A Bonvoy Moment includes dinner and a stay at Hotel Danieli in Venice.

This year, Marriotts loyalty program received a revamp, creating a sort of super-program called Marriott Bonvoy. The new travel program for Marriott International replaced Marriott Rewards, Starwood Preferred Guest and The Ritz-Carlton Rewards. Members can earn and use points to visit a large portfolio of global brands located in 132 countries and territories.

To encourage membership while rewarding loyal clientele, the company launched an experience arm called Marriott Bonvoy Moment(s). These moments are experiences that include exclusive travel, sports and culinary access like reservations at Per Se and The French Laundry, to kitchen tours and culinary masterclasses with chefs. In fact, theres an entire team devoted to dreaming up, devising, and executing these experiences which, frankly, sounds like a pretty cool job.

To provide perspective, Marriott Bonvoy has 133 million members. Thats a lot of competition when bidding on moments, these money-cant-buy-but-your-points-can roster of curated experiences. Indeed, the most over-the-top auctions have tallied redemptions of thousands, even millions of points.

Though now closed, peek at this culinary-focused experience with Chef David Bouley. The moment, called Explore a Private Estate in Grand Cayman + Boat Excursion + Cooking Masterclass with Chef David Bouley, generated the highest redemption of any auction at 2 million points.

The singularity of that auction is a great example of whats been done, and whats on the horizon, especially with Marriotts new luxury home rental division called Homes & Villas by Marriott International. The vacation rental portal features upscale, vetted properties meant to compete with sites like VRBO, AirBnB, and OneFineStay but with the benefit of allowing customers to pay with points or earn points on stays.

Seems like a good time to be a Marriott Bonvoy member. Now check your account and start bidding on these five upcoming moments.

Access the 2019 NFL Mexico Game with Premium Tickets + Pre-Game Sideline Passes+ Meet an NFL Legend + Hotel Stay:Get ready for a Monday Night showdown in Mexico City when some of the biggest teams in the league go head to head for the 2019NFL Mexico Game. Kick off this incredible day with access to the VIP Reception before the game where you will have the chance tomeet a NFL Legend at the famed Azteca Stadium. Then, head down to the sideline where you will experience the intensity of warmups with pre-game field passes before taking your premium seats for the game. Top of the experience with a hotel stay. Link to full experience detailsHERE.

Take a Private Surquillo Market Tour with Renowned Chef Jaime Pesaque, Dine at Mayta + Stay at AC Hotel Lima Miraflores: Go on a culinary journey through Lima, Peru, with a guest. Discover the city's Surquillo market on a private tour with Chef Jaime Pesaque, and dine at Chef Pesaque's prestigious Mayta Restaurant. As part of the experience, stay for two nights at the newly opened AC Lima Miraflores, a contemporary hotel boasting an unbeatable location, and receive VIP round-trip transportation from the AC Hotel Lima Miraflores to Mayta. Link to full experience detailsHERE.

Private concert by Mi Casa + Sushi Masterclass + two-night stay at Crystal Towers:Stay at the vibrant Cape Town Marriott Hotel Crystal Towers, and rock out with award-winning South African band, Mi Casa. Thenchannel your inner chef, and learn how to make your own sushi, in a one-on-one sushi-making class with our Head Sushi Chef. Thebest part: eating the actual sushi that you have personally made, complimented by a classic signature Crystal Mojito. End yourexperience with two full body massages at the award-winning Life Day Spa. Link to full experience detailsHERE.

Celebrate the Artist Canaletto with a Chef's Table Five-Course Dinner + Suite Stay atHotel Danieli:You and a guest are invited to celebrate one of the most influential landscape painters of his time, Giovanni Antonio Canal todayknown to the world as Canaletto, with a five-course tasting dinner inspired by his paintings and the tradition of 18th-Century Venice,at Restaurant Terrazza Danieli. Tour Venice's famed Rialto Market with the Executive Chef. Stay in aDandolo Suite at Hotel Danieli,A Luxury Collection Hotel, steps away from the Bridge of Sighs and Piazza San Marco.Link to full experience detailsHERE.

Experience the World-Famous Dner en Blanc in Sydney + Kick off the Party with ExclusiveSparkler Lighting:Join thousands of people in Sydney for the invite-only world-famous Dner en Blanc, where people dress in all white and experience a mass chicpicnic in a public space. Receive two seats at a VIP Marriott International catered table, savor gourmet culinary creations and curated wineselections, and signal the dancing of the night with the sparkler lighting signal. Over the course of the evening, celebrate this magical event withguests brought together from diverse backgrounds by good taste and a love of beauty.Le Dner en Blanc recalls the elegance and glamour of high French society, and guests engage one another, knowing that they are taking part in atruly spectacular event. Guests must dress in all white as part of the tradition of this prestigious, exclusive event.Link to full experience detailsHERE.

Read the rest here:

Savvy To The Experience Economy, Marriott Bonvoy Auctions Once-In-A-Lifetime Moments - Forbes

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

How to Stop Superhuman AI Before It Stops UsStuart Russell | The New York TimesOnce the focus shifts from building machines that are intelligent to ones that are beneficial, controlling them will become a far easier feat. Consider it the difference between nuclear power and nuclear explosions: a nuclear explosion is nuclear power in an uncontrolled form, and we greatly prefer the controlled form.

This Girls Dramatic Story Shows Hyper-Personalized Medicine Is Possibleand CostlyErika Check Hayden | MIT Technology Reviewin a dramatic demonstration of the power of personalized medicine, doctors in Boston created a treatment just for [six-year-old Mila Makovec]. In only eight months, they found the genetic cause of Milas disease, designed a drug to overcome the error, and began giving it to Mila via an injection in her spine, in whats believed to be the first individually tailored treatment of its kind.

Waymo Tells Customers That Completely Driverless Vehicles Are on the WayAndrew J. Hawkins | The VergeIts a sign that Waymo is growing confident enough in its technology to increase the frequency at which it allows passengers to ride in autonomous vehicles without a safety driver behind the wheel.

Virgin Orbit Says It Wants to Send Tiny Spacecraft to Mars in 2022Neel V. Patel | MIT Technology ReviewIf it succeeds, Virgin Orbit will be the first commercial company to travel to the Red Planet. It will also mark an unexpected entrance into deep spaceflight for a company whose plansfocus on air launches, which have always been considered unsuitable for traveling beyond low Earth orbit.

Jeff Bezoss Master PlanFranklin Foer | The AtlanticWhere in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. [But] the scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism.

Meet the Robot Racing Drone That Could Beat Human Pilots by 2023Stephen Shankland | CNETSince 2016, the human pilots of theDrone Racing Leaguehave competed to see who could whip a quadcopter around pylons and through hoops the fastest. On Tuesday, theyll get a new challenge: the fully autonomous RacerAI, adroneprogrammed to fly itself.

Image Credit:MEAX /Unsplash

Read the original here:

This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through October 12) - Singularity Hub

Oscar Gonzalez, provided by

Fortnite season 11 event ends with a cosmic explosion and now the game is gone

This article, Fortnite season 11 event ends with a cosmic explosion and now the game is gone, originally appeared on CNET.com.

After a week's delay, Fortnite season 10 ended Sunday with The End event that would have introduced season 11. But it was literally the end as the game was no longer playable after the event started.

An explosive season-ending event caused the destruction of the island and apparently the game itself, as it's not playable at time of writing.

Fortnite has ended. For now.

Like in season 4, the event started off with a rocket launching into the sky and exploding to create rifts. Like in the earlier event, the rocket went out of one rift into another. This time, however, there were several more rockets. The spacecrafts then flew around into multiple rifts again and again until they all entered one final rift.

After a moment of calmness, the rockets appeared above the meteor over Dusty Depot. One by one they entered another rift below the meteor. Dozens of more rockets than previously seen appeared only to slam into this final rift, which caused the rift to grow. The meteor that was frozen over Dusty Depot throughout season 10 began to move, and then it, too, disappeared into the now large rift.

For a moment, the meteor and rockets were gone.

Then the music of the event began to swell and far above the island was one giant rift. Players were then sent into the air, floating uncontrollably. Finally, out of the rift, six rockets and the meteor reappeared. The rockets changed directions to fly off in different directions while the meteor crashed into the singularity located at Loot Lake. The dome surrounding the area attempted to shield the island, but it failed as the meteor finally smash into the island as it did at the end of season 4 but with much more of an impact.

An explosion occurred when then began sucking in everything. The island, the Battle Bus and even the players were soon gone in a blink.

All that was left was a black hole.

The official Fortnite Twitter account and website only show the black hole. The game's Instagram account shows the same.

Since then, developer Epic deleted all of the more than 12,000 tweets on the Fortnite Twitter account, aside from the link to the stream of the black hole.

The Fortnite YouTube channel has a livestream of the event that shows the explosions and is currently streaming just the singularity. More than 1 million people tuned in to watch the event unfold on Twitch.

During the stream, keen-eyed viewers saw a set of numbers appear around the black hole: 146, 11, 15, and 62.

