In a disused military aircraft hangar buried deep in a granite hillside, Johan Tofeldt flicks a switch on the future of mining. "Look, no hands!" he beams, as the truck lurches backwards and executes a precise reverse. "It's a little heavy on the clutch, but then it's not designed for driver comfort." The cheerful Swede is sitting in a standard Volvo FMX heavy duty truck, a haulage industry workhorse. But where once there was a narrow bed behind the seat there is now a laptop and a tangle of wires.

The lightest material on Earth now packs a powerful punch. Scientists from Texas and around the world have created a material that, by density, is lighter than air yet, when electrified, instantly and powerfully contracts. Their work is detailed in this week's issue of the journal Science. "These artificial muscles are very lightweight and can do wonderful things," said Ray Baughman, the study author from the University of Texas at Dallas. While the artificial muscle is unlikely to be used in humans or prosthetic limbs, Baughman says "these sheets of carbon nanotubes ... are of great practical interest for LEDs, solar cells, and other applications."

The Iller river stretches for 91 miles through southeastern Germany before meeting up with the Danube. This river, like all rivers, is filled with sediment-- rocks and pebbles from thousands of years ago that sit on the riverbed and along the bank. One day last year, Benjamin Maus was lounging near the Iller admiring a handful of pebbles. "I was basically just sorting pebbles and spraying them with sunscreen, which made the colors much more vivid," Maus recalls. At the time Maus, an artist, had no clue that these pebbles would inspire his latest work.

This project is part of the Human Data Interaction project at CSAIL, MIT. The Deep Mining project aims at finding the best hyperparameter set for a Machine Learning pipeline. A pipeline example for the handwritten digit recognition problem is presented below. Some hyperparameters indeed need to be set carefully, as the degree for the polynomial kernel of the SVM. Choosing the value of such hyperparameters can be a very difficult task and this project's goal is to make it much easier.

Agriculture is considered a prime area of potential growth in the drone industry because of the technology's ability to help survey crops and gather real-time information on farmland. Crop-spraying drones or easy-to-fly devices that are designed to spray pesticides on crops, can also capture high resolution images of whole field for further analysis. Effect of crop-spraying drone usage is massive. Drones can take off and land vertically which means unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sprayer does not need a runway. They are suitable for all kinds of complex terrain, crops and plantations of varying heights.

The global population is expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050, which means double agricultural production in order to meet food demands. Farm enterprises require new and innovative technologies to face and overcome these challenges. Artificial intelligence robotics is one of these technologies that promises to provide a solution. An increasing number of farmbots are being developed that are capable of complex tasks that have not been possible with the large-scale agricultural machinery in the past. Here's a list of real use cases of robots that will help agriculture changing.

US-based conglomerate GE has signed an agreement with the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras), to set up an Industrial Internet Centre of Excellence. The Centre is being designed to develop applications that will help companies save costs. The first of these will be the Digital Twin of an aluminium smelter. According to senior company officials, GE would invest around Rs 3 crore in the first six months and could commit around Rs 30 crore over five years depending upon the outcome. Aluminium smelters are refineries for extracting the metal from aluminium oxide, separating it from oxygen through a chemical reaction.

LONDON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--According to the latest research study released by Technavio, the global industrial robotics market in the rubber and plastic industry is expected to record a CAGR of over 18% until 2020. This research report titled'Global Industrial Robotics Market in the Rubber and Plastic Industry 2016-2020', provides an in-depth analysis of market growth in terms of revenue and emerging market trends. To calculate the market size, the report considers the revenue generated primarily through the sales and services of various industrial robotics such as cartesian, articulated, and others for different applications in the rubber and plastic industry. "China accounted for about 25% of the overall production of plastics, followed by European countries that accounted for 20%. Key findings of this report show that the demand for plastics is anticipated to grow during the forecast period, and positively impact the market. Significant improvements in gripper technology, such as the development of Versaball by Empire Robotics for handling materials of any shape and size, is also slated to play a critical role in the expansion of robots in the rubber and plastic industry," said Bharath Kanniappan, one of Technavio's lead analysts for robotics research.

It's a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari's office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. "It's from 2010," he says, "and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!" Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer -- a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future. Instead of continuing to develop new materials the old-fashioned way -- stumbling across them by luck, then painstakingly measuring their properties in the laboratory -- Marzari and like-minded researchers are using computer modelling and machine-learning techniques to generate libraries of candidate materials by the tens of thousands.

Unstructured data is the most prevalent form of information on the planet. It exists in our e-mails, surveys, social media accounts, call center logs, etc. With a strong text analytics strategy in place, companies can get critical information from this data to drive better business decisions.