ELECTRIC SCHOOL BUSES CAN BE BACKUP BATTERIES FOR THE US POWER GRID
We often think of electricity as a one-way transaction. Need to toast a bagel, wash the sheets, or charge your phone? Your fuse box sends you the juice you need. Electric vehicles, though, have the capacity to send power back to the electrical grid using vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology—and that’s good news for an aging grid already operating at full capacity. Vehicle-to-grid does this by letting electric vehicle (EV) batteries switch between providing and consuming energy on an as-needed basis. As EV adoption rates steadily climb, this technology could help stabilize the electrical grid, lessen the need for new power plants, and reduce kids’ exposure to cancer-causing exhaust.
Read moreINSIDE THE PLAN TO PRINT ALL OF WIKIPEDIA AND SEND IT TO THE MOON
The Arch Mission Foundation is printing out all 25 million pages of the English version of Wikipedia and sending it to the moon. That way, even if humans don’t make it, a comprehensive record of our existence will survive for millennia. In short, it appears like the only way to totally destroy Wikipedia would be to destroy the world, or at least all the humans on it.
Read moreEVIDENCE OF AN ALIEN OCEAN FOUND IN DEFUNCT 1990S SPACECRAFT DATA
While the Cassini orbiter (RIP) actually flew through watery plumes erupting from cracks in Enceladus’ icy surface, similar sprays on Europa have long been suspected, but have never been directly sampled. Or have they? Research published Monday in Nature Astronomy reveals that data acquired by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft (also RIP), which explored Jupiter from 1995 to 2003, includes evidence that the probe swept through a plume in 1997. Led by Xianzhe Jia, a planetary scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, the study finds that the onboard magnetometer and plasma wave spectrometer picked up readings that suggest Galileo skinny-dipped through a Europan geyser. Jia was already familiar with Galileo’s observations, having worked with them extensively while pursuing his PhD at UC Los Angeles.
Read moreUS CELL CARRIERS ARE SELLING ACCESS TO YOUR REAL-TIME PHONE LOCATION DATA
Four of the largest cell giants in the US are selling your real-time location data to a company that you’ve probably never heard about before. In case you missed it, a senator last week sent a letter demanding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigate why Securus, a prison technology company, can track any phone ‘within seconds’ by using data obtained from the country’s largest cell giants, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, through an intermediary, LocationSmart. The story blew up because a former police sheriff snooped on phone location data without a warrant, according The New York Times.
Read moreA CHEMIST SHINES LIGHT ON A SURPRISING PRIME NUMBER PATTERN
About a year ago, the theoretical chemist Salvatore Torquato met with the number theorist Matthew de Courcy-Ireland to explain that he had done something highly unorthodox with prime numbers, those positive integers that are divisible only by 1 and themselves. Torquato told de Courcy-Ireland, a final-year graduate student at Princeton who had been recommended by another mathematician, that a year before, on a hunch, he had performed diffraction on sequences of prime numbers. Hoping to highlight the elusive order in the distribution of the primes, he and his student Ge Zhang had modeled them as a one-dimensional sequence of particles — essentially, little spheres that can scatter light.
Read moreHOW AN AI STARTUP COULD DEFEAT NOW UNBEATABLE BUGS
The need for new medications is higher than ever, but so is the cost and time to bring them to market. Developing a new drug can cost billions and take as long as 14 years, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Yet with all that effort, only 8 percent of drugs make it to market, the FDA said. The six-year-old company, a member of our Inception startup incubator program, is working to make that happen by using GPU-accelerated deep learning to predict which molecules are most likely to lead to treatments. It’s already had some success, identifying possible medicines for multiple sclerosis and the deadly Ebola virus. Researchers first identify the biological cause of a disease — usually a protein — to target with a treatment.
Read morePREFRONTAL CORTEX AS A META-REINFORCEMENT LEARNING SYSTEM
Recently, AI systems have mastered a range of video-games such as Atari classics Breakout and Pong. But as impressive as this performance is, AI still relies on the equivalent of thousands of hours of gameplay to reach and surpass the performance of human video game players. In contrast, we can usually grasp the basics of a video game we have never played before in a matter of minutes.
Read moreTHINK ORGANIC FOOD IS BETTER FOR YOU, ANIMALS, AND THE PLANET? THINK AGAIN
What we eat is seen as more important than ever. And everywhere we are urged to go organic: we are told it is more nutritious, it improves animal welfare and helps the environment. In reality, that is mostly marketing hype. In 2012 Stanford University’s Centre for Health Policy did the biggest comparison of organic and conventional foods and found no robust evidence for organics being more nutritious. A brand-new review has just repeated its finding: ‘Scientific studies do not show that organic products are more nutritious and safer than conventional foods.’ Likewise, animals on organic farms are not generally healthier.
Read moreHOW LONG CAN A NEUTRON SURVIVE OUTSIDE AN ATOM?
Neutrons are probably best known for being a chargeless component of the nucleus of all atoms other than hydrogen. In that context, they can be extremely stable—you probably noted the fact that your body wasn’t decaying around you. But pull neutrons out of that context, and they become very unhappy. They’ll decay into a proton, an electron, and a neutrino. That decay has a half life—the time it would take half the neutrons in a large sample to decay—of a bit under 15 minutes. But just how much less isn’t clear.
Read moreTHE SPECTACULAR POWER OF BIG LENS
If you have been wearing glasses for years, like me, it can be surprising to discover that you perceive the world thanks to a few giant companies that you have never heard of. Worrying about the fraying edge of motorway lights at night, or words that slide on the page, and occasionally spending a fortune at the opticians is, for many of us, enough to think about. And spectacles are unusual things.
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