Chinese Economy Now Largest in the World
December 4th, 2014Via: Marketwatch:
The Chinese economy just overtook the United States economy to become the largest in the world. For the first time since Ulysses S. Grant was president, America is not the leading economic power on the planet.
It just happened — and almost nobody noticed.
The International Monetary Fund recently released the latest numbers for the world economy. And when you measure national economic output in “real” terms of goods and services, China will this year produce $17.6 trillion — compared with $17.4 trillion for the U.S.A.
As recently as 2000, we produced nearly three times as much as the Chinese.
To put the numbers slightly differently, China now accounts for 16.5% of the global economy when measured in real purchasing-power terms, compared with 16.3% for the U.S.
This latest economic earthquake follows the development last year when China surpassed the U.S. for the first time in terms of global trade.
The Smart Mouse with the Half-Human Brain
December 4th, 2014Via: New Scientist:
Mice have been created whose brains are half human. As a result, the animals are smarter than their siblings.
The idea is not to mimic fiction, but to advance our understanding of human brain diseases by studying them in whole mouse brains rather than in dishes.
The altered mice still have mouse neurons – the “thinking” cells that make up around half of all their brain cells. But practically all the glial cells in their brains, the ones that support the neurons, are human.
“It’s still a mouse brain, not a human brain,” says Steve Goldman of the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York. “But all the non-neuronal cells are human.”
Discarded Laptop Batteries Keep the Lights On
December 4th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
Many of the estimated 50 million lithium-ion laptop batteries discarded every year could provide electricity storage sufficient to light homes in poor countries, researchers at IBM say.
In work being aired this week at a conference in San Jose, researchers at IBM Research India in Bangalore found that at least 70 percent of all discarded batteries have enough life left to power an LED light at least four hours a day for a year.
While it’s possible to combine LED lights with solar panels and rechargeable batteries (see “Innovators Under 35: Evans Wadongo”), using discarded batteries could make the approach far cheaper.
“The most costly component in these systems is often the battery,” says Vikas Chandan, a research scientist at the lab’s Smarter Energy Group, who led the project. “In this case, the most expensive part of your storage solution is coming from trash.”
The IBM group, working with a hardware R&D firm called RadioStudio, tore open discarded laptop battery packaging and extracted individual storage units called cells, tested those individually to pick out the good ones, and recombined them to form refurbished battery packs. Then, after adding charging dongles as well as circuitry to prevent overheating, they gave them to five users in Bangalore who lived in slums or operated sidewalk carts.
Three months later, the users said the battery packs had worked well; the main request was for rat-resistant wires and brighter bulbs, says Mohit Jain, a research engineer with the group. A revised setup is now being tested.
Mexico Federal Police, Troops to Patrol Acapulco
December 3rd, 2014Via: AP:
Federal police and soldiers will take over policing duties in the resort of Acapulco to ensure the safety of tourists amid a wave of violence and protests that has scared away visitors, Mexican authorities said Wednesday.
Troops and federal police will also take over policing in 20 more townships north of Acapulco in a region known as Tierra Caliente, or the Hot Lands, which is plagued by drug cultivation, trafficking and cartels. The region covers parts of the states of Guerrero, Michoacan, Morelos and Mexico State.
Mystery Surrounds NASA’s Secret Mission in Africa
December 3rd, 2014Via: ABC:
A NASA official recently confirmed that one of the agency’s aircraft had been spotted on an American military airstrip in eastern Africa a few weeks ago, but like a series of U.S. military officials, declined to say what the space agency’s high-tech bird was doing there.
“I really can’t give you any of the details,” Jim Alexander, a NASA official with the WB-57 High Altitude Research Program, told ABC News. “You know, the airplane was there, you see it in the picture. But I really can’t tell you what it was for.”
The broad-winged white plane belonging to the agency best known for putting a man on the moon was photographed by the satellite company Digital Globe back in September sitting next to some tilt-rotor aircraft at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, a development reported by the military blog War Is Boring last month.
A NASA website that tracks the agency’s three WB-57s shows that one of its planes, number 926, was on a “foreign deployment” from July to November this year. A NASA handbook for the WB-57 posted online lists 14 international deployment sites for the aircraft around the world, but the American base near Djibouti isn’t one of them.
Iraqi Army ‘Had 50,000 Ghost Troops’ on Payroll
December 3rd, 2014Via: BBC:
An investigation into corruption in the Iraqi army has revealed that there were 50,000 false names on its payroll.
Known in the military as “ghost soldiers”, they either did not exist or no longer reported for duty, however their salaries were still paid.
A statement from the PM’s office said the payments have been stopped.
Correspondents say rampant corruption in the Iraqi army is seen as one of the reasons why it has struggled to contain Islamic State militants.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Haidar al-Abadi, quoted by AFP news agency, said the investigation began when the latest salary payments were made.
“Over the past few weeks, the prime minister has been cracking down to expose the ghost soldiers and get to the root of the problem,” said Rafid Jaboori.
It is thought that the salaries were siphoned off by corrupt officers.
An unnamed officer told AFP that the 50,000 names include soldiers who had deserted or were killed in recent fighting.
Google’s Intelligence Designer
December 3rd, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review:
But Hassabis sounds more excited when he talks about going beyond just tweaking the algorithms behind today’s products. He dreams of creating “AI scientists” that could do things like generate and test new hypotheses about disease in the lab. When prodded, he also says that DeepMind’s software could also be useful to robotics, an area in which Google has recently invested heavily (see “The Robots Running This Way”). “One reason we don’t have more robots doing more helpful things is that they’re usually preprogrammed,” he says. “They’re very bad at dealing with the unexpected or learning new things.”
We Need to Talk about Sandy Hook
December 3rd, 2014Via: Independent Media Solidarity:
Stephen Hawking Warns Artificial Intelligence Could End Mankind
December 2nd, 2014Via: BBC:
Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain’s pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence.
He told the BBC:”The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.”
His warning came in response to a question about a revamp of the technology he uses to communicate, which involves a basic form of AI.
Electricity Infrastructure in Detroit “Beyond Salvage”
December 2nd, 2014Via: Mlive:
When a major U.S. city’s government loses power to its schools, fire stations, government buildings and sporting arenas because it’s operating on an antiquated power grid that it can’t afford to update, it’s national news, Detroit proved Tuesday.
Media across the nation covered the power outage that selectively impacted municipal buildings in Detroit, the criminal courthouse, schools, sporting arenas, a hospital and City Hall. The buildings receive their electricity from the Detroit Public Lighting Department on an internal energy grid, rather than from area utility DTE Energy.
Lights stayed on for residents, while courtrooms and classrooms dimmed and elevators slowed to a halt.
Mayor Mike Duggan announced at an early-afternoon conference that a cable “failed,” The nature of the failure was not revealed.
Electricity had been restored by about 5 p.m., but the national ribbing may have just begun.
Pundits, late night comedians and perhaps a sprinkling of conspiracy theorists are likely to jump on Detroit’s brief return to the dark ages for material in coming days.
“Poor Infrastructure is completely at fault for this,” Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said at a press conference Tuesday afternoon, adding that Detroit’s self-contained power grid hasn’t “been modernized in decades” and is beyond salvage.
