Month: March 2020

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Using Fluorescent Dye To Demonstrate How Efficient Sea Sponges Are At Circulating Water Through Themselves

https://geekologie.com/2020/03/using-fluorescent-dye-to-demonstrate-how.php

This is a video of a marine scientist at the Gardens Of The Queen, Cuba demonstrating how efficient sea sponges are at circulating water through themselves by squirting some non-toxic fluorescent dye at the base of one and letting it do its thing. Some more info while I see how efficiently my heart can circulate margaritas through my bloodstream:

"This video shows non-toxic dye being used to show how efficient sponges can circulate water through their bodies. Sponges filter plankton and oxygen out of the water by sucking in the water through the outside and discharging the wastewater out through the chimney-like center of the sponge. Due to the lack of food and oxygen in the water, you rarely find anything inside of sponges. You can see how quickly the dye moves from the outside of the sponge and out through the center exhaust area. This happens very quickly."

That’s cool, man. Still, it’s a shame in like four years the only sponges left in the oceans will be plastic shower scrunchies. I mean have you seen the way Captain Planet has been drinking lately? "He’s given up." I saw him flick a lit cigarette into the woods! Keep going for the video.

Thanks to blue16, who agrees that might have been SpongeBob’s girlfriend right there.

via Geekologie – Gadgets, Gizmos, and Awesome https://geekologie.com/

March 18, 2020 at 04:03PM

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Conan O’Brien will shoot full-length shows using an iPhone and Skype

https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/19/conan-obrien-full-length-shows-iphone-skype/

With COVID-19 self-isolation, we can all use as much entertainment as possible. To that end, Conan O’Brien and his staff aim to prove that it’s possible to produce a full-length television show from home using technology. "I am going back on the air [on TBS] Monday, March 30th," O’Brien wrote on Twitter. "All my staff will work from home, I will shoot at home using an iPhone, and my guests will Skype."

The idea came about after O’Brien and staff produced several short videos for social media and realized the same tech could be employed for a full show. "We have a staff that wants to work, that doesn’t want to not get paid, and you just want to keep the business going," Conan executive producer Jeff Ross told Variety.

So far, it seems that Conan will be the first late-night show to attempt complete shows from home. Others, including Stephen Cobert and Jimmy Fallon, are airing re-runs with some original segments mixed in. It might be a bit easier for Conan to pull that off, though, because it recently became a half-hour show while the latter two run for 60 minutes each.

Still, O’Brien warned viewers to expect the worst, given the lack of a polished studio and potential for technical snafus. "The quality of my work will not go down because technically that’s not possible," he said. "This will not be pretty, but feel free to laugh at our attempt."

Source: Conan

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

March 19, 2020 at 03:57AM

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Vega rocket’s new 3D-printed thrust chamber passes critical hot-fire test (video)

https://www.space.com/vega-rocket-3d-printed-thrust-chamber-test-video.html

A successful firing test shows that Europe’s lightweight Vega launcher is well on its way to cheaper and more efficient launches in 2025, officials say.

Video footage from the “hot-fire” test of a 3D-printed thrust chamber prototype for Vega’s new M10 engine showed it successfully firing on a rainy day. Flames jut out from the thrust chamber, with the pressure causing ripples in the puddles below. The thrust chamber assembly fired 19 times for 450 seconds (about 7.5 minutes) at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama — a common location for developing rocket technology.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: community@space.com.

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March 18, 2020 at 06:38AM

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Watch Netflix With Friends Thanks To New Chrome Extension, Which Is Like An AOL Chatroom With Movies

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/watch-netflix-with-friends-thanks-to-new-chrome-ex/1100-6474858/?ftag=CAD-01-10abi2f

The need to socialize is a primal part of human nature, so while the world practices social distancing, it is important to fill that void. Luckily, there is a Google Chrome extension that allows you and your friends to watch Netflix together without having to be in the same room.

Netflix Party is a simple-to-use extension that allows people to watch something together. You can catch up on what’s happening in your lives in the chat or MST3K/Rifftrax a movie together. So in order to test out Netflix Party, we needed to pick out a movie to watch, and what better movie than Horse Girl, which has a very bizarre trailer. Considering “horsie movies” is already a weird inside joke with the entertainment team, why not watch this movie together?

GameSpot's Mat Elfring, Chris Hayner, Dan Auty, and Will Potter
GameSpot’s Mat Elfring, Chris Hayner, Dan Auty, and Will Potter “partying”

After Netflix Party is installed, the person running the party selects a movie on Netflix, then clicks on the “NP” button in your browser, to the right of the address bar. From there, you start the party and get a specific URL to copy and send to your friends. You can also select whether you have control over the movie or if everyone else can. But how does it work?

As you can see, the chat box pops up on the right side. You can customize your chatroom name and pick from a few avatars. It is very basic, but it brings back a very nostalgic feeling of hanging out in an AOL chatroom–why didn’t any of us write “A/S/L?” The person controlling the party is streaming their Netflix account to the others in the group, so there is a tiny bit of a delay, but that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things since it’s a chatroom.

