A guy convinces his wife to try out a new AI technology to spice up their sex life, but gets a bit more spice than he bargained for.
Synopsis:
This short film may not feature internationally recognized A-list movie stars. But with the help of machine learning AI algorithms, our actors may seem a bit familiar. A cautionary science fiction satire, FACE SWAP is arguably the first narrative film using the “deepfakes” process as a storytelling tool.
On Wednesday, astronomers announced the first detection of water in the atmosphere of a planet that orbits within the habitable zone of its host star. The planet, K2-18b, is certainly not habitable by us, as it's a mini-Neptune that may not have any solid surface and is likely to have a hydrogen/helium-rich atmosphere. But the discovery of water vapor and clouds confirms expectations that the Earth isn't necessarily special in having water at a distance from its star where that water could be liquid.
Big planet, small star
As the planet's designation indicates, K2-18b was discovered during the extended second mission of the Kepler space telescope. After the failure of some of the telescope's pointing hardware, NASA figured out how to keep the optics stable by using its solar panels. This allowed Kepler to examine additional areas of the sky during what was termed the K2 mission.
K2-18b is a large planet, as follow-on observations have indicated its mass is over eight times that of Earth's. It's close enough to its host star that it only takes 33 days to complete an orbit. But, because the host star is much smaller and cooler than the Sun, that means K2-18b only gets slightly more light than Earth does (1,441 Watts/square meter versus 1,370 for Earth). That's consistent with the planet having a temperature that allows liquid water to exist.
SpaceX says it plans to change its satellite launch strategy in a way that will speed up deployment of its Starlink broadband service and has set a new goal of providing broadband in the Southern United States late next year.
In a filing on August 30, SpaceX asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to "adjust the orbital spacing of its satellites." With this change, each SpaceX launch would deploy satellites in "three different orbital planes" instead of just one, "accelerating the process of deploying satellites covering a wider service area."
"This adjustment will accelerate coverage to southern states and US territories, potentially expediting coverage to the southern continental United States by the end of the next hurricane season and reaching other US territories by the following hurricane season," SpaceX told the FCC. The Atlantic and Pacific hurricane seasons each begin in the spring and run to November 30 each year.
Enlarge / Holders of large amounts of bitcoin are known as "whales." (credit: Jenny Evans/Getty Images)
Late on Thursday night, US Eastern time, someone made one of the biggest transactions in bitcoin history: 94,504 bitcoins. At the then-current bitcoin price of around $10,600, this transaction was worth almost exactly $1 billion. It's now worth around $967 million.
Bitcoin's shared transaction ledger is open, but addresses are anonymous by default. As a result, we know that the transaction occurred, but we don't know who made it or why. One analysis indicated that at least a third of the money comes from Huobi Global, a cryptocurrency exchange based in Singapore. So the transaction could reflect big withdrawals from a Huobi customer—or it could mean that Huobi itself was consolidating some of its deposits.
This isn't the largest transaction in bitcoin terms. In 2013, for example, someone moved 194,993 bitcoins in a single transaction. But bitcoins were much less valuable back then, so the transaction was only valued at around $150 million.
Comcast and several TV network owners have sued the state of Maine to stop a law that requires cable companies to offer à la carte access to TV channels. The complaint in US District Court in Maine was filed Friday by Comcast, Comcast subsidiary NBCUniversal, A&E Television Networks, C-Span, CBS Corp., Discovery, Disney, Fox Cable Network Services, New England Sports Network, and Viacom.
The companies claim the Maine law—titled "An Act To Expand Options for Consumers of Cable Television in Purchasing Individual Channels and Programs"—is preempted by the First Amendment and federal law. The Maine law is scheduled to take effect on September 19 and says that "a cable system operator shall offer subscribers the option of purchasing access to cable channels, or programs on cable channels, individually." The lawsuit seeks an injunction to prevent the law from being enforced.
Many cable TV customers want the ability to pay for channels individually instead of in large bundles, in hopes of getting only the channels they want and saving money in the process. But cable TV operators and the programmers that license their content to cable TV operators have resisted changes to the bundle system.
Enlarge / "Agrivoltaics" studies like the one pictured here in Massachusetts are finding many crops that pair well with solar panels. (credit: NREL / Flickr)
Solar panels might seem like they’re in direct competition with plants. One is catching sunlight to do photosynthesis, the other wants to take it to push electrons. Surely Highlander rules apply, and there can be only one on a plot of land, right?
In reality, it’s not a zero-sum game. Some plants will burn in direct sun, after all, and so there are plenty of food crops that would be happy to share their space with panels. And as a new study led by the University of Arizona’s Greg Barron-Gafford shows, the combination isn’t even necessarily a compromise—there are some synergies that can bring significant benefits to a solar-agriculture.
Everybody wins
Prof. Barron-Gafford et al. focused on dry areas like the American Southwest, where water for crops is limiting and things are projected to get drier. The shade provided by solar panels could lower soil surface temperatures and evaporation, the researchers thought, and vegetation could similarly keep the panels themselves a little cooler than a bare ground installation. Since solar panel efficiency drops at high temperature, that could mean more electricity generated.
