They can unload the dishwasher, deliver packages to your home and open doors. Their thin, metallic legs are able to traverse a steep flight of stairs -- or crawl straight into your worst nightmares. Now Boston Dynamics' awkward, four-legged, doglike robot, SpotMini, is evolving from a YouTube sensation to a purchasable pet of sorts, according to the company's founder, Marc Raibert. Raibert told an audience last month at the CeBIT computer expo in Hanover, Germany, that his company is already testing SpotMini with potential customers from four separate industries: security, delivery, construction and home assistance. His presentation at the expo was reported by Inverse.

On the heels of United States President Donald Trump's historic de-nuclearization summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, non-proliferation is once again a timely topic. Since the dawn of the nuclear age, keeping tabs on who has military-grade nuclear capabilities and materials has been a vital – and difficult – task. Thankfully, it's also one that may be getting easier, thanks to leaps forward in fields like data analysis, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Last month, Thomson Reuters Labs was invited to present at a workshop called "Applications of Innovative Tools and Technologies for Nonproliferation and Disarmament" held in Krems, Austria, for diplomats representing their countries at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other international organizations. The diplomatic workshop was preceded by a day-long session for technical participants at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation.

The use of natural wood, hand-knitted fabrics, and leather lend a rustic hand-made vibe to the Maverick.Cavalier Cavalier Audio is a New Jersey-based designer and manufacturer of voice-controlled speakers. The company's latest product is Maverick portable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi speaker with Amazon Alexa voice control. Maverick blends a hand-crafted finish and immersive sound to a market that's positively crowded out with'me-too' products produced from mass-produced plastics and so-so design. The Maverick has been designed to stand out from the crowd by using authentic materials, stylish design while incorporating the latest audio technology. Maverick was dreamed up by a team of musicians and engineers with the aim of offering world-class acoustics to life via a 20W stereo speaker system featuring two active drivers and dual passive radiators that the designers claim will produce true room-filling experience.

Maintaining assets such as compressors is an extremely complex endeavor: they are used in everything from small drilling rigs to deep-water platforms, the assets are located across the globe, and they generate terabytes of data daily. A failure for just one of these compressors costs millions of dollars of lost production per day. An important way to save time and money is to use machine learning to predict outages and issue maintenance work orders before the failure occurs. Ultimately, you need to build an end-to-end predictive data pipeline that can provide a real-time database to maintain asset parts and sensor mappings, support a continuous application that processes a massive amount of telemetry, and allows you to predict compressor failures against these datasets. Our approach to addressing these issues is by selecting a unified platform that offers these capabilities.

They can unload the dishwasher, deliver packages to your home and open doors. Their thin metallic legs are able to traverse a steep flight of stairs -- or crawl straight into your worst nightmares. Now Boston Dynamics's awkward, four-legged, dog-like robot, SpotMini, is evolving from a viral YouTube sensation to a purchasable pet of sorts, according to the company's founder, Marc Raibert. Raibert told an audience last month at the CeBIT computer expo in Hanover, Germany, that his company is already testing SpotMini with potential customers from four separate industries: security, delivery, construction and home assistance. His presentation at the expo was reported by Inverse.

Drones are not new to industry or the oil and gas sector. They have been used by companies that are offering full-service video, or to capture survey photographs for some time. However, Renner Vaughn, director of oil and gas at commercial drone operator, Cape, believes that there is a major gap between what companies are hoping for and achieving in the use of drones. "What we've done at Cape, is bring the user drones together with aerial telepresence, our technology, to give experts that visibility they need in real time," Vaughn said. "Instead of hiring a company to go out and perform the survey for you, I'm trying to coach them on what to see and what's important in terms of the asset inspection.

Small robots aren't anything new, from DARPA's insect-sized disaster relief bots to diminutive inchworms powered by humidity. Now, though, researchers at MIT have likely created the smallest robots, yet: Microscopic, cell-sized electronic circuits made of two-dimensional materials that catch a ride on colloids, insoluble particles that stay suspended in liquid or even air. Since these minuscule devices can sense their environment, store data and carry out computational tasks, they could eventually be found in oil and gas pipelines, checking for leaks. They could be deployed into the air at a chemical refinery to sense harmful byproducts, or even into the human digestive tract for early detection of illness. "We wanted to figure out methods to graft complete, intact electronic circuits onto colloidal particles," MIT's Michael Strano said in a blog post.

Researchers hoping to deploy a 600-meter plastic-sweeper to the Pacific Ocean to clean up the notorious floating Great Garbage Patch have revealed the final design for their contraption. The gigantic'pac man' system consists of a 600-meter-long floating tube that sits at the surface of the water, with a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below to catch plastic waste. It harnesses the power of wind and surface waves to autonomously sweep through the area, gathering up plastic waste as it goes. The gigantic'pac man' system consists of a 600-meter-long floater that sits at the surface of the water, with a tapered 3-meter-deep skirt attached below to catch plastic waste. In the water, the'pac man' will catch plastic in a skirt, which will be emptired by a boat every few weeks Ocean Cleanup Project was forced to radically redesign the system after tests of their original system found it moved too much due to waves.

Graphs that model social networks, numerical simulations, and the structure of the Internet are enormous and cannot be manually inspected. A popular metric used to analyze these networks is Betweenness Centrality (BC), which has applications in community detection, power grid contingency analysis, and the study of the human brain. However, these analyses come with a high computational cost that prevents the examination of large graphs of interest. Recently, the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) has been promising for efficient processing of unstructured data sets. Prior GPU implementations of BC suffer from large local data structures and inefficient graph traversals that limit scalability and performance. Here we present a hybrid GPU implementation that provides good performance on graphs of arbitrary structure rather than just scale-free graphs as was done previously. Our methods achieve up to 13 speedup on high-diameter graphs and an average of 2.71 speedup overall compared to the best existing GPU algorithm. We also observe near linear speedup when running BC on 192 GPUs. Network analysis is a fundamental tool for domains as diverse as compilers,17 social networks,14 and computational biology.5 Real world applications of these analyses involve tremendously large networks that cannot be inspected manually. An example of a graph analytic that has found significant attention in recent literature is BC.

That new technologies could actually be bad for us, by sapping our attention or ruining our memories, is an argument that goes back to Socrates. It's tempting to summarily dismiss these concerns, but such tech-doomsaying is actually an important part of economic discovery. Our societies are organised by rules, embedded in our collective knowledge, about the proper way to behave and interact with each other. These rules are worked out over a long, often bitter process of debate and competition between rival ideas about society. Some of the most important rules we need to discover are about how to use technology and, just as importantly, how not to use it.