sciencehabit writes: A mini-arms race is unfolding in the supposed field of quantum radar, spurred by press reports in 2016 that China had built one — potentially threatening the ability of stealthy military aircraft to hide from conventional radars. Governments around the world have tasked physicists to look into the idea. Whereas a conventional radar searches for objects by detecting pulse…
Tag: searches
DuckDuckGo Is Growing Fast
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: DuckDuckGo, the privacy-focused search engine, announced that August 2020 ended in over 2 billion total searches via its search platform. While Google remains the most popular search engine, DuckDuckGo has gained a great deal of traction in recent months as more and more users have begun to value their privacy on the internet….
Voice Assistants Are Doing a Poor Job of Conveying Information About Voting
Kyle Wiggers, reporting for VentureBeat: Over 111.8 million people in the U.S. talk to voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant every month, eMarketer estimates. Tens of millions of those people use assistants as data-finding tools, with the Global Web Index reporting that 25% of adults regularly perform voice searches on smartphones. But while voice assistants can answer questions about…
Software Could Help Reform Policing — If Only Police Unions Wanted It
tedlistens writes: The CEO of Taser maker Axon, Rick Smith, has a lot of high-tech ideas for fixing policing. One idea for identifying potentially abusive behavior is AI, integrated with the company’s increasingly ubiquitous body cameras and the footage they produce. In a patent application filed last month, Axon describes the ability to search video not only for words and locations…
Scientist searches for stellar phosphorus to find potentially habitable exoplanets
A Southwest Research Institute scientist has identified stellar phosphorus as a probable marker in narrowing the search for life in the cosmos. She has developed techniques to identify stars likely to host exoplanets, based on the composition of stars known to have planets, and proposes that upcoming studies target stellar phosphorus to find systems with the greatest probability for hosting life…
Has microbial life been found on Venus?
Is there microbial life in the atmosphere of Earth’s closest neighbor, Venus? An international team of astronomers has found tentative but highly compelling evidence. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/life-on-venus-phosphine-biosignatures…
IBM Will Feed Four Children For a Day For Every Student Who Masters the Mainframe
This week brings a special event honoring the IBM Z line of mainframes, writes long-time Slashdot reader theodp: As part of this week’s IBM Z Day event, looking-for-young-blood IBM is teaming up with tech-backed K-12 CS nonprofits Code.org and CSforALL and calling on students 14-and-up to Master The Mainframe during the 24-hour code-a-thon to open doors to new opportunities with…
A breakthrough in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence
The researchers called their new analytical technique “a milestone in SETI.” One researcher commented: “We now know that fewer than one in 1,600 stars closer than about 330 light years host transmitters just a few times more powerful than the strongest radar we have here on Earth.” Source: https://earthsky.org/space/analytical-breakthrough-seti-expand-search-200-times…
Astronomers issue report on the effect of ‘satellite constellations’ on astronomy
A new report concludes that large constellations of bright satellites in low-Earth orbit will fundamentally change ground-based astronomy and impact the appearance of the night sky for stargazers worldwide. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/astronomers-report-effect-of-satellite-constellations-astronomy…
Are there more rogue planets than stars in our galaxy?
A new study suggests there are more rogue, free-floating planets – unconnected to any star – than stars in our Milky Way galaxy. NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is expected to begin finding hundreds of them. Source: https://earthsky.org/space/rogue-planets-milky-way-roman-space-telescope…