Stunning concept images for the world's first first floating nation have been released as part of a project bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. The plans will see the seabound city-state, complete with a handful of hotels, homes, offices, restaurants and more, built in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Tahiti in 2020. Now, a series of computer generated graphics reveal how it might look once complete, with a design that blends futuristic technology with Polynesian traditions. Stunning concept images for the world's first first floating nation have been released as part of a project bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Floating islands would feature aquaculture farms, healthcare, medical research facilities, and sustainable energy powerhouses.

LiDAR is having a moment right now helping self-driving cars and robots not hit things, but don't forget about what else it can do. In a study called The Bare Earth, scientists from the Washington Geological Survey used it to image the ground right down to dirt and rocks. Stripped of trees and other distractions, the images provide not only valuable geological survey data, but stunning, otherworldly views of our planet. The image above depicts a LiDAR relative elevation model (REM), showing current and previous channels carved out by the Sauk River in Washington State's Skagit and Snohomish counties. In the regular satellite image below, however, only the active, vegetation-free channels are clearly visible -- a striking display of what the technique can reveal.

Note: The top row (left to right) represent the artistic style which is transposed onto the original images which are displayed in the first column (Woman, Golden Gate Bridge and Meadow Environment). Using conditional instance normalisation a single style transfer network can capture 32 style simultaneously, five of which are displayed here. This work will feature in the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR) 2017. Source: Dumoulin et al. (2017, p. 2)[79] Style transfer as a topic is fairly intuitive once visualised; take an image and imagine it with the stylistic features of a different image. This year Facebook released Caffe2Go,[80] their deep learning system which integrates into mobile devices.

The world's first floating nation is set to appear in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Tahiti in 2020. A handful of hotels, homes, offices, restaurants and more will be built in the next few years by the nonprofit Seasteading Institute, which hopes to'liberate humanity from politicians'. The radical plans, bankrolled by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, could see the creation of an independent nation that will float in international waters and operate within its own laws. In a new interview, Joe Quirk, president of the Seasteading Institute, said he wants to see'thousands' of rogue floating cities by 2050, each of them'offering different ways of governance'. The world's first floating nation is set to appear in the Pacific Ocean off the island of Tahiti in 2020 (artist's impression).

Deep sea explorers sent a drone to the ocean floor to beam back stunning images of the USS Indianapolis, a naval gunship that lies three miles beneath the surface of the Philippine Sea 72 years ago, in a dramatic live broadcast on Wednesday. Findings from the footage enabled experts to piece together the final moments of the WWII ship, which was discovered by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen last month. The ship was sunk by a Japanese torpedo in the final days of World War Two, more than 18,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, the Navy said. From the new drone footage, researchers have concluded that two Japanese torpedoes hit the ship, one of them striking an area near a chamber with crew members that likely would have died immediately upon impact. Researchers also discovered guns, torpedo remnants and parts of aircraft that were preserved thanks to the extremely cold temperatures at the bottom of the sea.

During the past several years, in my capacity as deputy director and then acting director of national intelligence, I have participated in National Security Council meetings about immediate challenges, from North Korea's aggressive missile and nuclear development programs to Russian military operations along its borders, and from ISIS threats to the homeland to Chinese activity in the South China Sea. Michael Dempsey is the national intelligence fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former acting director of national intelligence. The author is an employee of the US government on a sponsored fellowship, but all opinions are those of the author and do not reflect the official views of the US government. Even in instances in which the threat the US confronted was especially complex, there was at least a familiar policy playbook of options, as well as a shared understanding of how to approach these crises. However, in today's dynamic security landscape, it's fair to ask whether US policymakers might soon be forced to grapple with a new series of threats for which we have no common understanding or carefully considered counter-measures.

If Uber's scandals, lawsuits, and federal investigations haven't already driven you into the backseat of its competition just yet, maybe this will: Lyft is launching a fleet of self-driving cars and select customers in the San Francisco Bay Area will be offered free rides in autonomous cars developed and operated by self-driving outfit Drive.ai. "We really want to understand, what are all the pieces that need to come into place?" For Drive.ai, a two-year-old self-driving startup, it's a chance to see test out its tech and see how real customers interact with its product. To start, the program will include about a dozen AVs (drawn from Drive.ai's mixed fleet of Lincoln MKZ and Audi A4 sedans), but that number will grow as the company starts spending the $50 million it recently raised in a Series B funding round led by VC firm New Enterprise Associates. Both companies will collect data from customers (mostly through in-app reviews) about their experience, in the hopes of making sure they're comfortable, or at least not terrified. Uber started a pilot program in Pittsburgh last year, which it has since expanded to Tempe, Arizona.

The iPhone has been my primary smartphone for well over a decade, and therefore I've had Siri on my phone ever since its introduction in 2011. But I never really found a reason to use it. I've always felt self-conscious when talking to my phone -- I find people who use voice commands in public really annoying -- so I wanted to avoid doing it myself. I have Bluetooth in my car so I don't have to use my phone while driving, and when I'm at home, I have my trusty fingers instead. So I imagined that being forced to use Siri for a whole week was going to be a nightmare.

SpaceX is poised to fire off a fresh Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday, delivering a comically tiny payload for Taiwan's National Space Organization. At 1,047 pounds, the Formosat-5 Earth-observing satellite is almost light enough for a human to deadlift--but it'll launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket with 50 times more capacity. The overkill is thanks to a years-long delay, and SpaceX will take a substantial financial hit to make good on a contract it signed in 2010. Elon Musk's spaceflight company will attempt to launch the rocket from Vandenberg Air Force base in California during a 42-minute window opening at 11:51am PDT on Thursday. The satellite is bound for heliosynchronous orbit, where it will pass over Taiwan every two days for data retrieval. After the lightest single payload to ever hitch a ride on a Falcon 9 separates, the booster will fly back for a drone ship landing--hopefully to be reused in future, more economically viable missions.

Austin Russell hops in a motorized cart and goes whizzing through a cavernous building on the edge of San Francisco Bay that is normally used to disembark cruise-ship passengers. As the lanky 22-year-old CEO tools around, he passes a mannequin, a tire and a co-worker on a bicycle--all elements of a demonstration to show how well his company's sensor can monitor the environment. On a nearby screen, those shapes appear in rainbow colors that signify exactly how far away they are. All of it is the result of laser beams shooting out of a black box and bouncing off more than a million points around the room every second. "It's easy to make an autonomous vehicle that works 99% of the time," Russell says later.