View post:

Fortnite season 11 event ends with a cosmic explosion and now the game is gone - Thehour.com

Hey Google, hows my health this morning?

One moment, says your digital assistant.

It takes thirty seconds for the full diagnostic to run, as the system deploys dozens of sensors capturing gigabytes of data.

Smart sensors in toothbrush and toilet, wearables in bedding and clothing, implantables inside your bodya mobile health suite with a 360-degree view of your system.

Your microbiome looks perfect, Google tells you. Also, blood glucose levels are good, vitamin levels fine, but an increased core temperature and IgE levels

Googlein plain English?

Youve got a virus.

A what?

I ran through your last 48 hours of meetings. It seems like you picked it up Monday, at Jonahs birthday party. Id like to run additional diagnostics. Would you mind using the.?

As the Internet of Things catapults to new heights, Google is developing a full range of internal and external sensors, monitoring everything from blood sugar to blood chemistry. The list of once multi-million-dollar medical machines now being dematerialized, demonetized, democratized, and delocalizedthat is, made into portable and even wearable sensorscould fill a textbook.

Sensors will not only transform healthcare and diagnostics. Any electronic device that measures a physical, quantitative valuelight, acceleration, temperature, etc.then sends that information to other devices on a network qualifies as a sensor.

Sensors add intelligence to our appliances. But more importantly, they add hours to our lives. Consider that in less than a decade, when you run out of coffee, your kitchen cabinet will detect a shortage (cross-referencing sensor data with your coffee-drinking habits) and order more. A blockchain-enabled smart contract will subsequently place an order, triggering an Amazon drone delivery directly to your doorstep.

And of course, your very own Butler-bot might soon transport these freshly-ground beans from delivery box to cabinet, sparing you the trouble.

If advances in computing power, AI, and networks represent the center mass of the digital revolution, then todays sensor uprising is the outer edge of that revolt.

Comprising the first part of tomorrows smart environment information-processing pipeline, sensors are the data-gathering apparatus that provide our computers with the information they need to act.

Not much more than a sleek, black band, the Oura Ring is the most accurate sleep tracker on the market, thanks to its TK sensors.

The product began in 2014 at an infectious disease lab in Finland. Health researcher Petteri Lahtela noticed that many of the diseases hed been studying, including Lyme disease, heart disease, and diabetes, shared a curious overlap: all of them negatively affected sleep. Lahtela started to wonder if all these diseases cause insomnia or if it worked the other way around. Could these conditions be alleviated, or at least improved, by fixing sleep?

To solve that puzzle, Lahtela decided he needed data, so he turned to sensors. In 2015, driven by advances in smartphones, we saw the convergence of incredibly small and powerful batteries with incredibly small and powerful sensors. So small and powerful, in fact, that building a whole new kind of sleep tracker might be possible.

The sensors that caught Lahtelas fancy were a new breed of heart rate monitors, particularly given that heart rate and variability serve as excellent sleep quality indicators. Yet at the time, all such trackers on the market were riddled with issues.

Fitbit and the Apple Watch, for instance, measure blood flow in the wrist via an optical sensor. Yet the wrists arteries sit too far below the surface for perfect measurement, and people dont often wear watches to bedas smart watches can interrupt the very sleep theyre designed to measure.

Lahtelas upgrade? The Oura ring.

Location and sampling rates are its secret weapons. Because the fingers arteries are closer to the surface than those in the wrist, the Oura gets a far better picture of the action. Plus, while Apple and Garamond measure blood flow twice a second, and Fitbit even raises this figure to 12x/second, the Oura ring captures data at250 timesper second.

And in studies conducted by independent labs, the ring is 99 percent accurate compared to medical-grade heart rate trackers, and 98 percent accurate for heart rate variability.

Twenty years ago, sensors with this level of accuracy would have cost in the millions, requiring reasonably-sized data centers and tremendous overheard processing costs. Today, the Oura costs around $300 and sits on your fingera perfect example of sensors exponential growth.

We are in the middle of a sensor revolution. The street name for this uprising is the Internet of Things, the huge mesh network of interconnected smart devices that will soon span the globe.

And its worth tracing the evolution of this revolution to understand how far weve come.

In 1989, John Romkey, one of the inventors of the transmission control protocol (TCP/IP), connected a Sunbeam toaster to the internet, making it the very first IoT device.

Ten years later, sociologist Neil Gross saw the writing on the wall and made a now famous prediction in the pages ofBusiness Week: In the next century, planet Earth will don an electric skin. It will use the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its sensations [] These will monitor cities and endangered species, the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations, our bodieseven our dreams.

A decade later, in 2009, Gross prediction bore out: the number of devices connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on the planet (12.5 billion devices, 6.8 billion people, or 1.84 connected devices per person).

A year later, driven primarily by the evolution of smart phones, sensor prices began to plummet. By 2015, all this progress added up to 15 billion connected devices, with researchers at Stanford predicting 50 billion by 2020.

As most of these devices contain multiple sensorsthe average smartphone has about twentythis also explains why 2020 marks the debut of whats been called our trillion sensor world.

Nor will we stop there. By 2030, those same Stanford researchers estimate 500 billion connected devices. And according to Accenture, this translates into a US$14.2 trillioneconomy.

Hidden behind these numbers is exactly what Gross had in mindan electric skin that registers just about every sensation on the planet.

Consider optical sensors. The first digital camera, built in 1976 by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson, was the size of a toaster oven, took 12 black-and-white images, and cost over $10,000. Today, the average camera that accompanies your smartphone shows a thousand-fold improvement in weight, cost, and resolution.

And these cameras are everywhere: in cars, drones, phones, satelliteswith uncanny image resolution to boot. Already, satellites photograph the Earth down to the half-meter range. Drones shrink that to a centimeter. And the LIDAR sensors atop autonomous cars are on track to capture just about everythinggathering 1.3 million data points per second, and registering change down to the single photon level.

We see this triple trendof plummeting size and cost, alongside mass increases in performanceeverywhere.

The first commercial GPS hit shelves in 1981, weighing 53 pounds and costing $119,900. By 2010, it had shrunk to a five-dollar chip small enough to sit on your finger.

The inertial measurement unit that guided our early rockets was a 50-pound, $20 million device in the mid-60s. Today, the accelerometer and gyroscope in your cellphone do the same job, yet cost about four dollars and weigh less than a grain of rice.

And these trends are only going to continue. Were moving from the world of the microscopic, to the world of the nanoscopic.

As a result, weve begun to see an oncoming wave of smart clothing, jewelry, glassesthe Oura ring being but one example. Soon, these sensors will migrate to our inner bodies. Alphabets Verily branch is working on a miniaturized continuous blood glucose monitor that could assist diabetics in everyday treatment.

Research on smart dust, a dust-mote-sized system that can sense, store, and transmit data, has been progressing for years. Today, a mote is the size of an apple seed. Tomorrow, at the nano-scale, theyll float through our bloodstream, exploring one of the last greatterra incognitathe interior of the human body.

Were about to learn a whole lot more, and not just about the body. About everything. The data haul from these sensors is beyond comprehension. An autonomous car generates four terabytes a day, or a thousand feature length films worth of information. A commercial airliner: Forty terabytes. A smart factory: A petabyte. So what does this data haul get us? Plenty.

Doctors no longer have to rely on annual check-ups to track patient health, as they now get a blizzard of quantified-self data streaming in 24-7.

Farmers now know the moisture content in both the soil and the sky, allowing pinpoint watering for healthier crops, bigger yields anda critical factor in the wake of climate changefar less water waste.

In business, agility has been the biggest advantage. In times of rapid change, lithe and nimble trumps slow and lumbering, every time. While knowing every available detail about ones customers is an admitted privacy concern, it does provide organizations with an incredible level of dexterity, which may be the only way to stay in business in tomorrows accelerated times.

Within a decade, we will live in a world where just about anything that can be measured will be measuredall the time. It will not be your knowledge that matters, but rather the questions youask.

Its a world of radical transparency, where privacy concerns will take on a whole new meaning.

From the edge of space to the bottom of the ocean to the inside of your bloodstream, our worlds emerging electric skin is producing a sensorium of endlessly available information. And riding rapid advances in AI, this skin possesses the machine learning required to make sense of that information.

Welcome to the hyper-conscious planet.

Abundance-Digital Online Community:Stay ahead of technological advancements and turn your passion into action. Abundance Digital is now part of Singularity University.Learn more.

Image Credit: Pratchaya.Lee/Shutterstock.com

Follow this link:

We Can't Even Comprehend the Massive Data Haul We'll Soon Get From Sensors - Singularity Hub

we are actually diverse around the globe. I refuse to see the world with borders. I think as long as we can apply a diverse point of view, the rest of the details will follow. In order to make leaps, we each need to adopt a similar perspective that sees the world as a BlueDot.

