News

The Army Is Working on Brain Hacks to Help Soldiers Deal With Information Overload

The Gambler Who Cracked the Horse-Racing Code

On the evening of Nov. 6, 2001, all of Hong Kong was talking about the biggest jackpot the city had ever seen: at least HK$100 million (then about $13 million) for the winner of a single bet called the Triple Trio. The wager is a little like a trifecta of trifectas; it requires players to predict the top three horses, in any order, in three different heats. More than 10 million combinations are possible.

Mobile phone cancer warning as malignant brain tumours double

Last night the group said the increasing rate of tumours in the frontal temporal lobe “raises the suspicion that mobile and cordless phone use may be promoting gliomas”. Professor Denis Henshawsaid: “Our findings illustrate the need to look more carefully at, and to try and explain the mechanisms behind, these cancer trends, instead of brushing the causal factors under the carpet and focusing only on cures.” In 2015 the European Commission Scientific Committee on Emerging and Newly Identified Health Risks concluded that, overall, the epidemiologic studies on cell phone radiofrequency electromagnetic radiation exposure do not show an increased risk of brain tumors or of other cancers of the head and neck region.

Woman receives $5,751 ER bill—for an ice pack and a bandage

NASA completes full-power tests of small, portable nuclear reactor

Being able to generate power will be essential for long-term space travel. Powering a stay on Mars, for example, will require a lot of fuel, way more than we can pack onto a rocket. That’s why NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Department of Energy and a number of other groups have been working on a small, transportable nuclear reactor that can reliably generate power on the go.

Facebook Open Sources ELF OpenGo

Inspired by DeepMind’s work, we kicked off an effort earlier this year to reproduce their recent AlphaGoZero results using FAIR’s Extensible, Lightweight Framework (ELF) for reinforcement learning research. The goal was to create an open source implementation of a system that would teach itself how to play Go at the level of a professional human player or better. By releasing our code and models we hoped to inspire others to think about new applications and research directions for this technology.

Artificial Intelligence Opens the Vatican Secret Archives

Known as In Codice Ratio, it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and optical-character-recognition (OCR) software to scour these neglected texts and make their transcripts available for the very first time. If successful, the technology could also open up untold numbers of other documents at historical archives around the world.

Google gVisor, a sandboxed container runtime

To that end, we’d like to introduce gVisor, a new kind of sandbox that helps provide secure isolation for containers, while being more lightweight than a virtual machine (VM). gVisor integrates with Docker and Kubernetes, making it simple and easy to run sandboxed containers in production environments.

Random quantum circuit easiest way to beat classical computer

The key question: what computation should be performed? A team of researchers is suggesting that computing the state of a random quantum circuit that exhibits chaotic behavior would be perfect for the task. Let’s delve into why that might be.

CoreOS Introduces the Operator Framework: Building Apps on Kubernetes

You may be familiar with Operators from the concept’s introduction in 2016. An Operator is a method of packaging, deploying and managing a Kubernetes application. A Kubernetes application is an application that is both deployed on Kubernetes and managed using the Kubernetes APIs and kubectl tooling.