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Tesla has unveiled its latest version of its Dojo supercomputer, and it's apparently so powerful that it tripped the power grid in Palo Alto.

Dojo is Tesla's own custom supercomputer platform built from the ground up for AI machine learning and, more specifically, for video training using the video data coming from its fleet of vehicles.

The automaker already has a large NVIDIA GPU-based supercomputer that is one of the most powerful in the world, but the new Dojo custom-built computer is using chips and an entire infrastructure designed by Tesla.

The custom-built supercomputer is expected to elevate Tesla's capacity to train neural nets using video data, which is critical to its computer vision technology powering its self-driving effort.

Last year, at Tesla's AI Day, the company unveiled its Dojo supercomputer, but the company was still ramping up its effort at the time. It only had its first chip and training tiles, and it was still working on building a full Dojo cabinet and cluster, or "Exapod."

Tesla has unveiled the progress made with the Dojo program over the last year during its AI Day 2022 last night.

The company confirmed that it managed to go from a chip and tile to a system tray and a full cabinet.

Tesla claimed it can replace six GPU boxes with a single Dojo tile, which the company claims costs less than one GPU box. There are six of those tiles per tray.

Tesla said that a single tray is the equivalent of "3 to 4 fully-loaded supercomputer racks."

The company is integrating its host interface directly on the system tray to create a big full host assembly:

Tesla can fit two of these system trays with host assembly into a single Dojo cabinet.

Here's what the Dojo cabinet looks like closed and opened:

That's pretty much where Tesla is right now as the automaker is still developing and testing the infrastructure needed to put a few cabinets together to create the first "Dojo Exapod."

Bill Chang, Tesla's Principal System Engineer for Dojo, said:

We knew that we had to reexamine every aspect of the data center infrastructure in order to support our unprecedented cooling and power density.

They had to develop their own high-powered cooling and power system to power the Dojo cabinets.

Chang said that Tesla tripped their local electric grid's substation when testing the infrastructure earlier this year:

Earlier this year, we started load testing our power and cooling infrastructure and we were able to push it over 2 MW before we tripped our substation and got a call from the city.

Here's how the Tesla Dojo Exapod looks opened and closed:

Tesla released the main specs of a Dojo Exapod: 1.1 EFLOP, 1.3 TB SRAM, and 13 TB high-bandwidth DRAM.

The company used the event to try to recruit more talent, but it also shared that it is on schedule to have its full first cluster, or Exapod, in Q1 2023.

It is currently planning to have seven Dojo Exapods in Palo Alto.

Why does Tesla need the Dojo supercomputer?

It's a fair question. Why is an automaker developing the world's most powerful supercomputer? Well, Tesla would tell you that it's not just an automaker but a technology company developing products to accelerate the transition to a sustainable economy.

Musk said it makes sense to offer a Dojo as a service, perhaps to take on his buddy Jeff Bezos's Amazon AWS, and calling it a "service that you can use that's available online where you can train your models way faster and for less money."

But more specifically, Tesla needs Dojo to auto-label training videos from its fleet and train its neural nets to build its self-driving system.

Tesla realized that its approach to developing a self-driving system using neural nets training on millions of videos coming from its customer fleet requires a lot of computing power; it decided to develop its own supercomputer to deliver that power.

That's the short-term goal, but Tesla will have plenty of use for the supercomputer going forward as it has big ambitions to develop other artificial intelligence programs.

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Tesla unveils new Dojo supercomputer so powerful it tripped the power grid

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Tesla has unveiled its latest version of its Dojo supercomputer, and it's apparently so powerful that it tripped the power grid in Palo Alto. Dojo is Tesla's own custom supercomputer platform built from the ground up for AI machine learning and, more specifically, for video training using the video data coming from its fleet of vehicles.

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WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - The world's human population is forecast to surpass 8 billion in the coming months. Compared to ants, that is a mediocre milestone.

Researchers have made the most thorough assessment to date of the global population of ants - insects that have colonized almost everywhere on the planet - and the estimated total is a mind-blowing 20 quadrillion of them, or approximately 2.5 million for every human.

It should come as little surprise considering how ubiquitous these busy and social insects are and the fact that they have thrived since the age of dinosaurs, with the oldest-known ant fossil dating back about 100 million years to the Cretaceous Period.

"Ants certainly play a very central role in almost every terrestrial ecosystem," said entomologist Patrick Schultheiss of the University of Würzburg in Germany and the University of Hong Kong, co-lead author of the study published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"They are very important for nutrient cycling, decomposition processes, plant seed dispersal and the perturbation of soil. Ants are also an extremely diverse group of insects, with the different species fulfilling a wide range of functions. But most of all, it is their high abundance that makes them key ecological players," Schultheiss said.

There are more than 12,000 known species of ants, which generally are black, brown or red in color and possess bodies segmented into three parts. Ranging in size from about four-hundredths of an inch (1 mm) to about 1.2 inches (3 cm) long, ants typically inhabit soil, leaf litter or decaying plants - and occasionally human kitchens.

Ants, whose closest relatives are bees and wasps, are native to nearly everywhere on Earth, as any picnicker knows, except Antarctica, Greenland, Iceland and some island nations.

"I was amazed that the ants' biomass was higher than that of wild mammals and birds combined, and that it reaches 20% of the human biomass. That gives you an understanding of the scale of their impact," said insect ecologist and study co-lead author Sabine Nooten, also of the University of Würzburg and University of Hong Kong.

"I find the enormous diversity of ants fascinating. They can be tiny or huge and show the most bizarre adaptations," Nooten added, citing a widespread ant genus called Strumigenys, known for long mouthparts with spikes used to hunt small invertebrates.

The researchers based their analysis on 489 studies of ant populations spanning every continent where ants live.

"Our dataset represents a massive collecting effort of thousands of scientists. We were then able to extrapolate the number of ants for different regions of the world and estimate their total global number and biomass," Schultheiss said.

Tropical regions were found to harbor many more ants than other regions, with forests and drylands boasting more ants than urban areas.

"There are certain parts of the world where we have little data and we cannot reach reliable estimates for all continents. Africa is one such example. We have long known that it is a very ant-rich continent but also very under-studied," Schultheiss said.

Ants generally live in colonies, sometimes consisting of millions of them divided into groups with different roles such as workers, soldiers, and queens. The workers, all females, care for the bigger queen and her offspring, maintain the nest, and forage for food. Males mate with queens, then die.

"Some ants can certainly be very annoying, but that's a very human-centered perspective," Schultheiss said.

"Most ants are actually highly beneficial, even to us humans," Schultheiss added. "Think about the amount of organic matter that 20 quadrillion ants transport, remove, recycle and eat. In fact, ants are so essential for the smooth working of biological processes that they can be seen as ecosystem engineers. The late ant scientist E.O. Wilson once called them 'the little things that run the world.'"

Reporting by Will Dunham, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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How many ants are crawling on Earth? Scientists say 20 quadrillion

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WASHINGTON, Sept 20 (Reuters) - The world's human population is forecast to surpass 8 billion in the coming months. Compared to ants, that is a mediocre milestone. Researchers have made the most thorough assessment to date of the global population of ants - insects that have colonized almost everywhere on the planet - and the estimated total is a mind-blowing 20 quadrillion of them, or approximately 2.5 million for every human.

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A California gas station manager has been fired for setting gas prices at 69 cents per gallon rather than $6.99 after accidentally misplacing the decimal.

Customers flooded the station to take advantage of the mistake, costing the place $16,000 before it was fixed.

Gas prices haven't been 69 cents since 1978. The current average in California is $6.435 per gallon.

A manager at a gas station in California is out of a job after accidentally reducing prices to just 69 cents per gallon.

John Szczecina was setting prices at the Shell gas station in, California, last week when he moved a decimal by accident, marking gas per gallon as 69 cents instead of $6.99.

Several hours passed before anyone fixed the mistake. In the meantime, customers flocked to the station to capitalize on the unintentional deal, costing the establishment $16,000 before the error was corrected.

Szczecina said he was fired because of the error.

"I thought, 'This is a nightmare,'" Szczecina said, according to CBS13. "I put all three prices on there except the diesel, but the last one kind of didn't go, you know, right."

"So I just took responsibility for it and I said, 'Yeah it's my fault, and I'm to blame,'" he added.

The mistake gave customers a chance to fill up their tanks on a gas price not seen in more than four decades. The last time gas cost 69 cents in the US was October 1978, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Gas prices have been squeezing consumers' wallets for months. In California, the average cost per gallon of gas was $6.435 as of Wednesday morning, according to AAA. Nationwide, gas costs $5.014 per gallon on average.

A person claiming to be Szczecina's sister has set up a GoFundMe to help repay the lost revenue, as Szczecina is worried about being sued, CBS13 reports. On Wednesday, it had raised about $5,600.

Szczecina did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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A California gas station manager has been fired after accidentally setting the price to 69 cents per gallon by misplacing the decimal, costing the station $16,000 before the mistake was fixed

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A California gas station manager has been fired for setting gas prices at 69 cents per gallon rather than $6.99 after accidentally misplacing the decimal. Customers flooded the station to take advantage of the mistake, costing the place $16,000 before it was fixed. Gas prices haven't been 69 cents since 1978.

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After a Major Marketing Fail, This Fast-Food Chain Is Finally Launching a New Burger — Eat This Not That

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The launch of the new burger was inspired by a failed marketing campaign involving giant hamburgers, fractions, and confused fans.

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Journal Reports: Leadership

Hair-Care and Skin-Care Products Are Going Dry

May 27, 2022 at 2:00 PM ET

Manufacturers, spurred in part by sustainability concerns, are removing the water in shampoos and lotions, and selling them as powders.

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A High Percentage of Consumers Really Don't Understand Percentages

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Journal Reports: Leadership Hair-Care and Skin-Care Products Are Going Dry May 27, 2022 at 2:00 PM ET Manufacturers, spurred in part by sustainability concerns, are removing the water in shampoos and lotions, and selling them as powders.

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As we watched NASA put a rover on Mars last month, it definitely seemed like the agency had to be using some sort of high-tech processor in its machine. Surely the rover is built on something much more powerful than the components in devices us civilians use, right? But while NASA is technically using a specialized processor to power the Perseverance rover, it's not far removed from the world of consumer electronics-about 23 years ago.

NewScientist reports that the Perseverance rover is powered by a PowerPC 750 processor, which was used in Apple's original 1998 iMac G3-you remember, the iconic, colorful, see-through desktop. If the PowerPC name sounds familiar, it's probably because those are the RISC CPUs Apple used in its computers before switching to Intel. (Although now the company is back on the RISC train with its homegrown M1 processor.)

The PowerPC 750 was a single-core, 233MHz processor, and compared to the multi-core, 5.0GHz-plus frequencies modern consumer chips can achieve, 233MHz is incredibly slow. But the 750 was the first to incorporate dynamic branch prediction, which is still used in modern processors today. Basically, the CPU architecture is making an educated guess on what instructions the CPU is going to process as a way to improve efficiency. The more information that's processed, the better the chip gets at predicting what it needs to do next.

However, there's a major difference between the iMac's CPU and the one inside the Perseverance rover. BAE Systems manufactures the radiation-hardened version of the PowerPC 750, dubbed RAD750, which can withstand 200,000 to 1,000,000 Rads and temperatures between −55 and 125 degrees Celsius (-67 and 257 degrees Fahrenheit). Mars doesn't have the same type of atmosphere as Earth, which protects us from the the sun's rays, so one flash of sunlight and it's all over for the Mars rover before its adventure can begin. Each one costs more than $200,000, so some extra protection is necessary.

"A charged particle that's racing through the galaxy can pass through a device and wreak havoc," James LaRosa at BAE Systems told NewScientist. "It can literally knock electrons loose; it can cause electronic noise and signal spikes within the circuit."

But why use a processor old enough to remember when Eve 6 released its first album? It has nothing to do with cost-those old processors are the best ones for the job because they are reliable. NASA's Orion spacecraft, for instance, used the same RAD750 processor.

"Compared to the [Intel] Core i5 in your laptop, it's much slower...it's probably not any faster than your smartphone," Matt Lemke, NASA's deputy manager for Orion's avionics, told The Space Review back in 2014. "But it's not about the speed as much as the ruggedness and the reliability. I need to make sure it will always work."

Taking that into consideration, it's reasonable that NASA would choose older technology over the new stuff. After all, when you're spending $2.7 billion to land a robot on Mars, it's important that your tech is reliable enough to stand the test of time-down to the tiniest soldered circuits. Currently, the RAD750 powers around 100 satellites orbiting Earth, which includes GPS, imaging, and weather data as well as various military satellites. Not one of those has failed, according to LaRosa.

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A 1990s iMac Processor Powers NASA's Perseverance Rover

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As we watched NASA put a rover on Mars last month, it definitely seemed like the agency had to be using some sort of high-tech processor in its machine. Surely the rover is built on something much more powerful than the components in devices us civilians use, right?

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On February 6, 2018, at 2045 UTC, the first Falcon Heavy was launched into space. It contained a very special payload- a Tesla Roadster with Starman.

But where is this vehicle? The current location is LOADING miles (LOADING km, LOADING AU, LOADING light minutes) from Earth, moving toward Earth at a speed of LOADING mi/h (LOADING km/h, LOADING km/s).

The car is LOADING miles (LOADING km, LOADING AU, LOADING light minutes) from Mars, moving toward the planet at a speed of LOADING mi/h (LOADING km/h, LOADING km/s).

The car is LOADING miles (LOADING km, LOADING AU, LOADING light minutes) from the Sun, moving toward the star at a speed of LOADING mi/h (LOADING km/h, LOADING km/s).

The car has exceeded its 36,000 mile warranty LOADING times while driving around the Sun, (LOADING miles, LOADING km, LOADING AU) moving at a speed of LOADING mi/h (LOADING km/h, LOADING km/s). The orbital period is about 557 days.

It has achieved a fuel economy of LOADING miles per gallon (LOADING km/liter, LOADING liters/100 km), assuming 126,000 gallons of fuel.

If the battery was still working, Starman has listened to Space Oddity LOADING times since he launched in one ear, and to Is there Life On Mars? LOADING times in his other ear.

Starman has completed about LOADING orbits around the Sun since launch.

A telescope about LOADING ft (LOADING m) in diameter would be required to resolve the Upper stage from Earth. A smaller one could see him as an unresolved dot, about LOADING ft (LOADING m) in diameter, in ideal conditions.

The vehicle has traveled far enough to drive all of the world's roads LOADING times.

It has been 0 since launch.

Please note that this site is not in any way affiliated with Tesla, SpaceX, or Elon Musk. I'm just this guy, you know?

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Where is Starman? Track Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster in Space! · Where is Starman?

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On February 6, 2018, at 2045 UTC, the first Falcon Heavy was launched into space. It contained a very special payload- a Tesla Roadster with Starman. But where is this vehicle? The current location is LOADING miles (LOADING km, LOADING AU, LOADING light minutes) from Earth, moving toward Earth at a speed of LOADING mi/h (LOADING km/h, LOADING km/s).

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The U.S. is hanging on the precipice of economic collapse, with around 25 million Americans slated to be kicked off extended coronavirus pandemic uninsurance later this week and the White House mulling as a replacement. But every cloud has an obscene silver lining: world's richest man and Amazon overlord Jeff Bezos is doing great!

According to a Bloomberg estimate, Jeff Bezos saw his estimated net wealth surge by $13 billion to $189.3 billion on Monday. That's the largest single-day increase in the history of the news agency's eight-year-old Billionaires Index. Much of that increase was simply the reversal of a sudden decline in tech company stock last week (Microsoft rose 4.3 percent on Monday, while Tesla rose 9.5 percent). However, Amazon stock is up around 73 percent year to date-fueled by increased online shopping and demand for cloud services, i.e. the pandemic-and Bezos's personal hoard has surged $74.4 billion since the start of 2020. During that same period Amazon's awful treatment of its underpaid, overworked armies of warehouse workers and contractors has largely not changed and in some ways gotten worse, "bonus" payments to staff notwithstanding.

A study released this April by the Institute for Policy Studies found that 34 of the nation's wealthiest 170 billionaires "have seen their wealth increase by tens of millions of dollars" during the pandemic, including Bezos, Tesla/SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Zoom founder Eric Yuan, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and Silicon Valley real estate mogul John Albert Sobrato. The report noted that "the Jeff Bezos wealth surge is unprecedented in modern financial history and varies greatly day by day," with the $25 billion Bezos racked up between Jan. 1 and April 15 far exceeding the GDP of Honduras ($23.9 billion in 2018).

The report also warned that the nation's billionaires will likely emerge from the pandemic as though nothing happened "or even see a major surge," in part because their overall tax burden as a percentage of their wealth plummeted by 79 percent from 1980 to 2018.

(While tech magnates have done well, study co-author Chuck Collins told Gizmodo that the billionaire class is likely to lose money as a whole during the pandemic. He added that it is all but certain they will "bounce back much faster than everyone else-and the equity market as a whole, thanks to the big winners.")

Bloomberg noted that Bezos's former spouse Mackenzie Bezos, who from the Amazon CEO last year amid a labyrinthine dick pic scandal, saw her net wealth rise by around $4.6 billion on Monday. That places her as the 13th richest person in the world and its second richest woman, shortly behind L'Oréal heiress Françoise Bettencourt Meyers. She, unlike her former husband, has signed the Giving Pledge to donate most of her wealth over the course of her life.

Musk has posted similarly depraved gains on skyrocketing Tesla stock this year, with the Bloomberg Billionaire Index showing he is up $46.9 billion to $74.5 billion total year to date. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is up $14.8 billion to $93.1 billion, while Ballmer is up $18 billion to $76.1 billion.

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Jeff Bezos Makes $13 Billion in One Day During Pandemic

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The U.S. is hanging on the precipice of economic collapse, with around 25 million Americans slated to be kicked off extended coronavirus pandemic uninsurance later this week and the White House mulling tax cuts and screw you as a replacement. But every cloud has an obscene silver lining: world's richest man and ghoulish Amazon overlord Jeff Bezos is doing great!

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The Measure Of Things is a search engine for finding comparative or relative measurements of physical quantities.

Want to know how much, how long, how many, how far, how large, how tall, how high, or how heavy something is? Want to figure what weighs 5; 500; or 5,000 tons? The Measure Of Things can tell you what you need to know.

With the Measure Of Things tool, you can take a physical quantity - like 84 kilograms or 23 cubic meters - and see how it compares to a list of famous or well-known objects. For example, 84 kilograms is the weight of about 17 gallons of paint, while 23 cubic meters is about twice the volume of a cement mixer truck.

You can use the Measure Of Things to research equivalent measures for several types of quantities, including weight, length, speed, time, height, area, volume, and computer data.

Did you know?
The size of Monaco is 2,000,000 square meters

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The Measure Of Things is a search engine for finding comparative or relative measurements of physical quantities. Want to know how much, how long, how many, how far, how large, how tall, how high, or how heavy something is? Want to figure what weighs 5; 500; or 5,000 tons?

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Believe it or not, it actually is just a coincidence - and a happy one at that. The Moon and Sun have virtually the same angular size in our sky because the Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon, but it's also about 400 times farther away. This allows us to see spectacular coronal displays and prominences during total solar eclipses. Interestingly, this hasn't always been the case. Tidal interactions cause the Moon to spiral about one inch per year away from Earth. In the distant past, the Moon was close enough to Earth so that it could block the Sun's entire disk and then some. Our prehuman ancestors would not have witnessed the beautiful coronal displays that we now enjoy. And about 50 million years from now, the Moon will be far enough away so that our descendants will only see annular eclipses.

So why do we happen to live in the brief period of Earth's history when the moon just barely blocks the sun? Indeed, the odds against it are enormous. But the universe is a large enough place so that highly improbable coincidences can and do occur. It's important to note, however, that even today some solar eclipses are annular because the Earth and Moon have elliptical orbits. - ROBERT NAEYE, SENIOR EDITOR

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Why is the Moon exactly the same apparent size from Earth as the Sun?

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Believe it or not, it actually is just a coincidence - and a happy one at that. The Moon and Sun have virtually the same angular size in our sky because the Sun is about 400 times wider than the Moon, but it's also about 400 times farther away.

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Most traffic jams are unnecessary, and this deeply irks mathematicians who specialize in traffic flow. They reserve particular vitriol for local transport engineers. "They do not have competencies in the field of system-related increases in traffic performance," says Alexander Krylatov, a mathematics professor at St. Petersburg University. "If engineers manage to achieve local improvements, after a while the flows rearrange and the same traffic jams appear in other places." Burn!

Krylatov would like to solve urban traffic jams forever, so much so that he has coauthored a book of new math approaches to traffic and ways to implement them. (Translation: Engineers, Let Us Handle This.) Four takeaways:

1. All drivers need to be on the same navigation system. Cars can only be efficiently rerouted if instructions come from one center hub. One navigation system rerouting some drivers does not solve traffic jams.

2. Parking bans. Many urban roads are too narrow and cannot be physically widened. Traffic-flow models can indicate where parking spots should be turned into lanes.

3. Green lanes. For cities that want to increase electric car use, special lanes should be created for electric cars, providing an incentive for their use.

4. Digital twins. Traffic demands and available infrastructure can only be balanced with digital modeling that creates an entire "twin" of existing roadways. The software will be "an extremely useful thought tool in the hands of transport engineers."

Traffic modeling is a complex branch of applied mathematics, partially because it assumes that drivers are selfish and pursuing their own goals, rather than any predictable or shared efforts. "Every year a considerable budget is allocated for improving roads. [Our models] suggest a set of solutions for the efficient management of these funds."

And just in case you were wondering, "The mathematical approach in this case is superior to the engineering and economic one."

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Mathematicians have solved traffic jams, and they're begging cities to listen

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Most traffic jams are unnecessary, and this deeply irks mathematicians who specialize in traffic flow. They reserve particular vitriol for local transport engineers. "They do not have competencies in the field of system-related increases in traffic performance," says Alexander Krylatov, a mathematics professor at St. Petersburg University.

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February 29, "leap day", is an oddity on the calendar that occurs every four years in an attempt to sync up the Gregorian calendar (the calendar most of the world uses to keep time) with Earth's rotation around the sun.

One calendar year on Earth is 365 days long; however, the Earth actually takes 365.2422 days to lap the sun. That puts the planet roughly a quarter of a day behind at the end of each year.

To maintain consistency and ensure the seasons line up each year, an extra day was added to the already short month of February - a modification that happens every four years. But even this doesn't fully solve the problem; additional tweaks are needed.

For instance, if a year is divisible by 100, there's no extra day - unless the year is divisible by 400. That means that 1700, 1800 and 1900 did not have a leap day, but 2000 did. This adjustment ensures that Earth is as close as possible to the same point in its orbit in consecutive calendar years and keeps our seasons inline.

Unsurprisingly, Earth is not the only planet that needs leap days. The phenomenon could occur on other planets in our solar system as well as those around other stars. That's because you can't fit an exact number of spins into one trip around the sun for any planet. There's usually going to be something left over. Leap days on other worlds, such as Mars, could be more complicated than those here on Earth.

One year on Mars lasts for approximately 668.6 Martian days. (A Martian day is called a sols and equals 24 hours, 39 minutes, and 35.244 seconds.) Future inhabitants might decide that a year on the red planet will be described as 668 days. How do we adjust?

Over the decades, many different ideas for the Martian calendar have been proposed. The most popular one, called the Darian calendar, was created in 1985 by Tomas Gangale.

According to Gangale, the Martian calendar would feature 24 months, each named for the Latin and Sanskrit words for the constellation of the zodiac, like Sagittarius and Dhanus, and so forth. The first five months in each quarter would have 28 Martian days (or sols), with the sixth having only 27. Even-numbered years would total 668 days and odd-numbered years would have 669. The exception to that rule: even-numbered years that were divisible by 10.

An artist's concept depicts astronauts and human habitats on Mars. Credit: NASA

Another option was proposed by Michael Allison, a retired NASA scientist. In his version, the Martian calendar would have 668-days divided into 22 months, each totaling 30 or 31 days, similar in fashion to Earth. To make sure the seasons lined up, all years divisible by five will have three leap days, bringing the total to 671.

So which of these calendars do scientists use to keep track of time on Mars? Currently, none.

Instead, they use two systems to keep track of time: one counts the number of Martian days since the start of a mission, and the other keeps track of where Mars was in its orbit at that time.