I had the pleasure to interview Film Producer Ali M. Aksu. Born in Corum, Turkey and of Circassian ethnicity, Ali M. Aksu is an international film producer and entrepreneur. He is the executive producer of the groundbreaking film Laid in America the first-ever feature film to cast YouTube celebrities and directors, that was distributed by Universal Studios. He is the founder of Moon Lounge, a millennial content-based podcast dedicated for global grand challenges that was incubated at Singularity University. Aksu recently founded the film finance platform filmmaker.ai, a next-generation movie production company that employs data analytics at an extensive level, while producing content with the latest technologies. He holds a B.A. in Economics, with a minor in film, TV and digital media from UCLA, and earned executive-level degrees from MIT, Wharton and Singularity University.

Thank you so much for joining us! Can you tell us the story of how you grew up?

I grew up in the best family I can ask for. I had an older brother and sister growing up, so I had lots of attention. I remember as a child I would ask a lot of questions to everybody, imagining them as a source of knowledge. It became a joke matter at some point with my brother and sister.

Can you share a story with us about what brought you to this specific career path?

I would say curiosity and learning. I remember stargazing when I was six years old. I remember asking my cousin What if we didnt exist?. I feel like once you wonder beyond existence, you can never go back. Therefore, I always wanted to leave something meaningful behind. Lifelong learning, I call it my learning disorder, my adjacent luck. If you keep wondering, and then dedicate yourself to learn, I think that takes you are on the path to live a legacy. I am nowhere but in the beginning of my career.

Can you tell us the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

I first came to LA during high school for an internship called Dream Careers. I worked with an entrepreneur who happens also to be a film producer. I went back to Turkey for the senior year of my high school thinking I should be back in LA. Then I came back to UCLA for my undergraduate studies. During my second year, we made a movie with him. I thought it was pretty cool from the first day of the filming.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I met my hero! That was my mistake. Lol. But Im lucky that he is genuinely a great guy with great intentions.

What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now?

Im working on a very special project at Singularity University. It has a very disruptive potential in the film industry.

Im very interested in diversity in the entertainment industry. Can you share three reasons with our readers about why you think its important to have diversity represented in film and television? How can that potentially affect our culture?

Because we are actually diverse around the globe. I refuse to see the world with borders. I think as long as we can apply a diverse point of view, the rest of the details will follow. In order to make leaps, we each need to adopt a similar perspective that sees the world as a Blue Dot.

From your personal experience, can you recommend three things the community/society/the industry can do help address some of the diversity issues in the entertainment business?

Look for diverse stories to tell, hire diverse teams, question everything on an individual basis.

What are your 5 things I wish someone told me when I first started and why. Please share a story or example for each.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not burn out?

Make personal time, meditate, travel.

You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Blue Dot Initiative. People just need to realize that we are living on a blue dot. Keep that in mind, and go back to your daily life. I feel like thats a good start.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Yes a couple. I have had several mentors along the way. I feel like for a young entrepreneur, a mentor can only do so much. E! founder Larry Namer has been a mentor of mine. We met at a lunch in Beverly Hills when I was at UCLA, hustling to make my movie. We remained connected and to this day hes been there for me. When I ask for his opinion on something Im working on, or we just go grab lunch, as we are both foodies. One day I dream to thank him from a stage.

Can you please give us your favorite Life Lesson Quote? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

Its only with the heart one can see rightly; whats essential is invisible to the eye. This is one of my favorite quotes from Le Petit Prince aka The Little Prince. You can actually watch it on Netflix now. Im glad someone did that. Its a childrens book that my mom gifted me to read when I was little. She still calls me her little prince sometimes. I have several mom nicknames I think it sums up how I live. I go by my heart. I use my brain for data processing. My decisions are filtered through the heart. Thats just my flow. I respect everyones perspective.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them.

Mark Zuckerberg would be great or John McAfee. They are both equally interesting these days.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

@alimahiraksuits a private account with some accidental followers that bounced from my famous friends Instagrams ( lol).

Continued here:

Rising Star Ali M. Aksu: Look for diverse stories to tell, hire diverse teams & question everything on an individual basis - Thrive Global

THE SUPERMASSIVE black hole at the centre of the Milky Way exploded 3.5million years ago, according to astronomers.

This is considered to be 'astonishingly recent' in galactic terms and is changing what scientists thought they knew about our galaxy.

Professor Lisa Kewley, who worked on the study, said: "This is a dramatic event that happened a few million years ago in the Milky Way's history.

"A massive blast of energy and radiation came right out of the galactic centre and into the surrounding material.

"This shows that the centre of the Milky Way is a much more dynamic place than we had previously thought. It is lucky we're not residing there!"

The cataclysmic blast ripped through our galaxy and was likely felt 200,00 light years away in the Magellanic Stream.

It is considered to be a recent event because when it happened the dinosaurs had already been wiped out for 63million years and human ancestors were already walking on Earth.

This black hole blast phenomenon is known as a Seyfert flare.

The astronomers think it would have created two enormous 'ionisation cones' that would have sliced through the Milky Way.

They think it was caused by nuclear activity in the gigantic black hole, known as Sagittarius A.

It is estimated to have lasted for around 300,000 years, which is extremely short in galactic terms.

Co-author Magda Guglielmo from the University of Sydney said: "These results dramatically change our understanding of the Milky Way.

"We always thought about our Galaxy as an inactive galaxy, with a not so bright centre.

"These new results instead open the possibility of a complete reinterpretation of its evolution and nature.

"The flare event that occurred three million years ago was so powerful that it had consequences on the surrounding of our Galaxy.

"We are the witness to the awakening of the sleeping beauty."

The research was led by by Professor Joss Bland-Hawthorn from Australia's ARC Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D).

During the study, data was gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope and used to calculate when and how the explosion took place.

It will soon be published in The Astrophysical Journal.

What is a black hole? The key facts

Here's what you need to know...

What is a black hole?

What is an event horizon?

What is a singularity?

How are black holes created?

In other news, the mysterious cosmic web that sticks the universe together has been pictured for first time.

Aplanet so massive it should not existhas been found by baffled astronomers in a nearby star system.

GREAT BALLS OF FIRE Orionids meteor shower 2019 when and how to watch

SKY LIGHT How to spot the Draconids meteor shower in the UK tonight

ROCKY HORROR Huge 111ft asteroid to skim past Earth at 22,000mph TODAY

INCOMING New asteroid threat as 50ft space rock could hit Earth in just 70 years

BUGGED OUT Brit spots terrifying 'half-spider, half-scorpion' but it's actually neither

SHIRE GENIUS Mystery over 'Flores Man' Hobbit who split off from humans finally solved

And, there's an enormous black holelurking in this Nasa photo can you find it?

What do you make of this Milky Way explosion? Let us know in the comments...

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

See the original post here:

Giant black hole at centre of Milky Way exploded recently and blast was felt 200,000 light-years away - The Sun

A particle physicist has created an online tool which enables you to calculate what would happen if the Earth or any other astronomical object was sucked into a black hole.

The tooldeveloped by lvaro Diez from the University of Warsaw in Polandshows you various parameters, such as the amount of energy that would be produced by collisions with different-sized objects.

For example, the calculator shows that the energy generated by a collision between an object with the same mass as the Earth and a black hole with about four million solar masseslike Sagittarius A*, which lies at the center of the Milky Waywould be roughly 32,200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 megajoules.

"These events are so huge we couldn't even begin to comprehend the size," Diez told Newsweek. "There's not really much more context for such a huge amount. Black holes are so compact and, hence, have such strong gravity around them that the speeds, forces and energies related to anything that gets close to them are just out of our imagination."

Diez said he created the calculator because he was inspired by several black hole discoveries which have been announced recently.

"This year has been undeniably the black hole year, from the data collected by Nobel Prize-winning collaboration LIGO, to the first-ever picture of a black hole, to NASA publishing a collision between a black hole and a neutron star not two weeks ago, it seems like we can't go for a month without one or more breakthroughs in our understanding of black holes," he said.

"In particular, this last story was an inspiration for me to create a more complete version of a black hole calculator that can show people not only what black holes are and how they interact, but also the consequences of those interactions and collisions on the black hole itself," he said.

In simple terms, black holes are dead stars that, after exploding as supernovae, have so much mass that nothing can hold them together anymore.

These dead stars eventually collapse in on themselves into a single point of infinite density, known as a singularitywhere gravity is predicted to be infinite and the laws of physics as we know them break down. The singularity is surrounded by the event horizonthe boundary beyond which nothing can escape due to the extreme gravitational pull.

"A black hole is defined by its mass or its Schwarzschild Radius, which is the surface that marks the 'point of no return,' anything that gets closer than that distance cannot escape the black hole, not even lightwhich is why they are called black holes," Diez said.

According to the physicist, there are two main types of interactions between black holes and other objects which help alert us to their existence: destructive and non-destructive.

In the non-destructive interactions, astronomers observe astronomical objectsmost of which are starsorbiting around what appears to be a non-existent object with an extremely strong gravitational pull.

After ruling all other options out, astronomers may conclude that this signifies the existence of a black hole, even if they can't see the object directly.

