ClaRAN is the brainchild of big data specialist Dr. Chen Wu and astronomer Dr. Ivy Wong, both from The University of Western Australia node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).
Dr. Wong said black holes are found at the centre of most, if not all, galaxies.
“These supermassive black holes occasionally burp out jets that can be seen with a radio telescope,” she said.
“Over time, the jets can stretch a long way from their host galaxies, making it difficult for traditional computer programs to figure out where the galaxy is.
“That’s what we’re trying to teach ClaRAN to do.”
Dr. Wu said ClaRAN grew out of an open source version of Microsoft and Facebook’s object detection software.
He said the program was completely overhauled and trained to recognise galaxies instead of people.
ClaRAN itself is also open source and publicly available on GitHub.
Energy is already stored, of course, in batteries or various other technologies. Even reservoirs can act as huge stores of energy. However nothing that exists or is in development can store energy as well, and as cheaply, as compressed air.
The concept seems simple: you just suck in some air from the atmosphere, compress it using electrically-driven compressors and store the energy in the form of pressurised air. When you need that energy you just let the air out and pass it through a machine that takes the energy from the air and turns an electrical generator.
Compressed air energy storage (or CAES), to give it its full name, can involve storing air in steel tanks or in much less expensive containments deep underwater. In some cases, high pressure air can be stored in caverns deep underground, either excavated directly out of hard rock or formed in large salt deposits by so-called “solution mining”, where water is pumped in and salty water comes out. Such salt caverns are often used to store natural gas.
Salt caverns are ideal for storing air as they are impermeable and don’t react with oxygen.Maria Avvakumova / shutterstock
Compressed air could easily deliver the required scale of storage, but it remains grossly undervalued by policymakers, funding bodies and the energy industry itself. This has stunted the development of the technology and means it is likely that much more expensive and less effective solutions will instead be adopted. At present, three key problems stand in the way of compressed air:
1. It’s not a single technology
The above description of how it works is an over-simplification. CAES is, in fact, not a single technology but a wide family that includes compression machinery, expansion machinery, heat exchangers, the design of air stores and the design of thermal stores. These all require meticulous engineering to get right.
An artist’s sketch of a proposed CAES plant above a disused limestone mine in Ohio.US Department of Energy
2. It’s better for longer-term storage
At the moment, wind and solar still make up only a small proportion of the overall sector. As electricity generated from fossil fuels can cover the overcast or wind-free days, renewable energy is often used straight away and only needs to be stored for short amounts of time. For these situations, batteries work quite well and can be economically viable.
Large-scale decarbonisation will require us to store energy for much longer periods, however, for instance from a sunny day to use on a cloudy day. CAES is especially suited for storage durations of some hours through to several days.
All affordable energy storage involves converting energy from the form of electricity to some other form and storing it in that other form. For pumped-hydro storage, for instance, the other form is water that has been lifted up to a great height. For CAES, that other form includes both heat and high-pressure air.
The UK’s largest pumped storage station is in Snowdonia, Wales. Water is pumped from a low level reservoir to a high one (seen here) during off peak hours, then released downhill to generate energy during peak hours.Hefin Owen, CC BY-SA
For such systems, there are separate costs for the equipment that does the conversion and for the storage itself. Systems like CAES and pumped-hydro involve relatively expensive equipment for the power conversion but very inexpensive provisions for the storage of energy. These systems, where small amounts of power can fill up very large amounts of storage, are therefore very economical for storing energy over a long period.
3. CAES lasts a lifetime
Private investment requires high rates of return. An indirect effect of this is that investors place less value on what utility may be left in an asset in the longer term.
In most CAES systems, costs are concentrated in things that naturally have very long lifetimes. For example, a solution-mined cavern in a salt deposit might reasonably be expected to operate for at least 100 years, while high power machines for compressing and expanding air can typically operate for 50 years or more. With returns over such a long timescale, there is a strong argument that at least some large-scale compressed air installations should be treated as national infrastructure projects financed by governments.
