FCC back at full strength after Senate appoints two new members

The FCC is no longer shorthanded after seven months of operating below max capacity now that the Senate has finally appointed two new commissioners. In a statement released today, the agency has named Jessica Rosenworcel and Brendan Carr to fill the last two of the five commissioner seats. Both are no strangers to the work the FCC does: Rosenworcel was actually a commissioner under the previous administration and was known for being an avid supporter of net neutrality and open internet. She was never supposed to leave her seat in the commission, but lawmakers failed to extend her term on time due to political issues.

Rosenworcel’s appointment is definitely good news for those fighting against the administration’s plan to revoke net neutrality rules, but she might still be outnumbered in the commission. Brendan Carr, the Senate’s other appointee, joined the FCC in 2012 as an attorney adviser after his stint as a telecom lawyer. He became top legal adviser to Ajit Pai in 2014 and was appointed as the agency’s general counsel when the Trump administration named Pai as FCC chairman. Pai has always been vocal about his plans to gut net neutrality, and all signs point to Carr voting whichever way the chairman does when it comes to rolling back its rules. We’ll likely know his stance soon enough after he and Rosenworcel are sworn in and reveal their projects and advocacies.

Source: FCC

A Japanese cosmetics company found its perfect pitch man: Guile

The trend of video game characters hawking real-life products doesn’t seem to be slowing, but this time it’s a classic character capitalizing on the right opportunity. Guile’s unmoving ‘do makes him the perfect imaginary person to endorse J-Gel, which is made by a cosmetics company that Kotaku says has been in the business since 1615. Even in defeat the Street Fighter character’s hair hardly moves, which makes us wonder why this tie-in didn’t happen sooner? (Although, if Capcom is ready to license, someone has a few ideas for what comes next.)

Oddly, while this comes after a pair of branding opportunities shoehorned into the Final Fantasy universe (Nissin Cup Noodles and Nissan vehicles), this isn’t even the first Street Fighter tie-in this year. In Japan Toyota advertised its small C-HR crossover with a series of ads sliding it into older versions of the games.

Via: Kotaku

Source: J-Gel

Artificial skin transplants could be used to treat diabetes

Skin grafts made using CRISPR gene editing are preventing mice from developing diabetes, and scientists claim they could prove beneficial for humans too. In a proof-of-concept study, researchers at the University of Chicago edited stem cells from newborn mice to controllably release glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1). This is the hormone that stimulates the pancreas to produce insulin while maintaining healthy levels of blood glucose. The genetically modified skin grafts were then given to mice that were fed high-fat diets to induce obesity. These mice saw a reverse in insulin resistance and gained around half as much weight as those not given the grafts.

Obesity is one of the main risk factors that can cause type 2 diabetes, with high insulin resistance leading to the development of the condition. According to the study’s senior author, the inexpensive nature of growing human skin from stem cells means the treatment could work for people with the condition.

Artificial skin has been used to treat burn patients for decades. But as the the process has developed, to the point where skin can now be grown in a lab, researchers have sought other clinical uses for the treatment. However, a major hurdle that kept holding them back was a lack of test subjects. Until now, stem cell-generated skin transplantation has only been shown to work on mice with weakened immune systems. This latest study marks a breakthrough, as it is the first time the process has worked long-term on wild mice. The researchers claim they can now look into using different gene-edited grafts to treat other diseases.

“We didn’t cure diabetes, but it does provide a potential long-term and safe approach of using skin epidermal stem cells to help people with diabetes and obesity better maintain their glucose levels,” said senior author Xiaoyang Wu.

Via: New Scientist

Source: Cell Stem Cell

Your next craft beer might be named by a neural network

Researcher Janelle Shane has used AI to come up with names for paint colors, metal bands and guinea pigs in the past. She’s even used it to generate wonderfully weird pickup lines. Now, she’s turned her AI naming capabilities towards beer.

While writing about her neural network-generated paint color names, Gizmodo’s Ryan Mandelbaum mentioned the issues craft brewers were having coming up with names for their beers — issues that have at times led to legal action. Not long after that, with the help of a Gizmodo reader who put together a dataset of beer names culled from BeerAdvocate.com, Shane plugged the names into a neural network and out popped a bunch of new names for brewers to use.

Shane has posted a lot of the names on her blog, but there were so many, all of them wouldn’t fit. Some of my favorites include Toe Deal, Heaven Cat, Sacky Rover, Borb! and I the Moon. If you want more, you can sign up through Shane’s blog to get 100 additional names. “For these names I turned the neural network’s creativity variable higher and got results that can be described mainly as … interesting,” she said on the blog. “And of course, there’s the inevitable beer named Fart. (It’s a stout. Of course it’s a stout.)”

Image: lewisandquark.tumblr.com

Via: Gizmodo

Source: Lewisandquark

Dark energy tests prove science is right about the universe

The results are in: As best we can tell, the universe clumps and expands just how we thought it did. That confirmation comes from the first results of a five-year survey wherein researchers took dark energy into account, observing much more recent cosmic activity than previous methods allowed. The new method: Strapping a 570-megapixel camera to a 4-meter telescope in the Chilean mountains and snapping photos of light streaming across space from as far back as 7 billion years ago.

This setup, known as the Dark Energy Camera (or DECam), shot its first photos back in 2012. Researchers used it for this study, the Dark Energy Survey (DES), an international effort that analyzed light from 26 million galaxies to learn how cosmic bodies have changed over the last 7 billion years. That spans the last half of our universe’s lifespan, which is far more recent than the previous method, which used the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope (retired in 2013) to scan cosmic background radiation from the origins of the universe.