The more violent encounters involve objects getting too close to the black hole and being swallowed by it. These events are not as common, however, when objects like stars fall into black holes, the collisions produce vast amounts of energywhich we can detect on Earth using infrared and gamma ray detectors, even if they take place in other galaxies, millions of light-years away.

Sometimes stars get too close to the black hole and are ripped apart by what's known as "tidal disruption." This process describes how different parts of the star are pulled into the black hole at different speeds, eventually leading to its demise. Once the black hole has eaten, the event horizon grows, as the calculator reveals.

Recently, NASA released a visualization of a simulated black hole which demonstrates how the extreme gravitational forces produced by such objects distorts the light around them like a carnival mirror.

More here:

This Calculator Tells You What Will Happen If Earth Gets Sucked Into a Black Hole - Newsweek

Simon Segars, CEO of the Cambridge, England-basedArm, took the stage at last weeks Arm TechCon 2019 event in San Jose, California to tell the companys ecosystem of partners about its future plans.

Arm designs the underlying architecture and semiconductor chip components for its partners, who license the technology and put it into a wide range of chips that drive just about everything electronic, from smart doorbells to energy-efficient Arm-based servers. Arms partners have shipped more than 150 billion chips to date, and in the next two years Segars expects 50 billion more to ship.

The world is undergoing nothing less than an electronics revolution, and Arm is at the center of it. The internet of things everyday devices that are smart and connected could reach more than a trillion units by 2035, Segars said.

These dynamics attracted Japans SoftBank and led to its $31 billion acquisition of Arm in 2016. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said he was readying his company for the Singularity, or the day when AI exceeds the collective intelligence of humanity, in a few decades. But last year Son acknowledged that he might spin off Arm in an initial public offering, possibly within five years (by 2023).

Segars is trying to run the company as usual in the meantime, with a near-doubling of the companys staff to more than 6,500 people. At TechCon, he announced that Arm would fend off competition by enabling custom instructions for embedded centralized processing units (CPUs) to give chipmakers more flexibility in a changing world.

I sat down with a group of reporters at Arm TechCon 2019 last week to talk with Segars in a wide-ranging interview. We discussed the possible IPO, the custom instructions, Arms moves in IoT, its interest in security, and the state of competition.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and questions have been reordered by theme.

Above: Simon Segars, Arm CEO, at a press group interview at Arm TechCon 2019.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Question: I talked to a couple of analysts who felt like the custom instructions were a nod toward the competition from RISC-V.

Simon Segars: The way were looking at it is that chip design is evolving in multiple ways in parallel. You have consolidation going on amongst big chip companies, producing large players who are investing on the leading edge. They have the size and scale to build very complex devices. You have some OEMs who want to build chips. You have various smaller companies who are looking at how to create things much more optimized for specific applications, especially in this world of IoT. Theres a range of different solutions out there for how people can extend the capability of what an ARM processor does based on the workload.

Our inclusion of the custom instructions is based on feedback from the market. In some areas having a dedicated accelerator sitting in the memory map or sitting as a co-processor, that works very well. There are some other applications where doing that final optimization can make a big difference. Weve listened to the market. Weve thought long and hard about how we add that flexibility and maintain the benefits weve had for our entire history of standardization and that big software ecosystem weve developed. This seems like a good way to address all those needs. Its really driven by the needs of the market more than anything else.

Question: How should we visualize what this new customization ability addresses?

Above: Arm custom instructions

Image Credit: Arm

Segars: The target market is actually quite broad. When you look at the biggest shippers of ARM-based microcontrollers today, its companies that have been around a long time. They have broad portfolios of microcontrollers where theyre taking, say, a Cortex-M3, M33, whatever, and building portfolios around them that produce hundreds of SKUs. They ship development boards. They ship a lot of software support to go with that, so that as a developer you have this library of functions prebuilt for you that you can integrate together in software, whatever application in particular you want to build.

I anticipate companies looking at particular markets, like motor control. We have these libraries today that are implemented using special ARM instructions. If, as we implement our Cortex-M33, we can add some special feature, maybe we can halve the run time of that library that does some operation to work out where to take the motor to next. Companies like that are going to do those optimizations and build them into the board support packages that they create.

There will be some others in the startup category that are going to focus on one specific thing, as opposed to a broad portfolio of MCUs that theyre largely shipping to distributors. They might have some market in mind where adding some instructions can, again, just optimize for that. Again, I think its going to be quite broadly applicable. Were going to see big, classic MCU shippers adopting it, and were going to see smaller startups.

Question: How do you add custom instructions and still maintain the ecosystem?

Segars: Were trying to enable the best of all worlds. One key thing is that the custom instructions that can be added are purely additive to the core instruction set. The operating system that might sit on top of this processor isnt going to rely on custom instructions. It might call a routine where, if the custom instructions are there, it runs very efficiently, and if theyre not there, it goes and does something else. But the core operating system that you can take off the shelf and run, that will still run on every ARM processor, because all the instructions that are defined today are still there.

Were not enabling people to strip stuff out and risk having a C compiler spit out code that wont work. Theres still that compatibility with the architecture. This is an opportunity to add things for the regular code its never going to touch, but specific application optimizations could take advantage of this in a particular vendors set of support tools.

That isnt very different, at the chip level, from what we have today. There may be, in an MCU, some accelerator thats sitting completely outside the core. It sits in a memory map. Again, one of these library routines might call upon it to do something. If that accelerator isnt there in Vendor Bs chip, its not going to do anything. Same principle applies here, but its more tightly integrated. For some functions we think thats going to deliver significant performance uplift for very small overhead in silicon. Thats much more efficient than building a completely separate accelerator.

Question: Should we expect the majority of customers to do custom instructions?

Segars: No, I dont think the majority. Like any instruction set check, when we look at the architecture were going to put this in. Whats this used for? Who is going to use it? How do we support it? Its a significant step to add something into the architecture, to change it. I think youll see companies think long and hard about it. Again, back to this mix of partners we have, bigger companies maybe standardize around a few optimizations, make sure theres great support for it, and then youll have some small guys that focus on one thing. But I dont think youre going to suddenly see a million and one different variations.

Above: Simon Segars expects a trillion internet of things devices by 2035.

Image Credit: Dean Takahashi

Question: Do you have any updates about a new IPO?

Segars: At last years SoftBank AGM [annual general meeting], Masa said that in about five years, well have an IPO of Arm. Thats not a hard and fast ruling, where on July 10, 2023 well have an IPO. Its not cast in stone.

What were doing is investing to make Arm a more valuable company. Were investing to do that through the development of technologies, the development of our ecosystem, to ensure that we can grow with the growing opportunity thats represented by IoT and AI and 5G and autonomous vehicles and continued growth in mobile. I think there are a number of these technologies that will drive growth for the semiconductor industry, and since we supply into that, we want to make sure were providing the building blocks for chip companies that want to serve those markets.

It feels to me that in that sort of 2023 time frame, we should be seeing the real fruits of that investment. We should be seeing revenues take off from the sale of those chips, and that should be flowing to the profitability of ARM. If all that comes together and the conditions are right, that would be a good time to have an IPO of Arm and release some of that back.

Question: You mentioned driving growth, having a mandate from SoftBank to drive growth and push forward as fast as you possibly can, and not be as concerned about quarterly earnings and so forth. What does that mean for Arm in terms of the overall attitude as you continue to drive growth?

Segars: For now, nothing has changed. Weve been investing our profits in growing the company. Since the acquisition as you know, prior to, we were a very profitable company. We operated with roughly 50% margins. Weve taken that down significantly and invested our profitability in our growth to develop this long-term road map of compute solutions for these growing markets. None of that has changed relative to anything thats gone on in the rest of the SoftBank portfolio. For us were continuing on that mission. Its business as usual.

If and when Arm becomes a public company, the stake in the ground is 2023. Thats a while off. We need to have gone through this phase of investment, seeing the growth in the end markets, seeing how that growth in top-line converts and profitability a lot of things need to fall into place for us to be in the right shape to go back to the public markets. Were on a runway to do that. Thats not changed based on anything else thats going on across the board.

Question: If you were to relist as a public company, where would you might like to do it?

Segars: Its not something were spending any time as a board discussing. Its still a long way away. If we were to relist, it would be in a market that takes a long-term view on technology. We had a great time being a public company previously, with a primary listing in London and a secondary listing in the U.S. The world is a different place from what it was in 1998 when we went public and that choice was made. Well determine how much closer.

Question: As a board member of SoftBank, can I ask you about the recent results of the investment in the Vision Fund?

Segars: The way the SoftBank group is organized, the business is run separately. Im running Arm. Rajeev [Misra] is running Vision Fund. Masa is running Sprint. Theyre separate companies. Im not spending my days worrying about whats going on at Vision Fund, nor is Rajeev, who runs the Vision Fund, spending his days worrying about what Im doing. My primary focus is on delivering an Arm strategy.

The SoftBank group board, as you can imagine, is pretty interesting, and its a fascinating experience for me being part of that. The Vision Fund is going to do what it needs to do.

