There was a huge amount of excitement when the Higgs boson was first spotted back in 2012 – a discovery that bagged the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2013. The particle completed the so-called standard model, our current best theory of understanding nature at the level of particles. Now scientists at the Large Hadron Collider […]
Last week, or maybe the week before (the days fly by so fast), reporters were all agape with surprise that the electron was round. Very round. I put it on my list of things to write about, took a deep breath, and dived back into the painful process of grading. Grades are now done, and […]
Planning to get in early on the Portal phenomenon? Facebook announced today that it’s starting to ship the video chat device. The company’s first true piece of devoted hardware comes in two configurations: the Echo Show-like Portal and the larger Portal+ . Which run $199 and $349, respectively. There’s also a two-fer $298 bundle on […]
Researchers at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) have partnered with a team from Tencent Machine Learning to create a new technique for training artificial intelligence (AI) machines faster than ever before while maintaining accuracy. During the experiment, the team trained two popular deep neural networks called AlexNet and ResNet-50 in just four minutes and 6.6 […]
Russia’s space agency says that one of the International Space Station’s computers has malfunctioned, but the glitch doesn’t pose any risks to the crew. Roscosmos said Tuesday that one of three computers in the station’s Russian module has failed. It said Russian flight controllers plan to reboot it Thursday. The agency emphasized that the computer […]
The first components of the International Space Station (ISS) launched into space more than 20 years ago, and it’s been continuously occupied for 18. Right now, it’s the only operational space station in orbit – but that’s about to change. China just unveiled a life-size replica of the core module of the country’s new space […]
Microsoft’s “Kaizala” app — which began as a Microsoft Garage incubation project — started out as a productivity tool specifically for the Indian market. Since then, Microsoft has started broadening its distribution and is making the “Pro” version of the app part of the Office 365 commercial plans worldwide for no additional fee. Kaizala is […]
“Cloud native” has always had the ring of yet another enterprise computing buzzword, one designed to sound impressive to people with money and a casual grasp of the massive shift brought on by cloud computing. But the surge in interest around multicloud computing has proven that startups born on the cloud really do have a […]
The humble nematode, also known as C. elegans, is the only organism on Earth to have its entire nervous system and brain mapped out like a wiring schematic. We understand this little worm so well, in fact, that scientists are now trying to digitize its peabrain for use in machine learning experiments—in other words, creating […]
Any species reaching for the stars is bound to have its fingertips singed. Probably more than once. One of NASA’s latest posts on the Astronomy Picture of the Day website is an iconic reminder of the mishaps in our spacefaring history. “A flying saucer from outer space crash-landed in the Utah desert after being tracked […]
With Samsung now having reported earnings for the first three quarters of the year, we can safely say that all three of its 2018 flagship smartphones have underwhelmed. The company’s mobile division dragged down stellar performance in Samsung’s semi business over and over, thanks in large part to a trio of premium smartphones that are […]
Productivity in the United States’ health care industry is declining — and has been ever since World War II. As the cost of treating patients continues to rise, life expectancy in America is beginning to fall. But there is mounting evidence that artificial intelligence (AI) can reverse the downward spiral in productivity by automating the […]