Right now scientists don't care if the seasons line up perfectly with the calendar, but that may change when you add humans into the mix. NASA and other space agencies around the world have their sights set on Mars. Once humans land on the red planet and spend significant time there, we are going to need a common calendar to keep track of seasons.

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Mars could have a Leap Day like Earth but way more complicated

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February 29, "leap day", is an oddity on the calendar that occurs every four years in an attempt to sync up the Gregorian calendar (the calendar most of the world uses to keep time) with Earth's rotation around the sun. One calendar year on Earth is 365 days long; however, the Earth actually takes 365.2422 ...

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Fifteen years ago, the people of Italy experienced a strange kind of mass hysteria known as " 53 fever ".

The madness centred on the country's lottery. Players can choose between 11 different wheels, based in cities such as Bari, Naples or Venice. Once you have picked which wheels to play, you can then bet on a selection of numbers between 1 and 90. Your winnings depend on how much you initially bet, how many numbers you picked and how many you got right.

Sometime in 2003, however, the number 53 simply stopped coming up on the Venice wheel - leading punters to place increasingly big bets on the number in the certainty that it must soon make a reappearance.

By early 2005, 53 fever had apparently led thousands to their financial ruin, the pain of which resulted in a spate of suicides. The hysteria only died away when it finally came up in the 9 February draw, after 182 no-shows and four billion euros worth of bets.

While it may have appeared like a kind of madness, the victims had been led astray by a reasoning flaw called the " gambler's fallacy " - a worryingly common error that can derail many of our professional decisions, from a goalkeeper's responses to penalty shootouts in football to stock market investments and even judicial rulings on new asylum cases.

Research has found that people with higher IQs are more susceptible to the gambler's fallacy, perhaps because they believe they can better predict patterns (Credit: Getty Images)

To find out if you fall for the gambler's fallacy, imagine you are tossing a (fair) coin and you get the following sequence: Heads, Heads, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails, Tails. What's the chance you will now get a heads?

Many people believe the odds change so that the sequence must somehow even out, increasing the chance of a heads on the subsequent goes. Somehow, it just feels inevitable that a heads will come next. But basic probability theory tells us that the events are statistically independent, meaning the odds are exactly the same on each flip. The chance of a heads is still 50% even if you've had 500 or 5,000 tails all in a row.

For the same reason, HTHTTH is just as likely as HHHHHH. Once again, however, many disagree and think that the mixed sequence is somehow more probable than the streak.

As its name suggests, the gambler's fallacy has been of most interest to researchers studying games of chance. Indeed, it is sometimes known as Monte Carlo Fallacy, after a notorious event at one of Monaco's roulette tables in 1913, with 26 blacks in a row. Observational studies - using casino security footage - have confirmed that it continues to influence bets today.

Surprisingly, education and intelligence do not protect us against the bias. Indeed, one study by Chinese and American researchers found that people with higher IQs are actually more susceptible to the gambler's fallacy than people who score less well on standardised tests. It could be that the more intelligent people overthink the patterns and believe that they are smart enough to predict what comes next.

Whatever the reason for these false intuitions, subsequent research has revealed that gambler's fallacy can have serious consequences far beyond the casino. The bias appears to be present in stock market trading, for instance. Many short-term changes in stock price are essentially random fluctuations, and Matthias Pelster at Paderborn University in Germany has shown that investors will base their decisions on the belief that the prices will soon "even out". So, like Italy's lottery players, they trade against a streak. "Investors should, on average, trade equally 'in line' with the streak and against it," he says. "Yet that is not what we can see in the data."

The gambler's fallacy is a particular problem in the very professions that specifically require an even, unbiased judgement.

One team of researchers recently analysed US judges' decisions on whether or not to grant asylum to refugees. Logically speaking, the ordering of the cases should not matter. But in line with the gambler's fallacy, the team found that the judges were up to 5.5% less likely to grant a case if they had granted the two previous cases - a serious decline from the average acceptance rate of 29%. Consciously or not, they seemed to think that the chances of having the same judgement three times in a row was just too small, and so they were more inclined to break the streak.

The researchers next analysed bank staff considering loan applications. Once again, the order of the applications made a difference: the loan officers were up to 8% more likely to reject an application after they had already accepted two or more in a row - and vice versa.

As a final test, the team analysed umpires' decisions in Major League Baseball games. In this case, the umpires were about 1.5% less likely to call a pitch a strike if the previous pitch was also called a strike - a small but significant bias that could make all the difference in a game. Kelly Shue, one the co-authors of the study, says that she was initially surprised at the results. "Because these are professionals and they're making decisions as part of their primary occupation," she says. But they were still vulnerable to the bias.

Umpires in Major League Baseball were found to be 1.5% less likely to call a pitch a strike if the previous pitch was also a strike (Credit: Getty Images)

Football players might pay particular attention to the gambler's fallacy. In a penalty shootout, it takes between 0.2 and 0.3 seconds for the ball to hit the goal. "The goalkeeper must [therefore] decide whether to jump to one of the sides or to stay in the goal's centre more or less at the same time that the kicker chooses how to kick," Simcha Avugos at Ben-Gurion University in Israel explains. This means that the decision of where to dive is essentially a gamble.

Would they, like the judges, loan officers and baseball umpires, "bet" against a streak? Avugos's team recently analysed shootouts at events such as the FIFA World Cup and the UK's Champions League - and that is indeed what they found. Given these results, the team argue that footballers could exploit this tendency by continuing to shoot in the same direction during a penalty shootout.

Most jobs may feel a world away from these high-stakes situations, but Shue believes that the gambler's fallacy will be prevalent in many other careers - even when we don't realise we're making unconscious probabilistic judgements. She gives the example of employee recruitment. If the interviewers have already seen one good candidate, they might not expect another exceptional individual. "And then I'd be more likely to give a harsh rating to the next person." The same goes for teachers grading essays, she says. Similarly, if you were a publisher considering new novels, you might reject the next JK Rowling based solely on the fact that you have recently commissioned a couple of other stellar manuscripts.

Whatever your profession, you'd do well to remember Italy's "53 fever" and the chaos that ensued. Occasional streaks can and do occur in any kind of sequence - and we'd all be more rational if we accepted that our intuition about chance is often wildly off the mark.
David Robson is the author of The Intelligence Trap: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things, which examines our most common thinking errors and the ways to correct them.

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The simple maths error that can lead to bankruptcy

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Fifteen years ago, the people of Italy experienced a strange kind of mass hysteria known as " 53 fever ". The madness centred on the country's lottery. Players can choose between 11 different wheels, based in cities such as Bari, Naples or Venice.

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On January 24, 1984, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first Macintosh at Apple's annual shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, California, debuting the new computer equipped with a 9-inch black and white display, an 8MHz Motorola 68000 processor, 128KB of RAM, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a price tag of $2,495.

The now iconic machine weighed in at a whopping 17 pounds and was advertised as offering a word processing program, a graphics package, and a mouse. At the time it was introduced, the Macintosh was seen as Apple's last chance to overcome IBM's domination of the personal computer market and remain a major player in the personal computer industry.

A Computerland newspaper ad from the day the Macintosh was introduced

Jobs pulled the Macintosh out of a bag at the event, powered it on, and the Mac had a little message for everyone in attendance.

Hello, I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: NEVER TRUST A COMPUTER YOU CAN'T LIFT!

Obviously, I can talk, but right now I'd like to sit back and listen. So, it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who's been like a father to me... STEVE JOBS.

Despite the high price at the time, which was equivalent to around $6,000 today, the Macintosh sold well, with Apple hitting 70,000 units sold by May 1984. The now iconic "1984" Super Bowl ad that Apple invested in and debuted days before the Macintosh was unveiled may have helped bolster sales.

After the Macintosh, Apple introduced the Macintosh II, the Macintosh Classic, the PowerBook, the Power Macintosh, the iMac G3, the iBook, and so on, eventually leading to the current Mac lineup, which includes the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, ‌iMac‌, iMac Pro, Mac mini, and Mac Pro.

Today, Apple is one of the leading PC vendors in the world, shipping an estimated 18 million Macs worldwide in 2019. Then Apple competitor IBM is no longer in the personal computer business, having sold its technology to Lenovo back in the early 2000s.

Apple in the future is expected to continue expanding its popular Mac lineup, and current rumors suggest we can expect to see new 16-inch ‌MacBook Pro‌ models, a refreshed 13-inch machine with scissor keyboard, and, eventually, an ARM-based Mac.

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36 Years Ago Today, Steve Jobs Unveiled the First Macintosh

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On January 24, 1984, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the first Macintosh at Apple's annual shareholder's meeting in Cupertino, California, debuting the new computer equipped with a 9-inch black and white display, an 8MHz Motorola 68000 processor, 128KB of RAM, a 3.5-inch floppy drive, and a price tag of $2,495.

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This past weekend, lakeside residents of Hamburg, New York, awoke to find their neighborhood transformed into a full-scale replica of Frozen 's ice-covered kingdom, Arendelle.

According to CNN, gale force winds produced giant waves that sprayed the houses along Lake Erie with sheets of water for two days straight, covering them in layers of ice up to three feet thick.

"It looks fake, it looks surreal," Hamburg resident Ed Mis told CNN. "It's dark on the inside of my house. It can be a little eerie, a little frightening."

While the homeowners are anxious for the ice to melt, they're also concerned about what could happen when it does.

"We're worried about the integrity, of structure failure when it starts to melt, because of the weight on the roof," Mis said.

He added that this is the worst ice coating he's seen since he moved to the area eight years ago-but it's not because they've had a particularly harsh winter. In fact, just the opposite is true. According to The Detroit News, warm winter temperatures have caused ice cover on the Great Lakes to drop from 67 percent in 2019 to less than 20 percent this year.

"Lake Erie typically has significant ice cover by this time of the year, and that protects the shoreline from these battering storms," The Weather Channel's winter weather expert Tom Niziol explained in a video.

The phenomenon has created another unforeseen issue for Hamburg's coast, too: Tourism. The local police department posted a message on Facebook on Sunday, March 1, asking people to keep off both the "extremely unsafe and unstable" ice and people's private property.

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What's the Difference Between "Mostly Sunny" and "Partly Cloudy"?

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This past weekend, lakeside residents of Hamburg, New York, awoke to find their neighborhood transformed into a full-scale replica of Frozen 's ice-covered kingdom, Arendelle. According to CNN, gale force winds produced giant waves that sprayed the houses along Lake Erie with sheets of water for two days straight, covering them in layers of ice up to three feet thick.

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NASA research mathematician Katherine Johnson is photographed at her desk at NASA Langley Research Center with a globe, or "Celestial Training Device," in 1962. (NASA)

When Katherine Johnson began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1953, she was classified as "subprofessional," not far outranking a secretary or janitor.

Hers was a labor not of scheduling or cleaning but rather of mathematics: using a slide rule or mechanical calculator in complex calculations to check the work of her superiors - engineers who, unlike her, were white and male.

Her title, poached by the technology that would soon make the services of many of her colleagues obsolete, was "computer."

Mrs. Johnson, 101, went on to develop equations that helped the NACA and its successor, NASA,send astronauts into orbit and, later, to the moon. In 26 signed reports for the space agency, and in many morepapers that bore others' signatures on her work, she codified mathematical principles that remain at the core of manned space travel.

She was not the first black woman to work as a NASA mathematician, nor the first to write a research report for the agency, but Mrs. Johnson was eventually recognized as a pathbreaker for women and African Americans in the newly created field of spaceflight.

Like most backstage members of the space program, Mrs. Johnson was overshadowed in the popular imagination by the life-risking astronauts whose flights she calculated, and to a lesser extent by the department heads under whom she served.

She did not command mainstream attention until President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom - the country's highest civilian honor - in 2015. The next year, her research was celebrated in the best-selling book "Hidden Figures" by Margot Lee Shetterly and the Oscar-nominated film adaptation starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monáe.

Mrs. Johnson was "critical to the success of the early U.S. space programs," Bill Barry, NASA's chief historian, said in a 2017 interview for this obituary. "She had a singular intellect, curiosity and skill set in mathematics that allowed her to make many contributions, each of which might be considered worthy of a single lifetime."

A math prodigy from West Virginia who said she "counted everything" as a child - "the steps to the road, the steps up to church, the number of dishes and silverware I washed" - Mrs. Johnson worked as a schoolteacher before becoming a computer at the NACA's flight research division, based at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va.

The agency was established in 1915 and began hiring white women to work as computers 20 years later. Black computers, assigned mainly to segregated facilities, were first hired during the labor shortage of World War II. Mrs. Johnson was one of about 100 computers, roughly one-third of whom were black, when she joined the NACA.

The movie "Hidden Figures" took occasional liberties with fact to emphasize the indignities of segregation. Mrs. Johnson, played by Henson, is forced to run half a mile to reach the "colored" bathroom. In reality, Mrs. Johnson said, she used the bathroom closest to her desk.

"I did not feel much discrimination, but then that's me," she recalled in a 1992 NASA oral history. When she detected hints of racism, such as when a white colleague stood up to leave as soon as she sat down, she said, she tried not to respond. "I don't wear my feelings on my shoulder. So I got along fine."

Mrs. Johnson, who had a bachelor's degree in mathematics, spent her early career studying data from plane crashes to help devise air safety standards, at a time when the agency's central concern was aviation. Then, in October 1957, the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik thrust the space race into full tilt.

Mrs. Johnson and dozens of colleagues wrote a 600-page technical report titled "Notes on Space Technology" outlining the mathematical underpinnings of spaceflight, from rocket propulsion to orbital mechanics and heat protection.

One of rocket science's most vexing challenges, they soon realized, was calculating flight trajectories to ensure that astronauts returned safely to Earth, splashing down in the ocean reasonably close to a Navy vessel waiting to pluck them from the water.

For astronauts such as Alan B. Shepard Jr., who became the first American in space when Freedom 7 launched on May 5, 1961, the math was relatively straightforward. Shepard's craft rose and fell, like a champagne cork, without entering orbit.

Calculating the trajectory for an orbital flight, such as the one to be undertaken by Marine pilot John Glenn in 1962, was "orders of magnitude more complicated," Shetterly, the "Hidden Figures" author, said in 2017.

"I said, 'Let me do it,' " Mrs. Johnson recalled in a 2008 NASA interview. "You tell me when you want it and where you want it to land, and I'll do it backwards and tell you when to take off."

Mrs. Johnson's findings, outlined in a 1960 paper she wrote with engineer Ted Skopinski, enabled engineers to determine exactly when to launch a spacecraft and when to begin its reentry. The paper, "Determination of Azimuth Angle at Burnout for Placing a Satellite Over a Selected Earth Position," marked the first time a woman wrote a technical report in NASA's elite flight research division.

"You could work your teeth out, but you didn't get your name on the report," she said in the 1992 oral history, crediting her breakthrough to what she described as an assertive personality. When a superior said that she could not accompany male colleagues to a briefing related to her work, Mrs. Johnson asked, "Is there a law that says I can't go?" Her boss relented.

Mrs. Johnson's handwritten calculations were said to have been more trusted than those performed by microprocessors. A short time before Glenn launched into space, he asked engineers to "get the girl to check the numbers."

"All the women were called 'the girls,' " said Barry, "and everyone knew exactly which girl he was talking about." Mrs. Johnson, who was then 43, spent a day and a half checking the trajectory calculations made by the IBM computer before giving the go-ahead to Glenn, who became the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth.

In a subsequent report, Mrs. Johnson took her calculations one step further, working with several colleagues to determine how a spacecraft could move in and out of a planetary body's orbit. Her formulas were crucial to the success of the Apollo lunar program and are still in use today, Barry said. "If we go back to the moon, or to Mars, we'll be using her math."

Modest beginnings

Katherine Coleman was born in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., then a town of about 800, on Aug. 26, 1918. Her mother was a former teacher. She credited her proclivity for mathematics to her father, a farmer who had worked in the lumber industry and could quickly calculate the number of boards a tree could produce.

By 10, Katherine had finished all the coursework offered ather town's two-room schoolhouse. Joined by her mother and her three older siblings, she moved to Institute, a suburb of the state capital, to attend the laboratory school of West Virginia State College while her father remained at home to support the family.

Mrs. Johnson went on to study at West Virginia State, a historically black college, with plans to major in French and English and become a teacher. A mathematics professor - W.W. Schiefflin Claytor, widely reported to be the third African American to receive a doctorate in math - persuaded her to change fields.

Mrs. Johnson later recalled his saying: "You'd make a good research mathematician, and I'm going to see that you're prepared." She had never heard of the position before. "I said, 'Where will I get a job?' And he said, 'That will be your problem.' "

After graduating in 1937, at 18, she taught at a segregated elementary school in Marion, Va., a town near the North Carolina border.

Three years later, she was one of three black students selected to integrate West Virginia University's graduate programs. She dropped out of her master's in mathematics program after one semester to start a family with her husband, James Goble, a chemistry teacher. She later returned to teaching, in West Virginia, before a brother-in-law suggested she apply for a computer position at Langley.

Goble died of cancer in 1956. Mrs. Johnson married James Johnson, an Army artillery officer, three years later. Complete information on surivivors was not immediately available.

Mrs. Johnson was invited to move to Houston in the mid-1960s to help establish what is now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, but she declined the offer to maintain her family's ties to the Hampton community, Shetterly said.

At Langley, where she retired in 1986, she performed calculations that determined the precise moment at which the Apollo lunar landercould leave the moon's surface to return to the command module, which remained in orbit high above. She also contributed to NASA's space shuttle and Earth satellite programs.

After the release of "Hidden Figures," Mrs. Johnson played down the importance of her role in the early years of the space program. "There's nothing to it - I was just doing my job," she told The Washington Post in 2017.

"They needed information, and I had it, and it didn't matter that I found it," she added. "At the time, it was just a question and an answer."

Read more Washington Post obituaries

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Katherine Johnson, 'hidden figure' at NASA during 1960s space race, dies at 101

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When Katherine Johnson began working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1953, she was classified as "subprofessional," not far outranking a secretary or janitor. Hers was a labor not of scheduling or cleaning but rather of mathematics: using a slide rule or mechanical calculator in complex calculations to check the work of her superiors - engineers who, unlike her, were white and male.

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A London (CNN) - British Airways (BA) flight has broken the record for the fastest-ever subsonic flight between New York and London, reaching a top speed of more than 800mph (1,287km/h).

The Boeing 747 aircraft flew overnight from Saturday to Sunday and reached its destination in four hours and 56 minutes, as Storm Ciara sped towards the United Kingdom.

The plane landed at Heathrow airport at 4.43 a.m., almost two hours earlier than scheduled. Its top speed during the flight was 825mph (1,327km/h), according to Flightradar24, an online flight-tracking service.

The flight-tracking platform estimates that the average time it takes a plane to fly between London and New York is six hours and 13 minutes.

Flightradar24 announced the news of the record-breaking flight on its Twitter account, writing: "If we're not mistaken, BA now retakes the fastest subsonic NY-London crossing from Norwegian."

The service added that the British Airways flight was one minute faster than a Virgin Airbus A350 flight, which touched down at Heathrow moments later. It beat another Virgin plane which landed half an hour later by three minutes.

All three flights comfortably beat the previous record of five hours and 13 minutes, held by Norwegian since January 2018.

A spokesperson for BA said: "We always prioritise safety over speed records, but our highly trained pilots made the most of the conditions to get customers back to London well ahead of time."

Storm Ciara made landfall in the United Kingdom over the weekend and has caused severe travel disruptions.

A company spokesperson told CNN that BA, like all other airlines operating flights into and out of the UK, was being affected by Storm Ciara -- and had canceled some of its flights and merged others.

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british airways flight smashes record for quickest journey from new york to london  - cnn

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British Airways smashes record for quickest subsonic flight from New York to London

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A London (CNN) - British Airways (BA) flight has broken the record for the fastest-ever subsonic flight between New York and London, reaching a top speed of more than 800mph (1,287km/h). The Boeing 747 aircraft flew overnight from Saturday to Sunday and reached its destination in four hours and 56 minutes, as Storm Ciara sped towards the United Kingdom.

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Today is a very special occasion - the date is a palindrome, meaning it is the same when read forwards and backwards.

It is February 2, 2020, or 02/02/2020, in both the MM/DD/YYYY format and the DD/MM/YYYY format. At just after 2 a.m., it was 02:02:20 on 02/02/2020.

This is the only time such a date will occur this century.

The previous palindrome date in all formats came 909 years ago on 11/11/1111. The next will come in 101 years on 12/12/2121 and after that there will not be another until 03/03/3030. Solihull School Maths Department wrote on Twitter: "Today is a Palindrome Day in all date formats (UK, USA, ISO). It's also a palindrome day of the year (33) and there are a palindrome number of days left in the year (333). Quite a unique day!"

Today is a Palindrome Day in all date formats (UK, USA, ISO). It's also a palindrome day of the year (33) and there are a palindrome number of days left in the year (333). Quite a unique day! #PalindromeDay #SolSchMaths pic.twitter.com/uKikl1iTXf

- Solihull School Maths Dept (@SolSchMaths) February 2, 2020

The Royal Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas was advertising weddings on the " significant " date, pointing out that your two-year anniversary would fall on 2/2/22. "Two being the ultimate symbolic number representing you and your spouse to be."

It's also Super Bowl Sunday and Groundhog Day.

November 11, 2011 caused a major stir, when the clock struck 11:11:11 on 11/11/11. It was the only double-figure palindromic date and will not come round again for 100 years, in 2111.

However, it is not as perfect as 02/02/2020, because using the full year, 2011, ruins the symmetry.

Las Vegas chapels were bursting at the seams with couples wanting to tie the knot on 11/11/11, with "queen of nightlife" Tiffany Masters holding what she billed as the world's largest reception.

Verizon Wireless launched its Droid Razr at 11:11 on 11/11/11 and there was even a movie "11-11-11," about an American author plagued by strange happenings and constant sightings of the number 11.

Human brains are naturally inclined to look for patterns, and many consider such dates lucky. Daniel Hardt, president of Life Path Numerology Center in Indianapolis, called it a "powerful day."

In September, there was a week of palindrome dates using the US format, if you removed the 20- in the year. There was 9/10/19, 9/11/19 and so on, through to 9/19/19. But of course, these only worked with the US format of MM/DD/YYY.

There had been one of these every year since 2011, but that was the last of the century.

A palindrome is any word, phrase or sequence of numbers that reads the same whether you read it forward or backward, such as "mom," "race car" or "tacocat." Author James Joyce invented "tattarrattat," which is supposed to be the sound of a knock on the door and the longest single-word palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Famous palindromes include "rats live on no evil star," "never odd or even" and "a man, a plan, a canal, Panama." The phrase "A Toyota's a Toyota" can continue as a palindrome forever, as in, "A Toyota's a Toyota's a Toyota..."

Palindrome comes from the Greek words "palin," which means "again, back" and "dromos," meaning "running," according to Dictionary.com. So palindrome is a word or phrase that runs back on itself.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2020 Cable News Network, Inc., a WarnerMedia Company. All rights reserved.

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Today is the first global palindrome day in 909 years

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Today is a very special occasion - the date is a palindrome, meaning it is the same when read forwards and backwards. It is February 2, 2020, or 02/02/2020, in both the MM/DD/YYYY format and the DD/MM/YYYY format. At just after 2 a.m., it was 02:02:20 on 02/02/2020.

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Apple's shares jumped 2 percent today in after-market trading, following the company's best reported quarter ever in terms of revenue and profit.

The tech giant's market capitalization has now grown to over $1.4 trillion, further cementing its place as the world's most valuable tech company. Only the Saudi Aramco oil company is worth more.

AAPL is currently hovering around $312 in pre-market trading. As The Guardian points out, Apple's valuation is now more than Germany's 30 largest listed companies that make up the DAX index on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.

The DAX is worth a combined $1.36 trillion, including business software giant SAP ($162 billion), chemical company Linde ($111 billion), engineering and industrial conglomerate Siemens ($108 billion), and insurance group Allianz ($100 billion).

The figures are a response to Apple's glowing financial results last night which saw the company post revenue of $91.8 billion and net quarterly profit of $22.2 billion, or $4.99 per diluted share, compared to revenue of $84.3 billion and net quarterly profit of $20.0 billion, or $4.18 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. The quarter was the best in Apple's history, topping the first fiscal quarter of 2018.

