Month: June 2018

Enlarge (credit: Miguel Navarro / Getty Images)

Compared to a typical CPU, a brain is remarkably energy-efficient, in part because it combines memory, communications, and processing in a single execution unit, the neuron. A brain also has lots of them, which lets it handle lots of tasks in parallel.

Attempts to run neural networks on traditional CPUs run up against these fundamental mismatches. Only a few things can be executed at a time, and shuffling data to memory is a slow process. As a result, neural networks have tended to be both computationally and energy intensive. A few years back, IBM announced a new processor design that was a bit closer to a collection of neurons and could execute neural networks far more efficiently. But this didn't help much with training the networks in the first place.

Now, IBM is back with a hardware design that's specialized for training neural networks. And it does this in part by directly executing the training in a specialized type of memory.

Enlarge / US Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) answers questions during his weekly press conference on April 12, 2018 in Washington, D.C. (credit: Getty Images | Win McNamee )

With net neutrality rules scheduled to be repealed on Monday, Senate Democrats are calling on House Speaker Paul Ryan to schedule a vote that could preserve the broadband regulations.

The US Senate voted on May 16 to reverse the Federal Communications Commission's repeal of net neutrality rules, but a House vote—and President Trump's signature—is still needed. Today, the entire Senate Democratic Caucus wrote a letter to Ryan urging him to allow a vote on the House floor.

"The rules that this resolution would restore were enacted by the FCC in 2015 to prevent broadband providers from blocking, slowing down, prioritizing, or otherwise unfairly discriminating against Internet traffic that flows across their networks," the letter said. "Without these protections, broadband providers can decide what content gets through to consumers at what speeds and could use this power to discriminate against their competitors or other content." The letter was spearheaded by Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), and Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii).

Enlarge / Since 2012, NASA's Curiosity rover has been trying to find organic molecules. Now, it has succeeded. (credit: NASA)

After more than four decades of searching for organic molecules on the surface of Mars, scientists have conclusively found them in mudstones on the lower slopes of Mount Sharp. A variety of organic compounds were discovered by NASA's Curiosity rover, which heated the Martian rocks to 500° Celsius to release the chemicals.

The finding is significant—for life to have ever existed on Mars there would almost certainly need to be organic molecules to get it started; they're the basic building blocks of life as we know it. And if life did get started, it would have left organic molecules behind. However the confirmation of organics on Mars raises more questions than it answers. Based upon the information scientists have gleaned so far, they cannot determine whether these organics were produced by life, delivered to the surface of Mars by meteorites, or are the byproduct of geological processes on Mars.

The Viking landers reached the surface of Mars during the summer of 1976 amid some expectation that they might find evidence of past life, if not life itself. However, when Viking landers sampled the Martian soil they found no past life, nor did their gas chromatograph mass spectrometers find any organic molecules. Nada.

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Windows 10's S Mode, the locked-down mode that permits only applications from the Microsoft Store, started out as a separate edition of Windows 10 that was locked down as soon as it was installed and had a one-time irreversible upgrade to unrestricted Windows 10 Pro.

In Windows 10 version 1803, that changed to an install-time option for both Windows 10 Home and Pro. Again, this offered an irrevocable upgrade to the corresponding unrestricted version after installation.

The latest Windows 10 Insider Preview suggests that S Mode is changing again, and this time it looks like it's going to be a regular option that can be set at any time. Build 17686 includes a "Switch to S Mode" search item in the Settings app. The actual switch to enable S Mode isn't present in this build, so we can't be entirely certain of how it will work, but this is a strong suggestion that it will now be possible to put a machine into S Mode after the initial installation.

Enlarge / The insanely colorful Android P Easter Egg. (credit: Android)

Android P Developer Preview 3 came out yesterday, and we're here to break down all the changes in Google's latest in-development Android release. After Preview 2 was deemed a beta, Google is calling this release "Beta 2." There aren't a ton of changes in this release, mostly a bit of polish and some bug fixes. The latest release is currently available for Google's Pixel phones, while beta-compatible devices from Essential, Nokia, OnePlus, Oppo, Sony, Vivo, and Xiaomi will be updated in the coming weeks.

Just as has been the case for every major Android release for the past few years, it seems like Android P will come with a full version number bump. After Android 8.0 Oreo last year, Preview 3 of Android P refers to the OS as "Android 9" in the settings. "Android 9" would be a bit of a change from the usual "x.0" format. Google is also declaring the Android P APIs to be final with this release, so it is giving it the official designation of "API level 28," and Android P apps can now be uploaded to the Play Store. This build is also a bit more consumer-ready and doesn't show as many developer warnings and error messages as previous builds (Google shut off the banned API warnings).

Now on to the new stuff...

Enlarge / Carbon Engineering's pilot plant, which captures CO₂ from the atmosphere. (credit: Stephen Hui, Pembina Institute)

When you spill a drink, you don’t say, “Oh well, the only thing we can do is spill fewer drinks in the future.” You grab a towel. So there’s also a natural attraction to the idea that we should develop a towel that can remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. That isn’t as simple as grabbing one from a Home Goods store, however, and cost estimates have not fueled optimism for most methods of doing this.

Reforestation is an obvious option, but its potential impact is probably smaller than you think. Other biological schemes could include growing biofuels to burn in power plants that capture emissions and store them underground. Recently, we’ve also seen a couple of working pilot projects that look like a power plant run in reverse—they suck in air and harvest concentrated CO₂, ready for storage.

One of those plants, located an hour north of Vancouver, British Columbia, is the brainchild of a company called Carbon Engineering. One of the founders of Carbon Engineering is Harvard’s David Keith, a researcher studying this and other conceivable methods of “geoengineering” our planet’s climate. This week, the Carbon Engineering team has published a nuts-and-bolts breakdown of its design, providing the first cost analysis of a working carbon capture plant.

Enlarge / The cracks are beginning to show in Valve's almost-no-curation policy. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

Steam's new lasseiz faire content guidelines—which officially allow anything short of illegal activity and "obvious trolling" in games on its store—are an untenable attempt to have it both ways. On the one hand, Valve obviously no longer wants the responsibility of playing arbiter to what kind of content should and should not be considered "acceptable" for a Steam game. On the other hand, Valve also doesn't want the games on the Steam Store to be considered "a reflection of Valve’s values."

This attempt to thread an admittedly difficult needle doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. Allowing almost anything on the world's most popular PC gaming storefront is, in itself, "a reflection of Valve's values," and the company can't absolve itself of the responsibility and implicit endorsement of hateful content that will come with that allowance.

...But I defend your right to say it

It's not hard to see why giving up on content moderation wholesale might seem appealing to a company like Valve (even beyond explanations that focus on laziness or cheapness). Just in the last month, Valve has faced highly publicized controversies over delisting "erotic" visual novel games while allowing titles like the utterly debauched Agony and school shooting game Active Shooter (which was recently reinstated on the service).