List of All Articles with Tag 'tec'

July's Buck supermoon could be seen around the world lighting up the skies at the start of this week, but incredible new footage is showing the sheer scale of the phenomenon. A plane flying over the skies of Oregon is going viral after being filmed getting completely eclipsed by the moment. In the footage of the giant moon, the tiny plane goes flying past, and looks absolutely minuscule in comparison to the planet. Click here to sign up for our newsletters

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visits China this week with the goal of finding areas of common economic

South Korea salvaged a failed North Korean spy satellite from the sea, giving it a rare direct look

While inflation has peaked in Singapore and growth prospects have dimmed, authorities aren’t shifting to pro-growth mode just

There are eight planets in our solar system – plus poor old Pluto, which was demoted in 2006 – but what if there were more? Turns out that might be the case. Astronomers have calculated there is a 7 per cent chance that Earth has another neighbour hiding in the Oort cloud, a spherical region of ice chunks and rocks that is tens of thousands of times farther from the sun than we are. “It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” said Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Hidden worlds like this are “a class of planets that should definitely exist but have received relatively little attention” until now, he said.. If a planet is hiding in the Oort cloud, it’s almost certainly an ice giant. Large planets like Jupiter and Saturn are generally born as twins. They have huge gravitational pulls of their own, however, and sometimes destabilise one another. That could have led to a planet to be nudged out of the solar system entirely – or exiled to its outer reaches, where the Oort cloud resides. “The survivor planets have eccentric orbits, which are like the scars from their violent pasts,” said lead author Sean Raymond, researcher at the University of Bordeaux’s Astrophysics Laboratory. That means that the Oort cloud planet could have a significantly elongated orbit, unlike the near-perfect circle Earth tracks around the sun. Trouble is, when things are that far away, they’re pretty difficult to spot. “It would be extremely hard to detect,” added Raymond. “If a Neptune-sized planet existed in our own Oort cloud, there’s a good chance that we wouldn’t have found it yet,” said Malena Rice, an astronomer at MIT not involved in this work. “Amazingly, it can sometimes be easier to spot planets hundreds of light-years away than those right in our own backyard.” Time to crack out the telescope. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Researchers in China have developed an artificial intelligence tool capable of designing a working computer in under five hours. The team of 19 computer scientists from five different institutions made the AI breakthrough after setting out to prove that machines can create computer chips in a similar way to humans. The feat was performed 1,000 times faster than a human team could have achieved it, the researchers claimed, marking a major step towards building self-evolving machines. “Design activity... distinguishes humanity from other animals and traditional machines, and endowing machines with design abilities at the human level or beyond has been a long-term pursuit,” the scientists wrote in a paper detailing their research. “We present a new AI approach to automatically design a central processing unit (CPU), the brain of a computer, and one of the world’s most intricate devices humanity has ever designed.” The project involved the layout of an industrial-scale RISC-V CPU, capable of running the Linux operating system and achieving an accuracy of 99.99 per cent in validation tests. The AI bypassed the manual programming and verification process of the typical design cycle, which the researchers said “consumes more than 60-80 per cent of the design time and resources” of human teams. The AI was also able to autonomously make discoveries involving computer design, uncovering something called the von Neumann architecture, first invented in 1945. The overall performance of the CPU is relatively modest compared to modern computers, with the researchers saying it can perform at a similar level to a 1991 Intel 80486SX CPU. Developing the AI approach, however, has the potential to “reform the semiconductor industry by significantly reducing the design cycle”, the researchers said. The research is detailed in a study, titled ‘Pushing the limits of machine design: Automated CPU design with AI’. Leading AI chip maker Nvidia has previously used artificial intelligence to optimise its computer chip designs, publishing a new approach to AI-powered chip design in March that could significantly improve the cost and performance of CPUs. Read More 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity Harvard’s new computer science teacher is a chatbot Google’s DeepMind unveils AI robot that can teach itself unsupervised Robots can now learn new skills like picking up knives by watching YouTube videos

Scientists believe they have discovered the cause of the megalodon's extinction – and no, it’s not Jason Statham. Experts have been conducting research on fossils of teeth from the biggest species of shark the world has ever seen, which went extinct around 3.6 million years ago and measured at least 15 metres long. Research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explains that the animal was actually partially warm-blooded. Unlike most cold-blood sharks, the body temperature is thought to have been around 27 degrees. The temperature is higher than the sea temperatures around the time. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Study co author Robert Eagle, who is professor of marine science and geobiology at UCLA, said [via CNN]: “We found that O. megalodon had body temperatures significantly elevated compared to other sharks, consistent with it having a degree of internal heat production as modern warm-blooded (endothermic) animals do.” They were able to prove that the animals were warm-blooded by analysing how carbon-13 and oxygen-18 isotopes were closely bonded together in the fossilised teeth. Senior study author Kenshu Shimada is a paleobiologist at DePaul University in Chicago, who said: “A large body promotes efficiency in prey capture with wider spatial coverage, but it requires a lot of energy to maintain. “We know that Megalodon had gigantic cutting teeth used for feeding on marine mammals, such as cetaceans and pinnipeds, based on the fossil record. The new study is consistent with the idea that the evolution of warm-bloodedness was a gateway for the gigantism in Megalodon to keep up with the high metabolic demand.” The fact it was warm-blooded means that regulating body temperature could have been the cause of its eventual demise. The Earth was cooling when the animal went extinct, which could have been a critical factor. “The fact that Megalodon disappeared suggests the likely vulnerability of being warm-blooded because warm-bloodedness requires constant food intake to sustain high metabolism,” Shimada said. “Possibly, there was a shift in the marine ecosystem due to the climatic cooling,” causing the sea level to drop, altering the habitats of the populations of the types of food megalodon fed on such as marine mammals and leading to its extinction. “One of the big implications for this work is that it highlights the vulnerability of large apex predators, such the modern great white shark, to climate change given similarities in their biology with megalodon,” said lead study author Michael Griffiths, professor of environmental science, geochemist and paleoclimatologist at William Paterson University. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

China’s decision to control the export of two key metals showed it has some power to retaliate against

The European Union’s top diplomat will head to Beijing next week for meetings with Chinese officials, a trip

A shakeup at China’s central bank has poured cold water on speculation that the nation may be about

European stocks were muted on Monday following gains in the first half of the year as cyclical sectors

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s elevation of a long-serving technocrat as the central bank’s top Communist Party official signals