Peek into a tide pool along the shore and you may see a starfish clinging quietly to a rock. But that secure adulthood comes at the expense of a harrowing larval journey. Tiny starfish larvae — each smaller than a grain of rice — spend 60 days and 60 nights paddling the open ocean, feeding to accumulate the energy needed to metamorphose into the familiar star shape. […]
Qantas Group has selected SAP executive Susan Doniz to fulfil the role of CIO after undertaking a global search for Luc Hennekens’ replacement. Hennekens revealed his intention to leave the national carrier in July after three years of leading its technology operations. He moved to France to join Airbus Group as CIO after working his last day at Qantas in September. Doniz will relocate from Canada to […]
WASHINGTON A 38-year-old Chinese man pleaded guilty on Monday to charges that he stole numerous sensitive military program documents from United Technologies Corp (UTX.N) and transported them to China, the U.S. Justice Department said. Yu Long pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to engage in the theft of trade secrets to benefit a foreign government and one count of unlawful export and attempted export of defence […]
Amazon’s Echo Dot, a hands-free voice-controlled Alexa-enabled device, has enjoyed pretty rave reviews upon its release, simply because the device, a minute puck-shaped plaything, is far more capable than what its size suggests. Yes, the tiny flat cylinder sports Amazon’s proprietary voice-enabled virtual assistant Alexa, which is by and large its headline feature. It hears its owners, even when outputting loud music from its speakers, and it […]
Jayant Bhandari warns “there are clear signs that in a very convoluted way, possession of gold for investment purposes will be made illegal” as he discusses India’s attempts to create a cashless society (and consequences of it) and why precious metals and geographical diversification are the most viable options investors around the world, not just India, should be taking. “The situation is getting worse by the day… […]
On a clear afternoon on September 28, 2008, Elon Musk was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Years earlier he had sunk most of his internet fortune into a commercial space company – SpaceX – and was now vying for a lucrative deal with NASA to resupply the International Space Station. There was only one problem: the last three attempts to send a rocket into space […]
In this Dec. 8, 2016 photo, Steve Burke and Jim Besha of Albany Engineering Corp. stand at the site of an abandoned iron mine in the Adirondacks, in Mineville, N.Y., where they’re seeking a federal permit to build an underground hydroelectric pumped storage project. The hills behind them are “tailings” leftover from crushing ore to extract iron from the mine that closed in 1971. (AP Photo/Mary Esch) […]
BERLIN Daimler (DAIGn.DE) does not expect Donald Trump to favor U.S. carmakers over their European counterparts, the carmaker’s chief executive told a German paper, shrugging off concerns over the president-elect’s protectionist rhetoric during his campaign. “I find it hard to believe that it would come to punitive tariffs,” Dieter Zetsche told Bild am Sonntag in an interview published on Sunday, adding he did not expect any negative […]
Famous U.S. treasure hunter, Tommy Thompson found a trove of gold coins and bars on the floor of the Atlantic ocean back in 1988. The treasure came from the SS Central America, which sank to the bottom of the sea during a hurricane in 1857, along with at least three tons of California gold and its 425 crewmembers. The gold lay on the ocean floor for 180 […]
It’s been a big month in theme parks in the UAE, with the official opening of Dubai Parks & Resorts in Dubai Sunday, news that IMG Worlds of Adventure are opening yet another venue, Legends, and Miral announcing that SeaWorld is coming to Abu Dhabi. By the time the Expo comes to the UAE in the year 2020, almost every popular movie and animation brand you can […]
Wall Street is bathing in nostalgia. This week the cover of Barron’s, the bible of US retail investors, proclaimed “Dow 20,000”. Presenters on CNBC are wearing Dow 10,000 caps first donned in 1999. And each day the thinning crowds on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange have watched the boards to see if the Dow Jones Industrial Average, having passed 19,900, can top the 20,000 […]
Engineers reveal a manufacturing technique that promises to bring a simplified form of printing and imaging in color and infrared into daily use. Because the process uses existing materials and machines that are relatively inexpensive and easily scalable, it could revolutionize any industry where multispectral imaging or printing is used. (via WSJ)
