Friday, June 8, 2018
DIY Natural Wart and Skin Tag Removal at Home
Sunday, March 11, 2018
Easy Cellar Review How to Build an Underground Root Cellar and Bunker
Tuesday, March 6, 2018
Manifestation Miracle and The Law of Attraction You Can Do, Be and Have anything you Want
Tuesday, February 13, 2018
7 Top Cat Videos We Saw On Instagram This Week
Can you scream aww!
- 1Via @thedodo
- 2Via @afvofficial
- 3Via : @mishipeshus
- 4Via @vlenika
- 5
- 6Via catloversclub
- 7
Read more: http://cheezburger.com/4771845/7-top-5-cat-videos-we-saw-on-instagram-this-week
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Officials: The kids were starved. The dogs were well-fed.
(CNN)When authorities arrived Sunday night to a home in the California town of Perris, they found a family with 13 children, most of them starved and startlingly skinny.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/19/us/turpin-family-dogs/index.html
Sunday, December 17, 2017
Thanks to Google AI, Astronomers Have Found New Planets
For the first time, NASA has used machine learning to identify two new planets in distant star systems. One of those worlds is the eighth in its system, making that planetary system the largest-known yet discovered.
We know stars can have eight planets already (hello, Solar System!), so thats no surprise. The excitement comes in how this new world was found: using an artificial intelligence machine learning method known as neural networks.
On Thursday afternoon, Christopher Shallue, a senior software engineer at Google Brain, and Andrew Vanderburg, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin, announced the new worlds in a press conference. Its the eighth planet orbiting the 90th star in the Kepler observatorys catalog, so it carries the name Kepler-90i. Its a smallish, rocky planet orbiting very close to its host star. This method also identified a fifth planet in the Kepler-80 system, described in the same research paper.
The data pointing to the planets existence was collected several years ago, but was simply too weak a signal to be revealed using standard methods.
But thats exactly what computers are good at: performing tasks that are challenging or tedious for humans to do unaided. In particular, neural networks operate by teaching a computer to recognize patterns. In fact, the type of neural network we use is similar to the type we use for identifying cats and dogs in images, Shallue said at a press conference.
Once the neural network establishes a pattern, it can apply what it learns to new data, much like we humans can recognize dogs weve never seen before. Now weve shown that neural networks can also identify planets, Shallue said.
The Kepler mission collected so much data that it was impossible for scientists to analyze it all by hand, Vanderburg said. There are too many weak signals.
In other words, the signs of these planetssome possibly even habitableare hiding in plain sight within Kepler data, but produce effects that are too small for us to notice. Its like trying to pick out the sound of a single violin within a large symphony orchestra. With neural networks, however, the proverbial needle in the haystack can be found. Shallue reported it takes roughly five to six hours of computer run-time per star to find planets, but the speed improved as the neural network learns.
This is a really exciting discovery, and we consider it to be a proof-of-concept for identifying planets, Vanderburg said.
The Kepler observatory identifies exoplanets (planets orbiting other stars) by the amount of light they block from their host stars. This brief eclipse, called a transit, provides information about the size of the planet, which tells us if its rocky like Earth or gaseous like Jupiter. The transit also tells us how long the planet takes to orbit and how large its orbit is, revealing whether liquid water could exist on the surface.
Kepler-90 is a little larger and hotter than our sun. Kepler-90i is the smallest planet in the system, though its still about 30 percent larger than Earth. Kepler-90i orbits Kepler-90 about every 14 days, meaning its surface is likely about 800 degrees F. Its probably a rocky world, its temperature making it more like Mercury than Earth.
Its not a place I would want to visit, Vanderburg said.
The other newly discovered planet, Kepler-80g, is slightly larger than Kepler-90i, and orbits at about the same distance to its star. These arent planets for future human settlement, even if we could figure out how to get there. But both planets are members of complex star systems, which have planets far more tightly packed than the Solar System.
In particular, all eight of Kepler-90s planets orbit the star closer than Earth orbits the sun. Thats a common situation in exoplanet systems, where nearly all multiple planet systems we know have very hot planets.
On the other hand, exoplanet transits make it more likely to find such close-in planets. The neural network method of identifying other planets could help locate others that dont fit that pattern.
Its possible Kepler-90 has even more planets that we just dont know about, says Vanderburg. He wants to analyze all 150,000 stars in the Kepler data set to find other planets that might be hiding there, particularly those that are small, far out from their host stars, or both.
The Kepler observatory was launched into space on March 9, 2009, and operated successfully until the middle of 2013. Rather than orbit Earth, the spacecraft orbits the sun directly at the same distance Earth does, so (unlike the Hubble) its view isnt blocked by the planet. During its operation, the telescope aimed at a region of the sky, observing all the stars in its field of view constantly.
