Hong Kong based venture capital firm Deep Knowledge Ventures (DKV) has appointed a machine learning program to its board. Called VITAL, it's an "equal member" that will uncover trends "not immediately obvious to humans" in order to make investment recommendations.
The problem with power is that, eventually, it runs out. To help cope with this inevitability, scientists at the University of Washington have developed prototype "ambient backscatter" devices that can passively harness the juice in radio and TV waves. Because they don't generate their own signal, these devices can get by on the juice they siphon from the air -- communicating by absorbing or reflecting binary information from existing signals, instead. According to the researchers, these signals can travel as far as 6.5 miles from a TV tower at speeds of 1KB per second.
Although the project is still in its infancy, its creators are already thinking up practical applications. Ambient backscatter tags could be built into buildings or bridges, for instance, and alert monitoring stations to potential structural damage or defects. The team also imagined tagged keys and furniture, warning a user if they accidentally dropped something between the couch cushions -- all without an energy source. This type of tech could bring us closer to the internet-of-things future we've been promised, allowing smart communications to exist virtually anywhere. The Huskies said this could even enable a dead smartphone to send TV signal-powered text messages -- which could be great considering how often we forget to charge our handsets.
Filed under: Wireless, Science
Via: Dvice
Source: University of Washington
Chinese sculptor Hu Shaoming's urban landscapes look like something out of a fairy tale—golden cities that hang upside down or steel towers that ride on a seahorse's head.
Hu explains that the seahorse piece, titled "City of Dreams," is actually about the broken nature of its fairy tale premise, the idea that nature is supporting humanity's urban dreams, and will one day be exhausted. Perhaps when the seahorse grows weary of bobbing its city at the surface, it will sink, carrying the city down with it.
The golden series, his "Umbrella" series, contains by his count 2,000 individual buildings, made of metal from buttons, clothing accessories, utensils, food containers, furniture fixtures, and other odds and ends of daily life. For him, they represent the way in which traditional Chinese culture is diminishing:
When these trivial details of life in the magnificent mirrored patchwork ancient feng shui compass, I feel Chinese culture decentralized, set Japan's unique cultural charm.
Hu's works are currently on display at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.
Hu Shaoming [via My Modern Met]
The world beneath the ocean often looks like an alien planet. And these photographs of denizens of the deep make it obvious that aliens are already swimming amongst us.
(via The Featured Creature and National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration)
(via Allan Bruce and Fishes of Australia, photo by Edith Widder)
(via Dianne Bray/Museum Victoria 1 - 2 and Wikimedia Commons)
(via All That Is Interesting, Citron and Brian Suda)
(via Tywkiwdbi)
(via Fishindex)
(via Wikimedia Commons/Theodore W. Pietsch)
(via Fishindex)
(via Awashima Marine Park/Getty Images)
(Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images and Bounty Fishing)
(via The Featured Creature)
(via CSIRO, photos by Karen Gowlett-Holmes and Andrew Maver)
These buildings come from an alternate universe, one where architecture isn't bound by the rules of gravity—or perhaps even taste. Some of these concept buildings are pretty neat, but we get vertigo just looking at others.
(via Weburbanist and Victor Enrich)
(via Designboom)
(via The Superslice and Filip Dujardin/Facebook)
(via Olivier Ratsi/WYSI*not*WYG)
(via Jim Kazanjian)
(via Laurent Chéhère)
(via Gizmodo and Frank Kunert)
The Olympic Games are always proceded by a furious amount of building as host cities construct arenas, pools, ski jumps, Olympic villages, and anything else the games demand. While some of the buildings are repurposed after the athletes depart, others are left to rot.
The Olympic Village
Before the WWII it was converted into a military school, but after the war it was used by Soviet forces for decades.
(via Slow Travel Berlin/Photo by Julia Stone, Flickr/Frederik Jacobs, DKB Stiftung, Fotocommunity/katinkahbg and Good Hard Working People)
This is the place where the legendary "Flying Finn", Paavo Nurmi won five Gold medals, including two within an hour (1500m and 5000m).
(via Paris Invisible)
The Wembley Palace of Engineering
This building held the fencing competition in 1948. Partially demolished in 2006, and now it's a warehouse.
