Energy crisis

Squid and several other cephalopods can rapidly shift the colors in their skin, thanks to that skin's unique structure. Engineers at the University of Toronto have drawn inspiration from the squid to create a prototype for "liquid windows" that can shift the wavelength, intensity, and distribution of light transmitted through those windows, thereby saving substantially on energy costs. They described their work in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “Buildings use a ton of energy to heat, cool, and illuminate the spaces inside them,” said co-author Raphael Kay . “If we can strategically control the amount, type, and direction of solar energy that enters our buildings, we can massively reduce the amount of work that we ask heaters, coolers, and lights to do.” Kay likes to think of buildings as living organisms that also have "skin," i.e., an outer layer of exterior facades and windows. But these features are largely static, limiting how … [Read more...] about Squid skin inspires novel “liquid windows” for greater energy savings

The border crisis expanded to Florida in recent months as officials in the Miami Sector report a massive increase in migrant landings. During the first four months of FY23, Miami Sector agents encountered more migrants than for the entire FY22. U.S. Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz tweeted that since the new fiscal year began on October 1, 2022, Miami Sector agents apprehended more than 4,400 migrants who landed on the Florida coast. This is more than the 4,009 migrants apprehended in this sector for all of the previous fiscal year. Since Oct. 1, agents have responded to 246 migrant landings and encountered over 4,400 migrants in Miami Sector. We have increased personnel and continue to partner with Federal, State, and local agencies to deter, detect, and interdict these illegal maritime attempts in Florida. pic.twitter.com/x4CaYfK3Q5 — Chief Raul Ortiz (@USBPChief) February 1, 2023 The surge began in August 2022 when Miami Sector agents apprehended 1,049 migrants. This … [Read more...] about Miami Border Patrol Sector Breaks Annual Migrant Apprehension Record in Four Months

TikTok , owned by China's ByteDance, should be removed from app stores run by Apple Inc and Alphabet's Google because the short video social media app poses a risk to national security, Senator Michael Bennet , a Democrat on the intelligence committee, said in a letter dated. The app, which Congress has already banned from federal government devices, has come under increasing criticism because of concern that China's government could use it to harvest data on Americans or advance Chinese interests. "No company subject to CCP (Chinese Communist Party) dictates should have the power to accumulate such extensive data on the American people or curate content to nearly a third of our population," Bennet wrote in the letter to Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook . Read Also France fines TikTok $5.4 million for online tracking shortcomings China's JD.com to shut e-commerce sites in Indonesia, Thailand … [Read more...] about tiktok: Democratic senator urges Apple, Google to kick TikTok out of app stores

Audio player loading… It looks like Sony will be scaling back its sales projections for the PSVR 2, along with unit production, in the wake of underwhelming pre-order performance. Pre-launch statistics for PSVR 2 haven't quite met Sony's expectations which, as Bloomberg reports (opens in new tab) , initially sat at a lofty 2 million units available worldwide throughout its launch quarter. Sony was clearly betting big on its latest VR peripheral, then. Now, though, according to an as-of-yet unnamed supply partner, Sony has set a more realistic expectation of shipping 1.5 million units throughout the upcoming financial year (April 2023 - March 2024). For context, Sony's sold roughly 30 million PS5 consoles as of December 2022, suggesting Sony expected one in 15 PS5 owners to purchase the VR headset. Back to the virtual drawing board So what's with the lukewarm pre-release reception for the PSVR 2 from consumers? For starters, you only need to look at the … [Read more...] about Low PSVR 2 preorders confirm that Sony is out of touch

More than 40 percent of last week’s known border crossers in the Del Rio Sector simply got away into the U.S. interior. Nearly 8,600 successfully avoided apprehension during the past two weeks, according to a Border Patrol official. Del Rio Sector Chief Patrol Agent Jason D. Owens tweeted a weekly recap revealing that of the 10,160 known border crossers (apprehended migrants plus gotaways), 4,297 got away without being apprehended. Agents took 5,863 migrants into custody. Del Rio Sector Weekly Recap (01/22/23 – 01/28/23) •5,863 Apprehensions pic.twitter.com/vuEfITOnx7 — Chief Patrol Agent Jason D. Owens (@USBPChiefDRT) January 31, 2023 Gotaways are an estimate of migrants who cross the border without being apprehended. The estimate comes from a combination of migrants who are unable to be apprehended after being sighted by agents or surveillance systems and tracks that are counted but migrants are not captured. Border Patrol officials say it is a conservative estimate … [Read more...] about 42 Percent of Last Week’s Known Border Crossers in One Texas Sector Got Away

NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs running on Supermicro servers have captured leading results for inference in the latest STAC-ML Markets benchmark, a key technology performance gauge for the financial services industry. The results show NVIDIA demonstrating unrivaled throughput — serving up thousands of inferences per second on the most demanding models — and top latency on the latest STAC-ML inference standard. The results are closely followed by financial institutions, three-quarters of which rely on machine learning, deep learning or high performance computing, according to a recent survey . NVIDIA A100: Top Latency Results The STAC-ML inference benchmark is designed to measure the latency of long short-term memory (LSTM) model inference — the time from receiving new input data until the model output is computed. LSTM is a key model approach used to discover financial time-series data like asset prices. The benchmark includes three LSTM models of increasing complexity. … [Read more...] about NVIDIA A100 Aces Throughput, Latency Results in Key Inference Benchmark for Financial Services Industry