In that way, Kepler could monitor the tiny fluctuations of light from the transit of exoplanets. As of Thursday morning, astronomers had identified 4,496 potential exoplanets and confirmed 2,341 of those as definitely being planets orbiting other stars. Based largely on those discoveries, scientists think most stars in the Milky Way have planets, and the total number of planets may vastly outnumber the galaxys stars.
When two of its four reaction wheels failed, the telescope lost its ability to point steadily at one part of the sky. From that point, the mission was renamed K2, and continued to work, even though it slowly rotates and cant consistently look at the same stars. Despite that, K2 has identified 184 new exoplanets and 515 candidates.
Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at NASAs Ames Research Center, pointed out that not only are these successes due to the sheer amount of data Kepler has collected, but also to technological advances in efficiently analyzing that data. The use of neural networks is the latestbut probably not lastexciting development.
[Keplers data] clearly demonstrate the diversity of planetary systems, Dotson said. Using these new methods, who knows what potential insights might be gained?
Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/thanks-to-google-ai-astronauts-have-found-new-planets
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Missed the bitcoin boom? Five more baffling cryptocurrencies to blow your savings on
Regretting not spending a few hundred quid on bitcoin five years ago? Get ahead of the speculators by spending thousands of dollars on a imaginary cat or the Paris Hilton-backed LydianCoin
If you are worried youve missed out on making millions by betting on bitcoin, dont worry: there will be plenty more bizarre, borderline-incomprehensible digital bubbles in the future, and their value is only going to go up (until it all comes crashing down, that is). Here are five assets each competing to be the next bitcoin.
Ethereum
If there is a reason beyond market exuberance for the latest boom in bitcoins price $16,900 (12,600) as I write this, though who knows what it will be when you read it then it is Ethereum. It is hard to buy Ethereum directly, so most investors trade currency for bitcoin, then bitcoin for Ethereum, meaning a spike in interest in the latter helped revive the former.
Ethereum, which was launched in 2015, allows users to build decentralised applications, spending tokens called ether to buy processing power on computers run by other members of the network. Those applications can offer anything from file storage to financial services or simple games, all in a way that is impossible for any centralised authority to shut them down.
CryptoKitties
One of the oddest Ethereum projects in operation, CryptoKitties is a three-way cross between Tamagotchis, Beanie Babies and animal husbandry. Users can buy, sell and breed the eponymous cats, with traits inherited down the generations. The CryptoKitties network is responsible for 11% of all traffic on Ethereum, according to one report. A new gen0 cat is born every 15 minutes, which the company auctions off, and it also takes a cut of all other CryptoKittie sales. The typical cat sells for about $4 these days, but a few of the rarer cats particularly those descended from some of the oldest bloodlines are worth many times that. The most expensive CryptoKitty sold to date, Founder Cat #18, went for more than $110,000 on Thursday.
Monero
If lovable algorithmic cats are too cutesy for you, Monero harks back to the dark origins of the cryptocurrency craze. This alternative to bitcoin lets users make the same sort of digital transactions as its older sibling, but with vastly greater privacy protections. While bitcoin transactions are permanently recorded, and visible to everyone (if hard to connect to a real person), Monero goes to great lengths to obscure what is actually going on: you cant ever prove the sender, recipient and value of a transaction at the same time. The currency is also altered to make it easier to generate new coins using the sorts of processors in computers and phones, rather than requiring specialised mining rigs. This makes it very popular for services ranging from drug dealing online to monetising malware by taking over the processors of victims.
LydianCoin
Perhaps you want to plough your money into something backed by an authority you trust. In that case, let me introduce you to LydianCoin, the first AI big data marketing cloud for blockchain. If the buzzword bingo doesnt get you pulling out your e-wallet, maybe the celebrity backer will: in September, Paris Hilton said she is backing the currency.
Want someone else? Boxer Floyd Mayweather posted his support of Stox.coms ICO (a Bancor-based open-source prediction market platform that is built on Ethereum, to quote industry news site Coin Telegraph), as well as Hubii Network (a content marketplace). He even dubbed himself Floyd Crypto Mayweather. Or you could follow Jamie Foxx (Cobinhood, a zero trading fee cryptocurrency exchange) or Wu-Tang Clan member Ghostface Killah (Cream Capital, a blockchain-based ATM network).
PlexCoin
PlexCoin, an innovative attempt to build the next decentralised worldwide cryptocurrency, has already raised $15m from backers, so youd better move fast to ah, hang on. No. The founder has just been sent to jail for two months for, among other things, falsehoods on the companys fundraising documents, as well as taking investor money and using it to fund home improvements. A statement by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said the company hits all of the characteristics of a full-fledged cyber scam. Oh well. At least PlexCoin is now a steal on the open market: just 2 a coin, down from 12 before the SEC filed charges. Maybe you could buy low and make a killing after all?