By Stanley White and Izumi Nakagawa | TOKYO TOKYO Japanese workers put up with long hours and unpaid overtime under pressure from cost-saving companies, and figures from government, which wants more money in workers’ pockets to boost consumer spending, appear to underestimate the problem. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is trying to enact labor reforms as part of his “Abenomics” plan to end decades of stagnant growth and […]
A new concept in energy harvesting could capture energy that is currently mostly wasted due to its characteristic low frequency and use it to power next-generation electronic devices. In a project funded by electronics giant Samsung, a team of Penn State materials scientists and electrical engineers has designed a mechanical energy transducer based on flexible organic ionic diodes that points toward a new direction in scalable energy […]
(Image: file photo) An advisor working for financial planning giant Ameriprise has inadvertently exposed hundreds of investment portfolios, worth tens of millions of dollars. The data was found on an internet-connected backup drive at the advisor’s home, which was set to synchronize over the internet with his primary backup drive at his office. But neither drive had a password, allowing anyone to view sensitive client data. The […]
DUBAI // From building a steel bridge to link two towers to selecting glazing to prevent solar heat from damaging the glass facade, construction on The Opus has been a learning experience for engineers and architects alike. Consultancy Koltay Facades realised that the Sun’s intense rays could bounce off a curved surface on one side of the inner void and reflect on to the opposite side. The […]
It was a clear and chilly afternoon in Moscow – March 18, 2014 – when Russian President Vladimir Putin signed the documents to formally annex the Crimean Peninsula away from Ukraine. Frustrated Western governments soon began rolling out the only response they could agree on to Mr. Putin’s brazen redrawing of Europe’s borders: economic sanctions. Over the next two days, the United States would designate 27 individuals […]
When the first commercial solar photovoltaic panel was unveiled in 1954, it was only capable of converting into electricity six per cent of the Sun’s light. Efficiency has increased since then, making solar a viable option for homes and power plants alike. The gains started plateauing in the 1990s and today’s panels, which convert about a quarter of the sunlight they capture into electricity, are only slightly […]
When it emerged from stealth in 2011, MapR was an outlier in the Hadoop community. At the time, Hadoop was defined largely by two projects adapted from Google research: MapReduce, which introduced highly linear, massively parallel processing to big data, and the HDFS file system, which could accommodate data by the petabyte. And at the time, Hadoop was defined as an Apache open source platform. MapR’s message, […]
Low-frequency mechanical energy harvesting could provide as much as 40 percent of the power requirements for next generation smartphones and tablets. Credit: Wang Lab/Penn State A new concept in energy harvesting could capture energy that is currently mostly wasted due to its characteristic low frequency and use it to power next-generation electronic devices. In a project funded by electronics giant Samsung, a team of Penn State materials […]
Short takes and quick hits for the week of November 11-17, 2016. ‘Yahoo is not safe to use,’ former company engineer says Posted December 16, 2016 14:10 PST An absolutely brutal article in The Parallax by Seth Rosenblatt. After a second data breach involving as many as a billion users, what should users do? Let’s just say there aren’t many advocates for the company right now. Here’s […]
From left, Richard Baraniuk, Tan Nguyen and Ankit Patel. Credit: Jeff Fitlow/Rice University Neuroscience and artificial intelligence experts from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have taken inspiration from the human brain in creating a new “deep learning” method that enables computers to learn about the visual world largely on their own, much as human babies do. In tests, the group’s “deep rendering mixture model” largely […]
General Motors seems determined not to get sidelined by the recent flurry of announcements in the self-driving car category such as those issued by Waymo and Uber. GM’s Chairman and CEO Mary Barra presided a rare press conference last Dec. 15 to declare that GM’s autonomous vehicle called Chevrolet Bolt is now prowling the streets of southeast Michigan. Fleet of self-driving Bolts have already been unleashed in San Francisco […]
Lately, there has been discussion of a “blurring” of Agile methodologies with design thinking. These are two philosophies with different terminologies, practiced by different groups of people, that have the same goal — to provide elegant and continuously improving technology solutions that serve users and customers. This blurring may be necessary with software release cycles now going into the hours, or even minutes for some businesses. Photo: […]
