The LA Fires Spewed Out Toxic Nanoparticles. Nicholas Spada is one of the only scientists in the world using a nuclear x-ray process to study deadly nanoparticles in wildfire smoke. What he's uncovered in California is a nightmare. Nicholas Spada was used to fielding urgent requests when wildfire smoke blanketed cities. Winter was supposed to be the quiet period when wildfires die down and researchers like Spada perform instrument maintenance, write grant proposals and go home for dinner. Instead, 2025's so-called offseason ignited January 7, when the Santa Ana winds came howling through Los Angeles, bringing gusts upwards of 100 miles per hour, after more than eight months without meaningful rainfall. By nightfall, thousands of homes in Los Angeles' swanky Pacific Palisades neighborhood and the Altadena community north of the city were gone. The next morning, Spada was fielding call after call at the University of California, Davis, from fellow air researchers at universities across the country who were packing instruments and other gear and heading for Los Angeles, many on their own dime. They would be studying urban fires--not normal wildfires or even urban-wildland interface fires--but urban fires in which most of the fuel was manmade: lawn chemicals, asbestos insulation, lead paint, lithium batteries. They asked Spada which instruments to bring, what measurements to take, where to set up downwind and when he would be there. The calls quickly morphed into a WhatsApp group that's still going strong, as results continue to roll in sporadically all these months later. Spada, a trim, energetic man with a close-trimmed beard and reddish hair, is a project scientist at UC Davis' Air Quality Research Center. He is one of only a handful of scientists in the world proficient at using a nuclear method for detecting toxic substances in air particles to understand their impact on human health and the environment.

The OpenAI CEO lost the confidence of top leaders in the three organizations he has directed, yet each time he's rebounded to greater heights

NASA's next generation lunar backpack could give astronauts the ability to create a 3D map of the surface of the moon, as they walk across the regolith. The Kinematic Navigation and Cartography Knapsack (KNaCK) is a mobile lidar scanner, worn as a backpack that uses light and lasers to measure range. NASA researchers and industry partners developed the device that can not only aid astronauts in the airless wastelands of the Lunar South Pole, but also on the Earth. One suggested use is for a mountaineering expedition in an unchartered environment. The hikers can create a real-time map for others in the party, as well as other hikers that might come after them - all from a simple backpack.

Although sentiment analysis is an effective process that helps in a proper understanding of a text, a major roadblock to this was the presence of sarcasm in the text. Sarcasm is a hard nut to crack even in normal human communication, thus it can only be imagined what a predicament it might pose to a computer program to do the same. Since it poses a hurdle for the accuracy of sentiment analysis, experts began working on a suitable solution that could address this problem. One of the major challenges that come with the identification of sarcasm in the text is the lack of vocal tones and facial expressions. Thus, identifying sarcasm in the text becomes a task that is performed with a blindfold, making it quite hard.

A recent survey found that 31% of new hires quit within their first six months on the job. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, during the last half of the year from April 2017 to April 2018 over two million people left their jobs each month -- for the first six months, it was over 3 million. All of this churning points to a major headache for businesses seeking to identify and hire the right people. The traditional paradigm of HR personnel digging through stacks of paper resumes clearly isn't working that well -- and there's nothing to suggest that digital resumes are any better. And this is more than a mere annoyance for companies: Filling open positions costs money and time that's lost when the wrong person is hired.

Artificial intelligence built into new high-tech traffic signals could be a solution to Edmonton's LRT-related congestion issues, argues a west-end councillor. Andrew Knack is looking for council support for a new study and series of pilot projects, hoping to learn from cities such as Pittsburgh. Smart traffic signals there reduced travel time by 25 per cent and idling time by over 40 per cent, according to Rapid Flow Technologies, the company responsible. The company believes its system -- a network of 50 intersections -- also reduces vehicles emissions by 21 per cent because it cuts down on idling. "It's not because vehicles are moving faster, but they're stopping less," said Steve Smith, Carnegie Mellon University professor of robotics and Rapid Flow CEO.

For a million reasons, much of it out of anyone's control, the initial crop of games that launches with any brand new console is bound to have some duds. Normally, those unfortunate failures don't warrant a sequel, and second chances are exceedingly rare. System launch games are built on brand new hardware that developers are unfamiliar with. Deadlines are bound in steel because the game's launch is tied to the console's release. And, all while the, the pressure to make something innovative, a game that can show off the possibilities of a new generation of game consoles, is impossibly high.

Google's latest bombshell of a research project is a smart contact lens diabetics can use to read blood sugar levels through the tears in their eyes. Thanks to a tiny microchip, Google says, the lens can provide a new glucose reading as often as once a second. Some have pointed out that the project follows in the footsteps of rival Microsoft, but this is merely another reason to applaud Google, a company with a knack for bringing research into the real world that we'll likely never see from Microsoft. The lens Google unveiled on Thursday seems to draw heavily, if not directly, from work done by Microsoft. As TechCrunch notes, one of the Googlers behind the project, Babak Parvis, once collaborated with the Redmond software giant on a lens the company fashioned for tracking blood sugar without needles.

Hackathon[3]: "New Realities" examined what's real in the shrinking gap between our physical and digital lives. In terms of existing and emerging technology, reality is whatever we are capable of. We can talk to our TV with Siri, live inside a game with Oculus Rift or travel anywhere through Google Street View. There's never been a time of more reality-challenging innovation, as our Hackathon[3] teams demonstrated in a quick-turn all-or-nothing competition built on the latest forms of what's possible.] "Knack," the winning project, made sales empathy a reality. Knack is a product that demonstrates how artificial intelligence and organic intelligence empower a sales force to sell to the person and not to the script.