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During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, numerous research groups have worked to find effective ways to determine flow patterns and crowd densities on the streets of major cities like New York City to gain insight into the effects of stay-at-home and social distancing policies. But sending teams of researchers to the streets to observe and record […]

Astronomers have released the most detailed study of the Milky Way, revealing thousands of “starquakes” and stellar DNA that help pinpoint the habitable corner of the galaxy. Observations by the European Space Agency’s Gaia probe, covering nearly 2 billion stars — about 1 percent of all stars in the Milky Way — have allowed astronomers

Using a Lego-like design , MIT engineers have created a stackable, reconfigurable artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The chip building blocks keep devices up-to-date while reducing waste of electronics. The new design uses light instead of physical wires to transmit information through the chip. So you can add as many computational layers and light, pressure and

Microsoft-owned Bethesda Games Studio gave its first public demo of the highly anticipated space-based open-world game Starfield (YouTube) at its Xbox Games event on Sunday. Its gameplay was immediately dubbed by players as the No Man’s Sky version of Skyrim – the fifth installment in the Elder Scrolls series developed by Bethesda. No Man’s Sky,

In a blog show, two CEOs of the company’s business and data collection suggested creating a permanent, public database of employee performance . Some sort of employee credit score, a permanent HR profile, will follow an employee from job to job, and people who didn’t do well at the previous job may struggle to get

The Datun Volcano Group in Taipei, located in Yangmingshan National Park, has long been considered an extinct volcano, but Lin Zhenghong, director of the Datun Volcano Observatory, believes it is in fact an active volcano after long observations. In 2003, Lin Zhenghong led a small study that placed seismometers throughout the park, a standard method

Google engineer Blake Lemoine works in the Responsible AI group. As part of his job, he started talking to the company’s chatbot, LaMDA, last fall. LaMDA uses Google’s state-of-the-art large-scale language models, trained on trillions of words collected from the Internet. During an exchange with LaMDA, Lemoine, 41, believes that AI is conscious . For

Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said on Friday it was in talks to launch an investigation into Apple and Google’s market power in mobile browsers and Apple’s restrictions on cloud gaming through the App Store. The CMA will also take action against Google Play Store payments. A CMA report found that Apple and Google

NASA said Thursday that it is forming a team to study unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs), commonly known as UFOs. NASA said the team will collect data on “sky events that are not scientifically identifiable as aircraft or known natural phenomena.” NASA said it was interested in UAP for safety and security reasons. NASA added that

Alyssa Blackburn, a researcher at Rice University’s Baylor School of Medicine, and her team used a technique known as “address linking” to study transactions in the first two years of Bitcoin: from January 2009 to February 2011. They found that “the majority of bitcoins were mined by a mere 64 proxies for a combined value

Researchers at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand collected fresh snow samples from 19 sites on Ross Island in Antarctica and found that each snow sample contained microplastics . The researchers found that each liter of melted snow contained an average of 29 microplastics. They also identified 13 different types of plastic, the most

Thailand on Thursday legalized the cultivation and consumption of hemp for processed food, becoming the first country in Asia to legalize the consumption of cannabis in a move aimed at boosting agriculture and tourism. Thailand has strict restrictions on the amount of cannabis in processed foods, and direct smoking of cannabis remains illegal. Buyers lined

Two former litigation adversaries and rivals of Waymo and Uber are teaming up on self-driving trucks. Waymo describes the partnership as a deep integration of the two companies’ products, deploying self-driving trucks to Uber’s Freight Network platform when they are ready for commercial use. Waymo will integrate Uber Freight’s freight service into its self-driving truck