Science & Technology News – Page 264

Electric Vehicles, Green Friendly, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News, Shopping

Your UPS deliveries may soon arrive in electric trucks

July 26, 2019

Through its multiple partnerships with EV startups, the company is precipitating a sustainable transformation in the delivery industry.

A new UPS truck now rolling around the streets of London looks like an ordinary delivery vehicle. But at night, the truck plugs into a new smart grid at the company’s hub in the center of the city, where it pulls in enough charge to drive up to 150 miles the next day.

The smart grid and the battery infrastructure inside the truck are made by the U.K.-based startup Arrival. They will soon fully debut in a pilot fleet of custom trucks equipped with other features, including a wraparound front window that makes it easier for a driver to see other vehicles and pedestrians. This pilot is just one piece of UPS’ larger experimentation with electric vehicles.

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government, Healthcare, Legal Issues, Science & Technology News

Netherlands passes law making everyone an organ donor by default

July 26, 2019

THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Dutch senators have approved a new law that makes everybody a potential organ donor unless they decide to opt out of the system.

The new system narrowly passed a vote in the upper house of the Dutch parliament Tuesday. The lower house last year passed the legislation with a one-vote majority.

The new law’s drafter, lawmaker Pia Dijkstra, says under the new system — which is similar to donation laws in Belgium and Spain — every person over 18 who is not yet registered as a donor will receive a letter asking if they want to donate their organs after death.

Those who do not respond will be considered organ donors, although they will be able to amend their status at any time.

Via Canoe.com

Analysis, Business, Science & Technology News, Shopping

Tata: Most valuable Indian brand in 2019

July 26, 2019

It is not unusual for the Tata group to top brand valuation charts, as it has done several years in a row. But what has come as a surprise, in the 2019 study by UK-based Brand Finance of the nation’s leading 100 brands, is the sharp jump in brand valuation achieved by the salt-to-software business house.

The 2019 list, released exclusively to Business Standard, shows a 37 per cent jump in brand value for the Tata group, to $19.55 billion for 2019, the highest in the top 25. Last year, the group had achieved a brand value of $14.23 billion, which was a jump of nearly nine per cent over the previous year.

“The Tata group’s presence across sectors makes it a pioneering force to reckon with,” says David Haigh, chief executive officer, Brand Finance, about the conglomerate’s performance this year.

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Energy, Engineering, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News

Energy abundance : The future of nuclear

July 26, 2019

Yes, I want nuclear energy *in my back yard*!

Extraordinary new innovations are giving us failsafe nuclear fission and the potential to achieve our age-old dream of fusion.

This year, Bill Gates commented: “Nuclear is ideal for dealing with climate change, because it is the only carbon-free, scalable energy source that’s available 24 hours a day. The problems with today’s reactors, such as the risk of accidents, can be solved through innovation.”

This blog is about convincing you to re-consider nuclear as a viable and critical idea. The upside of success is extraordinary, which is why, for the first time, we’re beginning to see venture capital make massive investments in the field.

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Amazon.com, Employment, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

Education vs. Training: Corporate America’s role

July 26, 2019

What do you really need to know? Would a sixth-grade education give you enough basic skills to enable you to use online tools to learn a trade or become a service worker or a knowledge worker? Would you need eighth-grade skills? Tenth-grade? Perhaps a four-year college degree?

How much education do you need to learn to create and configure a new Aurora Serverless DB cluster on AWS? One of our engineers just taught a high-school intern how to do it in a few hours. This particular intern is about 150 hours of training away from being in a position to earn about $90k annually. With what he has learned in the past 50 hours of training, this young man could earn enough during the rest of the summer to pay for his first year of college – which he may not actually need.

But if he doesn’t need to go to college, or even finish high-school, what kind of education does he need? We need to shift the conversation from education to training – and that is precisely what corporate America is starting to do.

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Automation, Driverless vehicles, Robots, Science & Technology News

Meet your future package delivery team: A self-driving vehicle and a robot

July 26, 2019

Digit uses its hands made of rubber balls to lift boxes that weigh up to 40 pounds, and has the ability to sidestep objects in its path and walk up staircases.

In may, damion shelton, the CEO of Agility Robotics, watched nervously as his new robot, Digit, attempted a groundbreaking feat: delivering a package from a self-driving vehicle to a front porch. “The robot has only been assembled for a couple months,” he says. “Now, it needs to stand and walk on its own. Will it fall and damage itself or deliver the package?”

Digit, a five-foot-tall, 88-pound bipedal robot, stands upright on thin, long, ostrich-like legs. It has 3D-printed rubber balls instead of fingers, a laser-range (LiDAR) sensor, a 3D camera for its head, and a battery-pack that lets it run for three hours on a single charge. Capable of picking up packages that weigh up to 40 pounds, Digit is designed to work in sync with self-driving vehicles, unfolding itself from the trunks of cars to deliver items across short distances within neighborhoods.

