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Feb 1, 2019

Meet the Bots That Review and Write Snippets of Facebook’s Code

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, employment, engineering, robotics/AI

To make its developers’ jobs more rewarding, Facebook is now using two automated tools called Sapienz and SapFix to find and repair low-level bugs in its mobile apps. Sapienz runs the apps through many tests to figure out which actions will cause it to crash. Then, SapFix recommends a fix to developers, who review it and decide whether to accept the fix, come up with their own, or ignore the problem.

Engineers began using Sapienz to review the Facebook app in September 2017, and have gradually begun using it for the rest of the company’s apps (which include Messenger, Instagram, Facebook Lite, and Workplace). In May, the team will describe its more recent adoption of SapFix at the International Conference on Software Engineering in Montreal, Canada (and they’re hiring).

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Feb 1, 2019

Smart Blinds with Solar Panels

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

Window blinds that have solar panels. Solargaps is elegant decision that let you generate energy while keeping your home cool.

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Feb 1, 2019

The future of in-space manufacturing

Posted by in categories: futurism, space

Hoisting heavy machinery into space is cumbersome and expensive. Soon, however, it won’t be a problem. Cathal O’Connell reports.

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Feb 1, 2019

At-home DNA testing company gives the FBI access to its database

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Family Tree DNA has agreed to team up with the FBI, but it says feds won’t be able to see more information than any other user can.

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Feb 1, 2019

‘Mutant’ coyotes in California with piercing blue eyes stun scientists

Posted by in category: futurism

Last year, a wildlife photographer spotted a “one in a million” coyote with captivating blue eyes while out on a walk in California’s Point Reyes National Seashore.

The sighting quickly became national news and prompted an investigation by National Geographic, which confirmed the coyote’s eye color was indeed rare — as coyotes’ irises are almost always some shade of gold. At the time, Juan Negro, a senior researcher at the Spanish Council for Research in Spain, told the publication he hadn’t seen something like that in the 25 years he’d been studying animal coloration.

“Deviants, or strange colors, arise from time to time as mutants,” Negro suggested back in June.

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Feb 1, 2019

Jeff Bezos’ rocket company to help Telesat take on Elon Musk in internet satellite race

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, internet, satellites

Telesat picked Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin New Glenn rocket to launch its satellites into space.

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Feb 1, 2019

The Hidden Automation Agenda of the Davos Elite

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

But in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.


DAVOS, Switzerland — They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.

I know this because, for the past week, I’ve been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. And I’ve noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening.

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Feb 1, 2019

Learning Language in Deep Sleep Isn’t Just Science Fiction Anymore

Posted by in categories: health, neuroscience

As important as sleep is for health, happiness, and performance, it really is a time suck. Those eight or so hours when we lose consciousness may be restorative, but just think of what we could accomplish if we could actually put them to productive use. Scientists believe that we can use these unconscious hours to begin to learn new facts or languages in our sleep, as long the information is presented in the right way.

In his paper published Thursday in Current Biology, University of Bern neuropsychologist Marc Züst, Ph.D., presents evidence that it’s actually possible to form new “semantic connections” at specific moments during the sleep cycle. These, he explains, are associations between two words that we use to help encode new information and give words context. For instance, when we hear the word “winter,” we think of cold temperatures, skiing, or, most recently, polar vortices. In his study, Züst found that the brain can actually learn to make these associations if we hear two words paired together at certain times within the sleep cycle.

“Humans are capable of sophisticated information processing without consciousness,” Züst tells Inverse. “Sleep-formed memory traces endure into the following wakefulness and can influence how you react to foreign words, even though you think you’ve never seen that word before. It’s an implicit, unconscious form of memory — like a gut feeling.”

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Feb 1, 2019

New Madrid fault zone could spawn huge quakes in U.S. Midwest, South

Posted by in category: futurism

LOS ANGELES — The New Madrid fault zone in the nation’s midsection is active and could spawn future large earthquakes, scientists reported.

It’s “not dead yet,” said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Susan Hough, who was part of the study published online Thursday by the journal Science.

Researchers have long debated just how much of a hazard New Madrid (MAD’-rihd) poses. The zone stretches 150 miles, crossing parts of Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri and Tennessee.

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Feb 1, 2019

Scientists create strange matter that once filled Universe

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

The team created the so-called quark-gluon plasma by smashing packets of protons and neutrons into a much heavier gold atom in the PHENIX Detector particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York. It is theorised that this matter filled the entire Universe shortly after the Big Bang when it was still too hot for particles to come together to make atoms.

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