The only issue with Netflix Party was finding out how to exit. There’s not button in the chat section to do this. Very quickly, we learned you just exit the movie, and that’s all you need to do. The most obvious answer is the correct one.

Netflix Party is available now, so you can add it to Chrome and all watch horsie movies together.

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

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March 17, 2020 at 11:43AM

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A new computer chip mimics the neurocircuitry of our noses to smell

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/615366/ai-intel-neuromorphic-chip-mimics-brain-to-smell/

Of all the things our brain can do, the way it helps us smell is one of the best understood. When an odor hits the olfactory cells in our nose, they send a signal to the corresponding cluster of neurons in the brain known as the olfactory bulb. The bulb then ferries the signal out to other parts of the brain, allowing us to appreciate the perfume of a grapefruit or avoid the stench of trash.

Olfactory bulbs are specific to mammals, but other animals, like insects, also exhibit similar neural structures. It means “there’s probably something fairly fundamental and efficient about these implementations if evolution has arrived on them in different cases,” says Mike Davies, the director of Intel’s Neuromorphic Computing Lab.

Both because they are so efficient and because we understand them so well, olfaction systems are great starting point for neuromorphic chips, a new type of computing hardware that takes inspiration directly from the structure of the brain.

On Monday, scientists at Intel published a paper in Nature that proposes a new neuromorphic chip design that mimics the structure and capabilities of the olfactory bulb. The researchers worked with olfactory neurophysiologists who study the brains of animals as they smell. They designed an electrical circuit, based on the neural circuits that activate when their brains process an odor, that could be carved onto a silicon chip. They also designed an algorithm that mirrors the behavior of the electrical signals that pulse through the circuit. When they trained the algorithm on the chip using an existing data set of 10 “smells”—characterized by their measurements from 72 different chemical sensors—it was able to accurately distinguish between them with far fewer training samples than a conventional chip.

The chip is still a relatively early-stage prototype, but once mature it could serve a number of applications, such as bomb sniffing or the detection of noxious fumes in chemical plants. It also demonstrates the potential of neuromorphic computing for more data-efficient AI.

Currently the most popular chips for running state-of-the-art deep-learning algorithms all follow a von Neumman architecture, a design convention that has powered the computing revolution for decades. But these architectures are inefficient learners: the algorithms that run on them require massive amounts of training data, in contrast to our far more efficient brains. Neuromorphic chips, therefore, try to preserve the brain’s structure as much as possible. The idea is that such close mimicry will increase the chip’s learning efficiency. Indeed, Intel successfully got the chip to learn from very few samples.

Moving forward, the research team plans to design neuromorphic chips that mirror other functions in the brain beyond smell. Davies says the team will likely turn its attention to vision or touch next but has longer-term ambitions to tackle more complex processes. “Our sensing mechanisms are the natural place to start because these are well understood,” he says. “But in a sense we’re working our way in and into the brain, up to the higher-order thought processes that happen.”

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March 16, 2020 at 11:08AM

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Moog and Korg make synth apps free to help musicians stuck at home

https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/14/moog-and-korg-free-synth-apps/

If you’re a musician (or fan) whose concerts got scrapped over coronavirus concerns, you’ll at least have more tools to produce music when you’re at home. To start, Moog has made its Minimoog Model D iOS synth app available for free. It wasn’t hugely expensive to start, but this could make it easy to recreate the first portable synth and slip some Kraftwerk- or Dr. Dre-inspired sounds into your latest track. Moog didn’t say how long the price change would last, but you might want to act quickly.

Not to be left out, Korg is doing the same for its Kaossilator apps, which normally cost close to $20. Android artists can grab the software for no charge until March 20th, 2020, while the iOS crowd has until March 31st to get iKaossilator. Either app makes the most sense if you’re more into looping audio and variety than strict technical realism, but that may be all you need to add some spice to a future hit.

Via: MusicRadar

Source: Minimoog (App Store), iKaossilator (App Store), (Google Play), Korg

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

March 14, 2020 at 04:21PM

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Windows 10’s built-in Linux kernel will be available to everyone soon

https://www.engadget.com/2020/03/14/windows-10-linux-kernel-available-soon/

You won’t have to be a tester to try Windows 10’s new, built-in Linux kernel in the near future. Microsoft has confirmed that Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 will be widely available when Windows 10 version 2004 arrives. You’ll have to install it manually for a "few months" until an update adds automatic installs and updates, but that’s a small price to pay if you want Linux and Windows to coexist in peace and harmony. It’ll be easier to set up, at least — the kernel will now be delivered through Windows Update instead of forcing you to install an entire Windows image.

WSL2’s focus isn’t so much on basic functionality (there’s been an emulator for a while) as it is performance. It should load and run faster, with reduced memory consumption to free up your RAM for other tasks. This prioritization isn’t completely surprising. Now that Microsoft is less dependent on Windows sales and more on services like Azure, it benefits when it treats Linux like a first-class citizen. Still, it’s clear Microsoft has come a long, long way from the days when it was waging war on Linux and otherwise trying to hold on to its monopoly in computing.

Via: Craig Loewen (Twitter)

Source: Windows Command Line

via Engadget http://www.engadget.com

March 14, 2020 at 01:45PM