News

Showdown: MySQL 8 vs. PostgreSQL 10

Now that MySQL 8 and PostgreSQL 10 are out, it’s a good time to revisit how the two major open source relational databases compete against each other. Before these versions, the general perception has been that while Postgres is superior in feature sets and its pedigree, MySQL is more battle tested at scale with massive concurrent reads/writes. But with the latest releases, the gap between the two has gotten significantly narrowed.

Ancient Rome’s Collapse Is Written into Arctic Ice

On March 15, some time ago, several dozen famous politicians—sturdy men, duly elected senators who claimed to love their republic—attacked their chief executive while he walked into the Senate. They stabbed Gaius Julius Caesar 23 times, as he fell to the floor, defenseless, and bled to death, setting off a chain of wars that formally ended the Roman Republic and initiated the Roman Empire. Some 2,062 years have passed since that day, but we haven’t stopped arguing about it.

A new experiment hints at surprising hidden mechanics of quantum superpositions

Scanner: Processing Terabytes of Video on Hundreds of Machines

There are now many state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms which are a git clone away. We found that existing systems for distributed data analysis were not well suited to dealing with the computational challenges of applying computer vision algorithms to terabyte or petabyte sized video collections, so we designed and built a system called Scanner to make efficient video analysis easier.

Leading UK scientist reveals likely cause of childhood leukaemia

Professor Mel Greaves from The Institute of Cancer Research, London, assessed the most comprehensive body of evidence ever collected on acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) – the most common type of childhood cancer. His research concludes that the disease is caused through a two-step process of genetic mutation and exposure to infection that means it may be preventable with treatments to stimulate or ‘prime’ the immune system in infancy. The first step involves a genetic mutation that occurs before birth in the foetus and predisposes children to leukaemia – but only 1 per cent of children born with this genetic change go on to develop the disease.

Google sued for ‘clandestine tracking’ of UK iPhone users’ browsing data

NASA’s EM-drive is a magnetic WTF-thruster

A group of German scientists has now gotten a reasonable amount of money under the rubric of testing all the things. Basically, because the various space agencies have whispered that no idea is too silly to ignore, we need an effective way to quickly test all the stupid space stuff on the Internet. The Germans are currently building something that is designed to do all that testing.

China Is Going to Be the First Country to Land on the Dark Side of the Moon

A German Team Is Now Trying to Make the ‘Impossible’ EmDrive Engine

The Pentagon Can’t Account for $21T

There are certain things the human mind is not meant to do. Our complex brains cannot view the world in infrared, cannot spell words backward during orgasm and cannot really grasp numbers over a few thousand. A few thousand, we can feel and conceptualize.