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Showing posts from July, 2021
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  Scientists create super-bendy ice   Ice is stiff and brittle — if you bend it, it will snap in two. Right? Not quite. Researchers just found that when grown in tiny strands, ice can defy its reputation for breakability, becoming so elastic it can even bend into a loop, according to a new study.  These ice microfibers are so bendy that they are near the theoretical limit for ice elasticity. Perhaps even cooler, the scientists who grew the bendy ice think that their teensy ice strands could lead to both an avalanche of new ways to better understand ice in its natural state and more efficient technology for transmitting light. In theory, ice in the real world could be just as bendy as the researchers' ice, but defects such as cracks and misalignments of crystals makes naturally occurring ice far more brittle. The maximum theoretical elastic strain of water ice — or the percentage of its size by which it can be stretched or bent before returning to its origina...
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  How Apple's efforts to bring privacy to the masses will change the web Apple has announced a swathe of upgrades for its tablet, phone and computer operating systems that could change the way millions of people’s data is transmitted over the internet – a boon for privacy enthusiasts, but a potential problem for advertisers, law enforcement agencies and governments. At Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference yesterday, the company announced that upcoming updates to its web browser will offer an anonymous browsing feature called Private Relay. This will disguise user details from website operators by using a series of intermediary servers. Software to do this, such as the Tor network , already exists, but Apple’s move will make this kind of obfuscation far more mainstream. The voice-recognition assistant Siri will also process audio on the device, rather than sending it to Apple servers for analysis, and changes to Apple’s email app will stop senders tracking when a mes...
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  Google and Facebook hit by faulty chips that can silently corrupt data Internet giants Google and Facebook have discovered they are experiencing computer chip failures that can corrupt data or make it difficult to unlock encrypted files. Facebook says hardware manufacturers must take notice of the problem, which has emerged due to the vast scale of computing resources the firms use. The issue surfaced at Google when multiple teams of engineers reported problems with their computations, but the company’s usual diagnostic tools showed no problem. An investigation revealed that individual chips were responsible for repeated …
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  Google is using AI to design processors that run AI more efficiently Engineers at Google have tasked an artificial intelligence with designing faster and more efficient processors – and then used its chip designs to develop the next generation of specialised computers that run the very same type of AI algorithms. Google operates at such a large scale that it designs its own computer chips rather than buying commercial products. This allows it to optimise the chips to run its own software, but the process is time-consuming and expensive. A custom chip usually takes two to three years to develop. One stage of chip design is a process called floorplanning, which involves taking the finalised circuit diagram of a new chip and arranging the millions of components into an efficient layout for manufacturing. Although the functional design of the chip is complete at this point, the layout can have a huge effect on speed and power consumption. For chips in smartphones, the...
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  Meteorite-hunting drones could help find freshly fallen space rocks Meteorite are among the most important objects scientists can study to understand the solar system, but finding them is tricky and time-consuming. Now, one team of researchers is trying to speed up the process with drones. Robert Citron at the University of California, Davis, and his colleagues have been trialling using drones and machine learning to find these rocks shortly after their blazing journey through the atmosphere. The NASA-funded study flew a camera-equipped consumer drone over a dry lake bed in Nevada, … Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2281804-meteorite-hunting-drones-could-help-find-freshly-fallen-space-rocks/#ixzz6zcmRBwFk
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  Quantum internet: The race is on to build an unhackable online world Great leaps are already being made in creating a super secure quantum internet. It could overturn the role of information in our lives and give us a globe-spanning quantum supercomputer MANY of us have uploaded our lives to the internet. Banking, work emails, social media, dating profiles, medical records – all that vital, sensitive information. So it is a little disconcerting that the internet has a fatal security flaw. Don’t panic; our private information is safe for now. But before very long the encryption algorithms that protect us online are going to crack. That is the urgent driving force behind a new, more secure kind of internet that harnesses the power of the quantum realm . Once up and running, the system will be able to do a lot more than protect our data. It could bring us unforeseen quantum apps, and maybe become the scaffold for a wo...