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Apple Now Worth More Than Germany's Entire DAX Stock Index

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Apple's shares jumped 2 percent today in after-market trading, following the company's best reported quarter ever in terms of revenue and profit. The tech giant's market capitalization has now grown to over $1.4 trillion, further cementing its place as the world's most valuable tech company. Only the Saudi Aramco oil company is worth more.

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Princeton scientists demonstrate that two silicon quantum bits can communicate across relatively long distances in a turning point for the technology.
Imagine a world where people could only talk to their next-door neighbor, and messages must be passed house to house to reach far destinations.

Until now, this has been the situation for the bits of hardware that make up a silicon quantum computer, a type of quantum computer with the potential to be cheaper and more versatile than today's versions.

Now a team based at Princeton University has overcome this limitation and demonstrated that two quantum-computing components, known as silicon "spin" qubits, can interact even when spaced relatively far apart on a computer chip. The study was published today (December 25, 2019) in the journal Nature.

"The ability to transmit messages across this distance on a silicon chip unlocks new capabilities for our quantum hardware," said Jason Petta, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics at Princeton and leader of the study. "The eventual goal is to have multiple quantum bits arranged in a two-dimensional grid that can perform even more complex calculations. The study should help in the long term to improve communication of qubits on a chip as well as from one chip to another."

Quantum computers have the potential to tackle challenges beyond the capabilities of everyday computers, such as factoring large numbers. A quantum bit, or qubit, can process far more information than an everyday computer bit because, whereas each classical computer bit can have a value of 0 or 1, a quantum bit can represent a range of values between 0 and 1 simultaneously.

To realize quantum computing's promise, these futuristic computers will require tens of thousands of qubits that can communicate with each other. Today's prototype quantum computers from Google, IBM and other companies contain tens of qubits made from a technology involving superconducting circuits, but many technologists view silicon-based qubits as more promising in the long run.

Silicon spin qubits have several advantages over superconducting qubits. The silicon spin qubits retain their quantum state longer than competing qubit technologies. The widespread use of silicon for everyday computers means that silicon-based qubits could be manufactured at low cost.

The challenge stems in part from the fact that silicon spin qubits are made from single electrons and are extremely small.

"The wiring or 'interconnects' between multiple qubits is the biggest challenge towards a large scale quantum computer," said James Clarke, director of quantum hardware at Intel, whose team is building silicon qubits using using Intel's advanced manufacturing line, and who was not involved in the study. "Jason Petta's team has done great work toward proving that spin qubits can be coupled at long distances."

To accomplish this, the Princeton team connected the qubits via a "wire" that carries light in a manner analogous to the fiber optic wires that deliver internet signals to homes. In this case, however, the wire is actually a narrow cavity containing a single particle of light, or photon, that picks up the message from one qubit and transmits it to the next qubit.

The two qubits were located about half a centimeter, or about the length of a grain of rice, apart. To put that in perspective, if each qubit were the size of a house, the qubit would be able to send a message to another qubit located 750 miles away.

The key step forward was finding a way to get the qubits and the photon to speak the same language by tuning all three to vibrate at the same frequency. The team succeeded in tuning both qubits independently of each other while still coupling them to the photon. Previously the device's architecture permitted coupling of only one qubit to the photon at a time.

"You have to balance the qubit energies on both sides of the chip with the photon energy to make all three elements talk to each other," said Felix Borjans, a graduate student and first author on the study. "This was the really challenging part of the work."

Each qubit is composed of a single electron trapped in a tiny chamber called a double quantum dot. Electrons possess a property known as spin, which can point up or down in a manner analogous to a compass needle that points north or south. By zapping the electron with a microwave field, the researchers can flip the spin up or down to assign the qubit a quantum state of 1 or 0.

"This is the first demonstration of entangling electron spins in silicon separated by distances much larger than the devices housing those spins," said Thaddeus Ladd, senior scientist at HRL Laboratories and a collaborator on the project. "Not too long ago, there was doubt as to whether this was possible, due to the conflicting requirements of coupling spins to microwaves and avoiding the effects of noisy charges moving in silicon-based devices. This is an important proof-of-possibility for silicon qubits because it adds substantial flexibility in how to wire those qubits and how to lay them out geometrically in future silicon-based 'quantum microchips.'"

The communication between two distant silicon-based qubits devices builds on previous work by the Petta research team. In a 2010 paper in the journal Science, the team showed it is possible to trap single electrons in quantum wells. In the journal Nature in 2012, the team reported the transfer of quantum information from electron spins in nanowires to microwave-frequency photons, and in 2016 in Science they demonstrated the ability to transmit information from a silicon-based charge qubit to a photon. They demonstrated nearest-neighbor trading of information in qubits in 2017 in Science. And the team showed in 2018 in Nature that a silicon spin qubit could exchange information with a photon.

Jelena Vuckovic, professor of electrical engineering and the Jensen Huang Professor in Global Leadership at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study, commented: "Demonstration of long-range interactions between qubits is crucial for further development of quantum technologies such as modular quantum computers and quantum networks. This exciting result from Jason Petta's team is an important milestone towards this goal, as it demonstrates non-local interaction between two electron spins separated by more than 4 millimeters, mediated by a microwave photon. Moreover, to build this quantum circuit, the team employed silicon and germanium - materials heavily used in the semiconductor industry."

###

Reference: "Resonant microwave-mediated interactions between distant electron spins" by F. Borjans, X. G. Croot, X. Mi, M. J. Gullans and J. R. Petta, 25 December 2019, Nature.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1867-y

In addition to Borjans and Petta, the following contributed to the study: Xanthe Croot, a Dicke postdoctoral fellow; associate research scholar Michael Gullans; and Xiao Mi, who earned his Ph.D. at Princeton in Petta's group and is now a research scientist at Google.

The study was funded by Army Research Office (grant W911NF-15-1-0149) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's EPiQS Initiative (grant GBMF4535).

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Quantum Computing Breakthrough: Silicon Qubits Interact at Long-Distance

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Princeton scientists demonstrate that two silicon quantum bits can communicate across relatively long distances in a turning point for the technology. Imagine a world where people could only talk to their next-door neighbor, and messages must be passed house to house to reach far destinations.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- With Atlantis fueled and waiting for its final launch into space, The Huntsville Times thought it would be a good time to share some fun space shuttle facts with you to fill the time before countdown begins:
An Xbox 360 has far more power than the flight computer
The flight computer aboard the space shuttle has less than one percent of the power of an Xbox 360 game console. Astronauts load programs directing the phases of a mission - liftoff, orbit, landing - into the computer one at a time after removing the program for the previous segment. Why hasn't NASA upgraded the computer? The agency values its 30-year history of reliability. That said, astronauts don't go into space with only one computer. Crew laptops and other laptops also make the trip.
The orbiter vs. a Boeing 747
The orbiter is 122 feet long and 78 feet wide (wingspan) and it weighs 200,000 pounds. A Boeing 747, by comparison, is 231 feet long.
State-of-the-art materials make up the orbiter
The orbiters' flight computers may be primitive by today's standards, but its forward wing edge is composed of layers of state-of-the-art composite materials. That edge takes the maximum heat on re-entry. The oribters' "glass cockpits" are another example of cutting edge equipment. NASA installed them to replace 32 gauges, four cathode-ray tubes and a variety of electro-mechanical devices with 11 full-color electronic screens displaying critical flight information. The work NASA did to certify the cockpits led to FAA certification of glass cockpits for commercial airplanes.
Thank 'Star Trek' for the first shuttle's name
The space shuttle has a "Star Trek" connection. Fans of the original TV show flooded NASA in the 1970s with letters urging the first orbiter be named for the spaceship in the show, and the White House responded by changing its planned name to Enterprise. The Enterprise, however, never had an engine and never flew in space. It was used for tests to prove the craft could fly through the atmosphere and land. What was the name originally planned for the Enterprise? Constitution.

Will you be watching the launch? Upload your photos and videos at photos.al.com and videos.al.com.

Facebook: The Huntsville Times

Streaming video: Watch the shuttle launch live on al.com at 10:26 a.m. CDT, courtesy of WHNT Channel 19.
About the image: This commemorative patch, designed by Johnson Space Center engineer Blake Dumesnil, was painted on Atlantis's external tank earlier this year. Read more about the patch. 2.5 million parts make up orbiter
The most complex machine ever built, the orbiter has more than 2.5 million parts, including almost 230 miles of wire, more than 1,060 plumbing valves and connections, more than 1,440 circuit breakers, and more than 27,000 insulating tiles and thermal blankets.
Faster than a speeding bullet
In the eight minutes after launch, the shuttle accelerates from zero to about nine times as fast as a rifle bullet, or 17,400 miles per hour, to attain Earth orbit.
4.5 million pounds of shuttle
The space shuttle "stack," including the orbiter, solid rocket boosters and external tank, weighs more than 4.5 million pounds at launch. It has 3.5 million pounds of propellants that will be entirely consumed in liftoff.
Gas sucker
If the orbiter's main engines pumped water instead of fuel, they would drain an average-sized swimming pool every 25 seconds. Because liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen fuel the main engines, the majority of exhaust produced is water vapor.
Sparklers aren't for show
Hydrogen is the reason videos of shuttle launches always include a burst of sparklers around the base of the pad seconds before liftoff. The idea is to burn up any liquid hydrogen that might have leaked during fueling.
Solid rockets generate 14,700 locomotives worth of power
The shuttle's two solid rockets generate 44 million horsepower, equal to 14,700 locomotives. They produce power equivalent to 13 times that produced by the Hoover Dam.
Not your average kitchen aluminum
The shuttle's solid rockets burn powdered aluminum as fuel - a different form of the same type of material that is used as a foil wrap in most kitchens.
Extreme cold to extreme heat
The temperatures inside the shuttle's main engines and solid rockets reach more than 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit, higher than the boiling point of iron, yet the main engine's fuel, liquid hydrogen, is the second coldest liquid on Earth at minus 423 degrees Fahrenheit. Temperatures experienced by the shuttle range from as low as minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit in space to as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it re-enters the atmosphere.
Night launches rare
The space shuttle launched at night for 34 of its 135 total flights, counting the scheduled last launch on July 8.
Michelin-tough tires help shuttle land
The orbiter lands on special Michelin tires not much larger than truck tires. Like most aviation tires, the shuttle's tires are filled with nitrogen to a pressure of 340 psi. Michelin says "a main landing gear tire can carry three times the load of a Boeing 747 tire or the entire starting line-up of a NASCAR race - 40 race cars - all hitting the pavement at up to 250 miles per hour."

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Space Shuttle fast facts: Xbox 360 has more power than flight computer, orbiter has 2.5 million parts

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida -- With Atlantis fueled and waiting for its final launch into space, The Huntsville Times thought it would be a good time to share some fun space shuttle facts with you to fill the time before countdown begins: An Xbox 360 has far more power than the flight computer The flight computer aboard the space shuttle has less than one percent of the power of an Xbox 360 game console.

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The only thing worse than failing is knowing that you knew what you needed to do to succeed but you just couldn't be bothered to do it.

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The only thing worse than failing is knowing that you knew what you needed to do to succeed but you just couldn't be bothered to do it.

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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Monday said sales for its annual Singles' Day shopping blitz hit 158.31 billion yuan ($22.63 billion) in its first nine hours, up 25% from 126.72 billion yuan at the same point last year.

Akin to Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the United States, Singles' Day has been promoted as a shopping fest by Alibaba Chairman and Chief Executive Daniel Zhang since 2009, growing rapidly to become the world's biggest online sales event.

Also known as "Double Eleven", the festival's name originates from the calendar date Nov. 11, with the four ones of 11/11 signifying being single.

For an interactive graphic on the event, click here tmsnrt.rs/2WTFm7V.

Alibaba netted sales worth $30 billion on its platforms on Singles' Day last year, dwarfing the $7.9 billion U.S. online sales for Cyber Monday. Yet the 27% sales growth was the lowest in the event's 10-year history, spurring a search for fresh ideas.

Citic Securities, in a Nov. 9 research note, forecast Singles Day sales to grow 20-25% this year, held back partly by slowing overall e-commerce growth in China.

The Chinese retail juggernaut, with a market value of $486 billion, kicked off this year's 24-hour shopping fest with performances by American pop star Taylor Swift and local celebrities such as Jackson Yee.

Sales hit $1 billion in the first minute and eight seconds and reached 84 billion yuan in the first hour, up 22% from last year's early haul of 69 billion yuan.

Singles' Day was among the top trending topics on China's Twitter-like Weibo microblogging platform on Monday morning, with users discussing what they spent their money on.

Alibaba has said it expects over 500 million users to participate in the shopping festival this year, about 100 million more than last year.

This is the first time Alibaba's Singles' Day does not have flamboyant co-founder Jack Ma at its helm, after he resigned in September as chairman to "start a new life".

It also comes at a crucial time for the company, which is looking to raise up to $15 billion via a share sale in Hong Kong this month.

Alibaba continues to dominate the online shopping industry, but not without competition.

In addition to longtime rival JD.com, it also faces competition from Pinduoduo, which surged in popularity in 2017 by targeting consumers in China's lower-tier cities.
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that first-hours sales were 84 billion yuan ($12 billion), an increase of 22% year over year, in line with a correction issued by Reuters.

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Alibaba Singles Day sales hit $23 billion in first nine hours

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Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba on Monday said sales for its annual Singles' Day shopping blitz hit 158.31 billion yuan ($22.63 billion) in its first nine hours, up 25% from 126.72 billion yuan at the same point last year.

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University of Rochester researchers, inspired by diving bell spiders and rafts of fire ants, have created a metallic structure that is so water repellent, it refuses to sink-no matter how often it is forced into water or how much it is damaged or punctured.

Could this lead to an unsinkable ship? A wearable flotation device that will still float after being punctured? Electronic monitoring devices that can survive in long term in the ocean?

All of the above, says Chunlei Guo, professor of optics and physics, whose lab describes the structure in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

The structure uses a groundbreaking technique the lab developed for using femtosecond bursts of lasers to "etch" the surfaces of metals with intricate micro- and nanoscale patterns that trap air and make the surfaces superhydrophobic, or water repellent.

The researchers found, however, that after being immersed in water for long periods of time, the surfaces may start to lose their hydrophobic properties.

Enter the spiders and fire ants, which can survive long periods under or on the surface of water. How? By trapping air in an enclosed area. Argyroneta aquatic spiders, for example, create an underwater dome-shaped web-a so-called diving bell- that they fill with air carried from the surface between their super-hydrophobic legs and abdomens. Similarly, fire ants can form a raft by trapping air among their superhydrophobic bodies.

"That was a very interesting inspiration," Guo says. As the researchers note in the paper: "The key insight is that multifaceted superhydrophobic (SH) surfaces can trap a large air volume, which points towards the possibility of using SH surfaces to create buoyant devices."

Guo's lab created a structure in which the treated surfaces on two parallel aluminum plates face inward, not outward, so they are enclosed and free from external wear and abrasion. The surfaces are separated by just the right distance to trap and hold enough air to keep the structure floating-in essence creating a waterproof compartment. The superhydrophobic surfaces will keep water from entering the compartment even when the structure is forced to submerge in water.

Even after being forced to submerge for two months, the structures immediately bounced back to the surface after the load was released, Guo says. The structures also retained this ability even after being punctured multiple times, because air remains trapped in remaining parts of the compartment or adjoining structures.

Though the team used aluminum for this project, the "etching process "could be used for literally any metals, or other materials," Guo says.

When the Guo lab first demonstrated the etching technique, it took an hour to pattern a one-inch-by-one-inch area of surface. Now, by using lasers seven times as powerful, and faster scanning, the lab has speeded up the process, making it more feasible for scaling up for commercial applications.

Coauthors include lead author Zhibing Zhan, Mohamed ElKabbash, Jihua Zhang, and Subhash Singh, all PhD candidates or postdoctoral fellows in Guo's lab, and Jinluo Cheng, associate professor at the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics, and Physics in China.

The project was supported by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the US Army Research Office, and National Science Foundation.

Superhydrophobic metallic structure floats on the water surface in the Guo lab.

Superhydrophobic metallic structure is weighed down to keep it submerged in water in the Guo lab. Even after two months, it will bounce back to the surface.

Experimental setup used to determine just the right distance between the treated plates to trap and hold enough air to keep the structure floating.

The superhydrophobic structure remains afloat even after significant structural damage-punctured with six 3-millimeter diameter holes and one 6-millimeter hole.

Tags: Arts and Sciences, Chunlei Guo, Department of Physics and Astronomy, featured-post-side, Hajim School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Institute of Optics, Materials Science Program, research finding

Category: Science & Technology

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Spiders and ants inspire metal that won't sink

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University of Rochester researchers, inspired by diving bell spiders and rafts of fire ants, have created a metallic structure that is so water repellent, it refuses to sink-no matter how often it is forced into water or how much it is damaged or punctured. Could this lead to an unsinkable ship?

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Emma Haruka Iwao smashes pi world record with Google help

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Emma Haruka Iwao calculates the value of pi to 31 trillion digits, after a lifelong fascination.

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You know those photochromic lenses that turn regular glasses into sunglasses on sunny days? Wellness company Narbis just developed a unique twist on that idea - with a new pair of smartglasses intended to encourage concentration and discourage distractibility by darkening when your mind wanders from the task you should be focused on. If you ever lied to your parents that you were doing your homework when, in fact, you were thinking about something else entirely, this is the giveaway technology that promises to rat you out.

As it turns out, the term "rat you out" may be more than a little appropriate. The technology is built on a penalty-and-reward model based on brain patterns, known as operant conditioning, which has been practiced for more than 50 years. Operant conditioning, in which individuals make an association between a certain behavior and a consequence, was developed by B.F. Skinner, notable for his experiments involving rodents.

Using a trio of smart sensors, the smartglasses track relaxation, distraction, and focus. When distraction is detected, the glasses darken. When a person is relaxed and concentrating, the glasses instantly clear. An associated app tracks your progress and performance. Narbis recommends using the glasses two to three times per week for 30 minutes.

"Since a young age I worked alongside my father, who was a clinical psychologist [who] used neurofeedback in his clinics," Narbis CEO Devon Greco told Digital Trends. "I watched my father help countless people improve their [lives] and wellbeing with this powerful technology. I have worked with my father since the late 90s developing different kinds of neurofeedback technology which built the foundation for Narbis."

Greco said that one of the biggest shortcomings of previous neurofeedback technologies was their inability to be used in real-life situations, since they required a person to stare at a screen or listen to sounds. "It has been a long-term goal of mine to make neurofeedback more immersive and to find ways to integrate with real life," Greco noted.

The Narbis smartglasses are available to pre-order online for $590, a reduction of $100 from their planned retail price.

"Narbis represents an exciting option for families looking for a convenient way to practice attention and focus in day-to-day tasks," Greco said. "What makes this so exciting is that Narbis integrates with daily life, and applicable to many activities, allowing you to practice attention in the moment when concentration counts most."

Does it all sound a little bit Black Mirror? Certainly. Could it nonetheless be a game-changer for anyone wanting to improve their own concentration levels? You bet. Color us cautiously intrigued.

Editors' Recommendations

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NASA-inspired Smartglasses Turn Dark Whenever You Lose Focus | Digital Trends

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Struggle to concentrate? Wellness company Narbis has developed pair of smartglasses intended to discourage distraction by visibly darkening when your mind wanders from the task you should be focused on. Here's how you can get your hands on a pair in the very near future.

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quantum supremacy: google says its computer did a 10

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000-year calculation in 200 seconds - cnn

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Google claims its quantum computer can do the impossible in 200 seconds

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Google claims it has designed a machine that needs only 200 seconds to solve a problem that would take the world's fastest supercomputer 10,000 years to figure out. The results announced Wednesday herald the rise of quantum computers.

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Tesla shares shot up $45, or nearly 20%, on Thursday after the company reported a rare quarterly profit. Most analysts had been expecting a loss.

The stock price gain clobbered short sellers -- bearish investors who bet shares will fall -- with a $1.5 billion paper loss on Thursday alone.

Tesla remains one of the most shorted stocks in the market.

Wall Street short sellers, many of whom have long believed Elon Musk's electric car maker Tesla is a junker, got run over on Thursday, losing about $1.5 billion in one day on their bearish bets after the company reported a rare quarterly profit.

Tesla's stock price jumped about $45 to nearly $300 after Musk's company reported late on Wednesday that the company had turned a profit in the third quarter of $342 million. Analysts had been expecting the company to lose $72 million, according to FactSet.

That surprising news sent the stock soaring Thursday in the biggest increase in Tesla's stock since 2013. That clobbered short sellers, who borrow shares and then sell them in the hopes of buying them back later at a lower price, with a one-day paper loss of about $1.5 billion.

It's only the fourth time Tesla has had a profitable quarter in the past five years, or 20 quarters. Tesla lost nearly $600 million in the first six months of the year, but is now expected to pull off back-to-back profitable quarters in the second half, earning another $200 million in the last three months of 2019.

Tesla has long been one of the most shorted stocks on Wall Street - and Musk has often publicly battled short sellers and other critics.

In one apparent effort last year to get back at short sellers, Musk tweeted he was taking the company private in a buyout offer for $420 a share. No actual buyout offer happened, and Musk and his company eventually split a $40 million fine to settle a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit, claiming he had purposely misled shareholders. Musk did not admit wronging.

Judge tells Elon Musk and Securities Exchange Commission to settle dispute

As of yesterday, there were 32.6 million shares of Tesla sold short, according to S3 Partners, which tracks the data. That was down from earlier this year when as many as 43.7 million Tesla shares were sold short in early June.

But the loss for short sellers, at least for now, is just a pit-stop in what has been for the past year or so a very profitable ride. Even after Thursday's jump, Tesla's shares are still down 10.5% in 2019. S3 Partners estimates that short sellers have still collectively made $500 million betting against Tesla's stock this year.

And Tesla's short sellers are unlikely to unplug anytime soon. Despite the profit jump, Tesla's sales, which missed expectations, were down from the prior quarter and from a year ago.

A good portion of the third quarter profit came from the fact that Tesla was able to recognize as profit a chunk of cash it had already collected for pre-sales of its "summon" feature, which became available in September.

Tesla, like other car manufacturers, also is likely to be hit by the continued trade tensions with China.

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Tesla short sellers lose $1.5 billion in a single day

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Tesla shares shot up $45, or nearly 20%, on Thursday after the company reported a rare quarterly profit. Most analysts had been expecting a loss. The stock price gain clobbered short sellers -- bearish investors who bet shares will fall -- with a $1.5 billion paper loss on Thursday alone.

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Infrastructure-free NLoS Obstacle Detection for Autonomous Cars (IEEE IROS 2019)

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DreamWalker: Substituting Real-World Walking Experiences with a Virtual Reality

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Abacus Lesson 1 // Introduction, Proper Technique, & History of the Abacus // Tutorial

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One day last year, an engineer and I went to a pizza place for lunch. The engineer told me he wasn't very hungry, but he said he was going to get the 12-inch medium instead of the 8-inch small - because the medium was more than twice as big as the small, and it cost only a little bit more. This sort of blew my mind.

So I went big on the pizza-value question. The graph below is based on 74,476 prices from 3,678 pizza places around the country. To see how the price of pizzas changes with size - and how much more pizza you get when you get a large - drag the slider at the bottom the graph.

The math of why bigger pizzas are such a good deal is simple: A pizza is a circle, and the area of a circle increases with the square of the radius.

So, for example, a 16-inch pizza is actually four times as big as an 8-inch pizza.

And when you look at thousands of pizza prices from around the U.S., you see that you almost always get a much, much better deal when you buy a bigger pizza.

The data in the graph were provided by Grubhub Seamless.

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74,476 Reasons You Should Always Get The Bigger Pizza

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We crunched prices from thousands of pizza places around the country. The results convinced us we should never buy a small pizza again.

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Soroban   All in the mind - Legendado - Supera

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Popcorn kernels are exposed to the same oil and the same heat and yet they all pop at different times. Give yourself a chance to pop.

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Popcorn kernels are exposed to the same oil and the same heat and yet they all pop at different times. Give yourself a chance to pop.

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One honeybee, ah ah ah... (Credit: yod67/Shutterstock)

Humans, monkeys, pigeons, fish and honeybees can all grasp the concept of a greater than or less than sign and choose between bigger or smaller quantities. Now, new research from a team led by Martin Giurfa at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France is the first to show that honeybees, like other vertebrates, can also recognize a specific value, not just a relative value. That means they know the number 3, instead of simply recognizing 3 is greater than 2.

