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NEW YORK — The Empire State Building's owners once envisioned floating airships docking with the skyscraper's spire, but windy updrafts forced the dirigibles to abandon that dream. Today, the world-famous building may stand for a more practical vision of the future that can save energy without dimming the lights. Recent renovations have allowed the iconic skyscraper to save on 20 percent of the energy used by its 20,000 workers and 3.5 million annual visitors — total building usage being enough energy in an hour to keep an average light bulb burning for over 100 years. The energy retrofit included elevators that harvest energy with regenerative braking, lights capable of turning on and off by themselves and the largest wireless network of sensors installed in any building in the world. "Saving energy without compromise in performance is what's going to save the world, and that's the work we set about doing at the Empire State Building," said Anthony Malkin, chief of the Empire … [Read more...] about Empire State Building Innovations Generate Big Energy Savings

Dmitri Alperovitch is a computer security researcher and co-founder & CTO of CrowdStrike Inc., which provides cloud-based endpoint protection. With expertise incybersecurity technology, policies and state tradecraft, Alperovitch also holds eighteen technology patents. This Op-Ed is part of a series provided by the World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers, class of 2015 . Alperovitch contributed this article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights . Today, economic reliance on the internet is all-encompassing. With 40 percent of the world population now online, there is hardly an industry that has not been dramatically transformed and empowered by the communication and business opportunities created. But the very thing that has been such a powerful engine of global economic growth is now threatening to undermine it. Cyberthreats from hacktivists and terrorist groups, cybercriminals and nation states have had an impact on millions of companies, government … [Read more...] about How to Combat the Global Cybercrime Wave (Op-Ed)

A hot potato: Gamers who thought that the current crop of RDNA2 and RTX 30-series GPUs were already demanding might be in for a surprise, if the most recent drop of leaks is to be believed. Both kopite7kimi and Greymon55, established leakers in their own rights, seem to be in agreement that some of Nvidia's upcoming Lovelace GPUs will land somewhere north of the 400W range. These figures would presumably be for the top models of the RTX 4000 series, built on AD102 silicon, successors to the RTX 3080 / Ti and RTX 3090. Besides pushing the GPU core as hard as possible, a great deal of this power budget will come from the continued use of the hot and power-hungry GDDR6X memory on Nvidia's top models. 450-500w — Greymon55 (@greymon55) July 29, 2021 Separately, Bondrewd of the Beyond3D forums left hints on Navi 31, the top SKU from AMD's RDNA3 line-up, suggesting that the multi-chiplet GPU would sit below 500W in total board power draw and below 350 mm² per graphics core die. … [Read more...] about Next-gen GPUs look big and hungry, and that’s bad news

Black shadows of humans and objects, like bicycles, were found scattered across the sidewalks and buildings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , two of the largest cities in Japan, in the wake of the atomic blast detonated over each city on Aug. 6 and 9, 1945, respectively. It's hard to fathom that these shadows likely encapsulated each person's last moments. But how did these shadows come to be? According to Dr. Michael Hartshorne, emeritus trustee of the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and professor emeritus of radiology at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, when each bomb exploded, the intense light and heat spread out from the point of implosion. Objects and people in its path shielded objects behind them by absorbing the light and energy. The surrounding light bleached the concrete or stone around the "shadow." In other words, those eerie shadows are actually how the sidewalk or building looked, more or less, before the … [Read more...] about Why did the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima leave shadows of people etched on sidewalks?

Everyone knows health care costs are busting us, as individuals and as a nation. Reform is needed, but the question is whether it will come and whether it will do the job. Here's how bad it has gotten: Medical bills were behind nearly two-thirds of all U.S. bankruptcies in 2007, researchers said in June. And most of those folks were middle class; most were homeowners ; most went to college; most had health insurance. And that data came from before the economic downturn. Our health care system should really be called a " disease care system," says Mohammad Torabi of Indiana University Bloomington's School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation. As we've heard, the system is busy trying to stamp out diseases without focusing on the prevention of them, which would've cost a lot less. And with nearly 75 million Americans uninsured or underinsured, according to Dr. Mutaz B. Habal of the Tampa Bay Craniofacial Center, more and more of these folks end up at the emergency … [Read more...] about The Real Cost of Our ‘Disease Care’ System

