Alphabet’s Google will change procedures before July for reviewing its scientists’ work, according to a town hall recording heard by Reuters, part of an effort to quell internal tumult over the integrity of its artificial intelligence (AI) research. From a report: In remarks at a staff meeting last Friday, Google Research executives said they were working to regain trust after the…
Tag: hall
How Canadians Derailed a Train in 1998 and Drove It to City Hall for Power After a Brutal Ice Storm
James Gilboy, writing at The Drive: Over the week spanning Jan. 4-10, 1998, a trio of massive ice storms wracked the northeastern United States and parts of Canada. Knocking over transmission towers, the storms deprived up to 1.35 million people of electricity, in some cases for weeks (sound familiar?). Rather than leave town, though, one Canadian mayor stepped up to bring…
Magnetic effect without a magnet
Electric current is deflected by a magnetic field—in conducting materials, this leads to the so-called Hall effect. This effect is often used to measure magnetic fields. A surprising discovery has now been made at TU Wien, in collaboration with scientists from the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland), McMater University (Canada), and Rice University (U.S.): an exotic metal made of cerium, bismuth and…
The first CubeSat with a Hall-effect thruster has gone to space
Student-led teams aren’t the only ones testing out novel electric propulsion techniques recently. Back in November, a company called Exotrail successfully tested a completely new kind of electric propulsion system in space—a small Hall-effect thruster. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-01-cubesat-hall-effect-thruster-space.html…
New Train Hall Opens at Penn Station, Echoing Building’s Former Glory
The Moynihan Train Hall, with glass skylights and 92-foot-high ceilings, will open Jan. 1 as an area for Amtrak and Long Island Railroad riders. The New York Times: For more than half a century, New Yorkers have trudged through the crammed platforms, dark hallways and oppressively low ceilings of Pennsylvania Station, the busiest and perhaps most miserable train hub in North…
Physicists Made an Insanely Precise Clock That Keeps Time Using Entanglement
fahrbot-bot quotes an article from Science Alert: Nothing keeps time like the beating heart of an atom. But even the crisp tick-tock of a vibrating nucleus is limited by uncertainties imposed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Several years ago, researchers from MIT and the University of Belgrade in Serbia proposed that quantum entanglement could push clocks beyond this blurry boundary….
Quantum insulators create multilane highways for electrons
New energy-efficient electronic devices may be possible thanks to research that demonstrates the quantum anomalous Hall (QAH) effect—where an electrical current does not lose energy as it flows along the edges of the material—over a broader range of conditions. A team of researchers from Penn State has experimentally realized the QAH effect in a multilayered insulator, essentially producing a multilane highway…
Apple Starts Work on Its Own Cellular Modem, Chip Chief Says
Apple has started building its own cellular modem for future devices, a move that would replace components from Qualcomm, Apple’s top chip executive told staff on Thursday. From a report: Johny Srouji, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies, made the disclosure in a town hall meeting with Apple employees, according to people familiar with the comments. “This year, we kicked…
Urban Explorers Discover A Treasure Trove Of Soviet Computing Power
“The building did not stand out. Unremarkable industrial building, which was built in hundreds of Soviet cities,” explains a web site called Russian Urban Exploration. Hackaday describes what happened next:
It’s probably a dream most of us share, to stumble upon a dusty hall full of fascinating abandoned tech frozen in time as though its operators walked away one day and simply…
The Curse of the Buried Treasure
Two metal-detector enthusiasts discovered a Viking hoard. It was worth a fortune — but it became a nightmare. From a report:
Leominster, in the West Midlands area of England, is an ancient market town where the past and the present are jumbled together like coins in a change purse. Shops housed in half-timbered sixteenth-century Tudor buildings face the main square, offering cream…