News

Federal officials boot Tesla from crash investigation

The National Transportation Safety Board announced Thursday that it has revoked Tesla’s status as a party to its investigation of a fatal Model X crash in Mountain View, California last month.

Trouble Detected in Infamous Dark Matter Signal

New results from a decades-old experiment were initially touted as further evidence for dark matter. But independent scientists have cast serious doubt on that claim, leaving most everyone puzzled.

Birds can see Earth’s magnetic fields

The mystery behind how birds navigate might finally be solved: it’s not the iron in their beaks providing a magnetic compass, but a newly discovered protein in their eyes that lets them ‘see’ Earth’s magnetic fields. These findings come courtesy of two new papers – one studying robins, the other zebra finches. The fancy eye protein is called Cry4, and it’s part of a class of proteins called cryptochromes – photoreceptors sensitive to blue light, found in both plants and animals.

EdgeDB: A new open-source object relational database

Databases have always been and will always be the defining piece of any technological stack. In the last decade there has been a lot of activity and interesting developments in the field. Just 10 years ago there was no MongoDB, no affordable cloud databases, and even cloud itself was a relatively new concept.

World’s first electrified road for charging vehicles opens in Sweden

A ‘Quantum Radar’ System Will Watch for Stealth Aircraft and Missiles in the Arctic

Non-profit’s $300 hepatitis C cure as effective as $84,000 alternative

Rolls-Royce and Boeing invest in UK space engine

Key technologies include a compact pre-cooler heat-exchanger that can take an incoming airstream of over 1,000C and cool it to -150C in less than 1/100th of a second. This would permit Sabre to use oxygen direct from the atmosphere for combustion instead of carrying it in a tank with the weight penalty that implies.

Slow-Motion Ocean: Atlantic’s Circulation Is Weakest in 1,600 Years

In recent years sensors stationed across the North Atlantic have picked up a potentially concerning signal: The grand northward progression of water along North America that moves heat from the tropics toward the Arctic has been sluggish. If that languidness continues and deepens, it could usher in drastic changes in sea level and weather around the ocean basin.

Depthwise separable convolutions for machine learning

Convolutions are an important tool in modern deep neural networks (DNNs). This post is going to discuss some common types of convolutions, specifically regular and depthwise separable convolutions. My focus will be on the implementation of these operation, showing from-scratch Numpy-based code to compute them and diagrams that explain how things work.