DID PLANTS CAUSE ONE OF EARTH’S GREAT EXTINCTIONS?
Clues are hard to come by when you’re trying to look back to a time when the continents clumped together like a closed fist. But geologists have found evidence that plants, the most gentle of organisms, may have helped kill most of the life in the oceans 374 million years ago. Source: juneauempire.com
KUBERNETES GRADUATES FROM CLOUD NATIVE COMPUTING FOUNDATION (CNCF)
Established, global organizations like Uber, Bloomberg, Blackrock, BlaBlaCar, The New York Times, Lyft, eBay, Buffer, Squarespace, Ancestry, GolfNow, Goldman Sachs and many others use Kubernetes in production at massive scale. Furthermore, according to Redmonk, 71 percent of the Fortune 100 use containers and more than 50 percent of Fortune 100 companies use Kubernetes as their container orchestration platform. Source: cncf.io
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF INTERPRETABILITY
Interpretability techniques are normally studied in isolation. We explore the powerful interfaces that arise when you combine them — and the rich structure of this combinatorial space. Source: distill.pub
GOOGLE HELPS PENTAGON ANALYZE MILITARY DRONE FOOTAGE—EMPLOYEES “OUTRAGED”
A report from Gizmodo says that Google is partnering with the United States Department of Defense and building drone software. The project will reportedly apply Google’s usual machine learning prowess to identify objects in drone footage. Google’s involvement in the project wasn’t public, but it was apparently discussed internally at Google last week and leaked. Source: arstechnica.com
TALENT VS. LUCK: THE ROLE OF RANDOMNESS IN SUCCESS AND FAILURE
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking. Sometimes, we are willing to admit that a certain degree of luck could also play a role in achieving significant material success. But, as a matter of fact, it is rather common to underestimate the importance of external forces in individual successful stories.
Read moreA VIRTUAL SLUG SIMULATOR COULD HELP RESEARCHERS DEVELOP BETTER AI
Researchers at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Urbana-Champaign developed Cyberslug, a simulation of the sea slug, to better understand how simple brains work and apply that knowledge to the broader field of artificial intelligence research. Their study, “Implementing Goal-Directed Foraging Decisions of a Simpler Nervous System in Simulation,” is published in the journal eNeuro. Source: vice.com
NEW STUDY TRACKS THE EVOLUTION OF STONE TOOLS
For at least 2.6 million years, humans and our ancestors have been making stone tools by chipping off flakes of material to produce sharp edges. We think of stone tools as very rudimentary technology, but producing a usable tool without wasting a lot of stone takes skill and knowledge. That’s why archaeologists tend to use the complexity of stone tools as a way to measure the cognitive skills of early humans and the complexity of their cultures and social interactions.
Read moreIS GOOGLE GOING UNDERGROUND WITH HYPERSONIC TECH?
Google is carrying out research on hypersonics, probably for new technologies to slash the cost of geothermal energy and tunneling. It could also be acquiring a Washington-based startup called HyperSciences that has already built prototype devices. Source: ieee.org
TECHNIQUE TO SEE OBJECTS HIDDEN AROUND CORNERS
A driverless car is making its way through a winding neighborhood street, about to make a sharp turn onto a road where a child’s ball has just rolled. Although no person in the car can see that ball, the car stops to avoid it. This is because the car is outfitted with extremely sensitive laser technology that reflects off nearby objects to see around corners.
Read moreSURPRISE GRAPHENE DISCOVERY COULD UNLOCK SECRETS OF SUPERCONDUCTIVITY
A sandwich of two graphene layers can conduct electrons without resistance if they are twisted at a ‘magic angle’’, physicists have discovered. The finding could prove to be a significant step in the decades-long search for room-temperature superconductors. Source: nature.com