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  Israel used world's first AI-guided combat drone swarm in Gaza attacks     During operations in Gaza in mid-May, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) used a swarm of small drones to locate, identify and attack Hamas militants. This is thought to be the first time a drone swarm has been used in combat. Drones are usually controlled individually by remote operators, but a swarm is a single networked entity that flies itself using artificial intelligence . It can cover a wide area and keep operating even if it loses many units, and only requires a single … Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2282656-israel-used-worlds-first-ai-guided-combat-drone-swarm-in-gaza-attacks/#ixzz6zckcR3Ql  
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  AI clears up images of fingerprints to help with identification       An AI that can repair blurred or distorted images of fingerprints lifted from crime scenes could make identifying people easier, but it is unclear whether such evidence would stand up in court. Amol Joshi at West Virginia University and his colleagues trained an AI to cancel out distortions of fingerprints caused by incorrect camera focusing and other errors. The team took a data set of 15,860 clean fingerprint images from 250 subjects and created blurred versions of them synthetically at varying levels of distortion. … Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2282218-ai-clears-up-images-of-fingerprints-to-help-with-identification/#ixzz6zckEe72E
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Cyber Security What is Cyber Security? Cyber security is the practice of defending computers, servers, mobile devices, electronic systems, networks, and data from malicious attacks. It's also known as information technology security or electronic information security. The term applies in a variety of contexts, from business to mobile computing, and can be divided into a few common categories. ·          Network security is the practice of securing a computer network from intruders, whether targeted attackers or opportunistic malware. ·          Application security focuses on keeping software and devices free of threats. A compromised application could provide access to the data its designed to protect. Successful security begins in the design stage, well before a program or device is deployed. ·          Information security protects the integrity and priv...
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World Fastest computer - Fugaku Fugaku – named after an alternative name for Mount Fuji  – is a claimed exascale supercomputer (while only at petascale for mainstream benchmark), at the RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe , Japan . It started development in 2014 as the successor to the K computer , and is officially scheduled to start operating in 2021. Fugaku made its debut in 2020, and became the fastest supercomputer in the world in the June 2020 TOP500 list, as well as becoming the first ARM architecture -based computer to achieve this. In June 2020, it achieved 1.42 exaFLOPS (fp16 with fp64 precision) in HPL-AI benchmark making it the first ever supercomputer that achieved 1 exaFLOPS.As of April 2021, Fugaku is the fastest supercomputer in the world   Hardware The supercomputer is built with the Fujitsu A64FX microprocessor. This CPU is based on the ARM version 8.2A processor architecture, and adopts the Scalable Vector Extensions for super...
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Python Language Introduction python is a widely used general-purpose, high level programming language. It was created by Guido van Rossum in 1991 and further developed by the Python Software Foundation. It was designed with an emphasis on code readability, and its syntax allows programmers to express their concepts in fewer lines of code. Python is a programming language that lets you work quickly and integrate systems more efficiently. There are two major Python versions: Python 2 and Python 3 . Both are quite different. Beginning with Python programming: 1) Finding an Interpreter: Before we start Python programming, we need to have an interpreter to interpret and run our programs. There are certain online interpreters like https://ide.geeksforgeeks.org/ , http://ideone.com/ or http://codepad.org/ that can be used to run Python programs without installing an interpreter. Windows : There are many interpreters available freely to run Python scripts like IDLE (Integrated Devel...
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 Artificial intelligence What is artificial intelligence? Artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, especially computer systems. Specific applications of AI include expert systems , natural language processing, speech recognition and machine vision . How does AI work? As the hype around AI has accelerated, vendors have been scrambling to promote how their products and services use AI. Often what they refer to as AI is simply one component of AI, such as machine learning . AI requires a foundation of specialized hardware and software for writing and training machine learning algorithms. No one programming language is synonymous with AI, but a few, including Python, R and Java, are popular. In general, AI systems work by ingesting large amounts of labeled training data, analyzing the data for correlations and patterns, and using these patterns to make predictions about future states. In this way, a chatbot that is f...