Military drones are often used to store sensitive data, ranging from troop movements to strategic operations. While this may make them vulnerable to enemy interference, a new system is aiming to protect these unmanned aerial vehicles from cyberattacks. Researchers at the University of Virginia and the Georgia Institute of Technology developed the system and tested it in a series of live, in-flight cyberattack scenarios. As military and commercial drone use continues to grow , protecting against such attacks will become a priority, the scientists said. When installed on a drone, the System-Aware Secure Sentinel system detects "illogical behaviors" compared to those expected of the vehicle, said project leader Barry Horowitz, a systems and information engineer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. [ Rise of the Drones: Photos of Unmanned Aircraft ] "Detections can serve to initiate automated recovery actions and to alert operators of the attack," Horowitz said … [Read more...] about Cyberwarfare? New System Protects Drones from Hackers

Iron maidens are one of the most notorious torture devices out there. But are they real? The answer is no — and yes. The widespread medieval use of iron maidens is an 18th-century myth, bolstered by perceptions of the Middle Ages as an uncivilized era . But the idea of iron-maiden-like devices has been around for thousands of years, even if evidence for their actual use is shaky. The iron maiden has been described as a human-sized box festooned with interior spikes. The hapless torture victim would be forced inside and the door would shut, driving the spikes into the body. The spikes were supposedly short and positioned so that the victim wouldn't die quickly, but would bleed out over time. Creepy, right? [ Medieval Torture's 10 Biggest Myths ] And basically fictional. The first historical reference to the iron maiden came long after the Middle Ages, in the late 1700s. German philosopher Johann Philipp Siebenkees wrote about the alleged execution of a coin-forger in 1515 … [Read more...] about Are Iron Maidens Really Torture Devices?

In 1241, the Mongol army marched into Hungary, defeating the Polish and Hungarian armies and forcing the Hungarian king to flee. In 1242, despite meeting no significant military resistance, the Mongols abruptly packed up and left. Now, a new study of the climate in Eastern Europe that year suggests a reason for this mysterious military retreat: The Mongols got bogged down. Literally. A cold and snowy winter yielded to a particularly wet spring in Hungary in 1242, according to data from tree rings. As a result, the grasslands of Hungary turned to marsh, said study researcher Nicola Di Cosmo, a historian at Princeton University. The Mongols, dependent on their horses, wouldn't have been able to move effectively across the squishy land, and their steeds would have had few fields to graze. "This is one of the very few cases in which we can identify a minor climatic change on just one winter and link it to a particularly important historical event," Di Cosmo told Live Science. [ … [Read more...] about Mystery of Mongol Retreat from Hungary Solved

No, it's not spooky, creepy Halloween — the most deaths occur on regular old Saturdays. Death can strike on any day of the week, but at Live Science we wanted to know if national data might reveal that some days are deadlier than others. To figure out which day of the week claims the most lives, we turned to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC's Wonder database contains data on all deaths in the U.S. from 1999 to 2014, and we found that, all told, there were more than 39 million deaths over the course of these 15 years. (Keep that time frame in mind as you read on — the numbers below represent the total number of deaths for this period.) [ The Odds of Dying ] We found that, day by day, the breakdown was fairly equivocal, ranging from a low of 5.6 million total deaths on the Sundays during that period to a high of 5.7 million total deaths on the Saturdays of those years. Moreover, the top 10 causes of death on each day lined … [Read more...] about The Deadliest Day of the Week

The nations with the most car-accident deaths have been highlighted in a new report. On average, 18 out of 100,000 people on the planet die in car accidents each year, but that fatality rate varies widely across different countries. Namibia has the highest car-accident death rate, with 45 people killed on the road out of every 100,000 in the whole population. In the Maldives, meanwhile, just two people die in car crashes out of every 100,000 each year. [ List of Countries with Most & Least Car Crash Deaths ] In United States, there are 14 car-crash deaths per 100,000 people, and auto accidents account for 1.8 percent of all deaths. Americans are 13 times more likely to die of cancer and 10 times more likely to die of heart disease than they are to be killed on the road. In a map showing the geographic spread of car-crash fatality rates, many of the countries with the highest rates are clustered in Africa while most of the lowest rates are scattered across … [Read more...] about Countries with the Deadliest Roads Revealed