Special interest groups and politicians in Washington spent this week telling each other they’ve got the best oversight plan for safely testing and bringing autonomous vehicles to market. Not surprisingly, it’s hard to find common ground. Democratic legislators want the feds to make self-driving cars super-safe. Republicans want to exempt 100,000 self-drive test cars a year from regulations. Automakers and Republicans want federal regulations to trump state rules. Safety activists want testing and deployment to move ahead cautiously. House Energy and Commerce hearings
Machines already think faster than we can with our squishy brains. But moving around is still a tough one for robots. Some machines can roll, walk, and even run, though they need a lot of power and complex, easily damaged components to do it. Researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology and Kent State University have developed a material that could make locomotion a much simpler affair. All this new polymer needs is a , and it gets going. The new material is a , a long chain of repeating molecules. In this case, the polymer contains light-sensitive crystals that change shape in response to certain wavelengths of light.
In our modern society, we’re swimming in data. Analytics are being collected on nearly everything we do, and even relatively simple questions sometimes take hundreds of thousands of points of data to properly answer. If you want to understand how to manage and process massive amounts of data for businesses, government agencies, or non-profits, today’s course and e-book bundle is right up your alley. • (List price: $684) With your purchase, you’ll get these five courses: • Learning ElasticSearch 5.0 (a $125 value) • Apache Spark 2 for Beginners (a $125 value)
Microsoft has evidently decided to deploy a new strategy for talking about its Fall Creators Update. Instead of revealing all of its information in one go, we’re seeing data trickle out in blog posts and direct communication. The company unveiled a new service, dubbed Autopilot, which can deploy a full suite of productivity software from the cloud, rather than dealing with standard image installation tools. Here’s how Microsoft . (It begins by noting that getting a new PC should be a “magical experience for an employee,” which makes me wonder if anyone at Microsoft has ever gotten a standard business system for anything, ever.
A new report from Verto Analytics claims that a huge swath of the PC market is eager to switch to a Mac PC (desktop or laptop), with 21 percent of laptop owners and 25 percent of desktop owners supposedly willing to make the jump. At the same time, Verto claims that 98 percent of current Mac owners are happy with their systems, with just 2 percent planning to switch to a Microsoft-based PC over the same time frame. Windows PC user interest in Mac adoption, by income bracket. Verto’s also found that the highest earners are the most likely to switch to Mac (which makes sense).
When Microsoft launched Windows 10, one of the major flashpoints of disagreement between the company and its users were Microsoft’s Windows 10 data collection practices. The French data privacy watchdog CNIL (Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés) later announced that it had begun an investigation into Microsoft’s data collection practices and found them to be in violation of French law. At the time, CNIL noted: “Seven online observations have been carried out between April and June 2016. On this occasion, several violations have been found and in particular: excessive collection of personal data, track of users’ web-browsing without their consent and a lack of security and confidentiality of users’ data.
A cache of CIA hacking and information gathering tools have been leaking online lately via in infamous WikiLeaks. Many of the documents detail complex and novel methods for infiltrating computer networks and mobile devices. Microsoft even had to in response to a CIA leak. The latest CIA tool revealed online is rather straightforward — malware that tracks a device’s physical location. However, it doesn’t need GPS, just . The CIA’s location tracker is known internally as ELSA, and appears to be limited to Windows systems. The leaked documents date from 2013 and focus on using ELSA on Windows 7.
If your lower back hurts, you’re in good company. Back pain inflicts itself on almost everyone during their lives. But there are some unlucky folk who get injured, or have a degenerative disorder or neuropathic condition that leaves them in chronic pain. And for people who have pain doctors can’t explain or really treat, things can start looking pretty bleak. Pain for the rest of my life, that I can’t alter or relieve. Grand. So it may come as a bit of welcome news that there are scientists working on brain-computer interfaces capable of intercepting noise and cross-talk between neurons — with the net result that people who have just been slogging through under the burden of invisible, intractable pain may be able to catch a glimpse of light.
Physicians have long been interested in approaches to chronic pain management that are less prone to abuse than traditionally prescribed medications. But the ongoing opioid crisis in America has shone a light on how a combination of increased heroin use, dubious prescription and pharmaceutical practices, and the increased amount of fentanyl drug dealers have added to heroin have combined to kill tens of thousands of additional people on a yearly basis. There’s a real problem growing in America, and new treatments for chronic pain could potentially address it, via drug delivery implant systems and intrathecal electrical stimulation.