Two large compressed air plants were built decades ago, one in Huntorf, Germany and the other in McIntosh, Alabama. Both are still working extremely well. Many refer to these two plants to draw conclusions about how efficient CAES can be and how much or little it can cost.
But this is misleading and pointless. Both plants were designed with very different priorities from those relevant today. It is imperative that we now think again about compressed air energy storage and evaluate it properly in light of what can be achieved by exploiting modern methods and knowledge.
AI can help chemists crack the molecular structure of crystals much faster than traditional modelling methods, according to research published in Nature Communications on Monday.
Scientists from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a research institute in Switzerland, have built a machine learning programme called SwiftML to predict how the atoms in molecules shift when exposed to a magnetic field.
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is commonly used to work out the structure of compounds. Groups of atoms oscillate at a specific frequencies, providing a tell-tale sign of the number and location of electrons each contains. But the technique is not good enough to reveal the full chemical structure of molecules, especially complex ones that can contain thousands of different atoms.
Another technique known as Density functional theory (DFT) is needed. It uses complex quantum chemistry calculations to map the density of electrons in a given area, and requires heavy computation. SwiftML, however, can do the job at a much quicker rate and can perform as accurately as DFT programmes in some cases.
“Even for relatively simple molecules, this model is almost 10,000 times faster than existing methods, and the advantage grows tremendously when considering more complex compounds,” said Michele Ceriotti, co-author of the paper and an assistant professor at the EPFL.
“To predict the NMR signature of a crystal with nearly 1,600 atoms, our technique – ShiftML – requires about six minutes; the same feat would have taken 16 years with conventional techniques.”
The researchers trained the system on the Cambridge Structural Database, a dataset containing calculated DFT chemical shifts for thousands of compounds. Each one is made up less than 200 atoms including carbon and hydrogen paired with oxygen or nitrogen. 2,000 structures were used for training and validation, and 500 were held back for testing.
SwiftML managed to calculate the chemical shifts for a molecule that had 86 atoms and the same chemical elements as cocaine, but arranged in a different crystal structure. The process took less than a minute of CPU time, compared around 62 to 150 CPU hours typically needed to calculate the chemical shift of a molecule containing 86 atoms using DFT.
The team hopes that SwiftML can be used to supplement NMR experiments to design new drugs. “This is really exciting because the massive acceleration in computation times will allow us to cover much larger conformational spaces and correctly determine structures where it was just not previously possible. This puts most of the complex contemporary drug molecules within reach,” says Lyndon Emsley, co-author of the study and a chemistry professor at EPFL.
Car personalization has been popular ever since. In which level it was applied depended on many factors like the availability of options from the car manufacturer itself or the artistic skills of some of its customers.
Today, car manufacturers already offer a wide range of pre-defined options. In the end though, options are limited to colors, finnishes and interior materials. This widely known car-configuration is already adapted within the automotive industry.
Beyond full-option
To stand out from the competition car brands are emerging towards more complex customization options. With new technologies like 3D printing and legacy manufacturing technologies like lasercutting and CNC, car parts can get personalized on a more advanced level.
MINI decided to tap into this, and became a pioneer in offering next level car individualization through an online platform where the end-consumer can personalize and design car parts for their own vehicle.
In order to enable personalized production at scale, the MINI yours customised experience runs on Twikit’s Twikbot platform technology. Our universal software supports the full customization journey, from product input, where all personalization assets are created, to front-end customer experience and the right output for production.
Qualcomm Inc. says its fight with Apple Inc. over how much the chipmaker can charge for essential patented technology used in iPhones and iPads is getting pricey.
“They’re trying to destroy our business,” Qualcomm lawyer Evan Chesler said at a hearing Friday in federal court in San Diego. “They’re now $7 billion dollars behind in royalties. The house is on fire and there is $7 billion of property damage right now.”