The study, published today in Bi o logy Letters, is an "important contribution" and "part of a growing body of work" on bees' mathematical cognition, according to Adrian Dyer, an insect vision scientist at RMIT University in Australia, who was not involved in the study.

We already knew honeybees can add, understand zero and recognize numerical symbols. These new findings suggest that bees can flexibly use both absolute and relative numerical reasoning, which is similar to the kind of reasoning that humans have.

3 Is the Sweetest Number

To figure out whether bees make decisions using exact numbers, instead of just relations like bigger or smaller, researchers first trained bees using a Y-shaped box. Like coming to a crossroads, each bee in the study had to decide which way to go to receive a tasty sugar water reward.

The bee can choose to go down either path of the Y-shaped box, toward the three dots or two dots, to receive a reward.
(Credit: Bortot et al./BIOLOGY LETTERS)

Half of the bees saw signs indicating a value of 2 vs 3 - the appropriate number of dots - while the other half saw signs for 3 vs 4. Both sets of bees were rewarded during training for picking the 3 path, which was the larger number for the first half of bees and the smaller number for the second half of bees. Importantly, the visuals included circles of slightly different sizes and densities, so that number value was the only constant feature that bees could depend on. They really were learning the meaning of 3, in other words, and not just a specific image of dots.

After training, bees again came to the crossroads in the Y-shaped box, but now had new signs to deal with. One was somewhat familiar to both groups because it was still just 3 dots, though in a new arrangement. But the other sign had a new number of dots: Bees whose training included the number 2 saw the sign for 4, and vice versa.

The goal was to see exactly what the bees learned from their training. If they had learned "always choose the larger/smaller number," they'd now choose the path marked with the new number. They did not. Instead, the majority of bees preferred to fly along the path marked with the familiar number of 3 dots. In other words, they knew what the number 3 was.

Same Difference

But bees don't treat all numbers equally.

Learning the value of 3 was more difficult when it was compared to 4 than when it was compared to 2. During training, the 3 vs 4 bees were 50/50 on whether they chose 3 or 4. In contrast, the bees that had to choose between 2 and 3, chose 3 closer to 70% of the time, indicating they were not choosing randomly. Because bees responded differently to these pairs that are both sequential, the researchers believe bees, like humans, are affected by the numerical size effect.

In humans, this effect can be seen with much larger numbers - we have much more difficulty determining whether there are 100 or 101 pieces of candy in a jar than we would with 10 and 11 pieces even though the difference is the same in both pairs. For bees, the limit that they can easily identify might be around 4 or 5, but previous studies are not entirely clear. This parallel between social insects and humans brings up new questions about bees' mathematical cognition.

Is 4 the actual limit of how high bees can count? Does it matter if bees count objects all at once, instead of one by one? Giurfa hopes to verify the answers to these questions in follow-up studies and to connect this invertebrate mathematical cognition with other evidence of bee intelligence.

For researchers, identifying the neural mechanisms underlying bees' computation may be a long way off. But once we understand how bees perform fairly complex tasks with much smaller and simpler brains, Dyer says, this could eventually inspire more efficient computer chips (I Bee M, perhaps), which are currently modeled on mammalian neurons.

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Honeybees Know What 3 Means (and 2 and 4), Researchers Find - D-brief

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Humans, monkeys, pigeons, fish and honeybees can all grasp the concept of a greater than or less than sign and choose between bigger or smaller quantities. Now, new research from a team led by Martin Giurfa at Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France is the first to show that honeybees, like other vertebrates, can also recognize a specific value, not just a relative value.

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Since 2 is the only even prime number, that makes it the oddest prime number

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Since 2 is the only even prime number, that makes it the oddest prime number

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An even number walks into a room full of primes and says, "Two can play this game."

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December 2, 2010 by Lisa Zyga, Phys.org

The Condor Cluster consists of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3's, and is the US Department of Defense's fastest interactive computer. Image credit: US Department of Defense.

(Phys.org)-About the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world right now is the US Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) newest system, which has a core made of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles. In addition to its large capacity, the so-called "Condor Cluster" is capable of performing 500 trillion floating point operations per second (TFLOPS), making it the fastest interactive computer in the entire US Defense Department.

The supercomputer, which is located in Rome, New York, was formally presented yesterday at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. It will be used by Air Force centers across the country for tasks such as radar enhancement, pattern recognition, satellite imagery processing, and artificial intelligence research.

Its speed allows it to analyze ultra-high-resolution images very quickly - at a rate of billions of pixels per minute - to greatly reduce the amount of time required. Due in part to the video game consoles' cutting-edge graphics capabilities, the supercomputer also has improved algorithms that can better identify blurred flying objects in space than previous computers could.

The Condor Cluster project began four years ago, when PlayStation consoles cost about $400 each. At the same time, comparable technology would have cost about $10,000 per unit. Overall, the PS3s for the supercomputer's core cost about $2 million. According to AFRL Director of High Power Computing Mark Barnell, that cost is about 5-10% of the cost of an equivalent system built with off-the-shelf computer parts.

Another advantage of the PS3-based supercomputer is its energy efficiency: it consumes just 10% of the power of comparable supercomputers.

In addition to the PS3s, the supercomputer also includes 168 separate graphical processing units and 84 coordinating servers to direct traffic within the system. The PS3s are the older, larger variety, since the newer slim models don't allow for the installation of Linux.

More information: via: Gamasutra and The Plain Dealer

© 2010 Phys.org

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US Air Force connects 1,760 PlayStation 3's to build supercomputer

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December 2, 2010 by Lisa Zyga, Phys.org (Phys.org)-About the 33rd largest supercomputer in the world right now is the US Air Force Research Laboratory's (AFRL) newest system, which has a core made of 1,760 Sony PlayStation 3 (PS3) consoles.

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Note: This is the full version of a two-part series. Already read part one? Click here to skip to part two. If you'd prefer to listen, you can also scroll to the bottom of this post for an audio version.

Just after 11 PM on February 15, 1992, a janky ball machine at the Virginia State Lottery HQ spit out 6 winning numbers on live television: 8... 11... 13... 15... 19... 20.

In the coming days, officials would find out that one "person" had secured not only the $27,036,142 jackpot, but 6 second prizes, 132 third prizes, and 135 minor prizes collectively worth another $900k.

What unfolded next was the strangest, most improbable lottery tale in history - one involving thousands of international investors, dozens of complex computer systems, and a mathematical savant who'd masterminded the entire operation from the other side of the world.

This is the story of the man who "gamed" the lottery by buying every possible combination.

In the late 1960s, a young Romanian economist named Stefan Mandel was struggling to get by.

At the time, Romania was under oppressive Communist rule , a period marred by poverty, job and food shortages, and " profound misery ." Mandel's salary of 360 lei (US $88) a month was not enough to support his wife and two children, and, as he later Planet Money , he needed a way to "get some serious money, quickly."

Many Romanians in Mandel's predicament had, out of necessity, turned to lives of crime. But Mandel, a self-described "philosopher-mathematician," saw another way out: The lottery.

Let's take a step back here: What kind of idiot banks on winning the lottery? You're literally more likely to win an Olympic gold medal, have identical quintuplets, or get crushed by a vending machine .

Using the algorithm, Mandel claimed he could accurately predict 5 of the 6 winning numbers, reducing the number of combinations in a lottery from millions to mere thousands. With a band of friends and acquaintances, he took a big risk and purchased large blocks of lottery tickets with the combinations his formula has deemed to be most likely.

Miraculously (and with a lot of luck), he won the first prize of 78,783 lei (about US $19.3k). After expenses, he walked away with $4k, enough to bribe foreign ministry officials and flee Romania for a new life - and a bigger jackpot.

Turning lottery wins into a business

After 4 years of roaming around Europe, Mandel settled in Australia and he set out to game the lottery in a different way.

But Mandel caught on to something: In certain lottos, the total number of possible ticket combinations was significantly than the jackpot.

Mandel maintained that "any high school math student could calculate the combinations." But this method came with some major logistical setbacks. How would he get the capital? And how could he possibly fill out hundreds of thousands of tickets, number by number?

Over a period of years, while working a day job as an insurance agent, Mandel convinced hundreds of investors to pool their money together and create a "lotto syndicate." He then developed a full-fledged automation system: A room full of printers and computers running on an algorithm that pre-populated tickets with every combination.

Computers revolutionized Mandel's process. Before, he'd been limited to writing out millions of combinations by hand, where a single mistake could ruin 8 months' worth of work; now, he could outsource the work to a machine.

Throughout the 1980s, Mandel's syndicate would wait until a jackpot ballooned to an amount higher than the total combinations, then "move to buy" thousands of tickets. They managed to win 12 lotteries (and rake in 400k smaller prizes) across Australia and the UK.

But Mandel's system soon hit a wall.

So, he set his sights on much bigger feat - one that would make international headlines and boggle the minds of lottery officials around the world.

Virginia or bust

Using his profits, Mandel planted "scouts" all over North America (Montreal, Boston, Miami, Phoenix, Norfolk), and compiled a list of historical lotteries with jackpots that were at least 3x the total of all possible combinations.

Virginia's lottery offered several advantages. It was fairly new, and allowed buyers to purchase tickets in unlimited quantities and print them at home. But most importantly, its numbers only ranged from 1 to 44 (other states went as high as 54). This meant that with 6 picks, there were "only" 7,059,052 possible combinations, compared to the usual 25m+.

Under the shell corporation Pacific Financial Resources , Mandel set up a trust called the International Lotto Fund (ILF) and convinced 2,524 investors to put at least $3k each in the pot.

Given Mandel's prior successes, the demand was hot: He raised more than $9m.

In a Melbourne warehouse, he set up 30 computers and 12 laser printers, and hired 16 full-time employees to print 7m tickets pre-populated with every combination - a process that took 3 months. He then shipped the one-tonne of paper weight to a point-person in the US at a cost of $60k.

With the tickets secured in Virginia, Mandel had to wait until the jackpot hit a number that would make financial sense after taxes, overhead, and paying off investors.

On February 12, 1992, the Virginia Lottery jackpot hit $27m. Mandel's team on the ground was given a simple directive:

And nobody - not even Mandel - could've anticipated the the madness that would ensue.

As Mandel knew, the "buy all combinations" method of winning the lottery was more of a logistical than a financial challenge. The hard part was yet to come.

Tickets could be legally printed at home, but they still had to be taken to an authorized lotto retailer in the US, paid for (at $1 each), and processed. Waltzing into a gas station with 7m tickets and a truckload of cash wasn't an option.

For this task, Mandel turned to an esteemed associate by the name of Anithalee Alex.

Perennially outfitted in a gold rolex and a safari suit, Alex was a sweet talker who could "make the world seem like a bed of roses." An ex-paratrooper turned Rolls Royce salesman turned oil prospector, he could often be seen gallivanting around his small town of Teutopolis, Illinois, in a that read: " Please Lord, let me prove to you that winning the lottery won't spoil me ."

When his old pal, Mandel, rang, Alex was fresh out of bankruptcy court, with $400k in debt and 16 maxed-out credit cards. He was ready for action - action.

The job was harrowing: He was to coordinate the drop-off, payment, and processing of 7m lottery tickets at hundreds of stores all over Virginia.

The jackpot hit $27m on a Wednesday; the next draw would be on Saturday. This meant that he and his team had just 72 hours to pull it off.

A logistical nightmare

On February 12, 1992 - 3 days before the draw - Alex checked into a Holiday Inn in Norfolk, Virginia and set up a "command center" at the Koger Center, a nearby business park.

"Think of it like an office pool," he reportedly the CPAs, "except a office pool."

For 2-straight days, the couriers methodically descended on 125 gas stations and supermarkets. At Farm Fresh, Miller Mart, and Tinee Giant locations throughout the region, flummoxed store clerks were asked to buy and process millions of algorithmically-generated lotto tickets.

By Saturday evening, the team was nearing completion. Then, disaster struck.

One of the chains who'd bought tickets in bulk got overwhelmed and quit in the final hours, leaving millions of combinations on the table. When the deadline for entry arrived, only 5.5m of Mandel's 7m tickets (78%) had been processed. Mandel's "fool proof" plan, which relied on securing every single possibility, was in jeopardy.

Like a regular lottery, winning the jackpot would ultimately come down to luck.

"The most incredible thing in the world"

Mandel knew that without 100% of the combinations secured, his strategy was reduced to a multi-million dollar game of chance.

Even if Mandel to win, there was the possibility of multiple winners - a scenario that could significantly dilute the jackpot.

At 11:20 PM on February 15th, the numbers were drawn on live television. I nearby warehouse, Alex and his team frantically rifled through 5.5m physical copies of receipts, looking for the winning ticket.

Then, piercing through the carnage, a victorious shout: .

What would Thomas Jefferson say?

Although completely legal under both US and Virginia state law, the Australian group's feat was interpreted as an effort "cheat" the traditional system.

In the , neither Mandel nor the ILF was found guilty of any wrongdoing. "I will live to be 150," he proclaimed . "I am not the type of person who lays down and dies because some glorified clerk doesn't know what he's doing."

Meanwhile, in his home country of Australia, he became something of a folk hero: A widely-circulated cartoon depicted him as a kangaroo hopping out of the US with a pouch full of cash - defiant, victorious, and full of life.

I want my money back

The future, however, was not bright for everyone. Four years after the Virginia win, Mandel's investors were still looking for their "phenomenal returns."

The investors - small business owners, machine operators, housekeepers, and doctors - had been regaled with tales of riches, and promised participation in up to 9 lottos per year. Yet, they'd only received a $1.4k return on their $4k investment.

After failed attempts at launching a life insurance company and a lottery system in the British territory of Gibraltar, Mandel declared bankruptcy in 1995. He then spent the next decade running various investment scams - one of which earned him a 20-month prison sentence in Israel.

And what became of the mastermind?

Today, Mandel spends his days at a beach house on a remote tropical island in Vanuatu, a country off the coast of Australia. He lives a quiet life and reports being "retired" from the lottery.

Reflecting back on wilder times, he played off the riskiness of his gambit.

"I'm a man who takes risks, but in a calculated way," he told the Romanian paper, Bursa . "Trimming my beard is a lottery: There is always the possibility that I'll cut myself, get an infection in my blood, and die - but I do it anyway."

"The chances," he concluded, "are in my favor."

Prefer audio? You can listen to the full story below, courtesy of our friends at Curio.

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Note: This is the full version of a two-part series. Already read part one? Click here to skip to part two. If you'd prefer to listen, you can also scroll to the bottom of this post for an audio version.

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The Japanese space agency, JAXA, has been circling the asteroid Ryugu with its spacecraft Hayabusa2 for almost a year now and the agency has even shot a cannonball at the space rock.

That shot kicked up debris that Hayabusa2 collected in February but the agency wanted to go again -- and collect debris from further inside Ryugu.

On May 30, Jaxa performed a daring maneuver that brought its spacecraft within 9 meters (approximately 30 feet) of Ryugu to drop a target marker on its surface. The success of the mission was documented by the spacecraft's official Twitter account (because it's 2019), but on June 5, the agency released a photo that is absolutely wild.

The target marker separation on May 30 during PPTD-TM1A was caught at the last moment by the small monitor camera, CAM-H! The image time was May 30, 11:18 JST (on-board time) at an altitude of about 9m. CAM-H was built with donations from all of you & is a big success! Thank you! pic.twitter.com/pHSwqPaywh
- HAYABUSA2@JAXA (@haya2e_jaxa) June 5, 2019

Let's pause for a second and consider this:

The above image comes from a 600-kilogram, refrigerator-sized robot traveling at about 15 miles per second, around 170 million miles from Earth. It shows the shadow of the Hayabusa2 spacecraft and just below that shadow a tiny, spherical shadow. That tiny shadow is the target marker being released onto the asteroid. Crazy, huh?

The image was captured by CAM-H, one of Hayabusa2's suite of instruments that has previously captured touchdown on Ryugu. The small monitor camera was built and installed on the spacecraft thanks to public donations.

We've seen some fantastic images from the surface of Ryugu during Hayabusa2's mission. Two tiny rovers were deployed on the asteroid's surface in 2018, providing some incredible close-ups. Hayabusa2 will move to sample the asteroid for a second time later this year, before returning to Earth with samples in December 2020.

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Japan's Hayabusa2 spacecraft grabs epic close-up just 30 feet above asteroid

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The Japanese space agency, JAXA, has been circling the asteroid Ryugu with its spacecraft Hayabusa2 for almost a year now and the agency has even shot a cannonball at the space rock. That shot kicked up debris that Hayabusa2 collected in February but the agency wanted to go again -- and collect debris from further inside Ryugu.

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When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto, the trip took about 1 minute less than predicted or in a decade-long journey, NASA's forecast was 99.99998% accurate or the equivalent of forecasting a trip from New York to Boston & being accurate to within four-millionths of a second.

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When NASA's New Horizons spacecraft passed by Pluto, the trip took about 1 minute less than predicted or in a decade-long journey, NASA's forecast was 99.99998% accurate or the equivalent of forecasting a trip from New York to Boston & being accurate to within four-millionths of a second.

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MAGMA: the future of flight | Newsroom | BAE Systems | International

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For the first time in aviation history, an aircraft has been manoeuvred in flight using supersonically blown air, removing the need for complex movable flight control surfaces.

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View as slideshow

Sticker shocker: You might not think much about how products are priced, but we did the math to calculate how much you're spending.

2. Movie theater popcorn: 1,275% markup

Theaters know that viewers will pay more for movie snacks, so they hike the prices up: A bag of popcorn that costs 37 cents to make can easily sell for $5. One man in Michigan found the price so outrageous that he's suing his local theater.

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10 Outrageous Markups You'd Never Guess You Were Paying

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View as slideshow Sticker shocker: You might not think much about how products are priced, but we did the math to calculate how much you're spending. Theaters know that viewers will pay more for movie snacks, so they hike the prices up: A bag of popcorn that costs 37 cents to make can easily sell for $5.

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Do you know the answer to the following problem in arithmetic?

What is the sum of 1+1+1+1+1+1+1?

If you said "seven," you're right. And you're also better at math than state-of-the-art deep learning neural networks.

AI researchers from Google's DeepMind this week published research in which they attempted to train neural networks to solve basic problems in arithmetic, algebra and calculus. The kinds of problems on which a high school student would be typically tested.

But the neural networks didn't fare too well. In addition to incorrectly guessing six as the answer to the above question, the neural networks got just 14 of 40 questions correct on a standard test.

That's the equivalent of an E grade for a sixteen-year-old in the British school system, the researchers note.

Basically, at this point, AI is having a hard time really learning any basic math.

Also: Google's DeepMind asks what it means for AI to fail

The paper, "Analysing Mathematical Reasoning Abilities of Neural Models," was created as a benchmark test set upon which others can build in order to develop neural networks for math learning, similar to how ImageNet was created as an image recognition benchmark test.

The paper, authored by David Saxton, Edward Grefenstette, Felix Hill and Pushmeet Kohli of DeepMind, is posted on the arXiv preprint server. (See also comments by reviewers on OpenReview.)

Citing noted neural net critic Gary Marcus of NYU, the authors refer to the famous "brittleness" of neural networks, and argue for investigation into why humans are better able to perform "discrete compositional reasoning about objects and entities, that 'algebraically generalize'."

They propose a diverse set of math problems should push neural networks into acquiring such reasoning, which includes things like "Planning (for example, identifying the functions in the correct order to compose)" when a math problem has parts that may or may not be associative or distributive or commutative.

DeepMind

"It should be harder for a model to do well across a range of problem types (including generalization, which we detail below)," they write, "without possessing at least some part of these abilities that allow for algebraic generalization." Hence, the data set.

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Managing AI and ML in the Enterprise

The AI and ML deployments are well underway, but for CXOs the biggest issue will be managing these initiatives, and figuring out where the data science team fits in and what algorithms to buy versus build.

They came up with a slew of questions - none of them involving geometry, and none of them being verbal questions - of the following sort:

The authors synthesized the data set, rather than crowd-sourcing them, because it's easy that way to get a large number of examples. They submitted the questions to the machine as sentences in "freeform," so that they were not given to the computer in any way that would make the parsing of the question easier, such as a "tree" or "graph" data form.

The basis for the questions was "a national school mathematics curriculum (up to age 16), restricted to textual questions (thus excluding geometry questions), which gave a comprehensive range of mathematics topics that worked together as part of a learning curriculum." They enhanced that basic curriculum, they write, with questions that "offer good tests for algebraic reasoning."

To train a model, they could have given some neural net math abilities, they note, but the whole point was to have it start from nothing and build up a math ability. Hence, they went with more or less standard neural networks.

Also: A Berkeley mash-up of AI approaches promises continuous learning

"We are interested here in evaluating general purpose models, rather than ones with their mathematics knowledge already inbuilt," they write.

"What makes such models (which are invariably neural architectures) so ubiquitous from translation to parsing via image captioning is the lack of bias these function approximators present due to having relatively little (or no) domain-specific knowledge encoded in their design."

The authors constructed two different kinds of "state of the art" neural networks to parse, embed, and then answer these questions. One was a "long short-term memory," or LSTM, neural network, which excels in handling sequential types of data, developed by Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber in the 1990s.

They also trained the so-called "Transformer," a more recent style of recurrent neural network developed at Google that has become increasingly popular for a variety of tasks such as embedding sequences of text for processing natural language.

And they gave the neural nets some time to think, as "it may be necessary for the models to expend several computation steps integrating information from the question.

"To allow for this, we add additional steps (with zero input) before outputting the answer."

Also: Fear not deep fakes: OpenAI's machine writes as senselessly as a chatbot speaks

The results were so-so. For example, back to the question at the start of this article, basic addition failed when the numbers got higher than the first six counting numbers. The authors write that they "tested the models on adding 1 + 1 + · · · + 1, where 1 occurs n times.

"Both the LSTM and Transformer models gave the correct answer for n ≤ 6, but the incorrect answer of 6 for n = 7 (seemingly missing one of the 1s), and other incorrect values for n > 7."

Why is that? As is often the case with neural networks, something else seems to be going on behind the scenes, because the networks were able to do fine when adding far larger numbers together in longer sequences, such as negative 34 plus 53 plus negative 936, etc., the authors observed.

"We do not have a good explanation for this behaviour," they write. They hypothesize the neural nets are creating "sub-sums" as they parse the questions and operate on them, and that when they fail, it's because "the input is 'camouflaged' by consisting of the same number repeated multiple times."

In general, the neural nets did best at things such as finding the "place value" in a long number, like, say, picking out the "tens" place in a number such as 9343012. They were also fine at rounding decimal numbers and sorting sequences of numbers into size order.

Must read

The hardest problems for the system were "number-theoretic questions," such as factorization, breaking down numbers or other mathematical objects into constituent parts, and telling if a number is prime or not. But humans have trouble with those as well, they note, so it's no surprise. The other problems that tended to stump the machine were combinations of "mixed arithmetic," where all four operations are taking place. There, the machine's performance "drops to around 50%" accuracy.

Why does the computer do fine when just adding or subtracting but get flummoxed when asked to do all of them?

"We speculate that the difference between these modules in that the former can be computed in a relatively linear/shallow/parallel manner (so that the solution method is relatively easier to discover via gradient descent)," the authors muse, "whereas there are no shortcuts to evaluating mixed arithmetic expressions with parentheses."

All in all, on the high school curriculum, a collection of real-world problems, the authors call the nets' E grade "disappointing" and "moderate" performance.

They conclude that while the Transformer neural net they build performs better than the LSTM variant, "neither of the networks are doing much "algorithmic reasoning," and "the models do not learn to do any algebraic/algorithmic manipulation of values, and are instead learning relatively shallow tricks to obtain good answers on many of the modules."

Still, there's now a data set, and that's a baseline, they hope, upon which others will join them in training more kinds of networks. The data set is easily extended, they note, which should let researchers go right up to university level math.

Hopefully, by then, neural nets will have learned to add past six.

Previous and related coverage:

What is AI? Everything you need to know

An executive guide to artificial intelligence, from machine learning and general AI to neural networks.

What is deep learning? Everything you need to know

The lowdown on deep learning: from how it relates to the wider field of machine learning through to how to get started with it.

What is machine learning? Everything you need to know

This guide explains what machine learning is, how it is related to artificial intelligence, how it works and why it matters.