Read the original here:

Simon Segars interview Arms CEO on competitive threats, custom instructions, and a far-off IPO - VentureBeat

Each new spin-off of TYPE-Moon's Fate franchise has gone on to major successes with anime fans, and there's the same hope for the new series based on the incredibly popular Fate/Grand Order mobile game. Adapting a story voted on by fans in Japan, Babylonia serves as an entry point despite its actual story taking place after several other adventures in the canon of the original game. But with the debut of the series' second episode, we also got our first full look at the new opening and ending theme sequences for the series hyping up what's left to come.

The opening theme for the series is titled, "Phantom Joke," as performed by Unison Square Garden, and you can check it out in the video above. The ending theme for the series is titled, "Wishes in the Falling Stars," and you can check it out in the video below. Each one gives fans glimpses at all the new and familiar faces to the franchise, and teases an exciting new series to come.

If you wanted to check out the newest Fate series for yourself, Fate/Grand Order Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia is now streaming on FunimationNOW. Aniplex of America describes the series as such, "A.D. 2017 The last era in which Magecraft still existed. Society was created by human hands, but Mages grasped the truth of the world. Magecraft is comprised of techniques from past humans that cannot be explained by science, while science encompasses the techniques of future humans that Magecraft cannot achieve. Researchers and scholars of both Magecraft and science have been gathered to maintain human civilization under the Chaldea Security Organization.

But calculations then proved the extinction of humanity in 2019. The cause of this is 'realms that cannot be observed' that suddenly appeared in various eras of history, called 'Singularities.' Ritsuka Fujimaru, the one Master remaining in Chaldea, has been intervening within these Singularites, alongside the Demi-Servant Mash Kyrielight.

He has been attending to the forbidden rituals to resolve or destroy the Singularities: the 'Grand Order.' A seventh Singularity has been discoveredin ancient Mesopotamia in the year 2655 B.C. The land of Uruk, governed by the wise King Gilgamesh after his return from a journey seeking immortality, was grand and prosperous until three goddesses and countless Demonic Beasts appeared. These enemies have brought Uruk to the brink of destruction.

With a 'Rayshift'a method of time travel to the pastFujimaru and Mash arrive in the lands of Uruk to encounter the fortress city of Uruk and the Absolute Demonic Front, fighting back the fearsome attack of the Demonic Beasts. There, the people who live their lives to the fullest despite facing a major threat, continue to fight for their future. Deities and Demonic Beasts make their assault, and mankind stands up against it It is the destined era where humans and gods part ways."

See more here:

Fate/Grand Order: Babylonia Shares Opening, Ending Themes - Comicbook.com

Governments around the world are rushing to keep up with emerging technologies. No one wants to be left behind as more industries and facets of life are impacted by the transition from analogue to digital, manual to automated, and authentic to synthetic.

One of the countries at the front of the pack is China. Its government is aiming to lead the world in AI by 2030. Tech giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are rivaled in size and clout only by the likes of Amazon and Google. Its pouring huge amounts of venture capital into tech. And its scientists are moving forward with gene editing even as other countries grapple with its ethical concerns.

This all points to likely success for China as a tech superpower. But as it moves swiftly into the future, it can be easy to forget that, in terms of development, much of the worlds most populous country hasnt yet left the past behind.

Last week world leaders convened in New York for the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, which included a summit on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Much of the focus for the SDGs falls on the African continent, home to the countries with the highest poverty ratesand highest birth ratesin the world. Having reduced its extreme poverty rate from 88 percent in 1981 to less than 2 percent in 2013in whats been aptly dubbed the Chinese MiracleChina doesnt get mentioned as often in global development conversations anymore.

But its still an important player in the field, not least because of its massive population, which at nearly 1.5 billion outnumbers all African countries put together. Its size gives it a huge weight in overall global statistics, and we should still be keeping close tabs on its progress.

In a recent paper published in Science Advances, a research team examined regional divisions, gaps between urban and rural populations, social inequality, and other factors to evaluate where Chinas development progress measures up and where its falling short.

Even in the worlds richest countries, wealth is by no means evenly distributed across geographic lines. 2018 average per capita income in the US, for example, was $74,561 in Connecticutand $37,994 in Mississippi. People who live in or near big cities tend to have greater access to opportunity and wealth creation.

China is no exception; significant gaps exist between coastal and inland regions and between urban and rural areas, not just in wealth and employment, but also in access to education and healthcare. According to the paper, though these gaps have narrowed, they havent yet closed.

The widest gap is in education between urban and rural areas. The good news is that across the board, people are getting more years of educationbut urbanites are still getting 3 more years on average and are 7 times more likely to go to college.

The figures for healthcare are less stark. The infant mortality rate as of 2016 was 0.4 percent in urban areas and 0.9 percent in rural areas. The disparity in maternal mortality has disappeared, standing at 2 per million across the board.

Rural residents overall mortality rate used to be almost double that of urbanites, but theres been a leveling effect with the explosive growth of Chinese cities. While moving to cities has upped peoples incomes and educational attainment, its also exposed them to the ills of urban livingnamely, more pollution, less cardiovascular activity, and a less healthy diet, all contributing to higher rates of illnesses like cancer and heart disease.

Its important to note that while the paper details death and disease rates, it doesnt include information about access to care or quality of care, which are more indicative of equity.

Chinas urban migration between 19882015 was so massive that its been called not just the biggest human exodus in history, but the biggest migration of any type of mammal. A 2015 estimate put the number of migrant workers at 277 million. According to the paper, both urban and rural incomes increased more than 10-fold since the early 1990sbut the income gap increased even more. Factory and office workers in cities make on average three times more than agricultural workers in the countryside, and people working in coastal areas have by far the highest per capita disposable incomes.

While millions in China are no longer extremely poor, millions are still poor; 43 million people were estimated to be living below the poverty line in 2018. The governments main strategy in its declared war on poverty consists of moving rural residents to cities. But big cities are already sprawling and overcrowded, and plunking farmers down in high-rise apartments doesnt guarantee a better life, especially if they dont have the skills to get a city job.

The conditions that enabled the Chinese Miraclean authoritarian government, a huge working-age population, and population control via the one-child policycan only keep on giving for so long. In particular, the working population is aging, and as millions of workers approach retirement, the ranks available to take their placeand to fund the countrys pension systemarent as plentiful.

In short, China is approaching a fascinating (and potentially treacherous) inflection point. In the wake of its incredible 30 years, its path to sustained progress will likely be more complex. If its going to produce a second miracle and eradicate poverty across the country, its commitment to becoming a tech superpower may be an apt starting point. And its lax approach to privacy and the powerful tools already in place to collect data on multiple aspects of its citizens lives will give China a technological edge over its Western counterparts.

Whether Chinas ambitions will pan out remains to be seen, but its got its work cut out for it on multiple fronts.

For one, its economic growth has come with a hefty environmental price tag. As the paper put it, growth has been achieved at the expense of natural resources and the environment, which has led to excessive emissions including wastewater, waste gas, solid waste, and carbon dioxide that extended from the developed east region to the undeveloped west region. Though its already begun to take drastic measures to improve its environmental recordand safeguard the health of its land and peopleChinas size and clout mean it should be aiming to be a world leader in caring for the planet, rather than reactively combating an abysmal environmental record.

Its human rights record also leaves much to be desired. International outcry has grown over the CCPs treatment of Uighurs in the north-west Xinjiang province, and tensions have been building for months in Hong Kong. On the business side, a trade war with the US has escalated, and telecoms giant Huawei was banned from US communications networks in May (though theres since been a reprieve).

China has set its sights high, and the hurdles it will have to clear to reach its goals arent small. A country that can reduce poverty by 86 percent in 30 years has some experience solving tough problemsbut unlike 30 years ago, China is now at the center of the world stage, and the world should thus hold it to a high standard. Well soon see if it has another miracle up its sleeve.

Image Credit: Photo bywu yionUnsplash

Read more from the original source:

The End of the Chinese Miracle Is in Sight. What's Next? - Singularity Hub

Theres broad consensus that genetically modifying humans isnt a good idea, at least not anytime in the near future. But it seems Russia has less qualms about the idea, which could leave it to determine the future of the technology.

After Chinese geneticist He Jiankui announced he had used CRISPR to genetically edit two human embryos there was widespread outrage from both the scientific community and authorities at home and abroad. But it took less than a year for Russian scientist Denis Rebrikov to announce his desire to carry out similar experiments that edit germline DNA, which refers to changes that will be passed on to future generations.

Condemnation from the international community was again swift, but it appears Rebrikov may be finding a more receptive audience at home. Bloomberg reports that a secret meeting of top Russian geneticists and health officials was convened over the summer to discuss the proposals.

And the meeting had a significant guest: Maria Vorontsova, an endocrinologist and daughter of the man likely to make the final call on Russias position on gene-editing President Vladimir Putin.

Bloomberg reports there was a back and forth between opponents and proponents of the idea, but Vorontsova said scientific progress cant be stopped and suggested such research should be controlled by state-run institutions to ensure oversight.

