The Russian Navy will take delivery of an improved Project 885M Yasen-class attack submarine in 2016. They hope to procure a minimum of eight Yasen-class attack boats. The Yasen-class boats do not make use of a double-hull—instead it has hybrid design with a lighter structure over the vessel’s pressure hull according to Russian media reports. …
Pratt and Whitney and CFM International are making new more efficient airplane engines. Pratt and Whitney says its new engines—which use an internal gearbox to slow down the speed of the fan—could save 20 percent on fuel consumption compared to an airliner with a conventional engine. Competitor CFM International, meanwhile, has introduced its own advanced …
Nervana Systems ise building the first optimized, full-stack platform for machine intelligence. It will be built for ease of use, speed, and scale. Nervana’s brain-inspired deep learning solution abstracts away the complexities associated with AI development. They allow users to focus on building solutions that tackle the world’s toughest machine learning problems. Nervana Systems has …
According to epigenetics — the study of inheritable changes in gene expression not directly coded in our DNA — our life experiences may be passed on to our children and our children’s children. Studies on survivors of traumatic events have suggested that exposure to stress may indeed have lasting effects on subsequent generations. But how …
Japan discussed the technological strengths of their submarines compared to French and German competition. Japanese submarines can dive much longer without having to surface. This is a significant technology. Japan’s Ministry of Defense has said it plans to replace conventional lead-acid batteries with more powerful lithium-ion cells, which will enable the vessels to cruise at …
The $2 million DARPA Spectrum Collaboration Challenge (SC2) is about getting the billions to trillions of wireless devices to efficiently share the wireless spectrum. Teams will be rewarded for developing smart systems that collaboratively, rather than competitively, adapt in real time to today’s fast-changing, congested spectrum environment—redefining the conventional spectrum management roles of humans and …
Researchers from Griffith University and the University of Queensland have overcome one of the key challenges to quantum computing by simplifying a complex quantum logic operation. They demonstrated this by experimentally realizing a challenging circuit — the quantum Fredkin gate — for the first time. “The allure of quantum computers is the unparalleled processing power …
Drone delivery company, Flirtey, has made the first urban delivery in the United States by a fully autonomous drone. Flirtey started in 2013 in Australia, delivering textbooks to universities, before it moved to Nevada. Its six-engine multicopter flew along a predetermined path. When it reached the target house, it lowered a package containing bottled water, …
Solar and wind energy are still a tiny share of the overall energy production mix ARPA-E has the FOCUS (Full-Spectrum Optimized Conversion and Utilization of Sunlight) project to make solar energy a larger part of the US energy mix. SOURCE – ARPA-E Brian WangBrian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger …
Researchers at PARC, an R and D-focused subsidiary of Xerox, say they’re developing a new digital printing process that could make it much cheaper to mass-produce concentrated solar photovoltaic systems. Such systems can dramatically increase the efficiency of solar cells by using lenses to concentrate and focus the sunlight onto small cells. Increasing efficiency could …
How can a net decipher and label patterns that change with time? For example, could a net be used to scan traffic footage and immediately flag a collision? Through the use of a recurrent net, these real-time interactions are now possible. The Recurrent Neural Net (RNN) is the brainchild of Juergen Schmidhuber and Sepp Hochreiter. …