What is cloud computing? Everything you need to know about

An introduction to cloud computing right from the basics up to IaaS and PaaS, hybrid, public, and private cloud.

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Researchers at Google's DeepMind built two different kinds of state-of-the-art neural nets to see if they could be trained to answer high school math problems. The result was an E grade, and a failure to add single-digit numbers above 6.

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a 3-year-old boy repeatedly entered the wrong password

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Dr. Katie Bouman and the hard drives she used while working on the Event Horizon Telescope

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Dr. Katie Bouman and the hard drives she used while working on the Event Horizon Telescope

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This sounds like something out of a Dan Brown book but it isn't: The whole Internet is controlled by seven actual, physical keys.

The Guardian's James Ball was recently allowed to observe the highly secure ritual known as a key ceremony.

The people conducting the ceremony are part of an organization called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is responsible for assigning numerical Internet addresses to websites and computers and translating them into the normal web addresses that people type into their browsers.

For instance, type 64.27.101.155 into your browser and you'll be taken to Business Insider's web page. But www.businessinsider.com is easier for people to remember. ICANN maps the numbers (easier for computers to use) with words (easier for humans to use).

If someone were to gain control of ICANN's database that person would control the Internet. For instance, the person could send people to fake bank websites instead of real bank websites.

On the other hand, if a calamity happened, the ICANN database could need to be rebuilt. So ICANN came up with a way to do that without entrusting too much control to any one person. It selected seven people to be key holders and gave each one an actual key to Internet. It selected seven more people to be backup keyholders: 14 people in all.

The physical keys unlock safety deposit boxes stashed around the world. Inside those boxes are smart keycards. Put the seven smartcards together and you have the "master key." The master key is really some computer code, a password of sorts, that can access the ICANN database.

Four times a year since 2010 the seven keyholders meet for the key ceremony where they generate a new master key, i.e. a new password.

The security to be admitted to the ceremony is intense, Ball reports, and involves passing through a series of locked doors using key codes and hand scanners, until entering a room so secure that no electronic communications can escape it.

The group conducts the ritual, then each person files out of the room one by one, and then they all head to a restaurant and party.

Here's Ball's detailed account of the ceremony that most recently occurred.

Here's a video of the very first key ceremony conducted in 2010. Skip to 1:58 to see the ceremony.

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The Internet Is Actually Controlled By 14 People Who Hold 7 Secret Keys

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This sounds like something out of a Dan Brown book but it isn't: The whole Internet is controlled by seven actual, physical keys. The Guardian's James Ball was recently allowed to observe the highly secure ritual known as a key ceremony.

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If you let potatoes consisting of 99% water dry so that they are 98% water, they lose 50% of their weight

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The potato paradox is a mathematical calculation that has a counter-intuitive result. The Universal Book of Mathematics states the problem as such:

Fred brings home 100 kg of potatoes, which (being purely mathematical potatoes) consist of 99% water (being purely mathematical water). He then leaves them outside overnight so that they consist of 98% water. What is their new weight?

Then reveals the answer:

The surprising answer is 50 kg.

In Quine's classification of paradoxes, the potato paradox is a veridical paradox.

A visualization where blue boxes represent kg of water and the orange boxes represent kg of solid potato matter. Left, prior to dehydration: 1 kg matter, 99 kg water (99% water). Middle: 1 kg matter, 49 kg water (98% water).

If the potatoes are 99% water, the dry mass is 1%. This means that the 100 kg of potatoes contains 1 kg of dry mass, which does not change, as only the water evaporates.

In order to make the potatoes be 98% water, the dry mass must become 2% of the total weight-double what it was before. The amount of dry mass, 1 kg, remains unchanged, so this can only be achieved by reducing the total mass of the potatoes. Since the proportion that is dry mass must be doubled, the total mass of the potatoes must be halved, giving the answer 50 kg.

Let x be the new total mass of the potatoes (dry + water).

Let d be the dry mass of the potatoes and w, the mass of water within the potatoes.

Recall w is 98% of the total mass, that is, w = 0.98 x.

In our case, d = 1 kg so the new mass of the potatoes will indeed be 50 kg.

Let X be the mass lost. Since the solid (non-water) mass remains constant, then

X = initial water content - final water content

1 kg = 0.02 X

X = (1 kg)/0.02 = 50 kg

The potato paradox has made its way into popular culture. In one instance, it was the "Puzzler" on the radio show. It was subsequently featured on Neatorama. It was also named one of the "Five Famous Paradoxes".

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The potato paradox is a mathematical calculation that has a counter-intuitive result. The Universal Book of Mathematics states the problem as such: Fred brings home 100 kg of potatoes, which (being purely mathematical potatoes) consist of 99% water (being purely mathematical water).

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Old advertisement for a Mac

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For the first time, mathematics' most prestigious prize has been awarded to a woman, Karen Uhlenbeck

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Earlier this week, we received this question from a fan on Facebook who wondered how many decimals of the mathematical constant pi (π) NASA-JPL scientists and engineers use when making calculations:

Does JPL only use 3.14 for its pi calculations? Or do you use more decimals like say: 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588174881520920962829254091715364367892590360

We posed this question to the director and chief engineer for NASA's Dawn mission, Marc Rayman. Here's what he said:

Thank you for your question! This isn't the first time I've heard a question like this. In fact, it was posed many years ago by a sixth-grade science and space enthusiast who was later fortunate enough to earn a doctorate in physics and become involved in space exploration. His name was Marc Rayman.

To start, let me answer your question directly. For JPL's highest accuracy calculations, which are for interplanetary navigation, we use 3.141592653589793. Let's look at this a little more closely to understand why we don't use more decimal places. I think we can even see that there are no physically realistic calculations scientists ever perform for which it is necessary to include nearly as many decimal points as you present. Consider these examples:

1. The most distant spacecraft from Earth is Voyager 1. It is about 12.5 billion miles away. Let's say we have a circle with a radius of exactly that size (or 25 billion miles in diameter) and we want to calculate the circumference, which is pi times the radius times 2. Using pi rounded to the 15th decimal, as I gave above, that comes out to a little more than 78 billion miles. We don't need to be concerned here with exactly what the value is (you can multiply it out if you like) but rather what the error in the value is by not using more digits of pi. In other words, by cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point, we would calculate a circumference for that circle that is very slightly off. It turns out that our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by 1.5 inches. Think about that. We have a circle more than 78 billion miles around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by perhaps less than the length of your little finger.

2. We can bring this down to home with our planet Earth. It is 7,926 miles in diameter at the equator. The circumference then is 24,900 miles. That's how far you would travel if you circumnavigated the globe (and didn't worry about hills, valleys, obstacles like buildings, rest stops, waves on the ocean, etc.). How far off would your odometer be if you used the limited version of pi above? It would be off by the size of a molecule. There are many different kinds of molecules, of course, so they span a wide range of sizes, but I hope this gives you an idea. Another way to view this is that your error by not using more digits of pi would be 10,000 times thinner than a hair!

3. Let's go to the largest size there is: the visible universe. The radius of the universe is about 46 billion light years. Now let me ask a different question: How many digits of pi would we need to calculate the circumference of a circle with a radius of 46 billion light years to an accuracy equal to the diameter of a hydrogen atom (the simplest atom)? The answer is that you would need 39 or 40 decimal places. If you think about how fantastically vast the universe is - truly far beyond what we can conceive, and certainly far, far, far beyond what you can see with your eyes even on the darkest, most beautiful, star-filled night - and think about how incredibly tiny a single atom is, you can see that we would not need to use many digits of pi to cover the entire range.

Read more from Marc Rayman on the Dawn Journal, where he writes monthly updates about the Dawn spacecraft currently exploring the dwarf planet Ceres to provide scientists with a window into the dawn of the solar system.

Can you use pi like a NASA scientist?
› Take the Pi in the Sky Challenge!
TAGS: Pi, Pi Day, Dawn, Voyager, Engineering, Science, Mathematics

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NASA/JPL Edu supports science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education by providing NASA and JPL activities, resources and materials to educators and students in grades K-12 as well as STEM internships and research opportunities to higher education students and faculty.

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How Many Decimals of Pi Do We Really Need? - Edu News | NASA/JPL Edu

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Earlier this week, we received this question from a fan on Facebook who wondered how many decimals of the mathematical constant pi (π) NASA-JPL scientists and engineers use when making calculations:Does JPL only use 3.14 for its pi calculations?

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A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole.

Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible.

The remarkable photo, showing a halo of dust and gas 500 million trillion km from Earth, was released on Wednesday.

For Dr Bouman, its creation was the realisation of an endeavour previously thought impossible.

Excitedly bracing herself for the groundbreaking moment, Dr Bouman was pictured loading the image on her laptop.

"Watching in disbelief as the first image I ever made of a black hole was in the process of being reconstructed," she wrote in the caption to the Facebook post.

She started making the algorithm three years ago while she was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

There, she led the project, assisted by a team from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the MIT Haystack Observatory.

The black hole image, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) - a network of eight linked telescopes - was rendered by Dr Bouman's algorithm.

"When we saw it for the first time, we were all in disbelief. It was quite spectacular," she told BBC Radio 5 live.

"We got really lucky with the weather... We got lucky in so many ways."

In the hours after the photo's momentous release, Dr Bouman became an international sensation, with her name trending on Twitter.

First ever black hole image released

WATCH: Picture 'a dream come true'

Dr Bouman was also hailed by MIT and the Smithsonian on social media.

"3 years ago MIT grad student Katie Bouman led the creation of a new algorithm to produce the first-ever image of a black hole," MIT's Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab wrote. "Today, that image was released."

But Dr Bouman, now an assistant professor of computing and mathematical sciences at the California Institute of Technology, insisted the team that helped her deserves equal credit.

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The effort to capture the image, using telescopes in locations ranging from Antarctica to Chile, involved a team of more than 200 scientists.

"No one of us could've done it alone," she told CNN. "It came together because of lots of different people from many different backgrounds."

What do we know about the black hole?

The black hole, which is "unseeable" to the naked eye, measures 40 billion km across, or three million times the size of the Earth

It was scanned over a period of 10 days in the Messier 87 galaxy

It is "larger than the size of our entire Solar System", Prof Heino Falcke, of Radboud University in the Netherlands, who proposed the experiment, told the BBC

How did her algorithm create the image?

Put simply, Dr Bouman and others developed a series of algorithms that converted telescopic data into the historic photo shared by the world's media.

In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is a process or set of rules used to solve problems.

No single telescope is powerful enough to capture the black hole, so a network of eight was set up to so do using a technique called interferometry.

The data they captured was stored on hundreds of hard drives that were flown to central processing centres in Boston, US, and Bonn, Germany.

Dr Bouman's method of processing this raw data was said to be instrumental in the creation of the striking image.

She spearheaded a testing process whereby multiple algorithms with "different assumptions built into them" attempted to recover a photo from the data.

The results of the algorithms were then analysed by four separate teams to build confidence in the veracity of their findings.

"We're a melting pot of astronomers, physicists, mathematicians and engineers, and that's what it took to achieve something once thought impossible," Dr Bouman says.

Image Copyright TED TEDReport

How to See a Black Hole: The Universe's Greatest Mystery can be seen in the UK on BBC iPlayer.

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A 29-year-old computer scientist has earned plaudits worldwide for helping develop the algorithm that created the first-ever image of a black hole. Katie Bouman led development of a computer program that made the breakthrough image possible. The remarkable photo, showing a halo of dust and gas 500 million trillion km from Earth, was released on Wednesday.

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How to take a picture of a black hole | Katie Bouman | TEDxBeaconStreet

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What just happened? The Stratolaunch is a gigantic aircraft designed to carry rockets into the stratosphere and yesterday it completed its first flight. Lasting 150 minutes, the 385 ft wide plane reached a maximum speed of 189 mph and a height of 16,000 ft without a hitch, performing smoothly and just as expected.

The Stratolaunch is 385 ft (117m) wide, 238 ft (73m) long and 50 ft (15m) tall. It weighs 500,000 pounds (250 tons) empty, but full of fuel and with a rocket payload, it can weigh as much as 1,300,000 pounds (650 tons). To push all that weight, it uses two fuselages each with three Boeing 747 engines attached that can take it up to 35,000 ft and 2,000 nautical miles (3,704km).

"It was an emotional moment for me, personally, to watch this majestic bird take flight," Stratolaunch's CEO Jean Floyd said during a press call. "All of you have been very patient and very tolerant over the years waiting for us to get this big bird off the ground, and we finally did it."

The Stratolaunch is the furthest into the development of future rocket bearing aircraft, but it isn't alone. There's great demand for a way to launch rockets more cheaply and from more locations, and gigantic aircraft are reusable (unlike many rockets), can take off from most large airports and their flights are less weather dependent.

Stratolaunch was formerly partnered with SpaceX, but the latter ended that partnership to focus on launching their reusable rockets. Stratolaunch has now made a deal with Northrop Grumman to launch their Pegasus rockets, the first privately developed rocket and the first to use an aircraft to launch it. However, at 29 the Pegasus is starting to show its age.

While the flight was a proud moment for Stratolaunch, it was bittersweet for the many engineers that wished Microsoft and Stratolaunch founder Paul Allen could have celebrated the success. Allen passed away last October from non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. "Even though he wasn't there today, as the plane lifted gracefully from the runway, I did whisper a 'thank you' to Paul for allowing me to be a part of this remarkable achievement," Floyd said.

While the flight was a success in every measure, there's still a long road ahead. When asked, Stratolaunch employees couldn't pin down a schedule for future flights and couldn't guess when the first commercial operation might take place.

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World's largest plane completes a successful first flight

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The Stratolaunch is 385 ft (117m) wide, 238 ft (73m) long and 50 ft (15m) tall. It weighs 500,000 pounds (250 tons) empty, but full of fuel and with a rocket payload, it can weigh as much as 1,300,000 pounds…

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For the very first time, NASA has captured the shockwaves of two supersonic jets interacting in mid-flight, and the result is so brilliant, even the researchers are amazed.

The images feature two T-38s from the US Air Force, flying at supersonic speeds less than nine metres (30 feet) apart, with a stream of shockwaves emanating from either side. There is also an image of one, single T-38 flying on what is described as a " knife's edge".

"We never dreamt that it would be this clear, this beautiful," says JT Heineck, a physical scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center.

The images are part of an aeronautics mission at NASA that's partially dedicated to figuring out how shockwaves interact with each other, and with aircraft plumes. The knowledge could soon come in use as the space agency works towards a commercial aircraft that can fly quietly, even when it's going faster than the speed of sound.

It's a difficult challenge. Normally, when an airplane is flying through the sky, it pushes its way through molecules in the atmosphere. At the speed of sound, however, these molecules just can't get away fast enough. And so, they begin to compress, increasing the pressure at the front of the plane.

When the plane accelerates faster than the speed of sound, it then bursts through this invisible barrier of resistance, causing a rapid change in pressure that we call a shockwave.

The problem is, shockwaves are loud. As they travel away from the vehicles, they cause an explosion, or sonic boom, that can be heard on the ground.

It's not exactly what you want from a commercial airliner flying over densely populated areas; and this is where these stunning images come in.

After more than ten years of tweaking, NASA has at last developed a system that can capture high-quality images of shockwaves in mid-flight, giving the team a chance to study their behaviour in greater detail than ever before.

"I am ecstatic about how these images turned out," says Heineck.

"With this upgraded system, we have, by an order of magnitude, improved both the speed and quality of our imagery from previous research."

But capturing these breathtaking images was no easy feat. They were taken by an imaging system aboard a NASA B-200 King Air as a pair of T-38s passed 600 metres (2,000 feet) below at supersonic speeds.

This means that all three aircrafts had to be perfectly aligned, in the exact right place at the exact right time, for a proper image to be taken.

"What's interesting is, if you look at the rear T-38, you see these shocks kind of interact in a curve," says Neal Smith, a research engineer with AerospaceComputing Inc at the Ames Research Center, describing the image below.

"This is because the trailing T-38 is flying in the wake of the leading aircraft, so the shocks are going to be shaped differently. This data is really going to help us advance our understanding of how these shocks interact."

One day soon, the data might inform the production of the agency's X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology X-plane, which is currently being designed to produce shockwaves that are more like quiet rumbles than booms.

"We're seeing a level of physical detail here that I don't think anybody has ever seen before," says Dan Banks, an engineer at NASA Armstrong.

"Just looking at the data for the first time, I think things worked out better than we'd imagined. This is a very big step."

The images were created as a sub-project under NASA's Commercial Supersonic Technology project.

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For The First Time Ever, NASA Captures Images of Supersonic Shockwaves Merging in Air

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For the very first time, NASA has captured the shockwaves of two supersonic jets interacting in mid-flight, and the result is so brilliant, even the researchers are amazed. The images feature two T-38s from the US Air Force, flying at supersonic speeds less than nine metres (30 feet) apart, with a stream of shockwaves emanating from either side.

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As many as 1 in 5 people today are mooching off of someone else's account when streaming video from Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Video, according to a new study from CordCutting.com. Of these, Netflix tends to be pirated for the longest period - 26 months, compared with 16 months for Amazon Prime Video or 11 months for Hulu. That could be because Netflix freeloaders often mooch off their family instead of a friend - 48 percent use their parents' login, while another 14 percent use their sister or brother's credentials, the firm found.

At a base price of $7.99 per month (the study was performed before Netflix's January 2019 price increase), freeloading users could save $207.74 over a 26-month period. At scale, these losses can add up, the study claims.

The report estimates Netflix could be losing $192 million in monthly revenue from piracy - more than either Amazon or Hulu, at $45 million per month and $40 million per month, respectively.

Millennials, not surprisingly, account for much of the freeloading. They're the largest demographic pirating Netflix (18 percent) and Hulu's service (20 percent). But oddly, it was Baby Boomers who were more likely to borrow someone else's account to access Amazon Prime Video.

There's an argument that those who pirate would never be paying customers, so these aren't true losses. It's the same sort of thing that was said about Napster mp3 downloads back in the day, or about those pirating movies through The Pirate Bay. But there is some portion of the freeloading population that claims they would pay, if they lost access.

According to the study, 59.3 percent said they would pay for Netflix (or around 14 million people), contributing at least $112 million in monthly revenue, if they lost access. And 37.8 percent, or 2 million, said they'd pay for Hulu; 27.6 percent, or 1 million people, said they'd pay for Prime Video.

Of course, there can be discrepancies between what consumers say they will do versus what they actually end up doing. So such claims that "I'd definitely pay," have to be taken with the proverbial grain of salt.

It's worth noting, too, this study calculated figures by looking at Netflix's single-screen-at-a-time account - in theory, the one meant to be used by a single individual and not shared as a family plan, in order to keep the estimates conservative. The consumer survey defined mooching by asking users if they use a service they don't pay for, then asked what they would or would not pay for themselves, if that access fell through.

Hulu, at least, has more recently tried to make its service more appealing to penny-pinchers. At its new price - $5.99 per month, rolled out this week - it's making it harder to justify freeloading.

Netflix, on the other hand, seems to know its value, and raised prices this year so its base plan is a dollar more at $8.99 per month, and its most popular plan has climbed to $12.99 per month.

The full study offers other details on cord-cutting trends, including breakdowns by gender and details on who accounts are mooched from, among other things.

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Netflix may be losing $192M per month from piracy, cord cutting study claims

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As many as 1 in 5 people today are mooching off of someone else's account when streaming video from Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Video, according to a new study from CordCutting.com. Of these, Netflix tends to be pirated for the longest period - 26 months, compared with 16 months for Amazon ...

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Late Tuesday night, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent their final data uplink to the Opportunity rover on Mars. Over this connection, via the Deep Space Network, the American jazz singer Billie Holiday crooned "I'll Be Seeing You," a song that closes with the lines:

I'll find you in the morning sun
And when the night is new
I'll be looking at the moon
But I'll be seeing you

The scientists waited to hear some response from their long-silent rover, which had been engulfed in a global dust storm last June, likely coating its solar panels in a fatal layer of dust. Since then, the team of scientists and engineers has sent more than 835 commands, hoping the rover will wake up from its long slumber-that perhaps winds on Mars might have blown off some of the dust that covered the panels.

So on Tuesday night, they listened. They reminisced. But in the end, no response came. Opportunity would finally be declared dead on Sol 5352, as in five thousand, three hundred, and fifty-two days on Mars. NASA is expected to make it official at 2pm ET Wednesday, when NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and the chief of the agency's science division, Thomas Zurbuchen, convene a news conference.

Opportunity landed on Mars more than 15 Earth years ago, on January 25, 2004. So much time has passed since then. Facebook would not be created until a month later. YouTube would not get its first video upload for more than a year. George W. Bush was still in his first presidential term. NASA's Cassini spacecraft had not yet even arrived in the Saturn system.

And yet from that moment on, Opportunity and its sister rover Spirit began plugging along the surface of Mars. Originally designed for 90-day lifetimes, the rovers persisted. Spirit lasted until 2010, when its batteries were unable to keep the spacecraft's critical components from freezing.

Kept going and going

But Opportunity kept on keeping on amidst the harsh terrain. It roved a staggering 45.16 kilometers across the Red Planet, a distance unmatched by any rover on the Moon or Mars. In 2016, as it climbed a hill, Opportunity's tilt reached 32 degrees, the steepest ever for any rover on Mars.

The rover's primary task on Mars was to help better understand the planet's geology and understand the history of water there. It succeeded. In one discovery, for example, it found evidence of ancient hydrothermal vents that would have existed beneath a warm, shallow lake.

When the dust storm originally engulfed Opportunity last year, mission scientists were hopeful that they might yet recover the rover. Sure, it had to steer with just two instead of four wheels, and the rover was showing its age. But even then, its batteries had retained 85 percent of their original capacity. Now, though, NASA scientists know it will never emerge from Perseverance Valley, a feature carved into the rim of Endeavor Crater by flowing water in a distant age.

Spirit and Opportunity will not soon be forgotten. Their success led NASA to the development of larger rovers, including Curiosity and the forthcoming Mars 2020 rovers. Those two rovers carry considerably more scientific equipment and will probe deeper into Mars' watery past and whether it might have once supported life.

Most of all, perhaps, Spiritand Opportunity will be celebrated for their dogged survival in harsh conditions. One day-not in the movies but in real life-humans hopefully will visit the sites of these two rovers to marvel at their crude technology, dusty graves, and historic accomplishments. This would be humanity's best tribute to these two early Martian pioneers-that they were not the end of human exploration of Mars, but the beginning.

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Opportunity did not answer NASA's final call, and it's now lost to us

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Late Tuesday night, scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory sent their final data uplink to the Opportunity rover on Mars.

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Honeybees may have sesame seed-sized brains, but they're way smarter than scientists suspected. Stunning new research shows they can even do simple math, suggesting that our bigger brains aren't necessarily better or especially unique.

In the paper, published Wednesday in Science Advances, researchers described how they used color-coded shapes to train 14 honeybees to do simple arithmetic, as the video above details. When presented with a math problem and two possible solutions (one correct, one incorrect), these trained bees chose the correct option between 63.6 and 72.1 percent of the time - significantly more often than if they just chose at random.

This development calls the relationship between brain size and intelligence into further question, and it even makes scientists question whether math is really as "difficult" as we think.

"In the current study, the bees not only succeeded in performing these processing tasks but also had to perform the arithmetic operations in working memory," write the study's authors, led by Scarlett Howard, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research who conducted the research as a Ph.D. student at RMIT University in Australia. Howard was also the first author of a 2018 study showing that honeybees grasp the abstract mathematical concept of zero.

Scientists trained bees to do basic math, complicating what we know about brain size and brain power.

Of course, these honeybees didn't solve math problems like we do, with the questions written out in numerals with plus and minus symbols between them. Instead, they were taught to recognize colors as different operations - blue for addition and yellow for subtraction. Three blue shapes, for instance, meant the correct answer would be one greater - four. Three yellow shapes, meanwhile, meant the correct answer was one fewer - two.

The researchers write that these results are exciting because arithmetic is a complex cognitive process, requiring the bees to use both long-term memory to remember rules and short-term working memory to deal with the figures in front of them.

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In a Y-shaped maze, the bees were rewarded with sugar water for choosing correctly and were punished with a bitter quinine solution for choosing incorrectly. Since bees naturally want to seek food, they kept returning to forage and learn. The scientists observed each bee do this 100 times, as each one continuously became more accurate.