While thats a long way from an official endorsement, the Russian governments response to Rebrikovs plans has certainly been tepid compared to those in the US, where politicians recently renewed a ban on germline editing, and in China, where Hes work quickly led to a tightening of regulations around human gene editing.

Rebrikovs proposal potentially has more merit than Hes. Rebrikov initially planned to target the same gene as He, which is believed to determine susceptibility to HIV. Switching this gene off was criticized for being an unnecessarily complicated and dangerous way of ensuring the disease wasnt passed from parent to child.

Now he plans to use CRISPR to switch off a rare gene that leads to deafness. He is working with couples who are both deaf due to the condition, but dont want to pass it on to their children. Theres still very little understanding of what the potential side effects of this kind of intervention could be, which has led many to call for a moratorium on the technology.

Both the World Health Organization and an international commission set up by the US national academies and the UKs Royal Society are trying to develop guidelines for human gene editing technology, but scientists leading these efforts admit theres little they can do to prevent this kind of research at present.

And while Rebrikovs proposals may sound fairly benign, the way he talks about the technology should give serious cause for concern. In the Bloomberg article he openly discusses starting small and the prospect of parents genetically enhancing their children, while seeming to invoke the Soviet Unions pursuit of nuclear weapons as a justification for developing a technology that can be used for both good and evil.

So far, most of the discussion around germline editing has been focused on safety. But writing in Scientific American Mildred Solomon, president of bioethics institute The Hastings Center, says we need to start tackling questions that go beyond safety before its too late.

That will inevitably include discussions around the ethics of genetic enhancement, but its becoming increasingly clear that there also needs to be consideration of the geopolitical ramifications of the technology.

Putin has already voiced his concerns about genetically-engineered soldiers, and in todays hostile international climate its easy to see the worlds great powers worrying about being left behind by their adversaries. Rebrikov alluded to this train of thought in his comments to Bloomberg, saying hes sure embryo gene-editing is happening in clandestine dark sites.

Despite Chinas forceful public response to Hes research, theres evidence the government was actually funding it, and bioethicist James Giordano told National Defense that its highly unlikely the scientist was a rogue actor in a country where government, academia, and industry are so deeply entwined.

Were still a long way from the kind of capabilities required for doomsday scenarios like super-soldiers or genetically-targeted biological weapons, but recent developments suggest theres a real danger of a genetic arms race developing. Exactly what can be done to stop it remains far from clear, but there needs to be a major push to ensure the fundamental basis of our humanity doesnt end up being governed by realpolitik.

Image Credit: Shutterstock.com

See the article here:

Russia Could Take the Lead on Human Gene Editing - Singularity Hub

Michael Bauer from Sylabs.IO

In this video from the Perth HPC Conference, Michael Bauer from Sylabs presents: Addressing the Scientific Reproducibility Crisis with Singularity.

Containers provide the means to encapsulate an application, its dependencies, data, and configurations, that allows for full mobility and reproducibility of the software stack. Containers have disrupted the Linux scene within the last few years because they have created a paradigm shift in what it means to package up and move applications and data.

Sylabs is the leader in secure, trusted, performance focused container solutions. The capabilities that we have created are revolutionary and unique within the industry purposely built to address some of the shortcomings and flaws within the current container technologies. On top of that, we have created a series of commercially accessible value adds for traditional simulation, artificial intelligence, edge computing, on-ramping to the cloud, multi-cloud, edge, and core infrastructure management.

Michael Bauer is a senior software engineer at Sylabs, whos an expert in Linux container technologies. At Sylabs, hes the lead engineer of the core services team, providing technical oversight and direction over products such as Singularity, SingularityPRO, and various Kubernetes integrations. Michael has been involved with the Singularity open source project for almost three years, first as a contributor and now as a project lead and maintainer. Hes given talks about Singularity and Linux containers around the world at conferences such as ISC, SC, FOSDEM, and many others. Recently, hes been exploring novel approaches to machine learning via container technology.

See more talks from the Perth HPC Conference

Check out our insideHPC Events Calendar

See more here:

Addressing the Scientific Reproducibility Crisis with Singularity - insideHPC

Newtons First Law of Motion: A body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.

Newtons first law, in part, states: that a body in motion will remain in motion. As first principles go, I see a parallel to my experience.

A body in emotion also desires to stay in emotion. That emotion for me, right now, is love. I am not gifted at the letting go of it.

I do not know how to feign indifference for the love of a life deeply shared. I like being a plural unity singularity does not suit me and the hollowness of separation from a love, not yet fully savored, is an agony almost beyond description.

But that must be the Arc of Growth. In order to salvage the lesson that is bathed in the anguish, first must come a finding. For we are bodies acted upon by outside forces at least we were meant to be. It is the outside forces that create the Arc of us.

In life, there is either an Arc along which we travel or there is a flat line. The flat line is without pulse it is a kind of unbending death. An un-creativity. It is de-evolution at the level of apathy.

But not only Life and Growth have their Arc, Evil has its Arc as well. It is vital that I, as an outside force, change the motion of Evils Arc. I must remove from evil its inertia. Thus, I can help diminish the impact and the ancillary damage and the growing ripples of Evils victimhood.

Oddly enough it is the ripples of the Holocaust that have unsettled my world.

I was born into the Dutch Reform Church. I attended a Catholic Kindergarten. Went to a Lutheran 1 8, and then a Baptist High School. After High School, I attended a Pentecostal college where I roomed with a blind Buddhist I have heard the many nuanced voices of Deity.

Yet last week I found myself in the healing emotional embrace of a Rabbi as I was bluntly impacted by a deeper understanding of the holocaust and its horrors. A subset of humanity that suffered inhuman scarring as a result of a demonic evil that has claimed victims beyond themselves. Acts that have affected emotions past through lineage, and they now affect me.

The absolute soul-wrenching anguish perpetrated on these people did not end with individual souls. It had to have affected the way they were able to be loved and the way they loved others. It afflicted the way love was expressed and how they taught loving relationships to their children. It has infected the manor, in which a son or daughter is able to accept anothers committed love the ripples radiate outward and spread instability and pain across generations and decades.

My grief was over the unimaginable impact crater that the Holocaust inflicted on a particular man. He and the expanding circle of victims that radiate from the inhuman evils perpetrated on his life. But I know it is not just his life.

The ramifications are magnified by the millions of souls who have not actually crossed my path but the evil of it has! It still does. It has changed the way a generation was able to love. It changed the next generation, whom it raised with the brokenness It tried to love through.

Each of us can be the outside force that stops the momentum of that evil. We can be the inside force that dynamically enhances the impact of the positive emotional arc of healing. I can be that at a personal level.

It was Noahs Ark where two by two the creatures came and rose above the floods of destruction. They emerged as changed creatures onto a different world. Unified at a new level. Made one by the bonding between them. It is between the two where we find God. But also life and growth and glory!

Within me is a multi-chambered organ that pulsates with a dynamic force that acts to pump life through me. Each of us can be a multi-leveled dynamic force that can radiate a peace and a health and a repair that is vital to our world. Together we must accept that a love that flows beyond us honors our world and deity and our lineage.

Do not misunderstand it is no easy thing for me to set aside a love. My heart is bruised, that bruised part desires to shelter and hide. The separation of a unity, that at its core felt divine, is a raw and racking force.

But if not for the act of that force upon the somebody of who I am, and the lessons offered through that force, the remnant is just pain and scarring. Not growth, Not Redemption. Not insight. Not Healing (for me and my world).

Evil is a black hole. In the center of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space. Acting against that emotional black hole there must be another force in play, A place where the laws of physicality cease to operate. It is not easy if the gravitational force of a people is apathy. Within the infinitely small space of prejudice there is so little room to turn around in. To find momentum. And yet as a loving person I must.

Whether it is Apartheid or Racial Bigotry or Religious Persecution or the Economic snobbery of us vs. them I must choose to rise against the momentum of evils and to understand the ripples of hurt and to daily choose to be an outside force to bring a healing within.

Within my heart is a hollow place where the love of an imminently precious soul was pried from me by the momentum of inhumanities past. But there needs not be only cost, instead a growth and understanding and the willingness to turn, in that infinitely small space, and push back against the density of that darkness that hovers and wants its destruction, its impact, its craters and victims, The Hollow Cost of that ends with each of us.

The Hollow Cost of it ended, in part, with me.

Continued here:

Newton's Arc - The Good Men Project

SUPERMASSIVE black holes are such a huge force in the universe that you'd think they'd be easy to spot from a distance.

However, an image released by Nasa proves this is not the case as the black hole in the photo below can be hard to pinpoint.

2

The black hole in this image is within the bright elliptical galaxy called Messier 87 (M87).

If you look really closely to the upper left-hand side of the picture you should be able to spot jets of brightness sprouting from the centre of a cloud-like glow.

These jet-like strands are gas and dust particles being pulled into the black hole, which give off heat during the process and can be captured by an infrared camera.

Earlier this year, a close up image of this black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope for the first time ever.

2

The infrared image above was taken by the Spitzer Space telescope, which was focusing on M87 with its bright blue hues.

The jets of light sprouting from it are thought to spread for thousands of light-years.

