Technology

For a human, knowing the difference between the "charge" of a battery and being charged in a crime is easy. Any three-year-old can look at a cartoon of a chicken and say "That's a chicken" but for computers those are still daunting tasks. Obviously language is easier than visual recognition and linguists and programmers have spent 50 years trying to program semantics as software. While IBM's Jeopardy-winning Watson system and Google Translate are high profile, successful applications of language technologies, the humorous answers and mistranslations they sometimes produce are evidence of…

Using social media like Twitter, Facebook and others is said to be like drinking from a fire hose. A team of data scientists at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, is trying to drink from 7 billion firehoses.  They have created a system capable of analyzing billions of tweets and other social media messages in an effort to discover patterns and make sense of all the information. They call the analysis tool "SALSA" (SociAL Sensor Analytics). "The world is equipped with human sensors – more than 7 billion and counting. It's by far the most extensive sensor…

Karlsruhe's Institute of Technology, Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Geneva set out to determine whether and how far laser light and plasma can influence cloud formation. For their investigations, the researchers used the facility AIDA (Aerosol Interactions and Dynamics in the Atmosphere) on KIT's Campus North and the mobile laser lab "Teramobile" developed in Geneva and Berlin. AIDA offers unique possibilities of studying aerosol and cloud processes under atmospheric conditions and can simulate all temperature and pressure conditions occurring in the lower and middle…

Can climate change be mitigated without hurting the quality of life of people?  Food and basic necessities are met before culture and other aspects. Thinking among environmentalists is that if agriculture intensifies in a particular region, it would have an impact on the water sector due to irrigation use, meaning less water for domestic, industrial or environmental needs. Knowing that, they believe that by setting variables such as temperature, rainfall or irrigation’s efficiency, it is possible to predict how maize yields will be affected by these changes and have created a new…

Everyone says they care about science. And everyone says they care about developing nations. Chocolate may be instrumental in deliciously helping people care about both. Ivory Coast, the world’s top cocoa producer, has a problem; young people are turning to other crops or giving up on small farms because they can't improve yields enough to make their cocoa holdings worthwhile. The choice is lose out on a cultural heritage or turn everything over to giant corporate farms. But science can help. Mars, Incorporated chief agricultural officer Howard-Yana Shapiro says they can boost cocoa…

Are you among the 60% of UK television viewers who admit to a Television Tryst behind your partner's back? A survey of Netflix customers found that the freedom to watch what we want, when we want can be a romantic minefield.  Netflix has 36 million members in 40 countries so the pool of people is obviously there. Six in ten of us in the UK admitted to 'cheating' on partners by watching extra episodes of series without their significant other. Another 20% actually fallen out with a partner over such "Netflix infidelity." With Arrested Development Season 4, arriving 'streaming only' on…

A group contends that the journal impact factor (JIF), which ranks scholarly journals by the average number of citations their articles attract in a set period, has increasingly become an obsession in science. Impact factor of articles is used in evaluating research for funding, hiring, promotion, or institutional effectiveness.  But the people behind The San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, convened by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) last December in San Francisco, say impact factors warp the way that research is conducted, reported, and funded.…

Over the past few years, demand from the surveillance market and huge spending by governments across the globe on biometric technologies has caused the facial recognition technology market to become more accurate, less costly and significantly more mainstream. More accurate technology and the brighter economic future it can bring has led to more traction and investment from the commercial sector. The development of 3-D face recognition technology, backed by improved imaging solutions like middleware and fast analytics, has helped the technology to overcome its traditional flaws such as poor…

In a previous article, I demonstrate how to build an alcohol burner for a home chemistry set. In my article, I mention that "second-hand stores like Goodwill, Salvation Army, and local mom&pop shops are treasure troves of things to hack or repurpose." I would like to mention too that close-out stores like Dollar General are also fertile ground for modding. I found a USB lamp with a fan at a close-out store in Albuquerque for under $5.00 USD and decided to make it a magnifying lamp by combining it with a handheld lighted magnifying glass that my wife got me from a dollar store for,…

The downside to concerns about manure contaminating ground water is that, as manure pit storage to protect water has increased, so have fatalities due to toxic gas buildup. Researchers estimate that about 10 people die each year in North American animal-manure pits. That doesn't sound like a lot but the number of manure storage facilities on farms is steadily growing, because the average farm size is increasing, the number of farms is decreasing and that will mean more manure pits. These deaths are entirely preventable, it was just not a problem in the past, so Penn State's College of…