Could the planet’s next catastrophe be averted by R2-D2? That’s the idea behind the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a robot Olympiad designed to create autonomous machines that can go where no man can or should go—nuclear disaster sites, minefields, Montauk over Labor Day weekend—and fix all the toxic messes we make. The stakes are $3.5 million. Oh, and possibly the future of mankind.
Resetting Your Biological Clock: New Enzyme Found To Repair Telomeres.
The telomere caps on the end of your chromosomes unravel bit by bit with every cell division, and if they’re not repaired division eventually stops altogether. Cells like stem cells express special enzymes to lengthen these caps, and we’ve now found another one that does the job.
A key player in aging?
Continue reading “Resetting The Clock: New Enzyme Found To Repair Telomeres” »
Feeling like the typical four or eight (Extreme Edition) cores in your current Core i7 processor are holding you back? Well, you’re in luck. Intel is going to offer up their very first Core i7 with ten processing cores before the end of next summer.
While it’ll be the first desktop-class CPU with that many cores, it won’t actually be Intel’s first 10-core processor. They’ve been making Xeon chips with at least 10 cores since 2011, and some with as many as 15. They’re aimed primarily at servers and enterprise-class workstations, though. Next year, however, they’ll finally offer up a deca-core processor for the consumer market.
That chip will be the Core i7-6950X, a 10-core beast with Hyper-threading support that allows it to handle 20 independent instructions at any given time. It’s based on Intel’s new 14nm process, down from 22nm on Ivy Bridge and Haswell. The 6950X should be clocked at 3GHz, but it’s not yet known where Turbo Boost will top out.
Meet Amun 3554. Doesn’t look like much, right? Little more than a mile wide, it’s one of the smallest M-class (metal-bearing) asteroids yet discovered. Unless it ever decides to smash into us — a theoretical possibility, but extremely unlikely over the next few centuries — it will continue orbiting the sun, unknown and unmolested.
That is, unless Planetary Resources has its way. Planetary Resources is the asteroid-mining company launched Tuesday in Seattle, with backing from Microsoft and Google billionaires, along with the equally prominent James Cameron and Ross Perot Jr.
Continue reading “This $20 Trillion Rock Could Turn a Startup Into Earth’s Richest Company” »
In the past couple of years, Google has been trying to improve more and more of its services with artificial intelligence. Google also happens to own a quantum computer — a system capable of performing certain computations faster than classical computers.
It would be reasonable to think that Google would try running AI workloads on the quantum computer it got from startup D-Wave, which is kept at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, right near Google headquarters.
Google is keen on advancing its capabilities in a type of AI called deep learning, which involves training artificial neural networks on a large supply of data and then getting them to make inferences about new data.
Interesting…
According to Steve Jurvetson, venture capitalist and board member at pioneer quantum computing company D-WAVE (as well as others, such as Tesla and SpaceX), Google has what may be a “watershed” quantum computing announcement scheduled for early next month. This comes as D-WAVE, which notably also holds the Mountain View company as a customer, has just sold a 1000+ Qubit 2X quantum computer to national security research institution Los Alamos…
It’s not exactly clear what this announcement will be (besides important for the future of computing), but Jurvetson says to “stay tuned” for more information coming on December 8th. This is the first we’ve heard of a December 8th date for a Google announcement, and considering its purported potential to be a turning point in computing, this could perhaps mean an actual event is in the cards.
If the Spitfire is the classic car of a private plane collection then this Valkyrie is an Aston Martin. James Bond’s Aston Martin to be precise.
It’s the stunning new plane from Cobalt Aircraft and not only has the accolade of being of the most beautiful planes we’ve ever seen but being the fastest private plane in its category.
I had read about Singapore in genetic engineering way back in the 90’s. I think they were 1st or 2nd in making immortal skin cells at the time.
Singapore scientists have unravelled a mystery that could pave the way for turning back the clock on ageing.
A recent study led by Dr Ng Shyh Chang of the Genome Institute of Singapore at the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*Star) has found a gene in human egg cells that suppresses an enzyme causing cells to age.
Continue reading “Uncovering the secret of turning back time” »