Nasa annotated the image so it was easier for people to imagine the black hole in context.

The black hole, described by scientists as a "monster", is 24billion miles across - 3million times the size of the Earth.

Sitting about 300 million trillion miles away from our planet, it was photographed up close by a network of eight telescopes across the globe known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

When used together, the telescopes combine with the power of a single telescope "the size of our planet", scientists said.

The black hole is so far away, that taking the up close photo of it was equivalent to snapping a DVD on the surface of the moon.

Black holes are technically invisible because no light escapes from them but in certain circumstances, like in a bright galaxy, an outline of a black hole and the light it's swallowing can be seen.

What is a black hole? The key facts

Here's what you need to know...

What is a black hole?

What is an event horizon?

What is a singularity?

How are black holes created?

In other space news, a cannibalistic nearby galaxy has devoured several of its neighbours and scientists think our Milky Way is next.

Aplanet so massive it should not existhas been found by baffled astronomers in a nearby star system.

SKY LIGHT How to spot the Draconids meteor shower in the UK tonight

PORKING 'ELL Newly discovered 'mould pigs' are the ancient species baffling scientists

CURSE WORDS Ancient tablet deciphered to reveal 1,500-year-old 'demon curse' to hurt rivals

DEATH OF THE DINOS How asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs devastated Earth

ASH-MAZING Stunning photo of 2,300-foot volcano erupting taken from space by ISS astronaut

BURIED TERROR Mystery ancient remains of 'frightened' child with 'crushed skull' found

And, distant planets may host even more life than we have here on Earth,according to one shock study.

Did you spot the black hole? Let us know in the comments!

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

Follow this link:

Theres an enormous black hole lurking in this Nasa photo can you find it? - The Sun

THE COSMIC web responsible for 'gluing' the far-flung galaxies of the universe together has been directly observed for the first time ever.

Scientists using the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope were able to spot an ancient cluster of galaxies 12billion light years away that are linked together by a network of gas filaments.

2

The cosmic web theory is central to current explanations of how the universe formed after the Big Bang.

However, until this observation, there had only been indirect evidence to suggest it existed.

Prof Michele Fumagalli, an astrophysicist at Durham University and co-author of the work, said: It is very exciting to clearly see for the first time multiple and extended filaments in the early universe.

"We finally have a way to map these structures directly and to understand in detail their role in regulating the formation of supermassive black holes and galaxies.

2

The research team were able to directly detect the web by using intensive equipment designed to pick up the faintest of structures.

Galaxy clusters are known for being the most tightly gravitationally-bound structures in the universe.

They can contain hundreds of thousands of galaxies.

It has been predicted that 60% of the hydrogen created during the Big Bang can be seen as long filaments strung out across space in the cosmic web.

By mapping out some of the light emitted by hydrogen within a galaxy cluster called SSA22, the team were able to identify individual filaments of gas that make up a web-like structure between galaxies.

Erika Hamden, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona said: "These observations of the faintest, largest structures in the universe are a key to understanding how our universe evolved through time, how galaxies grow and mature, and how the changing environments around galaxies created what we see around us."

It is thought that the cosmic web is the scaffolding of the cosmos and provides the framework for galaxies to form and evolve.

The latest observations support this theory by revealing supermassive black holes, starbursting galaxies and lots of active stars all at the intersections between the filaments.

First author of the research Hideki Umehata said: "This suggests very strongly that gas falling along the filaments under the force of gravity triggers the formation of starbursting galaxies and supermassive black holes, giving the universe the structure that we see today."

The cosmic web has been observed before but only as short blobs of gas beyond galaxies.

Umehata noted: "Now we have been able to clearly show that these filaments are extremely long, going even beyond the edge of the field that we viewed.

"This adds credence to the idea that these filaments are actually powering the intense activity that we see within the galaxies inside the filaments."

The findings have been published in the journal Science.

What is a black hole? The key facts

Here's what you need to know...

What is a black hole?

What is an event horizon?

What is a singularity?

How are black holes created?

In other space news, acannibalistic nearby galaxyhas devoured several of its neighbours and scientists think our Milky Way is next.

Aplanet so massive it should not existhas been found by baffled astronomers in a nearby star system.

SKY LIGHT How to spot the Draconids meteor shower in the UK tonight

PORKING 'ELL Newly discovered 'mould pigs' are the ancient species baffling scientists

CURSE WORDS Ancient tablet deciphered to reveal 1,500-year-old 'demon curse' to hurt rivals

DEATH OF THE DINOS How asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs devastated Earth

ASH-MAZING Stunning photo of 2,300-foot volcano erupting taken from space by ISS astronaut

BURIED TERROR Mystery ancient remains of 'frightened' child with 'crushed skull' found

And, there's an enormous black hole lurking in this Nasa photo can you find it?

What do you think about this cosmic web revelation? Let us know in the comments...

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

The rest is here:

Mysterious cosmic web that sticks the universe together pictured for first time - The Sun

It's been a controversial tenth season for Fortnite, what with the introduction of giant mechs called Brutes into the battlefield and the subsequent backlash and buffing that ensued. So when Epic announced that it was delaying the end of Season 10 by one week, players were a bit confused.

The official Epic post read, "Season X has been extended one week to conclude on Sunday, October 13. This also means an additional week to complete your Battle Pass, so jump in and lock down all those Season X rewards!" Now it's looking like the delay is to help Epic cook up something, well, epic for the end of the season. Countdown clocks have appeared all over the island, on TV screens and above the rocket at Dusty Depot. Right now there are six more days left on the countdown, coinciding with the day Season 10 ends: October 13.

Fortnite Season 9 ended with a Polar Peak monster and a Brute battling it out, the results of which led into the events of Season 10 - a singularity caused a time warp that sent the island back to the state it was in at the end of Season 3. The Visitor's Rocket appeared in Dusty Depot along with multiple rifts, which ushered in a bunch of crossovers like Batman and Borderlands.

Data miners are suggesting that Season 11 could usher in an entirely new map, in a move not unlike Apex Legends' recent map change for the game's own third season.

Another data miner found information to suggest that the event will transport players to a zone between Loot Lake and Dusty Depot, where they may be trapped in a time loop.

No word yet on when Fortnite Season 11 will start - new seasons usually begin the Thursday after a season-ending event, but this is the first time an event has been held on a Sunday. We could be seeing Season 11 a little earlier than expected...

Prepare yourself for the next season with our Fortnite tips to help you get that elusive Victory Royale.

More:

Fortnite is teasing a big Season 10 ending event with countdown clocks all over the island - GamesRadar

People Make Games, a YouTube channel founded by former Eurogamer video maker Chris Bratt and animator Anni Sayers, has concluded a year-long investigation into Bachir Athene Boumaaza, a YouTuber who got his start with troll-y video game antics but went on to form a pseudo-religion called Neuro-Spinozism and is now the face of an organisation called The Singularity Group.

The investigation alleges that Boumaaza is responsible for manipulation, misogyny, emotional abuse, and a lack of accountability at the top of the organisation. Anonymous ex-members of the group discussed emotional manipulation and gaslighting behind the scenes, while Boumaaza made statements like girls have evolved to be emotional manipulation machines with cameras rolling.

The video culminates with a lengthy conversation between People Make Games and Boumaaza, in which the latter calls the investigation a hit piece among other things, denies some of the allegations, and offers his view of others.

The investigation is an extremely compelling piece of reporting. The full video is lengthy, complicated, and at times deeply frustrating, but well worth a watch.

Read the rest here:

Investigative Report Digs Into the Strange Story of a YouTuber Who Founded a Religion - Kotaku UK

As the grueling summer heat gives way to the brisk air of autumn, a shift in energy is beginning to take hold of the extreme metal world. Though the most prominent death and black metal releases over the past several months have displayed a marked focus on grimy, old-school, meat-and-potatoes interpretations of their genres, the final months of the year are soon to reveal gems of a more coldly calculated, hypermodern ilk, hinting at a new surge of highly technical material. Leading this hallowed return to fine-tuned complexity is Arizona four-piece Singularity, a long-running group whose bizarre yet neatly-defined stylistic crossover sees masterful tech-death riffwork colliding headlong with lush, orchestral black metal soundscapes. With their upcoming sophomore album Place of Chains, the group have pushed their sound even further into its own arena of innovation, achieving a truly progressive sound despite its clear-cut ingredients.

Formed in Tempe in 2010, Singularity have since chosen to favor the quality and refinement of their output over its volume. The follow-up to their 2016 Void Walker EP, Place of Chains sees the group streamlining the structure of their approach, yet also embellishing it with crisp, polished production and greater depth in its layered soundscapes. Mixed by Inferi guitarist Mike Low and mastered by Anagnorisis guitarist Zak Denham, the record takes on much of the orchestral, neoclassical grandeur of its producers work, giving Singularitys already spacious compositions an even more expansive atmosphere. With guest appearances from a stacked list of subgenre-specific musicians including Inferi guitarist Malcolm Pugh, Equipoise guitarist Nick Padovani, and Arkaik vocalist Jared Christianson, the record will shape up to be a hearty serving of masterful death metal. In anticipation of the record, Singularity have now unleashed its seventh track Serpentes, Eternal which you can stream at the link below.