Qualcomm wants as many as 56 patent-related claims and counterclaims cut from a lawsuit with Apple and its Asian manufacturers, arguing that these are just a sideshow to the broader licensing dispute between the companies. Apple, through its manufacturers, halted royalty payments to Qualcomm last year and the tech giants’ showdown has escalated into some 100 legal proceedings around the world.
Apple argues that Qualcomm is using its intellectual property to bully customers into paying excessive royalties even as it tries to duck scrutiny over whether its patents are valid. “You can’t just let Qualcomm walk away from this,” Apple’s lawyer, Ruffin Cordell, told the judge at Friday’s hearing.
Microsoft’s Office 365 has been giving some users cold sweats. No matter how hard they try to log in, they simply can’t access the service and haven’t been able to for hours – others say it has wobbled for days.
Sporadic reports of unrest began to emerge on Down Detector on Friday (26 October) in the UK and across the pond, stopped over the weekend and started again prior to 0800 GMT today. Office 365’s web woes have still not been resolved at the time of writing.
The first complaint was spotted on Twitter just after 0700 GMT.
Microsoft, at least initially, seemed to know nothing of the activation worries to which admin Tom Ruben referred, but he was backed up by others.
Admins raised support tickets with Microsoft but complained they’d only received acknowledgement of the outage early on in the screw-up and had precious else since.
Microsoft has said it is “investigating issues related to repeated credential prompts and users being unable to log in using the Outlook client under EX152471”. It asked admins to “please check the admin centre for more details”.
“Red Dead Redemption 2” broke records in its first three days on sale, pulling in more than $725 million in worldwide retail sales and achieving the biggest opening weekend in the history of entertainment, developer Rockstar Games announced.
That tops the highest-grossing movie in history, “Avengers: Infinity Wars,” which earned more than $640 million during its opening weekend earlier this year. But “Red Dead Redemption 2” still isn’t the highest grossing entertainment launch of all time. That honor also goes to Rockstar Games for “Grand Theft Auto V,” which earned more than $1 billion in sell-through in its first three days. Because “Grand Theft Auto V” launched on a Tuesday, it left the door open for “Red Dead Redemption 2’s” — which launched on a Friday — record-setting weekend.
Rockstar also reports that according to Sony Interactive Entertainment, “Red Dead Redemption 2” set records for highest ever pre-orders, highest day one sales and highest sales for the first three days in market on the PlayStation Network.
“Red Dead Redemption 2” is currently the highest critically reviewed game on the PlayStation 4, with an average score of 97 on Metacritic, and the top game on Xbox One, also with an average score of 97 on Metacritic.
The U.S. Justice Department has charged two Chinese intelligence officers, six hackers, and two aerospace company insiders in a sweeping conspiracy to steal confidential aerospace technology from U.S. and French companies.
For more than five years, two Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) spies are said to have run a team of hackers focusing on the theft of designs for a turbofan engine used in U.S. and European commercial airliners, according to an unsealed indictment (below) dated October 25. In a statement, the DOJ said a Chinese state-owned aerospace company was simultaneously working to develop a comparable engine.
“The threat posed by Chinese government-sponsored hacking activity is real and relentless,” FBI Special Agent in Charge John Brown of San Diego said in a statement. “Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, with the assistance of our private sector, international and U.S. government partners, is sending a strong message to the Chinese government and other foreign governments involved in hacking activities.”
The MSS officers involved were identified as Zha Rong, a division director in the Jiangsu Province regional department (JSSD), and Chai Meng, a JSSD section chief.
At the direction of the MSS officers, the hackers allegedly infiltrated a number of U.S. aerospace companies, including California-based Capstone Turbine, among others in Arizona, Massachusetts, and Oregon, the DOJ said. The officers are also said to have recruited at least two Chinese employees of a French aerospace manufacturer—insiders who allegedly aided the conspiracy by, among other criminal acts, installing the remote access trojan Sakula onto company computers.
