, net neutrality, cybersecurity, and internet access since 2015.
Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellites for broadband internet access are beginning to display signs of real potential. Recently, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin pulled back the curtain on its space intentions by announcing Project Kuiper, a 3,236-satellite constellation. Additionally, Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink recently launched a rocket containing 60 satellites from Florida’s Cape Canaveral.
The fight for space internet supremacy is on. Both players, alongside others like OneWeb, are spending billions in space in hopes of making further billions annually once the satellites go into service for consumers in the US and around the globe.
Scientists have developed a large-scale economical method to extract hydrogen (H2) from oil sands (natural bitumen) and oil fields. This can be used to power hydrogen-powered vehicles, which are already marketed in some countries, as well as to generate electricity; hydrogen is regarded as an efficient transport fuel, similar to petrol and diesel, but with no pollution problems. The process can extract hydrogen from existing oil sands reservoirs, with huge existing supplies found in Canada and Venezuela. Interestingly, this process can be applied to mainstream oil fields, causing them to produce hydrogen instead of oil.
Hydrogen powered vehicles, including cars, buses, and trains, have been in development for many years. These vehicles have been acknowledged to be efficient, but the high price of extracting the Hydrogen from oil reserves has meant that the technology has not been economically viable. Now a group of Canadian engineers have developed a cheap method of extracting H2 from oil sands. They are presenting this work at the Goldschmidt Geochemistry Conference in Barcelona.
A 3D map of how the brain responds to words could unlock new ways to understand and treat dyslexia and speech disorders.
Map-making: Researchers at UC Berkeley used functional MRI to measure nine volunteers’ brain activity (using blood flow as a proxy) as they listened to, and then read, stories from “The Moth Radio Hour,” a storytelling podcast which airs on 500 radio stations around the world. The researchers collected volunteers’ brain activity data for reading (one word at a time, to help separate the data) and listening to recordings of the same text, then matched both sets of data against time-stamped transcriptions of the stories.
Language links: The results were then fed into a computer program, which mapped out thousands of words according to their relationship to each other, using natural-language processing. For example, the “social” category includes words like “husband,” “father,” and “sister.” Different categories sparked activity in different parts of the brain: these “social” words were found on the right side, behind the ear. This area also responded most strongly to words that describe people or dramatic events, as well as words that describe time.
Starship Technologies announces an expansion of its robot delivery service after raising $40 million
The quintessential college experience of getting pizza delivered to your dorm room is about to get a high-tech upgrade. On Tuesday, Starship Technologies announced its plan to deploy thousands of its autonomous six-wheeled delivery robots on college campuses around the country over the next two years, after raising $40 million in Series A funding.
It’s a big step for the San Francisco (née Estonia)-based startup and its robots, which have been tested in over 100 cities in 20 different countries, traveled 350,000 miles, crossed 4 million streets, and just marked the milestone of completing its 100,000th delivery. College campuses, with their abundance of walking paths, well-defined boundaries, and smartphone-using, delivery-minded student bodies, are an obvious place for Starship to stake out the next phase of its business.
Next generation technology in the home for an aging population.
Startup founders can often find themselves working on an idea that sounds plausible, but does not provide a solution to a problem people care about in a meaningful way. Y Combinator founder and investor Paul Graham says that often, these startups are born from individuals who are simply “trying to think of startup ideas” and not looking for problems. Graham calls these ideas “made-up” or “sitcom” startup ideas, as they sound like something a writer for a television sitcom would come up with when creating a script for a character that had a business idea. The idea seems possible, even though in reality it is bad and no one would use or buy it.
Take a look around at the products and services you are currently using and surrounded by. Why are they there? Well, it’s because they are solving a problem or filling a need you would otherwise be experiencing. This is how all great inventions and startup businesses are born, from a problem or need. From electricity, to the telephone, to the Internet, and more recently to Uber and AirBnb, great businesses are built on big problems.
2019 World Artificial Intelligence Conference – Opening Ceremony
Alibaba Group chairman Jack Ma and Tesla CEO Elon Musk went head-to-head in a debate in Shanghai.VCG VIA GETTY IMAGES
The organizers of the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai got more than they bargained for when they arranged a debate between Alibaba’s billionaire chairman Jack Ma and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The leading tech entrepreneurs riffed on AI, chimpanzees, aliens, work cultures and Musk’s obsession with Mars during a wide-ranging and often quite bizarre discussion.
With a combined net worth of over $56 billion, the pair delved deep into the potential benefits and consequences of this burgeoning technology.
Tesla’s Musk argued that “people think of AI as a smart human; it’s going to be much more than that.” Tesla’s CEO likened the plight of ordinary humans trying to understand AI to that of chimpanzees trying to understand humans. “We must just seem like strange aliens,” he said, adding, “If the difference is only that small, that would be amazing.”
Fossil fuel drilling could be contributing to climate change by heating Earth from within
Almost all scientists agree that burning fossil fuels is contributing to climate change. But agreement is less clear cut on how exactly it’s influencing rising global temperatures.
The world is now 1°C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times. Is this solely down to emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2? Meteorologist Hubert Lamb, regarded as the father of modern climatology, argued that CO2 levels alone couldn’t account for all of the global warming that’s been observed.
His attention turned instead to the role of thermal emissions. Burning fossil fuels doesn’t just produce greenhouse gases, it also generates a lot of heat, which leaks out to the atmosphere. Nuclear tests and volcanic eruptions are some examples of other large heat sources.
