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Flyboard Air: New hoverboard actually works and uses a turbine engine to fly its rider around, creator claims
Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display
Drone racing is about to get cheaper and easier
The new Atom comes in at just 122mm wide, and thanks to its durable carbon fiber frame plus polycarbonate shell, it only weighs 5 ounces or about 142 grams -- well below the the FAA's 250-gram threshold for mandatory registration. For the same reasons, this tiny drone comes with greater crash resistanance as well as maneuverability than its bigger counterparts. The custom-made brushless motors and propellers allow the Atom to reach speeds of up to 60 mph or 100 km/h, and depending on how hard you push it, its 6,400 mAh swappable lithium ion battery will last for somewhere between three to ten minutes. Video feed is courtesy of a 600TVL CMOS camera with a 120-degree field of view at the front, and on the receiving end the 480p monitor features 40 channels on 5.8 GHz, with a range of 1.5 miles or about 2.4 km. Should you wish to record video, RotorX will later let you mount a 1080p camera module with a microSD slot.
SpaceX cargo ship delivers inflatable space habitat
A SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft arrived at the International Space Station Sunday (April 10) to deliver vital supplies, science experiments and a prototype inflatable space habitat for the orbiting outpost and its six-person crew. Launched on Friday (April 8) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, the Dragon pulled up to space station on this morning where it was captured by the orbital complex's Canadarm2 robotic arm. "It looks like we caught a Dragon," British astronaut Tim Peake of the European Space Agency radioed to Mission Control after snagging the spacecraft with the station's arm. Dragon was later attached to the Earth-facing port on the station's Harmony module at 9:57 a.m. EDT (1357 GMT) to begin its one-month stay. The Dragon's arrival marked the first time that two U.S. commercial spacecraft were berthed to the space station simultaneously.
Why it's a mistake to compare A.I. with human intelligence.
Moreover, it is fantasy to suggest that the accelerating development and deployment of technologies that taken together are considered to be A.I. will be stopped or limited, either by regulation or even by national legislation. A.I. is increasingly critical to competitive performance in most economic sectors, whether manufacturing or services; it is a significantly valued consumer product (how many people rely on softly spoken directions from their cellphone when they are driving?); and in some sectors in which it is highly prized, such as pornography and cybercrime, regulations are unlikely to be effective. And it is not just economics driving a more cognitive future: Every major military organization in the world knows that one way or another cognition in integrated techno-human systems--A.I. in one form or another--will be critical for military competence and national security in an increasingly complex and uncertain geopolitical environment. If the U.S. wants to stop military A.I. research, it is a dangerous whimsy to think that China, Russia, and others, public, private, and nongovernmental, necessarily will follow its lead.
SpaceX delivers the world's first inflatable room to the ISS
SpaceX has made good on a high-priority delivery - the world's first inflatable room for astronauts. A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, two days after launching from Cape Canaveral, and astronauts used a robot arm to capture the capsule. The Dragon holds 7,000lbs of freight, including the soft-sided compartment built by Bigelow Aerospace. A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship arrived at the International Space Station on Sunday, two days after launching from Cape Canaveral and astronauts used a robot arm to capture the capsule. The pioneering pod, packed tightly for launch, should swell to the size of a small bedroom once filled with air next month.
SpaceX delivers inflatable room that could be future of Mars exploration to International Space Station
SpaceX has delivered an inflatable bedroom for astronauts to the International Space Station. The soft compartment is the first of its kind to go into space. But it could be far from the last: its makers hope that it will allow for inflatable habits on Mars, revolutionising the way that astronauts live on space. The company that made the small room, Bigelow Aerospace, hopes that within four years it can launch inflatable space stations made with the same technology that can then be leased out to commercial companies. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module -- BEAM for short -- is able to be packed into much smaller spaces than traditional habitats.
Japan starts trial drone home delivery service in Chiba
CHIBA – The government and companies started a trial of a drone home delivery service in Chiba Prefecture on Monday, with drones loaded with packages flying between condominiums, commercial facilities and adjacent parks. The joint project involving the central government, the city of Chiba, research institutions and companies including e-commerce giant Rakuten Inc. is the first drone delivery trial in an urban area. The city of Chiba has been designated as a special deregulation zone to conduct the trial. In the next stage of the trial, drones will pick up packages from a warehouse located beside Tokyo Bay and deliver them to Chiba's Mihama Ward, about 10 km away. The city aims to start the drone home delivery service by 2020, when Tokyo will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games, and plans to ask real estate developers scheduled to construct high-rise condominiums in Mihama to set up landing areas for the craft on each unit's balcony.
Experts tell US agency to slow down on self-driving cars
Engineers, safety advocates and automakers have a safety message for federal regulators eager to get self-driving cars on the road: slow down. Self-driving cars may pave the way for the future, but industry officials cautioned the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration during a meeting on Friday, saying the vehicles aren't up to the demands of real-world driving yet. The federal agency had previously announced it would begin writing guidelines for deploying the automated vehicles in January with the promise that they would be ready by July. Instead of issuing more strictly defined regulations, which can take up to eight years, the agency is writing guidelines instead, arguing that they needed to catch up with cars on the road that already have self-driving features included. FILE - In this May 13, 2014 file photo, a Google self-driving car goes on a test drive near the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. Self-driving cars are more likely to be a threat than a boon to public safety because of unresolved technical issues, engineers and safety advocates told the government Friday, countering a push by innovators for expedited government approval.
DARPA Unveils Plans For World's First Flotilla of Killer Robot Warships Within 5 Years - "Sea Hunter"
Over the past several decades, the United States has been an aggressive first mover in a war-fighting regime centered on guided munitions and integrated battle networks. These innovations have allowed U.S. forces to operate relatively uncontested in space, in the air, and on and under the sea, and to dominate conventional force-on-force land combat. For a variety of reasons – the geopolitics of rising powers, the global diffusion of technology and counter-reactions by its adversaries chief among them – the preeminence enjoyed by the United States in this regime is starting to erode. It's an amazing document for which this first sentence barely does justice for what is revealed throughout. So, once again we are given a DARPA press release of sorts that covers a program supposedly in development.
In the mood: the dynamics of collective sentiments on Twitter
Charlton, Nathaniel, Singleton, Colin, Greetham, Danica Vukadinović
We study the relationship between the sentiment levels of Twitter users and the evolving network structure that the users created by @-mentioning each other. We use a large dataset of tweets to which we apply three sentiment scoring algorithms, including the open source SentiStrength program. Specifically we make three contributions. Firstly we find that people who have potentially the largest communication reach (according to a dynamic centrality measure) use sentiment differently than the average user: for example they use positive sentiment more often and negative sentiment less often. Secondly we find that when we follow structurally stable Twitter communities over a period of months, their sentiment levels are also stable, and sudden changes in community sentiment from one day to the next can in most cases be traced to external events affecting the community. Thirdly, based on our findings, we create and calibrate a simple agent-based model that is capable of reproducing measures of emotive response comparable to those obtained from our empirical dataset.