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AI, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

Machine learning goes beyond theory to beat human poker champs

July 26, 2019

How to deal with a breakdown in theoretical support in machine learning? Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Facebook describe winning many hands against the world’s top poker players by inventing smart search strategies to counter a lack of theoretical math used in most game-playing AI.

Among the many achievements of machine learning in recent years, some of the most striking are the victories of the machine against human players in games, such as Google’s DeepMind group’s conquest of Go in 2016. In such milestones, researchers are often guided by theoretical math that says there can be an optimal strategy to be found, given a good algorithm and enough compute.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Employment, Science & Technology News

The answer to the A.I. jobs apocalypse is all about geography

July 25, 2019

The spread of intelligence machines will worsen geographic inequality, unless we take proactive measures

Historically, the worst times for labor have been those characterized by both worker-replacing technological change and slow productivity growth. If A.I. technologies turn out to be as brilliant as some of us think, we can expect some workers to see their incomes vanish in the process — even as new jobs are created elsewhere in the economy. That is what has happened in recent years, and it is also what happened during the most tumultuous years of industrialization.

If current trends continue in the coming years, the divide between the automation winners and losers will become even wider. And there are good reasons to think that it will. Looking at the automatability of existing jobs, we have seen that most occupations that require a college degree remain hard to automate, while many unskilled jobs — like those of cashiers, food preparers, call center agents, and truck drivers — seem set to vanish, though how soon is highly uncertain. But there are also unskilled jobs that remain outside the realms of A.I. Many in-person service jobs that center on complex social interactions — like those of fitness trainers, hairstylists, concierges, and massage therapists — will remain safe from automation.

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Augmented Reality, Employment, Science & Technology News, Virtual Reality

Walmart is using VR to help decide who should get promotions

July 25, 2019

Walmart, the largest private employer in the U.S. with 1.5 million workers, is using virtual reality to help find candidates for management positions in all 4,600 stores, the Wall Street Journal reported. The VR headsets and the assessment program were designed by Strivr, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company.

Walmart’s idea for a VR assessment was rooted in seeing how its workers might respond to challenging situations and how they prioritize different tasks—things that would be hard to identify in an interview. So far, 10,000 employees have undergone the VR test as part of an initiative to identify potential high performers and cut back the overall number of managers in each store. This is part of a larger plan to change how many higher paid managers are overseeing teams and to give its frontline workers more decision-making power in their jobs, according to an earlier report in the WSJ.

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Biotech, Energy, Engineering, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News

South Korean tech breakthrough could change biofuels forever

July 25, 2019

Researchers in South Korea have made a major breakthrough in using bacteria to sustainably and efficiently produce biofuels. The team of scientists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) report that they have developed a new kind of engineered microorganisms that are capable of producing greater volumes of the fatty acids that make up biodiesel than ever before.

A team of researchers from KAIST released a study detailing their discovery last month in the scientific journal Nature Chemical Biology. The paper, titled “Engineering of an oleaginous bacterium for the production of fatty acids and fuels” details the development of these record-breaking microorganisms which could prove to be a key breakthrough in the effort to develop sustainable, bio-based energy sources to replace dirtier, finite fossil fuels.

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Great New Product, Housing, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy

Cooling/heating window film captures and releases solar energy

July 24, 2019

The MOST window film keeps rooms from heating up during the day, but warms them at night(Credit: Yen Strandqvist/Chalmers University of Technology )

A couple of years ago we heard about the MOlecular Solar Thermal (MOST) system, in which solar energy is stored in a liquid medium, then later released as heat. Now, the technology has been applied to a clear film that could be applied to the inside of windows in energy-efficient buildings.

Developed at Sweden’s Chalmers University, the MOST film incorporates a norbornadiene–quadricyclane molecule. This causes the transparent polymer film to take on an orangey-yellow color when not being directly exposed to sunlight.

Once the sun rises in the morning and its rays strike the material, however, much of the sunlight’s solar energy is absorbed by the molecule. More specifically, the molecule captures some of the incoming photons, causing it to isomerize – this means that it temporarily becomes another type of molecule, with exactly the same atoms but in a different arrangement.

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App, government, Law Enforcement, Legal Issues, privacy, Science & Technology News

Revealed: This is Palintir’s top-secret user manual for cops

July 24, 2019

Motherboard obtained a Palantir user manual through a public records request, and it gives unprecedented insight into how the company logs and tracks individuals.

Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It’s been described by scholars as a “secondary surveillance network,” since it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between individuals, even those who aren’t suspected of a crime.

Palantir software is instrumental to the operations of ICE, which is planning one of the largest-ever targeted immigration enforcement raids this weekend on thousands of undocumented families. Activists argue raids of this scale would be impossible without software like Palantir. But few people outside the company and its customers know how its software works or what its specific capabilities and user interfaces are.

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