Technology

America’s Biggest 3D Printed Building Is This New Military Barracks in Texas

From singularityhub.com
2021-08-30 14:00:33
Vanessa Bates Ramirez
Excerpt:

 

3D printing is picking up speed as a construction technology, with 3D printed houses, schools, apartment buildings, and even Martian habitat concepts all being unveiled in the last year (not to mention Airbnbs and entire luxury communities). Now another type of structure is being added to this list: military barracks.

ICON, a construction technologies startup based in Austin, Texas, announced the project earlier this month in partnership with the Texas Military Department. At 3,800 square feet, the barracks will be the biggest 3D printed structure in North America. It’s edged out for the worldwide title by at least one other building, a 6,900-square-foot complex in Dubai used for municipal offices.

The barracks are located at the Camp Swift Training Center in Bastrop, TX, and are replacing temporary facilities that have already been used for longer than their intended lifespan. 72 soldiers will stay in the building, sleeping in bunk beds, while they train for…

 

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Bitcoin’s Censorship-Resistance Was a Step Change in History – Coindesk

From www.coindesk.com
2021-07-22 07:00:00

Excerpt:

When he wasn’t getting enough attention from the public back in 2017, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon used to play this game: He’d just say something dismissive about bitcoin and it was sure to put him in the headlines.

So, a prominent entrepreneur at the time, Adam Ludwin, then CEO of early enterprise blockchain company Chain, decided to play along.

In a letter posted on his company’s blog, Ludwin argued to Dimon (and, presumably, his true audience, the many curious folks the open letter was sure to reach) that the quality that distinguished cryptocurrency and made it uniquely valuable was something called “censorship resistance.” Ludwin wrote:

“Nothing can stop me from sending bitcoin to anyone I please. Nothing can stop me from executing code on Ethereum. Nothing can stop me from storing files on Filecoin. As long as I have an internet connection and pay the network’s transaction fee, denominated in its crypto asset, I am free to do what I want.”

Censorship resistance is a jargony way of saying speech, or any other activity, that can’t be vetoed or stopped. Ludwin might be right that it’s a killer feature of distributed ledgers, but it goes further. Censorship resistance is also a step change in the history of political philosophy.

It’s an idea that evolved from prior ones, going all the way back to the earliest days of Western civilization (at least). In particular, though, our modern conception of the right to state one’s opinion, or free expression.

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Cerebras Upgrades Trillion-Transistor Chip to Train ‘Brain-Scale’ AI

From singularityhub.com
2021-08-27 14:00:10
Edd Gent
Excerpt:

 

Much of the recent progress in AI has come from building ever-larger neural networks. A new chip powerful enough to handle “brain-scale” models could turbo-charge this approach.

Chip startup Cerebras leaped into the limelight in 2019 when it came out of stealth to reveal a 1.2-trillion-transistor chip. The size of a dinner plate, the chip is called the Wafer Scale Engine and was the world’s largest computer chip. Earlier this year Cerebras unveiled the Wafer Scale Engine 2 (WSE-2), which more than doubled the number of transistors to 2.6 trillion.

Now the company has outlined a series of innovations that mean its latest chip can train a neural network with up to 120 trillion parameters. For reference, OpenAI’s revolutionary GPT-3 language model contains 175 billion parameters. The largest neural network to date, which was trained by Google, had 1.6 trillion.

 

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ISIS-K, the terror group that killed US troops in Kabul, and its complicated relationship with the Taliban

From www.washingtonexaminer.com
2021-08-26 20:11:35
Jerry Dunleavy
Excerpt:

 

The U.S. military says the Islamic State’s affiliate in Afghanistan was behind the deadly suicide bombing attacks in Kabul on Thursday that killed numerous U.S. service members, which won’t surprise Western intelligence officials or the ruling Taliban.

CENTCOM Commander, General Kenneth McKenzie said Thursday afternoon that 12 U.S. service members were killed and 15 more were injured, noting the suicide bombers are “assessed to have been ISIS fighters.” The general said he believed the suicide bomber made it through Taliban lines and was at a U.S.-controlled “interface point” when he detonated himself.

“We believe it is their desire to continue those attacks, and we expect those attacks to continue,” McKenzie warned. “If we can find out who is associated with this, we will go after them.”

He said the United States believed ISIS would like to conduct more walk-in suicide attacks, as well as suicide car bombs or rocket…

 

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An international team of researchers led by Stanford University have developed rechargeable batteries that can store up to 6 times more charge than ones that are currently commercially available

Researchers make rechargeable batteries that store six times more charge – Techexplore.com

An international team of researchers led by Stanford University have developed rechargeable batteries that can store up to six times more charge than ones that are currently commercially available.

The advance, detailed in a new paper published Aug. 25 in the journal Nature, could accelerate the use of rechargeable batteries and puts battery researchers one step closer toward achieving two top stated goals of their field: creating a high-performance rechargeable battery that could enable cellphones to be charged only once a week instead of daily and electric vehicles that can travel six times farther without a recharge.

The new so-called alkali metal-chlorine batteries, developed by a team of researchers led by Stanford chemistry Professor Hongjie Dai and doctoral candidate Guanzhou Zhu, relies on the back-and-forth chemical conversion of sodium chloride (Na/Cl₂) or lithium chloride (Li/Cl₂) to chlorine.

From www.reddit.com
2021-08-26 17:35:13
/u/QuantumThinkology
Excerpt:

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No, the Scale Model of Blue Origin’s Rocket Is Not an Operable Dildo

From futurism.com
2021-08-26 14:15:37
Victor Tangermann
Excerpt:

 

Model rocket maker Estes has released a 1/66 scale model of Blue Origin’s dick-shaped New Shepard rocket — and we are here to warn you that whatever it looks like, it is not an operable sex toy.

No, folks, this plastic object that bears a striking resemblance to a penis is not meant to pleasure oneself.

That’s in spite of its sticker price of $69.99, which admittedly sounds like a crude joke. But just to reiterate, as far as we can tell, it’s serious. It just happens to be based on a rocket that, to the bemusement of experts, looks a lot like a dong.

To be fair, as far as model rockets go, it’s kinda awesome. The model can be launched 400 feet into the air — if you’re willing to shell out extra for the launch pad, an electronic launch controller, engines, and some wadding for recovery, which all works out to a total of $109.99.

 

 

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