Big Helium find in East Africa could be the first of many helium discoveries

A newly discovered helium field in the geothermally active East African Rift Valley may contain more helium than the U.S. Federal Helium Reserve near Amarillo, Texas, which holds about 30 percent of the world’s helium supply. Independent experts have calculated a probable resource of 54 billion cubic feet [1.5 billion cubic meters] in just one …

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Is Elon Musk Iron Man or a Bond Villian? Bond Villain may have the stronger case

Is billionaire Elon Musk more like Iron Man or a Bond Villian? Bond Villain may have the stronger case for now. In the bond film MoonRaker, Hugo Drax is a billionaire who owns Drax Industries, a private company which constructs space shuttles for NASA. Drax planned to colonize space in space stations. Elon Musk plans …

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Phase locking arrays of microlasers could lead to terahertz security scanners

Terahertz radiation — the band of electromagnetic radiation between microwaves and visible light — has promising applications in security and medical diagnostics, but such devices will require the development of compact, low-power, high-quality terahertz lasers. In this week’s issue of Nature Photonics, researchers at MIT and Sandia National Laboratories describe a new way to build …

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Number of known exoplanets has increased by 60% to 3200

NASA’s Kepler space telescope has discovered 1,284 new exoplanets, including nine rocky worlds that might be capable of supporting life as we know it, astronomers announced today (May 10). This is by far the largest haul of alien planets ever unveiled at one time. The total exoplanet tally now stands at about 3,200, and Kepler …

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Retrofit houses with highest monthly bills during cold months for energy efficient cities

Many programs encourage owners of homes and other buildings to improve their energy efficiency, sometimes offering substantial subsidies or tax incentives for doing so. Now, planners may have a way to determine where such programs can get the most return for that investment: New research shows how to identify the buildings where retrofitting for energy …

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Air passenger believed economics professor belonged to terrorist group Al-gebra

Guido Menzio is associate professor in the department of Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. One of his specialties is search theory. He was on his way to give a talk in Quebec. A female passenger had been concerned about his [mathematical] writings — though not just his writings, one suspects. Guido Menzio is associate …

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Elon Musk hired the designer of suits for Superman, Batman and Black Panther in movies to make real spacesuits

Jose Fernandez is the founder and lead designer at Ironhead Studios, the company responsible for designing numerous superhero suits for the big screen. The studio has tackled Spiderman, Thor, and most recently, Batman. But the next big suit with Ironhead’s touch sounds like it’ll be for real-life spacemen. Namely, the ones that will work for …

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Recurrent Neural Nets

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. …

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What is different about AlphaGo versus Deep Blue? AlphaGo is a learning system and a hybrid system

AI expert Ben Goertzel explains AlphaGo. We are using learning now and not just simplistic search Alphago is not just one system Deep Learning neural networks Monte Carlo Sampling Game tree search Goertzel at Hanson Robotics is using hybrid architecture as well Deep Learning Symbolic Reasoning Computational Linguistics Machine Translation- Google is using pure statistical …

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G20 looking at coordinated economic stimulus program and China repeats promise not to have sharp devaluation

A report published by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Wednesday called for a coordinated stimulus program to support a slowing global economy. An official with a European delegation to the G20 earlier in the week said policymakers recognize elevated risks and will express the need for coordinated action in their joint communique at the …

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