(via Wikimedia Commons/oxyman)
Ahvenisto Swimming Pool
(via Confidentielles)
A Hotel on the way to Ski Jump
The Ski Jumping Ramp
The Bobsleigh Track
The Olympic Village
(via Dark Optics, Karen Barlow/cloudlessness and kc1yr/Sharon Machlis Gartenberg)
(Photos by AP and Oceansvibe)
Beach Volleyball Stadium
Kayaking Venue
(via Limitless)
The whole thing only took 15 minutes, but by the time it stopped over two-dozen homes and cottages were either seriously damaged or completely destroyed. An arctic wind blowing across Duphin Lake near Winnipeg, Manitoba, created this bizarre phenomenon in which rapidly forming ice moved inland along Ochre Beach.
According to Manitoba's Emergency Measures Organization, 12 permanent homes were completely crushed and destroyed by the ice floes. The walls of ice were pushed inward by winds gusting up to 37 mph (60 kph).
Images: Winnipeg Free Press/CKDM.
The Winnipeg Free Press reports:
Doug Davis had just taken a shower and was about to sit on his couch and relax at his home along Ochre Beach on Friday night.
Then he heard the ice coming.
"All of a sudden," said Davis's wife, Elaine, "that was it."
Within the next five minutes, a wall of ice rose from the lake, so powerful that it plowed though the Davis's two-storey home, pushing furniture from one bedroom into another. It pushed the bathroom tub and vanity into the hallway.
The Davis family weren't the only ones who had damage. In all, 27 homes and cottages were damaged or destroyed — but no injuries were reported.
A local state of emergency was declared in the municipality and residents along the beach were evacuated Friday night.
Residents could see and hear it coming, but could do nothing as the ice pierced through windows and doors.
Locas haven't had a lot of luck lately; many residents are still recovering from floods that struck the region in 2011.
A similar thing also happened in Minnesota this past weekend, though the damage was much lighter. Check out the video:
Images CTV.
Everything came together for Spanish photographer Isaac Gutiérrez Pascual when he snapped this glorious photo. With the Moon in its crescent phase, and Venus in perfect alignment to the right, a flock of birds took flight just as a storm began to break up.
Credit: Isaac Gutiérrez Pascual; published with permission.
Via APOD, which adds: "Bright Venus again becomes visible just after sunset this 2013 May and will appear near Jupiter toward the end of the month."
Are your eyes bored today? Look at this right now. It's a computer animation by computer artist Daniel Sierra, and it will mesmerize you, if only for a few minutes.
    
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A new UK startup is bringing one-hour grocery deliveries to the UK. PocketShop has opened up to initially serve a handful of postcodes in north London, but plans to expand to cover the whole of the city by the end of the summer.
Super-fast delivery of essential provisions is becoming increasingly popular in the USA, with Instacart, Postmates and even Google all running limited services. Now if you’re in the London Borough of Camden, PocketShop is providing a similar service by way of a well-designed and easy-to-use Web app that is equally at home on a mobile or desktop browser.
PocketShop is being developed by Forward Labs, essentially a ‘foundry’ for new startup ideas, which is based amongst the highly Google-inspired decor of the Forward Internet Group‘s HQ in Camden.
Having been in private beta for a few weeks, it’s now open for anyone to try. The idea is simple – you choose the items you want from a selection centered around ‘everyday essentials’ like coffee, ready meals, common cooking ingredients and the like. Then you select from one-hour or three-hour delivery and your order goes off to a team of buyers who pick up the items from local convenience stores and bring them to you.
The service is available from 9am to 9pm, Monday to Friday, and one-hour delivery costs £8.65 while three-hour delivery is £5.35. That’s not particularly cheap, but you are paying for the convenience of not having to go and collect the items yourself, after all.
With coverage of London planned to be completed by the end of the summer, PocketShop intends to then start expanding to other UK cities.
Same-day delivery isn’t an entirely new concept in the UK. Former The Next Web Conference Startup Rally contender Shutl has been offering it for a range of retailers for some time now, although grocery suppliers are absent from its current client list. It’s surprising that it’s taken so long for something like PocketShop to appear, although now it’s here, we imagine that the likes of supermarket giant Tesco will be watching with interest to see how it fares.
Also read: Hands on with Instacart, the delivery service that wants to make grocery shopping a snap
And: Google starts trialling Google Shopping Express in San Francisco
Image credit: Thinkstock
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