A new study led by an Iowa State University agronomist may help scientists sift through vast amounts of plant seeds stored in gene bank facilities across the globe to identify those useful to plant breeders attempting to produce better varieties. The effort represents a proof-of-concept experiment that may help plant scientists separate the wheat from …
Philip Koopman, professor of Carnegie Mellon Univ., believes the biggest hole in a Federal Automated Policy published late Sept. is in the regulators’ failure to tangle head-on with fundamental difficulties in testing Machine Learning — a problem already known to the scientific/engineering community. Representativeness of data Carmakers are building a fake city, for example, in …
In 2009, Carbon nanotube tethers with a strength of 9 N/Tex [9 million newton meters/kg] is over twice as strong as any fibers ever produced before. In 2016, Jian Nong Wang and his colleagues made nanotubes with a process akin to glass blowing: Using a stream of nitrogen gas, they injected ethanol, with a small …
A Chinese state-backed firm is developing a gigantic spaceplane The plane may one day fly up to 20 passengers to the edge of space The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology in Beijing has designed a simple, one-piece spaceplane whose design can be scaled up to carry more people, academy rocket scientist Lui Haiquang told …
The Dexmo exoskeleton allows its wearer to touch, grasp, and feel virtual objects as if they were real. A virtual baseball feels firm in the hand, an egg fragile. Pick up a digital rubber duck while wearing the Dexmo, and it can be squished pleasingly between the fingers. The exoskeleton, designed by a team of …
India –the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases — ratified the Paris climate agreement Sunday. With India’s signature, 62 countries have signed the pact. It will come into force legally after it is ratified by at least 55 countries between them that produce at least 55 percent of global carbon emissions. The European Union has said …
Alphabet’s Google has been quietly expanding a Waze ridesharing pilot program to more people. As of Thursday, it’s available to any interested Waze users in the San Francisco area. Unlike typical ridesharing services, Waze really is ridesharing: it lets people already driving somewhere connect with passengers and pick up some extra cash while doing it. …
In April 2016, Niti Aayog CEO Amitabh Kant gave a 2032 date to India becoming a $10-trillion economy, a year after Prime Minister Narendra Modi said India should dream of a $20 trillion economy but did not fix a target. India wants to accelerate GDP growth to 10% growth per yaer against its projected growth …
Stanford researchers are leveraging GPU-based machines in the Amazon EC2 cloud to run deep learning workloads with the goal of improving diagnostics for a chronic eye disease, called diabetic retinopathy. The disease is a complication of diabetes that can lead to blindness if blood sugar is poorly controlled. It affects about 45 percent of diabetics …
Welding is complete on the largest piece of the core stage that will provide the fuel for the first flight of NASA’s new rocket, the Space Launch System, with the Orion spacecraft in 2018. The core stage liquid hydrogen tank has completed welding on the Vertical Assembly Center at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New …
A new high-speed rail line will cut the journey time between Beijing and Zhangjiakou, the site of the Winter Olympics, to 50 minutes, down from more than three hours. “The Badaling station will be located 102 meters below the surface, with an underground construction area of 36,000 square meters, equal to five standard soccer fields, …