Scientists trained bees to do addition (bottom) and subtraction (top) based on the color of shapes.

Once they'd been trained, the bees were tested dozens more times, and in the end, they guessed correctly most of the time, regardless of whether they were adding or subtracting.

The researchers argue these results generally show the brain areas primates use for math - the posterior parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex - are not necessary for bees. While math itself may not be crucial to bees' survival, they write, the simultaneous use of long- and short-term memory has an evolutionary purpose when it comes to tasks like remembering the size, shape, and petal arrangement of flowers that are more nutritious.

"This important step in combining the arithmetic and symbolic learning abilities of an insect has identified numerous new areas for future research and also poses the question of whether these complex numeric understandings may be accessible to other species without large brains, such as the honeybee," the authors write.

Based on the results of this study, they argue that neither language nor numerical abilities are required for an animal to learn to do math. Maybe, it suggests, humans aren't so special after all.

Abstract: Many animals understand numbers at a basic level for use in essential tasks such as foraging, shoaling, and resource management. However, complex arithmetic operations, such as addition and subtraction, using symbols and/or labeling have only been demonstrated in a limited number of nonhuman vertebrates. We show that honeybees, with a miniature brain, can learn to use blue and yellow as symbolic representations for addition or subtraction. In a free-flying environment, individual bees used this information to solve unfamiliar problems involving adding or subtracting one element from a group of elements. This display of numerosity requires bees to acquire long-term rules and use short-term working memory. Given that honeybees and humans are separated by over 400 million years of evolution, our findings suggest that advanced numerical cognition may be more accessible to nonhuman animals than previously suspected.

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Honeybees That Solve Math Problems Challenge Supremacy of Human Brains

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Honeybees may have sesame seed-sized brains, but they're smarter than scientists suspected. New research shows they can even do simple math. This calls the relationship between brain size and intelligence into further question, and it even makes scientists question whether math is really as "difficult" as we think.

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Today marks the 35th anniversary of Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs unveiling the original Macintosh.

Jobs pulled the Macintosh out of a bag during Apple's annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984 at the Flint Center in Cupertino, California, grinning from ear to ear as the crowd erupted in applause.

Macintosh's very first words:

Hello, I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.

Unaccustomed as I am to public speaking, I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: NEVER TRUST A COMPUTER YOU CAN'T LIFT!

Obviously, I can talk, but right now I'd like to sit back and listen. So, it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who's been like a father to me... STEVE JOBS.

Two days earlier, Apple teased the Macintosh's introduction with its iconic "1984" ad during Super Bowl XVIII on CBS:

And here's a lesser-known video of Jobs introducing the Macintosh to the Boston Computer Society on January 30, 1984:

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Today marks the 35th anniversary of Apple's late co-founder Steve Jobs unveiling the original Macintosh. Jobs pulled the Macintosh out of a bag during Apple's annual shareholders meeting on January 24, 1984 at the Flint Center in Cupertino, California, grinning from ear to ear as the crowd erupted in applause.

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John Bogle, father of the index fund, dies at 89

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John Bogle, who created the first index fund in 1975 and founded The Vanguard Group, died Wednesday at the age of 89.

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With improved performance, 5G support, and built-in artificial intelligence, the Snapdragon 855 will be the processor powering a majority of flagship Android smartphones next year. Qualcomm announced the successor to the Snapdragon 845 (which is in most flagship 2018 phones) yesterday at its Snapdragon Tech Summit in Hawaii. Now, the company has shared more details about what we can expect from the new chipset.

The Snapdragon 855 is built to embrace a new wave of technologies expected to arise over the next few years, including 5G, mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and more. In fact, we already know of a phone to feature the new chip - at the event, OnePlus announced that its next flagship will be the first with the Snapdragon 855. Here's everything you need to know about the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 platform.

Ultrasonic fingerprint sensor

The Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 is designed to heighten the security of smartphones as we head into an era of in-display fingerprint sensors. As such, we can expect a whole lot more phones to feature in-display fingerprint sensors in 2019. While a few manufacturers have implemented in-display sensors before, they've so far been a little underdeveloped. That is because of the fact that they use optical sensors, which essentially take a photo of your finger and match it to a saved fingerprint to determine if you're you. There are a few problems with that. For starters, they aren't as secure considering they're two dimensional. Not only that, but they can take longer to unlock a device.

The Qualcomm 3D Sonic Sensor, on the other hand, bounces sound waves off of your finger to generate a 3D map of your fingerprint, including all the tiny ridges and bumps. Because it's 3D, it's much more secure, and because it uses sound waves instead of an optical sensor, it can see through contaminants on your finger. So, if you've just had lunch and your fingers are a little greasy, the sensor is much more likely to be able to read your fingerprint, compared to optical sensors that would see contaminants and not recognize the fingerprint. According to Qualcomm, the ultrasonic sensor is able to get a reading as deep as your pores - making it almost impossible to hack the sensor.

We don't know exactly what phones will feature this tech, but rumors indicate that Samsung will use an ultrasonic fingerprint sensor for the Samsung Galaxy S10 - and we expect other flagships in 2019 and beyond to do the same.

Performance

The Snapdragon 855, which is Qualcomm's first chipset to be built on a 7-nanometer process, features Qualcomm's new Kryo 485 CPU, which will reportedly deliver a 45 percent performance boost over previous-generation tech. Qualcomm has also switched to a slightly different architecture from the Snapdragon 845. There's one so-called "Prime Core," which delivers a clock speed of up to 2.84GHz. There are then three "performance cores," with up to 2.42GHz clock speeds. Last but not least are four "efficiency cores," with 1.8GHz clock speeds that are focused on battery-efficient tasks like background processes.

Graphics performance has also improved. The chipset features the new Adreno 640 GPU, which offers a 20 percent performance boost over the Snapdragon 845, and supports features such as HDR gaming and physically-based rendering. It also supports phone displays up to a 4K resolution, and up to two 4K HDR external displays. Things step up a bit for mixed reality too - in virtual reality, the Snapdragon 855 supports up to an 8K resolution at 120 frames per second. This improved GPU will be especially helpful when it comes to gaming, as there are algorithms in place to cut down on dropped frames by up to 90 percent.

Connectivity

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of the new Snapdragon 855 is that it works with Qualcomm's X50 5G modem, which is an option for manufacturers who want to implement 5G into new devices. In other words, the new chipset is expected to seriously accelerate the rollout of 5G, as carriers build out their 5G networks in 2019 and 2020. The modem supports both sub-6Ghz and mmWave frequency bands, which are the bands expected to help deliver super-fast 5G speeds. According to Qualcomm, with mmWave technology customers can expect to get data speeds up to 20 times faster than some current commercial solutions. These super-fast speeds will allow for things like real-time video collaboration and improved VR gaming, among other things.

5G isn't the only new connectivity supported by the Snapdragon 855. The new chipset also supports the new Wi-Fi 6 standard, which is faster than previous iterations of Wi-Fi, and offers lower latency. On top of that, the chipset supports 60GHz Wi-Fi, which Qualcomm says allows for speeds of up to a whopping 10Gbps.

Artificial intelligence

The Snapdragon 855 is built to deliver more intuitive on-device artificial intelligence features. Instead of sending information up to the cloud all the time, A.I. features like Google Assistant could use on-device processing to help users when they need it, without the need of a data connection. This should cut down on load times, and keep everything more secure and private. These new A.I. features are powered by Qualcomm's fourth-generation multi-core A.I. engine, which Qualcomm said is three times more powerful than the previous generation's engine. The Snapdragon 855 will boast "three times better A.I. performance" than the Snapdragon 845, and can process a massive 7 trillion operations per second.

In fact, on stage at the Snapdragon Summit event, Eddie Chung from Google's Augmented Reality team took to the stage to note that the Snapdragon 855 helps Google Lens achieve a lower latency, meter accuracy, and more.

Camera tech

Camera technology is becoming increasingly important in our smartphones, and the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 has an improved image signal processor (ISP) to help. The chipset incorporates Qualcomm's new Spectra 380 ISP, which is aimed at offering improved computer vision features. According to Qualcomm, the Spectra 380 ISP offers the world's first computer vision-based ISP. In other words, we should expect features like Google Lens to get a whole lot better on phones with the Snapdragon 855. According to Qualcomm, the Snapdragon 855 is capable of things like depth-sensing, image classification, and more, while offering power savings of up to 4 times. On top of that, the chipset supports new hardware-based depth sensing, which means users can do things like replace backgrounds in real time, in 4K HDR, and at a frame rate of 60 frames per second. Last but not least, the Snapdragon 855 supports the HEIF file format, which allows for the storage of video information like depth - which is helpful as we move into a world with smarter cameras.

The Snapdragon 855 supports up to two camera sensors up to 22 megapixels, or a single-sensor camera up to 48 megapixels. It also supports video capture of up to a 4K resolution at 60 frames per second, or 720p up to a whopping 480 frames per second.

Snapdragon Elite Gaming

The Snapdragon 855 is Qualcomm's first chipset to support the new Snapdragon Elite Gaming experience. This means the chipset supports color grading in true HDR, tone-mapping, physically-based rendering, and more. On top of that, the chipset supports the Vulkan 1.1 graphics library. According to Qualcomm, all this means that gaming will be far smoother and more powerful.

While we initially thought that Samsung's next flagship would be the first with the Snapdragon 855 given Samsung's manufacturing deal with Qualcomm, on stage at the Snapdragon Summit, it was announced that OnePlus' next flagship will be the first with the new Snapdragon 855. After that, we expect phones like the Samsung Galaxy S10 to feature the chip. Many Snapdragon 855 phones will likely debut at Mobile World Congress 2019, which kicks off at the end of February.
Updated on December 5, 2018: Added details about Qualcomm's ultrasonic fingerprint sensor.

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Qualcomm's 3D Sonic fingerprint sensor could make your next phone more secure

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Almost exactly a year after the launch of the Snapdragon 845, Qualcomm took the wraps off of its next-generation mobile platform, the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 855. The new chip puts an emphasis on A.I. performance, 5G, and computer vision, while naturally increasing performance and efficiency.

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Think about this: Someone could be born 20 hours after you but still be legally older because of time zones

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Think about this: Someone could be born 20 hours after you but still be legally older because of time zones

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The moon is 1/400th the size of the sun but also 1/400th the distance from Earth which results in the moon and the sun being the same size in the sky, a coincidence not shared by any other known planet-moon combination.

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The moon is 1/400th the size of the sun but also 1/400th the distance from Earth which results in the moon and the sun being the same size in the sky, a coincidence not shared by any other known planet-moon combination.

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Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Calculus.

The word alone is enough strike terror into the hearts of even the most accomplished students, but for those who break out in cold sweats at the thought of differentiation rules and integral tables, Philip Sadler and Gerhard Sonnert are here to offer some hope.

Contrary to widely-held opinion, taking high school calculus isn't necessary for success later in college calculus-what's more important is mastering the prerequisites, algebra, geometry, and trigonometry-that lead to calculus. That's according to a study of more than 6,000 college freshmen at 133 colleges carried out by the Science Education Department of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, led by Sadler, the Frances W. Wright Senior Lecturer on Astronomy, and by Sonnert, a Research Associate.In addition, the survey finds that weaker math students who choose to take calculus in high school actually get the most benefit from the class. The study is described in a May 2018 paper published in the Journal for Research in Mathematics Education.

"We study the transition from high school to college, and on one side of that there are college professors who say calculus is really a college subject, but on the other side there are high school teachers who say calculus is really helpful for their students, and the ones who want to be scientists and engineers get a lot out of it," Sadler said. "We wanted to see if we could settle that argument-which is more important, the math that prepares you for calculus or a first run-through when you're in high school followed by a more serious course in college?"

The study's results, Sadler said, provided a clear answer -a firmer grip on the subjects that led up to calculus had twice the impact of taking the subject in high school. And of those who did take calculus in high school, it was the weakest students who got the most from the class.

To get those findings, Sadler and Sonnert, designed a study that asked thousands of college freshmen to report not only demographic information, but their educational history, background and mathematics training.

"They fill out the detailed survey at the beginning of the semester...and there's a field on the last page where the faculty member can put their grade," Sonnert said. "Then the professors remove the first page with the student's name and we get their final grade and all the self-reported information."

"We looked at how students did in college calculus...and tried to figure out what the predictive influence of taking a calculus course in high school was versus mastering those pre-calculus subjects," Sadler said. "So, we looked at how those students did in algebra, geometry, and pre-calculus subjects like trigonometry, as well as their SAT and ACT scores, and we combined those into one factor.

That gave us a composite measure of how much they know of the math that's preparatory for calculus," he continued. "Then we looked at the students who had taken the subject in high school and built a statistical model to separate the two."

While it's difficult to pin down an exact reason for why weaker students who took calculus in high school get the most out of it, Sadler suggested that part of the difference may be chalked up to the educational environment of high school calculus.

A high school class, he said, might have just 15 or 20 students, each of whom likely receives constant support from their teacher and homework assignments are turned in daily.

"In some ways, the high school class is probably better supported," Sadler said. "In high school, if you are not doing your work, there is an interim grade that goes home to your parents (so intervention happens when you need it.)"

By the time they arrive in college, however, students might be one of several hundred in a lecture hall, and their only opportunity for one-on-one contact with the professor comes during office hours. In some cases, attending sections and even completing problem sets is optional, so unless students make an effort to seek out tutoring help, it's easy to fall behind.

"Even Harvard students run into this-they have trouble with learning how to be an independent learner," Sadler said. "But one other difference is that in college the professor just assumes you know all the prerequisites, and if you don't, or you're not really solid in them, then what do you do? They won't go back and cover the things that you may be missing like a teacher can do in high school."

Another reason weaker math students take more from a high school calculus class, Sadler and Sonnert suggested, may be similar-though they may not receive top marks, the high school class gives them a chance to bone up on the basics, so by the time they get to college those students have a stronger mathematical foundation on which to build.

"To some extent, it's like learning a foreign language," Sonnert said. "The more you're exposed to it, the more you do it every day, the more sentences you say, the better your sentences are. So, there may be this practice effect and facility with it that only comes in a college class."

Ultimately, Sadler said, the study's findings don't suggest that students should drop high school calculus altogether, but rather shows that success in the subject-whether in high school or college-comes more from having a strong foundation. That foundation starts early and every year of great math teaching, even as far back as Algebra I in eighth grade, contributes to math proficiency that pays off in college.

"The one thing the paper says is if your background is strong, if you really know your algebra, geometry and pre-calculus, you're going to do well in college calculus," Sadler said. "You don't need a high school calculus course. That was a surprise. There is no reason that those new to calculus should not take the course in college, in spite of half the students in class having taken it in high school."

"There are always these kinds of arguments in education, where people have very strong views based primarily on personal experience, and we specialize in investigating those views," Sadler said. "As it turns out, in this case, the professors are more right than high school teachers, because how well students did in courses before calculus makes the biggest difference in their college calculus grade. But, the heavy-lifting is done by those math teachers whose efforts lay the foundation for later student success."

Provided by: Harvard University

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Study finds that mastering prerequisites-not taking calculus in high school-better predicts success in college

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Calculus. The word alone is enough strike terror into the hearts of even the most accomplished students, but for those who break out in cold sweats at the thought of differentiation rules and integral tables, Philip Sadler and Gerhard Sonnert are here to offer some hope.

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Traffic flow measured on 30 different 4-way junctions

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Wearables are all the rage for us humans, delivering all kinds of useful information about our bodies and surroundings. Now, scientists from the University of Washington have developed a wearable system for a much, much smaller creature. Engineers from the university created tiny sensor-packed "backpacks" for bumblebees.

As you might have guessed, the devices don't deliver any information to the bees themselves, but instead funnel data back to researchers for a variety of purposes. With tiny rechargeable batteries that last for around seven hours, the backpacks collect data about location as well as temperature and humidity. These metrics can be used to paint a picture of the health of plant life in a given area, and it's all collected without the use of robotic drones.

As the researchers explain, drones are great at collecting useful data about crop health and other environmental statistics but they burn through battery power too fast to make them viable. Bees, on the other hand, fly for hours and hours, and a sensor small enough to be carried by an insect can passively collect data as the bug goes about its business.

"Drones can fly for maybe 10 or 20 minutes before they need to charge again, whereas our bees can collect data for hours," Shyam Gollakota, associate professor at University of Washington and co-author of the work, said in a statement. "We showed for the first time that it's possible to actually do all this computation and sensing using insects in lieu of drones."

The backpack itself weighs just 102 milligrams, which the scientists say is roughly the weight of seven grains of dry rice. The small batteries in the backpacks are recharged after the insects return to their hive in the evening, at which point the data gathered by the sensors is also collected.

The team says data like this could be used to help farmers track the health of their crops by seeing where the bees are traveling and at what times.

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Bees can wear backpacks now thanks to the University of Washington

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Wearables are all the rage for us humans, delivering all kinds of useful information about our bodies and surroundings. Now, scientists from the University of Washington have developed a wearable system for a much, much smaller creature. Engineers from the university created tiny sensor-packed "backpacks" for bumblebees.

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2019 is going to be the year of 5G-at least, that's what the cellular industry keeps saying. We're going to see the launch of several 5G smartphones from OEMs like Samsung, Motorola, and OnePlus, and carriers will be tripping over themselves to tell you how awesome their new 5G networks are despite coming with a slew of asterisks. I would like to make something up about how ridiculous the 5G hype has gotten, but it's hard to top actual quotes from industry executives, like Verizon's claim that 5G will "dramatically improve our global society." Faster mobile Internet is coming, but should you care about it yet?

Qualcomm recently had its big 2019 chip announcement, and as the world's biggest provider of smartphone chips, that gives us a good idea of what the upcoming 5G hardware will look like. The industry is doing its best to hype 5G up as The Next Big Thing™, but 5G hardware in 2019 is going to be a decidedly first-generation affair. Early adopters for 5G will have to accept all manner of tradeoffs. And when there might not even be 5G reception in your area, it might be better to just wait the whole thing out for a year or two.

A 5G mmWave primer: Making use of the spectrum that nobody wanted

"5G" is a shorthand reference to the next generation of cellular network technology that is launching in 2019. The whole "G" naming scheme started in the 1990s with the launch of GSM, which was called the "second generation"-aka "2G"-of mobile networking technology. GSM upgraded early networks from analog to digital, and those old analog networks were retroactively given the name "1G." Since then, we've gotten new "G" numbers with major coordinated network upgrades about every 10 years. These iterations brought important features like SMS and MMS messages, IP-based networking and mobile Internet, and, of course, more speed.

Today, modern smartphones run on "4G" LTE, which operates somewhere in the 450MHz to 5.9GHz range. The move to 5G will include improvements to the existing LTE infrastructure, but the defining characteristic of 5G is the addition of a new chunk of spectrum in the 24GHz to 90GHz range. The industry has settled on calling this new 5G spectrum "mmWave" (millimeter wave), and it's going to require new hardware in your phone, new hardware on the towers, and big changes to current phone and network designs.

We're used to these "G" network upgrades coming with a compelling sales pitch about how much better everything is going to be, but the move to 5G mmWave is not a slam-dunk argument. Since mmWave runs at a significantly higher frequency than LTE, that means it comes with no shortage of tradeoffs. MmWave has worse range and worse penetration compared to LTE. A mmWave signal can be blocked by buildings, trees, and even your hand. MmWave doesn't work well in the rain or fog, and the ~60GHz chunk of this spectrum can actually be absorbed by oxygen. That's right-a slice of mmWave spectrum can be blocked by the air.

With so many issues to overcome, mmWave sounds like a terrible chunk of spectrum to build a mobile network in until you consider two key points: the higher-frequency means mmWave has plenty of bandwidth and low latency if you can get it, and most of all, the spectrum is available. MmWave isn't being used for much right now because it is such a pain in the butt to work with. So if you can figure out all the implementation problems, you suddenly have a vast amount of airspace to work with. That's actually the first thing these companies talk about when they bring up mmWave. It's all going to be really, really hard and complicated, they say, but it's going to be worth it.

LTE debuted in 2011, and these past seven years have seen significant progress in making 4G smartphone hardware smaller, faster, and more efficient. With 5G, we're going to lose plenty of this technical maturity initially by packing in tons of new and expensive 5G hardware.

Discrete 5G modems-More components, more power usage, smaller batteries

Smartphones today are almost entirely powered by a single chip, appropriately called an "SoC" or " System on a Chip." As the name suggests, these are the most basic parts you need to make a computer all on a single, tiny chip. There are usually lots of CPU cores, a GPU, an "ISP" for camera functionality, Wi-Fi, and more. RAM isn't technically included on this chip, but to save space, the RAM actually gets stacked on top of the SoC. The main off-SoC component is the storage, and across the motherboard there will typically be a sprinkling of tiny chips for power management, audio, Bluetooth, NFC, and other things. From there, it's the motherboard's job to connect everything to everything else and then get the hell out of the way so that as much as the phone as possible can be filled with battery.

The point is that space is at a premium inside a smartphone, and while you can't do much to control the size of core components like the SoC, camera, SIM card, or USB port, the battery is the one part that can be as large or as small as you want it to be. When you think "size" in a smartphone, you should think "battery." Anything that gets bigger means less battery. Anything that adds an extra component means less battery. The battery gets all the leftover space in a smartphone. (This is, basically, the headphone jack argument.)

These past few years, smartphone manufacturers have all been trying to convince us that we don't need a headphone jack, and the argument has been that removing them means less complexity and more space for battery. Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan even put a number to this argument: he said that skipping a headphone jack in the Razer Phone meant the company could increase the battery capacity by 500mAh.

Why does this matter in an article about 5G? The short answer is that 5G mmWave is going to require a lot more hardware than 4G, which brings up all of these battery size and device-complexity concerns.

Qualcomm's biggest advantage in the 4G era has been its modems. Through a combination of technology knowhow and intellectual property rights, Qualcomm is the only chip maker that can combine an SoC and modem into a single chip and sell it around the world at a low price.

This single-chip solution is a huge advantage, resulting in a smaller, less-complex, cheaper motherboard and more room for battery. Merging everything into a single chip also results in power savings while the phone is running, since, generally, one chip takes less power than two chips. For years, Qualcomm users have enjoyed SoCs with onboard 4G LTE modems, and the company rode this design advantage to market domination. Today, as a high-end SoC vendor, Qualcomm is basically a monopoly, with nearly every Android flagship using a Qualcomm SoC.

Qualcomm recently showed off its flagship SoC for 2019, the Snapdragon 855. While the company spent hours beyond measure hyping up the Snapdragon 855's 5G compatibility, it won't actually have a 5G mmWave modem onboard. The 855 will have LTE onboard, as usual, but 5G phones will need a separate modem-Qualcomm is going to lose its single-chip advantage for 5G. As explained above, this means less battery and more power usage.

We've already lived through the whole "first-gen network hardware" routine before. When the switch to 4G happened, the first batch of new 4G hardware arrived with the same discrete modem compromise that we'll see with 5G. The most famous example was the HTC Thunderbolt, the first 4G device on Verizon's network. This used Qualcomm's Snapdragon MSM8655 SoC (before the simplified model numbers!) with a separate Qualcomm MDM9600 LTE modem. The Thunderbolt was a disaster, since it included all this new 4G hardware with only a 1400mAh battery. It was thick, hot, slow, buggy, and had terrible battery life. The Thunderbolt regularly makes lists of "the worst phones of all time," and one HTC employee even apologized for the phone's creation. New network hardware can be a disaster if you do it wrong.

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Don't buy a 5G smartphone-at least, not for a while

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2019 is going to be the year of 5G-at least, that's what the cellular industry keeps saying. We're going to see the launch of several 5G smartphones from OEMs like Samsung, Motorola, and OnePlus, and carriers will be tripping over themselves to tell you how awesome their new 5G networks are despite coming with a slew of asterisks.

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Credit: Brian Kenney/Shutterstock

For a few minutes on Jan. 23, 2017, the coldest spot in the known universe was a tiny microchip hovering 150 miles over Kiruna, Sweden.

The chip was small - about the size of a postage stamp - and loaded with thousands of tightly-packed rubidium-87 atoms. Scientists launched that chip into space aboard an unpiloted, 40-foot-long (12 meters) rocket, then bombarded it with lasers until the atoms inside it cooled to minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius) - a fraction of a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, the coldest possible temperature in nature.