Enlarge / While we prefer our "handsome PC game box" collections with gatefold covers and lenticular prints, we're still pretty charmed by Steam's upcoming update. (credit: Valve)
As the West's largest source of downloadable computer games, Steam has facedimmensescrutiny for just about everyone of its practices. Among its less controversial choices is one of its most dated: the "Steam Library" tab, where you find and load the games you've already purchased. What could be sensational about that?
But if you're interested in usability, this might be Steam's most offensive element. This interface, which revolves around a collapsible plain-text list, has remained the same since Steam's 2003 launch. It might have made sense in Steam's early years, but anyone who owns more than 50 games—a reasonable count after 16 years, between standard games and crazily discounted ones—knows that this interface does more to hide your oldies-but-goodies than to expose them.
The 2012 launch of a TV-friendly "Big Picture" mode didn't resolve this issue; if anything, its (wholly optional) oversized icons and text compounded the problem. But now, as the PC game-launcher space begins rapidly heating up, Steam has finally followed through on a promise to smooth over its game-launcher interface. Behold: the brand-new Steam Library, coming as an opt-in beta on Thursday, September 17.
This week, the US Department of Energy released a report that looks back on the state of wind power in the US by running the numbers on 2018. The analysis shows that wind hardware prices are dropping, even as new turbine designs are increasing the typical power generated by each turbine. As a result, recent wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant.
Wind is even cheaper at the moment because of a tax credit given to renewable energy generation. But that credit is in the process of fading out, leading to long-term uncertainty in a power market where demand is generally stable or dropping.
A lot of GigaWatts
2018 saw about 7.6 GigaWatts of new wind capacity added to the grid, accounting for just over 20% of the US' capacity additions. This puts it in third place behind natural gas and solar power. That's less impressive than it might sound, however, given that things like coal and nuclear are essentially at a standstill. Because the best winds aren't evenly distributed in the US, there are areas, like parts of the Great Plains, where wind installations were more than half of the new power capacity installed.
Enlarge / Google offers a suite of cloud collaboration services, but Drive is at the heart of it all. (credit: Google)
Soon, Google will add one of the most commonly requested features to its Drive file hosting, sharing, and collaboration service: shortcuts. These will allow users to create pointers to files from either the same drive or another, separate shared drive.
The new feature will work just like shortcuts in Windows—they are pointers to a file stored in another location. The shortcut can be stored anywhere without impacting the location of the original file. Google gave this example in its blog post announcing the feature:
If Paul in marketing shares a document from his team’s shared drive with the entire sales team, Greta in sales can create a shortcut to that document in her own team’s shared drive. Previously, because documents can’t be owned by two shared drives, Greta would need to create a copy of the document for her team’s shared drive, which could then quickly become out of date.
Google writes that supported content types for shortcuts include Docs, Slides, Sheets, JPGs, PDFs, folders, and Microsoft Office files.
The Dark Crystal: Age of resistance is a prequel to the original Dark Crystal movie. Watch the first trailer below!
Official Synopsis:
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance returns to the world of Thra, with an all new adventure. When three young Gelfling discover the horrifying secret behind the Skeksis’ power, they set out on an epic journey to ignite the fires of rebellion and save their world.
The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance premieres August 30.
With the development of carbon nanotubes and graphene, scientists were given an entirely new collection of materials to work with: sheets and tubes that could be consistently made with thicknesses roughly those of individual atoms. These materials hold the promise of building electronic devices with dimensions smaller than is currently possible through any other process and with properties that can be tuned by using different starting materials.
So far, most of the attention has gone to re-creating new versions of familiar devices. But a new paper by a group of researchers in Shanghai looks into what can be done if you're not constrained by the sorts of devices we currently make in silicon. The result is a device that can perform basic logic in half the transistors silicon needs, can be switched between different logical operations using light, and can store the output of the operation in the device itself.
OR or AND?
Computer instructions can be distilled down to a series of simple logical operations. Of these, the simplest are AND and OR. AND produces a value of 1 only if both of its two inputs are also 1; OR does so if either of the two inputs are 1.
Enlarge / Mockup of a future Recompose facility. (credit: MOLT Studios)
This week, Washington Governor Jay Inslee signed a bill to allow the composting of human remains within the state. It is the only state in the US—and possibly the only government in the world—to explicitly allow "natural organic reduction" of human remains.
The bill also legalizes alkaline hydrolysis, a base chemical process that also uses heat, pressure, and water to liquify remains. Bone is not liquified in the process, so it can be crushed and given to loved ones. Alkaline hydrolysis is legal in 19 other states, according to the New York Times.
The new law, which will take effect in May 2020, is a boon for Recompose, an organization that wants to offer composting as an alternative to green burials and cremation. Traditional burials usually require embalming chemicals and caskets that will remain in the ground for centuries if not millennia. Green burials, which forgo elaborate caskets and embalming chemicals, still require some amount of land, which can be expensive, especially in urban areas. Cremation, on the other hand, requires a significant amount of energy (mostly from fossil fuels) to complete, releasing greenhouse gases in the process.