Subscribe to Invisible Oranges on

A perfect microcosm of Singularitys special tylistic amalgam, Serpentes, Eternal presents a fascinating integration between the hyperspeed clockwork of tech-death and the diminished gothic tonalities of black metal. As the jagged precision of its spiraling central riff meets piano arpeggios and synths lurking beneath pummeling double bass, the interstellar prison-world setting of Place of Chains is illustrated in bleak detail. Much of Singularitys approach is rooted primarily in tech-death, of course, especially in the guttural and staccato texture of the bands vocals and percussion, the latter of which is provided by Nathan Bigelow of tech-death stalwarts Arkaik.

In a welcome fusion, however, black metal tonalities and harmonic inflections are woven between these sharpened bursts of technicality, with the dense synthesizer acrobatics of late keyboardist Nick Pompliano providing a the groundwork for the records symphonic splendor. The final moments of Serpentes, Eternal shift gears into a freakish hybrid between an arachnid breakdown and a frozen tremolo march of black metal percussion, providing compelling proof that Singularitys recipe is as versatile as it is novel.

With a pulse of virtuosic musicality, Singularity seize the most potent elements of each the two subgenres they have set out to combine in order to eschew the sterility that is present in each. Utilizing the polished poignancy of tech-death without any of its gratuitous convolutions and combining this with a grandiose but never campy black metal ambience, they have curated a healthy balance between two largely immiscible genres.

Place of Chains releases October 11th via The Artisan Era.

From the band:

Place of Chains lyrically illustrates the emotions of being wrongfully imprisoned. Considering that many of the songs on this record lyrically are about enslavement, we felt it was a good over-arching title for the album. With every record, we try to further hone in on what the core of Singularitys sound is and what we want to bring to the world of metal.

Support Invisible Oranges on Patreon and check out our merch.

Follow this link:

Singularity Unleash Serpentes, Eternal, the Latest From Their Upcoming Tech-Death Masterpiece - Invisible Oranges

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to disrupt our world. With intelligent machines enabling high-level cognitive processes like thinking, perceiving, learning, problem-solving and decision making, coupled with advances in data collection and aggregation, analytics and computer processing power, AI presents opportunities to complement and supplement human intelligence and enrich the way people live and work.

On the other hand, some of the leading scientists and thinkers have warned about 'technological singularity'. Technological singularity refers to the belief that ordinary humans will someday be overtaken by artificially intelligent machines or cognitively enhanced biological intelligence, or both.

It is a technology that takes in huge amounts of information from a specific domain and uses it to make a decision in the service of a specified goal.

For example, AI technology can be used to analyze loan repayment histories (information) of a person to decide whether to give an individual a loan or not (decision) so as to maximize the profits for the lender (goal).

In 2016, Google-run artificial intelligence (AI) programme "AlphaGo" defeated legendary player Lee Se-dol in Go - a complex Chinese board game that is considered the "quintessential unsolved problem" for machine intelligence.Though the AI has many benefits, it has sparked up a debate about its dangers to humanity.

AI machines are like other human beings in terms of their capacities for decision and action. They cannot be compared to other machines as the degree of independence that AI technologies have is much more complex.

AI is an attempt to reproduce super intelligent humans. It chooses one aspect of human beings, namely the intelligence, and artificially magnifies it to an extent that allows the machine to do things far better than humans can.

AI is associated with superlative memory, calculative power, decision-making capacity, high speeds of action, etc. These machines thus become super-beings, and a society filled with many super-beings is a recipe for disaster.AI machines are a mirror to our desire for immortality and the absence of human weaknesses.

Most importantly, the AI has not been used to get rid of poverty, to have a more equitable distribution of wealth, or to make people more content with what they have. Instead, they will primarily be dictated by profit for the companies that make them.

Healthcare and medicine become affordable and accessible with AI taking centre stage in telemedicine and quick diagnosis. Water and energy networks become accessible and widely usable when AI can mediate the use of different sources.

Unlike the Industrial Revolution and the computer revolution, the AI revolution is not taking certain jobs (artisans, personal assistants who use paper and typewriters) and replacing them with other jobs (assembly-line workers, personal assistants conversant with computers).

Instead, it is poised to bring about a wide-scale decimation of jobs - mostly lower-paying jobs, but some higher-paying ones, too. This transformation will result in enormous profits for the companies that develop AI, as well as for the companies that adopt it.

For example, imagine how much money a car-aggregators make if they remodel their business to userobots as drivers.

Thus, the world is facing two developments that cannot be placed together: enormous wealth concentrated in few hands and large numbers of people out of work.

Part of the solution lies in educating or retraining people in tasks that AI tools aren't good at. For example, artificial intelligence is not suited for jobs involving creativity, planning and "cross-domain" thinking.

A more promising solution is creating lower-paying jobs involving the "people skills" that AI lacks, such as social workers, bartenders etc. these professions require nuanced human interaction. But the question is how many such workers does a society really need?

The NITI Aayog has published an ambitious discussion paper on kick-starting the artificial intelligence (AI) ecosystem in India.

The paper talks about powering five sectors - agriculture, education, healthcare, smart cities/infrastructure and transport - with AI.

The discussion paper accepts that adoption of AI till date has been driven primarily from a commercial perspective.Further, it notes that technology disruptions like AI are once-in-a-generation phenomenon, and hence large-scale adoption strategies need to strike a balance between narrow definitions of financial impact and the greater good.

Data is one of the primary drivers of AI solutions, and thus appropriate handling of data, ensuring privacy and security is of prime importance. In order for India to ride the AI innovation wave, a robust data protection framework and intellectual property framework are required.

Despite the beneficial uses of AI, scientists and leading thinkers like Stephen Hawking, Nick Bostrom, and Elon Musk warn us about the dangers of AI and the coming technological singularity.

It is believed that the purely intelligent creatures, whether people or machines are bad for humanity.

On the other hand, AI, by itself, is not looking to destroy humanity. Whether we use AI to augment ourselves, create new species, or use it to destroy lives and what we've built is entirely in our hands - at least for now.

No matter how dangerous AI might be for humanity, it's clear that there's no slowing down the pace of progress. Regardless of how many deponents come out against AI, there's no way to stop its advancement.

Future discussions will help in directing AI for good rather than bad, but no matter what happens, there's certainly no stopping the wheels of progress as they slowly grind forward.

(Article by ClearIAS Team. ClearIAS.com is a popular website which helps IAS aspirants to prepare for UPSC Civil Services Exam online)

Read: What is India-US Tri-Services 'Exercise Tiger Triumph': All you need to know

Read: India is the 6th wealthiest country in the world, total wealth grew by 160 per cent in 10 years

More:

Is Artificial Intelligence a danger to humanity? Take a look at the truth - India Today

Live esports-dedicated betting platform X-Bet.co has partnered with the acclaimed Danish esports organization Team Singularity also known as SNG Esports.

As part ofthe arrangement, the partners will offer a 12-month sponsorship contract for SNGTeams, or a competitive player, or streamer to play under the X-Bet.co tag,with the X-Bet.co logo also featured on all SNG team jerseys in Dota2, CSGO,Fortnite, PUBG, COD, APEX, Hearthstone, Overwatch and the Team Singularity SIMRacing team and GT Racing Car.

Team Singularity is home to many world-famous players such as Alan Shakezullah Hardeman, Steve Excalibur Ye and Cameron Hydrex Kern. With the new CS:GO roster to be announced shortly, many more stars will be wearing Team Singularity jerseys.

We are very proud to be the main sponsor of Team Singularity. Considering the exponential growth both Team Singularity and X-Bet.co have enjoyed over recent years it is a natural fit for SNG and X-Bet.co to start cooperation. Having worked with Atle for a while now, his vision for the future, strategy, level of execution and management style of the SNG esports teams, is truly inspiring. I am certain over the coming years of our partnership Team Singularity will enjoy major victories in multiple esports disciplines and will exceed our expectations. As the leading live esports betting provider, we look forward to offering the best live odds for all Team Singularity matches commented Daniel Miller, CEO of X-Bet.

For both SNG and X-Bet.co the key behind this partnership is to bring esports to a wider audience by leveraging on their combined strengths and cross-promoting teams and events.

I am thrilled to welcome X-Bet.co into the Team Singularity family. We have been looking for a while for the right betting partner to support our vision and ambitions for the future, and now we found them! We are aligned in our thinking, and I cannot wait to get started on some of the projects to come. This is the start of a new chapter in Team Singularity, and I am looking forward to carrying the X-Bet.co banner around the world with all our teams and achieve greatness together. commented Atle Stehouwer, CEO & Founder Team Singularity.

X-Bet.co is aBulgarian based esports betting provider founded in 2016, headquartered inSofia, specializing in live esports betting and esports content.

Originally posted here:

X-Bet.co becomes the main sponsor of Team Singularity - TalkEsport