While the rocket bobbed in low gravity for the following 6 minutes, scientists were given a rare opportunity to study in-depth the weirdest, least-understood state of matter in the universe - the Bose-Einstein condensate. For the first time ever, scientists had created one in space.

Unlike the other four states of matter (solids, liquids, gases and plasmas), Bose-Einstein condensates can form only when clouds of gassy atoms cool to within a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. When groups of atoms are cooled to such unfathomably low temperatures, they stop moving as individuals and meld into one big "super atom." Tens of thousands of atoms suddenly become indistinguishable from one another, slowly vibrating on a uniform wavelength that can, theoretically, pick up the tiniest gravitational disturbances around them.

That hyper-sensitivity makes Bose-Einstein condensates promising tools for detecting gravitational waves - disturbances in the curvature of space-time created by collisions between supermassive objects like black holes and neutron stars. The trouble is, when scientists create Bose-Einstein condensates in terrestrial labs, they have just a few seconds to study them before the blob of homogenous matter falls to the bottom of its container and breaks apart.

Researchers sometimes try to buy themselves a few extra seconds by dropping Bose-Einstein condensates from tall towers, but this method is not sustainable for long-term study. Studying Bose-Einstein condensates in low or no gravity would be much more effective. (NASA recently set up a Cold Atom Laboratory on the International Space Station for just this purpose.)

This tiny microchip became the coldest spot in the known universe for 6 minutes on Jan. 23, 2017, as it hovered over Kiruna, Sweden.

Credit: DLR Aerospace Center

That brings us back to our rocket, and our very cold chip. When the chip-full-of-atoms was launched into space last January as part of the Matter-Wave Interferometry in Microgravity (MAIUS 1) experiment, scientists on the ground knew they had a few precious minutes to study it once the atoms inside froze. Using a compact laboratory built into the rocket, the team ran 110 lickety-split experiments on the chip to better understand how gravity affects atom trapping and cooling, and how Bose-Einstein condensates behave in free fall.

Among their results published in the Oct. 17 edition of the journal Nature, the researchers found that slicing up and reassembling Bose-Einstein condensates could be a key tool in detecting elusive gravitational waves. In one experiment, the team sliced their condensate cloud in half with a laser, then watched the halves recombine. Because both halves of the cloud share the exact same quantum state and move as a continuous wave, any differences in the two halves after recombination could indicate that an external influence altered that state. According to the researchers, the presence of gravitational waves could be one such influence.

If all this talk of chips and groundbreaking science is making you hungry for more, the good news is there's a lot more Bose-Einstein condensate research to be done, on Earth and above it. For now, the researchers behind the MAIUS I mission currently have two sequels in the works. Stay tuned (and bundle up).

Originally published on Live Science.

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Scientists Create Rare Fifth Form of Matter in Space for the First Time Ever

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For a few minutes on Jan. 23, 2017, the coldest spot in the known universe was a tiny microchip hovering 150 miles over Kiruna, Sweden.

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Alibaba on Sunday tore through last year's Singles Day sales record, racking up more than $30.8 billion in the 24-hour shopping event.

Gross merchandise value (GMV), a figure that shows sales across the Chinese e-commerce giant's various shopping platforms, surpassed last year's $25.3 billion record at around 5:34 p.m. SIN/HK (4:34 a.m. ET) on Sunday, and kept marching higher through the rest of the day.

In Chinese currency terms, GMV totaled 213.5 billion yuan, easily beating last year's figure of 168.2 billion yuan and representing a nearly 27 percent year-on-year rise. That was, however, smaller than the 39 percent year-on-year growth recorded in 2017.

Alibaba's Singles Day GMV beat last year's figure in yuan terms earlier than it toppled the dollar record. The Chinese currency is weaker against the greenback from a year ago, which means more sales in yuan are required to get the same dollar amount.

It was the 10th edition of the annual Singles Day event, which is also called the Double 11 shopping festival because it falls on Nov. 11. During the 24-hour period, Alibaba offered huge discounts across its e-commerce sites such as Tmall.

Alibaba's Singles Day sales haul easily exceeded the spending by consumers during any single U.S. shopping holiday.

The event got off to a strong start with sales hitting $1 billion in one minute and 25 seconds. Just over an hour in, and sales exceeded $10 billion, five minutes and 21 seconds faster than last year. The number of delivery orders surpassed a billion.

Alibaba introduced new aspects into this year's Singles Day. Lazada, a Singapore-based e-commerce site that has operations across Southeast Asia and is majority-owned by Alibaba, hosted its own sales. And Ele.me, Alibaba's food delivery platform, provided delivery for select Starbucks stores across 11 Chinese cities. Starbucks struck a deal earlier this year with Alibaba to work together in China.

'New retail focus'

Alibaba hosted a gala featuring celebrities including Miranda Kerr and Mariah Carey which kicked off on Saturday and went through to the end of the 11:11 event. Company founder Jack Ma also made an appearance at the media event which marked the start of Singles Day, but he did not give a speech.

The Chinese giant is putting a big focus this year on a strategy it calls "new retail," which aims to bring together the online parts of its business with the offline. For example, it has a chain of grocery stores called Hema which allow users to go in and shop, pay with their phone and walk out. The Starbucks deal is part of the new retail strategy.

"When we talk about new retail, we strongly believe that online commercial world and offline brick mortars are not separate worlds. And if you look at the customer base today, everyone is living in the internet. Everybody is the internet user. You have the same customer base. You must have the same commercial world. It's all about how to innovate online and offline to a whole digitalized commercial world," Zhang told CNBC.

Headwinds

Singles Day could provide some relief to investors amid concerns that the U.S.-China trade war and stock market drops in the mainland have hit Chinese consumer appetite. Alibaba is facing a number of headwinds with shares down nearly 16 percent this year due to weakening investors sentiment towards Chinese technology companies because of the trade war. And the company recently cut its revenue guidance for the fiscal year.

Ahead of Singles Day, Daniel Zhang, CEO of Alibaba told CNBC in an exclusive interview that aired earlier this week, that the U.S.-China trade tensions could be an opportunity for the firm.

"Well, I would say nobody likes trade war and nobody likes the uncertainty of the economic condition. But what we always do is that to try to find opportunities in the tough time. If people have some pain points, this means some opportunities. How to help people in the tough time to get more business, not only in China but also in the global markets," Zhang told CNBC.

"For Alibaba, we always think about our mission, which is make it easy to do business anywhere. I think it's more relevant today in this condition," he added.

Alibaba also pledged last week to help businesses sell $200 billion worth of goods to China in the next five year.

WATCH: Singles Day is like the 'Olympics' for some

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Alibaba sets new Singles Day record with more than $30.8 billion in sales in 24 hours

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Alibaba on Sunday tore through last year's Singles Day sales record, racking up more than $30.8 billion in the 24-hour shopping event. Gross merchandise value (GMV), a figure that shows sales across the Chinese e-commerce giant's various shopping platforms, surpassed last year's $25.3 billion record at around 5:34 p.m.

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On November 21, 2008, Apple released iPhone OS 2.2 to users in Japan, introducing an emoji keyboard and emoji characters for the first time ever on an iPhone. At the time, the latest iPhone to be released was the iPhone 3G, which launched in June 2008 with iPhone OS 2.

The emoji keyboard in 2008 (left) vs 2018 (right), via Jeremy Burge/Emojipedia

Emojipedia has provided an in-depth look today at the first iPhone emojis, explaining that despite Apple's decision to restrict the emoji keyboard to Japan in iPhone OS 2.2, some apps unlocked the keyboard for users outside of Japan. This was the first time that third-party apps were even available on iPhone, since iPhone OS 2.2 also introduced the App Store.
The launch within iPhone OS 2.2 predated emoji support in the Unicode Standard, which now makes the characters universally interchangeable between devices and operating systems.

Apple's 2008 emoji implementation was based on the set used by Japanese carrier Softbank, and the influence on many of these designs is clear.

Even moreso-much the the chagrin of some-Apple's emoji font has gone on to dominate public expectation of what an emoji should look like.

While Apple does not dictate which emojis are approved by Unicode, it is reasonable to wonder that without Apple's strong color emoji support in these earlier years, whether we would see it as the cultural phenomenon it has become today.

Emojis then gained traction in iOS 4 and Mac OS X Lion, but these were still not widely supported across regions. Not until iOS 5 in 2011 did Apple introduce the emoji keyboard setting that allowed anyone around the world to access the characters by tapping the Globe icon on the iOS keyboard. In 2012, Apple introduced 376 new emojis with iOS 6 and switched to Unicode-compatible code points for the emojis.

iPhone OS 2.2 emojis from 2008

One of the latest updates on the emoji timeline came in 2015, when Apple introduced new emojis for the first time in three years with iOS 8.3. This was the year that Apple also enabled the emoji keyboard to all iOS users by default, whereas before each user had to go into the Settings app, find the keyboard settings, and manually add the emoji keyboard.
In total, the number of emojis has increased from 471 in 2008 to 2,776 in 2018, thanks to the introduction of swappable genders and skin tones. Head over to Emojipedia for more details about the emoji anniversary, and to check out a long list of changes that some of the emojis have had over the years.

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Today is the 10th Anniversary of Emoji on iPhone

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On November 21, 2008, Apple released iPhone OS 2.2 to users in Japan, introducing an emoji keyboard and emoji characters for the first time ever on an iPhone. At the time, the latest iPhone to be released was the iPhone 3G, which launched in June 2008 with iPhone OS 2.

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Researchers at MIT have developed a plane capable of flying without any moving parts, reports MIT Technology Review. The feat was achieved using electroaerodynamic propulsion, which uses a pair of electrodes to push around ions and create ionic wind. The phenomenon has been known about since the 1960s (in fact, Apple even considered using it to cool its laptops back in 2012), but this is the first time it's been used to propel a plane.

That said, this 'plane' is an uncrewed model weighing just 2.45 kilograms. Scaling it up to the size of commercial aircraft would give it numerous safety, noise levels, maintenance, and environmental benefits over traditional planes, but doing so comes with enormous challenges. For one, the battery required to supply the necessary 40,000 volts the propulsion system requires would be massive, creating huge weight challenges that the design would need to overcome.

Instead of entirely powering a passenger plane, the researchers speculate that the technology could be used to power smaller drones. Alternatively, one of the researchers theorizes that it could be used in combination with traditional plane engines to make the overall craft more fuel efficient by reenergizing the air that passes over the aircraft and eliminating drag.

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MIT researchers create plane that flies without any moving parts

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Researchers at MIT have developed a plane capable of flying without any moving parts. The feat was achieved using electroaerodynamic propulsion, which uses a pair of electrodes to push around ions and create ionic wind. The phenomenon has been known about since the 1960s but this is the first time it's been used to propel a plane.

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Japan will soon be out of pagers after its only provider said Monday it will terminate the service next September, with the device - first introduced half a century ago - made redundant by mobile phones.

Around 1,500 customers have remained subscribers to Tokyo Telemessage Inc., including people working in hospitals who favor the device because it doesn't emit electromagnetic waves.

The company's current service area covers Saitama, Kanagawa and Chiba prefectures as well as Tokyo.

Tokyo Telemessage is planning to start a new radio service using the frequencies that were allocated to pagers. President Hidetoshi Seino said it will provide governments in other regions with information to help manage disaster relief operations more efficiently.

Beeper services began in Tokyo's 23 wards in July 1968 with Telephone Public Corp., a predecessor of NTT Corp., and eventually spread nationwide.

They aroused strong demand from hospitals, businesses and government offices, with the number of subscribers topping 10 million in 1996.

The popularity of pagers grew in the 1990s with female high school students becoming ardent fans; they came up with clever number combinations to exchange messages.

For example, the feature allowed users to send short numerical messages such as "0840," which in the Japanese language can be pronounced as " ohayō" (good morning). Other messages following this pattern included "0833," or " oyasumi" (good night) and "0906," or " okureru " (I'll be late).

The wireless devices were also featured in TV series and songs at the time, becoming a symbol of the age.

The number of pager service subscribers peaked at 10.61 million in 1996. But around that time use of mobile phones increased, supplanting beepers. One provider after another ended their service in the years that followed.

NTT Docomo Inc., the mobile unit of NTT, terminated its pager service in 2007, leaving only regional operators such as Tokyo Telemessage in the business.

Last year, Okinawa Telemessage, based in Naha, Okinawa Prefecture, ended its service.

Tokyo Telemessage once filed for bankruptcy but was purchased by another firm and has continued its pager service.

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Turning the page on an era: Pager services to end in Japan after 50 years | The Japan Times

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Japan will soon be out of pagers after its only provider said Monday it will terminate the service next September, with the device - first introduced half a century ago - made redundant by mobile phones. Around 1,500 customers have remained subscribers to Tokyo Telemessage Inc., including people working in hospitals who favor the device because it doesn't emit electromagnetic waves.

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Bitcoin mining could cancel out climate change efforts, scientists say | CBC News

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Bitcoin mining could cancel out climate change efforts, scientists say | CBC News

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Demand for bitcoin could single-handedly derail efforts to limit global warming because the increasingly popular digital currency takes huge amounts of energy to produce, scientists said on Monday.

Producing bitcoin at a pace with growing demand could by 2033 defeat the aim of limiting global warming to 2 C, according to U.S. research published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Almost 200 nations agreed in Paris in 2015 on the goal to keep warming to "well below" a rise of 2 C above pre-industrial times.

But mining, the process of producing bitcoins by solving mathematical equations, uses high-powered computers and a lot of electricity, the researchers said.

"Currently, the emissions from transportation, housing and food are considered the main contributors to ongoing climate change," said study co-author Katie Taladay in a statement. "This research illustrates that bitcoin should be added to this list."

Mining is a lucrative business, with one bitcoin currently selling for about $8,300.

In 2017, bitcoin production and usage emitted an estimated 69 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, the researchers said.

That year, bitcoin was involved in less than 0.5 per cent of the world's cashless transactions, they said.

As the currency becomes more common, researchers said it could use enough electricity to emit about 230 gigatonnes of carbon within a decade and a half. One gigatonne is equal to one billion tonnes of carbon.

"No matter how you slice it, that thing is using a lot of electricity. That means bad business for the environment," Camilo Mora, another co-author, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Bitcoin mining, however, is becoming more energy efficient, said Katrina Kelly-Pitou, research associate at the University of Pittsburgh.

She said bitcoin miners are moving away from sites such as China, with coal-generated electricity, to more environmentally friendly utilities in Iceland and the United States.

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Bitcoin mining could cancel out climate change efforts, scientists say | CBC News

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Demand for bitcoin could single-handedly derail efforts to limit global warming because the increasingly popular digital currency takes huge amounts of energy to produce, scientists say.

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New Thin, Light VR Gloves Provide Haptic Feedback | Digital Trends

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New Thin, Light VR Gloves Provide Haptic Feedback | Digital Trends

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Virtual reality can be a truly immersive experience, but a touch of an object in the virtual world doesn't quite equate to a physical touch you would expect in real life. That is exactly what scientists from EPFL and ETH Zurich have worked to address with newly developed thin and light VR gloves.

Called Dextres, the glove comes in at less than 8 grams per finger and allows for haptic feedback in "unparalleled" freedom of movement when touching objects in the virtual world. The glove is also 2mm thick and is currently powered by a thin electrical cable. However, the system is low voltage and the scientists developing the project are working to use a very small battery instead.

Designed of a nylon material, the glove features thin elastic metal strips over the fingers. Those strips are separated by a thin insulator, which can react whenever contact is made with a virtual object. As part of the reaction, an onboard controller applies a shock to the metal strips, which causes them to stick together. That, in turn, creates a braking force which then blocks the movement of the fingers, signaling that a virtual object is being held. Once the virtual object is dropped, the voltage is then again removed to allow movements once again.

"The human sensory system is highly developed and highly complex. We have many different kinds of receptors at a very high density in the joints of our fingers and embedded in the skin. As a result, rendering realistic feedback when interacting with virtual objects is a very demanding problem and is currently unsolved. Our work goes one step in this direction, focusing particularly on kinesthetic feedback," Otmar Hilliges, head of the Advanced Interactive Technologies Lab at ETH Zurich, said in a statement.

The Dextres glove improves on current VR gloves by removing a bulky exoskeleton, pumps, and thick cables. It is a step in the right direction and researchers are looking to scale up the glove and bring it to other parts of the body using conductive fabric. Though just a concept for now, the technology definitely looks promising for gamers and the augmented reality field. It might even be something that NASA can use in training.

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New Thin, Light VR Gloves Provide Haptic Feedback | Digital Trends

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Virtual Reality can be a truly immersive experience, but a touch of an object in the virtual world doesn't quite equate to a physical touch you would expect. That is exactly what scientists from EPFL and ETH Zurich have worked to address with newly developed thin and light VR gloves.

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There are numbers that can theoretically be said but are so long that we physically can't live long enough to say.

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The likely scale of the largest supermassive black hole known, S5 0014+81, compared to the size of our Solar System

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The likely scale of the largest supermassive black hole known, S5 0014+81, compared to the size of our Solar System

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Lyft's $299 All-Access service is available across the US

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Lyft's $299 All-Access service is available across the US

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That's a gigantic amount to pay per month, but Lyft is wagering that it's ultimately less expensive than owning and maintaining a car. You might save as much as 59 percent a month, it claimed. You're also at the mercy of availability, but that won't necessarily be an issue if you live in a major urban area and would otherwise have to grapple with fuel, parking and repair costs.

The company positions this as part of its quest to reduce the need for personal car ownership and a way of freeing you from driving. Why pay extra and stress during your daily commute? It's also a shrewd business strategy, though. Like in other industries, subscriptions are a way of generating a steady stream of revenue from customers that might not spend so much if they had to pay per use. And importantly, it's a competitive weapon against Uber. If your rides typically cost between $10 to $15, you're saving money -- you'll be less likely to use Lyft's rival if you know you're getting a better deal.

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Lyft's $299 All-Access service is available across the US

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That's a gigantic amount to pay per month, but Lyft is wagering that it's ultimately less expensive than owning and maintaining a car. You might save as much as 59 percent a month, it claimed.

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World’s Fastest Camera Captures 10 Trillion Frames Per Second

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World’s Fastest Camera Captures 10 Trillion Frames Per Second

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Researchers have developed the world's fastest camera that can capture 10 trillion frames per seconds. That speed is thousands of times faster than conventional high-speed cameras.

The new high-speed camera, called T-CUP, can literally freeze time and makes it possible to see incredibly rapid processes even light in extremely slow motion.

Many phenomena in chemistry, physics and biology have not been captured before. In order to observe them, a camera requires a way to record images in real time at a very short temporal resolution. No current camera is fast and sensitive enough to perform this job.

Compressed ultra-fast photography (CUP) served as a starting point for the new super-fast camera. CUP is a dynamic imaging technique that can capture 100 billion frames per second. Still, it is not capable of integrating ultra-short pulses in femtosecond range. To overcome this limitation, researchers developed a femtosecond streak camera that also incorporates a data acquisition system used in applications such as tomography.

"We knew that by using only a femtosecond streak camera, the image quality would be limited," said Professor Lihong Wang, the Bren Professor of Medial Engineering and Electrical Engineering at Caltech. "So to improve this, we added another camera that acquires a static image. Combined with the image acquired by the femtosecond streak camera, we can use what is called a Radon transformation to obtain high-quality images while recording ten trillion frames per second."

The ultra-fast camera set the world record for imaging speed by capturing the temporal focusing of a single femtosecond laser pulse in real time. This process was recorded in 25 frames taken at an interval of 400 femtoseconds and shows the light pulse's shape, intensity and angle of inclination in a remarkable detail. Speeds like this hold great promise for studying previously unexplored complex ultra-fast processes.

"It's an achievement in itself," said lead author Jinyang Liang, who was an engineer for Caltech Optical Imaging Laboratory (COIL). "But we already see possibilities for increasing the speed to up to one quadrillion (10 exp 15) frames per second!"

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World's Fastest Camera Captures 10 Trillion Frames Per Second

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Researchers have developed the world's fastest camera that can capture 10 trillion frames per seconds. That speed is thousands of times faster than conventional high-speed cameras. The new high-speed camera, called T-CUP, can literally freeze time and makes it possible to see incredibly rapid processes even light in extremely slow motion.

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Pixar: The math behind the movies - Tony DeRose - YouTube

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Pixar: The math behind the movies - Tony DeRose - YouTube

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Pixar: The math behind the movies - Tony DeRose

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Cool Jobs: The art of paper folding is inspiring science

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See how bringing art and math together led to the development of robo-roaches, self-folding papers and medical implants.

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1x1 One Handed Solve 0.07 Secs - YouTube

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1x1 One Handed Solve 0.07 Secs - YouTube

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Facebook's AI Just Set A New Record In Translation And Why It Matters

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Facebook's AI Just Set A New Record In Translation And Why It Matters

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Research at Facebook just made it easier to translate between languages without many translation examples. For example, from Urdu to English.
Neural Machine Translation
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is the field concerned with using AI to translate between any language such as English and French. In 2015 researchers at the Montreal Institute of Learning Algorithms, developed new AI techniques [1] which allowed machine-generated translations to finally work. Almost overnight, systems like Google Translate became orders of magnitude better.

While that leap was significant, it still required having sentence pairs in both languages, for example, "I like to eat" (English) and "me gusta comer" (Spanish). For translations between languages like Urdu and English without many of these pairs, translation systems failed miserably. Since then, researchers have been building systems that can translate without sentence pairings, ie: Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (UNMT).

In the past year, researchers at Facebook, NYU, University of the Basque Country and Sorbonne Universites, made dramatic advancements which are finally enabling systems to translate without knowing that "house" means "casa" in Spanish.

Just a few days ago, Facebook AI Research (FAIR), published a paper [2] showing a dramatic improvement which allowed translations from languages like Urdu to English. "To give some idea of the level of advancement, an improvement of 1 BLEU point (a common metric for judging the accuracy of MT) is considered a remarkable achievement in this field; our methods showed an improvement of more than 10 BLEU points."
Why this matters
Labeled data is often the largest bottleneck in AI systems. This means we'd have to pay humans to do manual translations which can be prohibitively time consuming and expensive. The advancements this recent paper highlights can provide new ways of training systems without needing to generate this labeled data. Some examples could be, determining if there's a cat in a photo without any examples of photos labeled as "cat" or question-answer systems where the system isn't told the correct answer.

From a social sciences perspective, it could allow us to translate documents written in lost languages, or allow new devices that can translate between rare languages in real-time, for example, Swahili and Belarusian.

We could also imagine abstracting this idea to translate between arbitrary domains. For example, "translate" between neural activity in the brain to videos on a screen, or performance of a stock given some news event, to projected performance of another stock given a similar news event.
How it works
Here I explain how the system works without getting into the nitty-gritty details of the math and AI principles.

Facebook's system identifies and combines 3 core components developed in previous research:

1. Byte-pair encodings [3]: Instead of giving the system whole words, they give the system the word in parts. For example, the word "hello" might be given as 4 word parts "he" "l" "l" "o". This means we could learn a translation for the word "he" without the system ever having seen the word "he".

2. Language model: They train other neural networks to learn to generate sentences that "sound good" in the language. For example, this neural network might change the sentence "how is you" to "how are you".

3. Back-translation [4]: This is a trick where another neural network learns to translate backward. For example, if you want to translate from Spanish to English, here we'd teach a neural network to translate from English to Spanish and use it to generate synthetic data, thereby increasing the amount of data we have.

The rest of the system combines the above techniques through two approaches, a neural network-based system (NMT) [1], and a phrase-based system (PBSMT) [5]. While either approach improves translation qualities, using both creates the new impressive results.
Learning to close a cup
The version of PBSMT used in this paper is one developed previously at FAIR [5]. This system learns a probability distribution for the phrases in each language and teaches another system to rotate the data points in the second set to match that of the first.

Example: Imagine having two images, one where a cup and a lid are next to each other and one where the lid is on the cup. The system would learn how to move the pixels around the image without a lid to generate the image with a lid.
Nice parts of this research
FAIR researchers did an amazing job at making this work accessible.

This nice post has a slightly more technical description of the research.

Facebook also opened access to the code for free, allowing anyone to build these systems.

Finally, the authors did a great job with an Ablation study which looked at the effect of removing each component of the system to look at the final results. This is often overlooked in research papers but provides great insights to us as researchers about what part of the new system is the source of these improvements.

