This 15 foot Tesla Coil creates sparks of up to 26 feet and runs up to 55,000 watts in Oklahoma.
“That electrical energy can be economically transmitted without wires to any terrestrial distance, with a loss not exceeding a small fraction of one percent in the transmission, even to the greatest distance, 12,000 miles – to the opposite end of the globe.”
Luv the whole beautiful picture of a Big Data Quantum Computing Cloud. And, we’re definitely going to need it for all of our data demands and performance demands when you layer in the future of AI (including robotics), wearables, our ongoing convergence to singularity with nanobots and other BMI technologies. Why we could easily exceed $4.6 bil by 2021.
From gene mapping to space exploration, humanity continues to generate ever-larger sets of data—far more information than people can actually process, manage, or understand.
Machine learning systems can help researchers deal with this ever-growing flood of information. Some of the most powerful of these analytical tools are based on a strange branch of geometry called topology, which deals with properties that stay the same even when something is bent and stretched every which way.
Such topological systems are especially useful for analyzing the connections in complex networks, such as the internal wiring of the brain, the U.S. power grid, or the global interconnections of the Internet. But even with the most powerful modern supercomputers, such problems remain daunting and impractical to solve. Now, a new approach that would use quantum computers to streamline these problems has been developed by researchers at MIT, the University of Waterloo, and the University of Southern California…
Interesting
Scientists have implanted a wireless device the size of a peppercorn inside mice to stimulate nerves.
The technique combines optogenetics—using light to control the activity of the brain—with a newly developed method for wirelessly powering implanted devices. It’s described in a paper published in Nature Methods.
“This is a new way of delivering wireless power for optogenetics,” says Ada Poon, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. “It’s much smaller and the mouse can move around during an experiment.”
This is a bit concerning ; it is feeling a lot like 1972 again when my mother and sisters took a special trip to D.C. for a special meeting and event.
When I moved to the Bay Area in 2007 to run the Wikimedia Foundation, the first thing that struck me was the eerie absence of women. I’d spent most of my working life at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., where we used to joke that women took power when the men went off to war in 1939, and afterward refused to give it back. At the CBC, easily half my colleagues, regardless of their gender, were overt, confident, unashamed feminists.
The Bay Area tech community was different. In my first three months I had dozens of meetings with tech executives, entrepreneurs and investors, and the only women I met were scheduling the meetings and bringing drinks to the boardrooms. I started asking myself what year it was in Silicon Valley for women. Had we reached the point where we could wear pantsuits and play golf, or was it still the Mad Men era?
Women make up a tiny fraction, roughly 15%, of people working in technical roles in the tech industry. And amazingly, that percentage is dropping, not rising. Multiple studies have found that the proportion of women in the tech workforce peaked in about 1989 and has been steadily dropping ever since.
Apple-linked Intelligent Energy poised for first major commercial deployment of technology in India.
China’s improved glass for space.
Chinese scientists developed a method to create a transparent, glass-based material with the power and lifespan to absorb ultraviolet rays. The metal oxide-based special glass is expected to not break down under prolonged UV radiation exposure. (Photo : John T. Clarke (University of Michigan), ESA, NASA | Wikimedia Commons)
Chinese scientists have discovered a special glass that can absorb and block dangerous ultraviolet rays.
UV light can harm living cells, and out in space where radiation from the sun is even greater, sensitive electronics on board a spacecraft can suffer even more damage.
A lithium-ion battery that self heats if the temperature is below 32 degrees Fahrenheit has multiple applications, but may have the most impact on relieving winter “range anxiety” for electric vehicle owners, according to a team of researchers from Penn State and EC Power, State College.
Chrome is about to load web pages a lot faster than you’ve experienced up until now. Thanks to a new compression algorithm called Brotli, which Google introduced last September, Chrome will be able to compress data up to 26 percent more than its existing compression engine, Zopfli, which is an impressive jump.
According to Google’s web performance engineer Ilya Grigorik, Brotli is ready to roll out, so Chrome users should expect to see a bump in load times once the next version of Chrome is released. Google also says Brotli will help mobile Chrome users experience “lower data transfer fees and reduced battery use.” The company is hailing Brotli as “a new data format” that Google hopes will be adopted by other web browsers in the near future, with Firefox seemingly next in line to adopt it. But for now, expect to notice your web pages loading a bit faster in the coming weeks.
Update: January 20th 10:30AM: Updated to note that Firefox will also adopt Brotli in a future update.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vXu5toPPqVE
Microsoft technical evangelist Bruce Harris has unveiled new details for Microsoft’s augmented reality headset, HoloLens. At an event in Tel Aviv, Harris was recorded (via Petri) saying that that any universal Windows 10 app will run natively on the device, as we’ve already heard, and that developers will naturally need to create 3D apps to realize the HoloLens’ full potential.
But Harris also talked about how the device features Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, describing it as “totally wireless.” In fact, he said a wired version of the HoloLens would not be available.
This brings up the question of battery life. Apparently in this department, the HoloLens will be “very much like a laptop.” That means up to 5.5 hours of basic use, and 2.5 hours of high-intensity use.