References
[1] Bahdanau, Dzmitry, Kyunghyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio. "Neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate." arXiv preprint arXiv:1409.0473 (2014).

[2] Guillaume Lample,Myle Ott,Alexis Conneau,Ludovic Denoyer,Marc'Aurelio Ranzato. "Phrase-Based & Neural Unsupervised Machine Translation." arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.07755 (2018).

[3] Sennrich, Rico, Barry Haddow, and Alexandra Birch. "Neural machine translation of rare words with subword units." arXiv preprint arXiv:1508.07909 (2015).

[4] Sennrich, Rico, Barry Haddow, and Alexandra Birch. "Improving neural machine translation models with monolingual data." arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.06709 (2015).

[5] Conneau, Alexis, et al. "Word translation without parallel data." arXiv preprint arXiv:1710.04087 (2017).

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Facebook's AI Just Set A New Record In Translation And Why It Matters

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Research at Facebook just made it easier to translate between languages without many translation examples. For example, from Urdu to English. Neural Machine Translation Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is the field concerned with using AI to translate between any language such as English and French.

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How 1 Guy Rode All 48 Rides at Walt Disney World in a Single Calendar Day

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How 1 Guy Rode All 48 Rides at Walt Disney World in a Single Calendar Day

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People go to Walt Disney World for many reasons - to get married, to celebrate a birthday, to run a marathon. But a certain subculture of people goes to WDW to see how far they can push themselves. Disney Challenge enthusiasts may see how many attractions they can experience in 1 park in single day, or compete in a scavenger hunt, or even see how many Disney boats they can ride in a single day.

About a year ago, I started following a group of people who attempt to ride every ride at WDW in one day. This challenge was invented in 2013 by two guys at Parkeology, and it sounds simple enough: During normal operating hours, using only the resources available to the typical guest, ride every ride at WDW. Except the rides are spread across 4 parks (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom) spanning 40 square miles of central Florida and on any given day there are 150,000 other people trying to ride those rides.

What does "available to the typical guest" mean?

If you're a normal human being, you should just think: you don't get to use money or tricks for special access.

If you're a Disney aficionado, you have many follow-up questions, so here goes: Yes to Extra Magic Hours, Minnie Vans, and the Express Bus if they ever bring it back. No to Early Morning Magic, Disney After Hours, club-level Fastpasses, Halloween Party, Christmas Party, Annual Passholder events, VIP tours, having your mom drive you from park to park, or begging Cast Members for a favor because you're in a race.

And if you're a Club 33 member, I'm sorry to say you're not eligible. You will have to be satisfied with your exclusive lounges, your VIP tours, your nearly unlimited Fastpasses, and your vast personal wealth.

What is a ride?

Normal human: Go to the official list of attractions; if it moves, it's a ride.

Disney aficionado: Yes, the rafts to Tom Sawyer Island count even though the Island is the attraction and it doesn't move. No the Epcot FriendShip Launches don't count even though they're practically the same idea. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And yes, Carousel of Progress counts even though COP is obviously a show and not a ride. Don't get me started.

The refurbishment controversy of 2018

As originally conceived, the Parkeology Challenge can only officially be completed when all rides are up and running. This ruled out the first 6+ months of 2018 while the Liberty Square Riverboat was scheduled for refurbishment. The opening of Toy Story Land with new rides Slinky Dog Dash and Alien Swirling Saucers on June 30, plus the return of the Riverboat on July 20, meant that a large number of teams were traveling to Orlando to try to ride all 49 rides in late July or early August.

But late on July 1, WDW extended the Riverboat refurbishment through the end of August, and the following day the Parkeology guys made clear that they were not planning any changes to their challenge, so any run would be an #autofail.

A wave of disappointment rolled through the Challenge Tour community, and many started to cancel trips. But after an impulsive tweet, a few offline discussions, a new hashtag, and a post on the website of well-known Disney Challenge Tour veteran Kenny "The Pirate" White, the event was reborn as the #Give Kids The Rides challenge, an expanded version of ToddlerofTerror's fundraiser for Give Kids The World Village.

Other benefactors stepped up and added per-ride or bonus challenges and, long story short, most challengers decided to run on their planned dates after all to help #GiveKidsTheRides. (A couple weeks later, the Parkeology guys changed their rules too, and now anyone can attempt the Parkeology challenge any day of the year.)

The short section about all the other awesome challengers

Through the end of August, over 80 teams had attempted the #GiveKidsTheRides challenge and 14 completed it: 4 completed all 47 rides in July (Prince Charming's Regal Carrousel was closed until July 31), and 10 more completed all 48 rides in August. You can see a summary of their runs and everyone else's on the spreadsheet that MsTdWldRdCount and I painstakingly filled in whenever a team was running.

What you can't see in the spreadsheet is that the stories of these challengers are full of drama and ride breakdowns and pouring rain and races to the finish, and you can read all about them as soon as they get a Medium account and write their own 5000-word stories. 😉

The much, much longer section about me

When I first told my wife that I wanted to do this, she said (and I think I married her in anticipation of this moment), "Yes! Go for it!" Then the preteen children in our house learned I was going to WDW and they were not. They were...not as thrilled. But the King Kids came around and were sweet, supportive, and excited by the time it came for me to run. I flew to Orlando on August 2, activated my annual pass, and promptly lost my hat and sunglasses on Splash Mountain.

On August 3, I was the 4th car in the Hollywood Studios parking lot at 5:45 am. Almost all #GiveKidsTheRides challenge runs have started at Hollywood Studios because the park opened at 7 am most days in July and August, usually at least 1 hour before every other park. On my day, HS was also open late, so I didn't have to complete all 6 rides during the morning stop. Shortly after 6 am the other team competing that day (MouseMomKris on Twitter) and I were joined by Kenny White (ThePirateKenny)  - a thrill for me since I've been following his Disney challenge runs for at least 8 years, and another team who completed 48 rides on August 1 (and katerpillar56). By 6:30 am we were waiting for Cast Members to walk us back to Toy Story Land.
Rides 1-3. Toy Story Land
I rode with Kenny for the first 3 rides. He's wearing a shirt my wife commissioned to commemorate a hashtag from ToddlerofTerror (#bankruptmartinking, to encourage people to make the most of my per-ride pledge). Per the rules, you must tweet a photo of yourself in the ride vehicle for each ride. Here's the tweet showing Kenny and me on Slinky Dog Dash (a fun ride!) and the ride photos from Alien Swirling Saucers and Toy Story Mania. Kenny is so nice that on TSM he stopped playing halfway through so I could get the best-in-vehicle score.
Ride 4. Rock 'N' Roller Coaster
We had a 5-minute pre-boarding delay due to technical difficulties and I was a little antsy - ToddlerofTerror and ThePirateKenny had come up 1 ride and 3 minutes short just a few days prior - I promised myself if it got to 7:30 I would bail on the ride and head to Magic Kingdom.
Ride 5. Main Street Vehicles
Efficient park hops are essential to a challenge run, so I ran and walked to the car after RNRC and totally followed all traffic laws before arriving at Magic Kingdom at 7:54 am (official opening time: 8 am). I was pleased to see one of the Main Street Vehicles waiting near the front gate, but it was full. No standing on the running boards allowed. (I asked!) The MSV typically only run until 10:15 am, so I waited there for the next MSV. I was happy to get this ride out of the way, although it meant I was late for the 8 am "rope drop" for Extra Magic Hours in Tomorrowland.
Rides 6-7. Tomorrowland
The Space Mountain line was way out the door and the posted wait time was 35 minutes, so I hopped on Astro Orbiter instead, followed by the Buzz Lightyear ride. I didn't score very high on Buzz, but I was still basking in my Galactic Hero status from the day before.
Rides 8-11. Fantasyland small rides
I had planned to ride Space Mountain and Tomorrowland Speedway during the first hour, but both lines were too long, so I headed to Fantasyland instead. I knew I should be able to get a Speedway Fastpass later, but not riding Space Mountain early in the day concerned me.

I started with Dumbo, then moved on to the Barnstormer, Little Mermaid, and the Teacups. A bit of excitement on the Teacups as a woman got ejected from the ride for reasons that were unclear to me ( selfie stick? spreading the ashes of a loved one?). She was unhappy. The rest of her party got to ride. Security arrived. Shouting ensued. Before 9 am is pretty early to be so unhappy at WDW -better to save the meltdowns for 3 pm when it's hot, you're tired, and the kids are overdue for a nap.
Rides 12-16. Frontierland and Adventureland
After the Teacups, I headed across the park for the 9 am rope drop for the west side (not open for morning Extra Magic Hours). Cast Members walked us through Adventureland to Frontierland. I started with Splash Mountain because it had caused problems for a number of recent teams; this time I hung on to my hat.

Back at Pirates of the Caribbean the posted wait time was 5 minutes, but it looked longer and in fact I waited about 18 minutes to board. After POTC I used the first of my 3 pre-booked Fastpasses (FP1) at Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

The rafts to Tom Sawyer Island trip up some challengers because their hours are limited and they close readily in bad weather. No normal human considers these to be a ride; they're just how you get to the island. But they're on the list, so I caught the first raft of the day and made the traditional round trip before heading to nearby Frontierland Railroad Station for ride 16 (just missing the previous train). If you've secretly been dying to hear me sing Clementine, find my tweets from the raft and you'll be in luck.
Rides 17-21. Back to Fantasyland
Exiting the train at the Fantasyland station, I used my 2nd FP at the 7 Dwarfs Mine Train.

I was happy with efficient order of the next few rides (to minimize walking distance), but not the efficiency of the rides themselves - the Regal Carrousel loads painfully slowly, Peter Pan stopped briefly, and It's A Small World stopped for several minutes. Laughter/tears/hopes/fears, I get it, I'm with you, but I was eager to move on.

Peter Pan was my 3rd FP, and immediately after "tapping in" I took advantage of the fact that after using 3 FPs, you can book additional FPs, one at a time. I got FP4 for IASW and moved the time up to 11:10 am (tap, grab, and modify). After tapping at IASW, I grabbed FP5 for the nearby Haunted Mansion.
Rides 22-23. Finishing Adventureland
At HM, I grabbed FP6 for Jungle Cruise. It was great to have a FP to shorten the posted wait time of 80 minutes for the "Standby" line, but it still took 40 minutes from entering the line until we disembarked at the end. I got on the nearby Magic Carpets of Aladdin (Ride 23, FP7) at 12:49 pm, and at that point I had 5 rides left at Magic Kingdom: 4 in Tomorrowland (Space Mountain, Speedway, the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover, and the Carousel of Progress), plus Winnie the Pooh around the corner in Fantasyland.
Rides 24-28. The rest of Magic Kingdom
I had spent the Magic Carpets ride humming the song Steppenwolf famously composed for the Aladdin movie ("...why don't you come with me little girl, on a magic carpet ride") and trying to improve the time of a Speedway FP. I couldn't move it closer than 1:15 pm, so I headed to the PeopleMover (a non-FP ride) to fill the time and then went to the Speedway with FP8.

In line for Speedway I got a big break. When looking for a FP for a specific ride, it's easiest to get one at any time for that ride, then try to modify the time. I had tapped and grabbed an evening FP for Space Mountain and was modifying when, at 1:21 pm, a 1:30 pm FP became available. I gladly took it and drove off in my stupid, smelly Speedway car. (I didn't get unlucky, that's just how Speedway cars are. It's not a good ride.)

I went from there to Space Mountain for ride 26 and FP9 and tapped and grabbed FP10 for Winnie the Pooh. Looking at your bright phone in the very dark Space Mountain queue is not advisable, but I only ran into the group in front of me 3 or 4 times.

In line for Pooh and the Woozles, I found FP11 for Na'vi River Journey. Not as good as Flight of Passage, but I was happy about it. My final ride at Magic Kingdom was the Carousel of Progress, which is a show that only counts as a ride because the seats rotate instead of the stage. I got on at 2:07 pm, for a total of 6 hours 8 minutes from first ride to last ride. I had thought my best possible time was about 30 minutes faster - extra time at the Railroad, Small World, and the Jungle Cruise made that impossible - but overall I was very pleased and knew that the dream was still alive.
The hop to Animal Kingdom and Rides 29-31.
I hustled to my car and drove to Animal Kingdom. I parked in Butterfly 17, which is...not close. It is literally closer to a McDonald's on Buena Vista Drive than to the Tree of Life.

I walked to the waiting parking lot tram. Shortly after the tram started moving, I checked my pockets. I didn't carry a backpack, so I had everything in my cargo shorts: 2 phones, 1 spare battery, 3 charging cords, 1 fuel rod, 3 inches of duct tape, 3 Band-Aids, a bottle of water, and a poncho. Notably absent: the key to the rental. Ohshitshitshitshitshit. Everything out on the tram bench. No key. OK, where is it? Let's try checking the pockets again. Hmm, no luck. What next? How about one more check of the pockets, just in case. Settle down. I used the key to drive here, so it's either in the car or on the ground between there and the tram stop.

Hopping off the moving tram seemed like it would have several unpleasant consequences. Riding it back to the car would cost me at least 20 minutes. I was here to ride Na'vi River Journey, the early-closing Wildlife Express Train, and Kilimanjaro Safaris. And my NRJ Fastpass window was closing. So into Animal Kingdom I went. I rode NRJ (ride 29 with FP11), grabbed FP12 for the Safari, and took a round trip on the train (just missing team MouseMomKris, I would find out later).

After the train, I hopped on the longest safari (ride 31) I think I've ever taken (move it, rhinos!). I grabbed a late FP for Frozen Ever After (the Epcot FP that's most difficult to find) and modified it to 6:15 pm. Except: you see how the "Save Changes" button is grayed out? If you don't scroll to the bottom before you press that button, it doesn't save your changes!

I discovered the phantom FP 15 minutes later while walking out. I got a FP for Soarin instead and that was fine, but I was preoccupied because it was the moment of truth. I felt a little sicker with each step toward the parking lot. Would the key be there? Would my stuff be there? Would the *car* be there? If the key was gone, would I search the parking lot? Would I give up the challenge and call Avis? Or pull up the Lyft app and keep going? At first I couldn't find the car because I didn't have the fob to make it beep. Okay, silver SUV with a Florida license plate, piece of cake. But in the end it was all very anticlimactic - the key was sitting there on the back seat.

Of course I instantly calmed down and put the incident out of my head, as evidenced by how coolly I handled a minor backup at the Epcot parking booths.
Rides 32-35. Epcot West Side
Epcot basically has 4 rides on the West side and 4 on the East, with Spaceship Earth in the middle. Overall Epcot had caused a lot of trouble for challengers - Spaceship Earth or Figment were often closed, and Test Track shuts down whenever someone spills a soft drink within 100 yards of it - but I got lucky. There was no bad weather and no closures, so I had it easy. Maybe too easy.

I started on the West side because I had FP13 for Soarin, and the 2 rides that close at 7 pm are on that side. In Soarin, I found a conveniently timed FP for Frozen, and the other 3 rides (Living With the Land, Figment, and Nemo) were all walkons.
Rides 36-39. Epcot East Side
At this point I get a little over-confident. I thought I had plenty of time, so I went to Club Cool to drink a shot of Beverly for a bonus challenge and wandered through MouseGear souvenir shop on the way to Test Track. The single rider line was a walkon - see, I have plenty of time! (I gave serious consideration to riding Test Track a 2nd time just for kicks!)

After TT it was Mission Space, then up to Frozen for FP14. While in line I got FP15 for Dinosaur and saw several service dogs riding Frozen. Very good dogs, each one at least 13/10. Then into the Mexico pavilion for the first time ever to find the Gran Fiesta Tour.
Ride 40. Spaceship Earth and I almost blow the whole damn thing
Still thinking I had plenty of time, after Gran Fiesta Tour I stopped for a margarita for another charity challenge (It's for the kids, how could I not, amirite ycatsdisneydogs?!) Then I waited for a PhotoPass photo and got some dinner at the Electric Umbrella. A mobile order, I'm not a complete idiot.

I ate my chicken nuggets while walking over to Spaceship Earth, where I got on the ride 26 minutes after the Gran Fiesta Tour. 26 minutes!
Rides 41-43. Dinoland, USA
Despite my lollygagging, I finished Epcot in 2:27 (time I boarded Soarin to time I boarded Spaceship Earth), which I was pretty happy with, but it really should have been about 15 minutes faster than that given the low crowds. On the hop back to AK, I got a call from my family (hi King Kids!) to cheer me on, and I finally got to park somewhere near the front of a parking lot.

I entered at 8:29. One reason I was overconfident was that 2 nights earlier, the dcwarriorswdw team had had the exact same rides to complete (3 Dinoland rides, Expedition Everest, Kali River Rapids, followed by Flight of Passage), and I knew their time to complete them was short (34 minutes from boarding Dinosaur until boarding KRR, as it turns out), but what I didn't remember was that they rode those right after a huge rainstorm that cleared out the park. In any case, with 90 minutes to get to FOP, I was still feeling good.

I entered the Dinosaur FP line at 8:34 pm and grabbed FP16 for Primeval Whirl. It was 16 minutes until I got on board, even though I got to skip ~30 people in line when they were looking for a single rider. After Dinosaur I tapped in to Primeval Whirl and grabbed FP17 for KRR and waited forever (12 minutes) and tweeted my photo at 9:08 pm. The replies let me know that the Dinosaur photo hadn't posted (and that no one had heard from me in 34 minutes). They were relieved to hear from me but I was getting pretty anxious. 50 minutes left and I still had 4 more rides (in 4 different locations, including two I'd never ridden before, one I'd never even seen except on Google Maps, and all of them in the dark). First up was Triceratops Spin.
Ride 44. Expedition Everest
Full panic mode now. Run from Dinoland to Asia. Catch glimpses of the Rivers of Light show. Into the Single Rider line. Single Rider line closed. Much standby line. Very walking. Wow. Loading area. Single Rider line now open. (Shake fist at sky.)

I was grouped with a family of 3 and rode next to 7-year-old Kayla. "Are you scared, Kayla?" her mom said from the row in front.

"I think you've ridden this more than more than I have," I said.

Patting my arm, Kayla replied, "Oh don't worry, it's not too scary. But there's a monster and we do go backwards."
Ride 45. Kali River Rapids
KRR is not far from Everest, but the Rivers of Light show had ended and the path was now filled with people. And I've never been to KRR before. And it was still dark. I finally found it and tapped in for my 17th and final FP of the day. I didn't see a single person as I ran/walked through the very dark queue, which is approximately 3.4 miles long. And if the CM hadn't stopped me I would have kept running out the exit. It was only 9:35, so I should have felt okay, but I didn't. I boarded the raft and went down the river alone. (I got so wet that the King Kids got to feel Kali River water 18 hours later when I pulled my still-damp shorts out of the suitcase. Lucky King Kids!)
Ride 46. Flight of Passage
It was 9:41 pm, so on some level I knew I was okay. But I ran to the exit of KRR, crossed to Discovery Island, threaded through the crowds, and made my way around to the bridge to Pandora. I'd never been in Pandora at night before. I knew FOP was on the right, so after the hitting the restroom, I headed that way but found myself at the Satuli Canteen near the exit. Where the $&#@ is the entrance? Oh, up the hill a little. And standing there was Reagan from dcwarriorswdw who, 2 nights earlier with his 10-year-old daughter, had become the first to complete all 48 rides in a single day. Reagan kindly joined me for the wait; I tweeted at 9:53 that we were in line and the family called me to celebrate so the King Kids could get to bed.

With someone to talk to, the time in the standby line passed quickly and we were on the ride in about 45 minutes.

Back in the car, I changed to dry clothes without getting arrested and drove back to Hollywood Studios to end the day where I started.
Ride 47. Star Tours
Inside HS, I met up with stevenamos of Give Kids the World Village (and a veteran of challenge runs) who was nice enough to come out and say hi. We walked to Star Tours together and I got on the ride at 11:32 pm.

As I settled into my ride seat, I pulled up the MDE app to check on the wait time at Tower of Terror.

If you had asked me ahead of time, I would have predicted that I would be pretty frantic in that situation, but I was calm and a little bemused. I still had almost an hour for the ride to open, and if it didn't, well, I had proved to myself I *could* ride all the rides, and as failed attempts go, it would make for a pretty good story.
Ride 48? Tower of Terror?
I walked to Tower of Terror to find about 15 people in line at the gates. I'd been there about 5 minutes when team MouseMomKris joined me. Despite multiple rounds of bad luck at Splash Mountain and a foot injury they had still completed 40 rides!

Cast Members were nearby, letting people know that they were working on the ride and hoped to re-open before the 12:30 am park closing. And then without any fanfare they opened the ride at 11:55 pm.

Soon after, we were on the ride and the challenge was complete!

The night ended quietly - no fireworks, no marching bands, no celebratory beverages - the Parrishes and I just hobbled together out to the parking lot and said our goodbyes. I ate about 10 fun-size Snickers (🎶 I wanna stuff some chocolate in my face 🎶) and drove to the airport hotel. 7 short hours later I was headed to the gate on the MCO PeopleMover.
Some things I might do differently

Ride just 3 rides at HS during the morning: Catching an earlier MSV and being at rope drop would have helped.

Take a different train: When I just missed a train in Frontierland, I should have walked to 7DMT rather than waiting what turned out to be 12 minutes for the next train. Walking uses energy, but the parks are not as big as you think and too many extra minutes waiting will sink your run.

Bail on Jungle Cruise: 9 minutes to the FP tapstiles, 13 more minutes to get on the boat, 18 more minutes until off the boat. I should have switched to Magic Carpets first and JC afterward.

Buy preferred parking: the back of the AK and Epcot parking lots are far away.

No dawdling at Epcot!

Baby powder. Next time I will bring baby powder.

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How 1 Guy Rode All 48 Rides at Walt Disney World in a Single Calendar Day

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People go to Walt Disney World for many reasons - to get married, to celebrate a birthday, to run a marathon. But a certain subculture of people goes to WDW to see how far they can push themselves.

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shapeShift: Rich VR Haptics With Shape-Changing Robotic Displays - YouTube

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shapeShift: Rich VR Haptics With Shape-Changing Robotic Displays - YouTube

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shapeShift: Rich VR Haptics With Shape-Changing Robotic Displays

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Japan wants citizens to donate their old phone to make 2020 Olympics medals | TechRadar

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Japan wants citizens to donate their old phone to make 2020 Olympics medals | TechRadar

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Japan is looking to recycle old technology, including smartphones, to create Olympic medals for Tokyo 2020.

The report comes from Japanese website Nikkei, which says organizers of the next Olympic Games would like gold, silver and bronze medals to be sourced purely from donated electronics.

The idea isn't as far-fetched as it sounds: our smartphones contain the gold, silver and copper that can be recycled for use in new electronics, albeit in small amounts. But all those small amounts add up, and Japan is looking to use those metals to make the most iconic medals in sport.

A new mine

It'll mean the country won't need to mine new metals, instead using what's referred to as Japan's 'urban mine' of discarded consumer tech. It's estimated that 16% of the world's gold and 22% of the planet's silver is currently sitting inside tech all over Japan.

Games organizers are asking Japanese firms to pitch ideas for recycling schemes to help encourage citizens to donate. If the scheme is successful it would mean the usual practice of getting precious material mines to donate the metal for the medals would cease, or at least be dramatically reduced.

The London Olympic games used 9.6kg of gold, 1,210kg of silver and 700kg of copper (the main ingredient used when making bronze) to make its medals in 2012. In 2014, Japan discarded 143kg of gold, 1,566kg of silver and 1,112 tons of copper through electronics.

The reason so much silver is needed is that the gold medals are made up of that material too, with gold added into the mix to create the distinction. Similarly, tin is used in the bronze medals, so multiple materials will need to be sourced to create fully recycled medals.

And knowing that part of your old smartphone has become one of the most iconic medals in sport may be enough to persuade people to donate to the cause.

However, there's one slight issue: currently, Japan's recycled precious materials are used to make new electronic devices, and it's hard to see the nation's citizens foregoing a new Blu-ray player or smartphone upgrade in order to help out.

Via Engadget

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Japan wants citizens to donate their old phone to make 2020 Olympics medals

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Japan is looking to recycle old technology, including smartphones, to create Olympic medals for Tokyo 2020. The report comes from Japanese website Nikkei, which says organizers of the next Olympic Games would like gold, silver and bronze medals to be sourced purely from donated electronics.