“While Planck looked at the structure of the very early universe, DES has measured structures that evolved much later,” Daniel Gruen, a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), said in a press release. “The growth of these structures from the early ages of the universe until today agrees with what our models predict, showing that we can describe cosmic evolution very well.”

Sure, it’s not quite as exciting when science doesn’t upend everything we knew — but it’s pretty cool that cutting-edge methods reinforced what we’d previously theorized. Now we wait for further results as DES completes its five-year mission — but if you want to read papers coming from the first year’s results presented today at the 2017 Division of Particles and Fields meeting of the American Physical Society at the DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, go nuts right here.

Source: SLAC

Intel ready to serve Coffee Lake to the mainstream PC market, leaked slides show

Why it matters to you

PC builders should not have to wait long before Intel releases its eighth-generation Coffee Lake desktop processors.

Additional information regarding Intel’s upcoming eighth-generation “Coffee Lake” processor family arrived in the form of leaked slides. They reveal a few details about the company’s unannounced Coffee Lake-S lineup, which will introduce six-core processor models to the mainstream desktop CPU market.

As a refresher, there are several variants of a specific CPU processor design (architecture/generation) that are designated with a letter. For instance, Coffee Lake-X would consist of high-end chips for the enthusiast market. A step down would be the “S” group for mainstream/performance PCs, followed by the “H” group for laptops requiring high-performance graphics. Other processor groups include the “U” chips for ultra-low power thin and light notebooks, and the “Y” chips serving extreme low-power tablets and 2-in-1 detachables.

As far as the actual Coffee Lake-S processor lineup goes, the slides do not appear to list specific models. Instead, there’s a new Core i3-8300 version added to the Coffee Lake rumor mill sporting four cores and eight threads. We do not know the specifics like speed and power draw just yet but the four-core chip will likely surface again in a few days.

Cores/
Threads
Base
Speed
Single
Core
Turbo
Two
Core
Turbo
Four
Core
Turbo
Six
Core
Turbo
Power
Draw
i7-8700K
6 / 12
3.7GHz
4.7GHz
4.6GHz
4.4GHz
4.3GHz
95 watts
i7-8700
6 / 12
3.2GHz
4.6GHz
4.5GHz
4.3GHz
4.3GHz
65 watts
i5-8600K
6 / 6
3.6GHz
4.3GHz
4.2GHz
4.2GHz
4.1GHz
95 watts
i5-8600
6 / 6
2.8GHz
4.0GHz
3.9GHz
3.9GHz
3.8GHz
65 watts
i3-8300
4 / 8
?
?
?
?
?
?

Of course, the slides have since been removed, but they revealed that the Coffee Lake-S platform will rely on the same motherboard LGA 1151 “seat” (socket) used by Intel’s seventh-generation (Kaby Lake) and sixth-generation (Skylake) desktop processors. The caffeinated chips will be compatible with Intel’s upcoming 300 Series motherboard chipsets, indicating that a new motherboard may be required to use Coffee Lake-S CPUs if Intel doesn’t release supporting firmware for its older 200 Series motherboard chips.

The Coffee Lake-S platform will include integrated USB 3.1 Gen2 (10Gbps) technology. It will also support Intel’s integrated Wireless AC Revision 2 and Bluetooth 5.0 connectivity, next-generation Intel Optane memory, Thunderbolt 3 with DisplayPort 1.4, enhanced memory overclocking, and DDR4 memory clocked at 2,666MHz. An integrated SDXC 3.0 controller will be included, as well.

According to the slides, Coffee Lake-S will enable a single processor to handle up to 24 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, up to 10 USB 3.1 ports with six of those based on Gen2 (10Gbps) technology, and up to six SATA 3 ports. On the storage front, Coffee Lake-S will rely on Intel Rapid Storage Technology to handle storage based on PCI Express 3.0 x4 connections.

Intel’s leaked roadmap indicates the first wave of Coffee Lake-S desktop processors will arrive at the tail end of the third quarter of 2017 (like, right now) and throughout the fourth quarter. These will supposedly consist of four-core and six-core 95-watt models labeled with a “K,” and 65-watt models without the “K” designation. Then in the first quarter of 2018, Intel plans to release the remaining Coffee Lake-S desktop CPU lineup consisting of two-core “K” units with a 95-watt power requirement, and several units only requiring 35 watts of power.

Robot industrial painter is designed to carry out one-off custom paint jobs

Why it matters to you

Robot painting system is designed for carrying out custom jobs on batch sizes of just one.

It’s no secret that the combination of robots and artificial intelligence are changing the workplace as we know it. Over the past couple of years, we have seen robot chefs, robot bricklayers, robot lawyers, and any other number of artificial intelligence-enabled machines that can carry out the jobs once reserved for humans. One area we often view as relatively safe, however, are bespoke jobs — such as carrying out custom paint jobs in manufacturing. The reason for this is that, while industrial robots have long been able to help with processes like painting, this has previously been limited to large batch sizes of identical components — with humans carrying out the more complex paint jobs, as well as performing inspections where robots are used.

A new system called SelfPaint, developed by German and Swedish scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute, may change that. Instead of the comparatively dumb painting systems used in traditional assembly lines, SelfPaint is a self-programming system designed to reflect a world of user customization in which batch sizes for products is as likely to be one as it is 100,000.

SelfPaint starts its painting process by producing a three-dimensional scan of the component in question. From this, smart algorithms then simulate the trajectory of the paint particles to work out the optimum volume of paint and air that are necessary to achieve a desired coating thickness. The system then plans the robot’s path so that it can paint most effectively. After the painting is done, it then uses a beam of light at a wavelength between microwave and infrared to measure the wet, colored paint quality. All of this is achieved without human intervention.

It’s an impressive tech demo — and its creators claim that it can save up to 20 percent in paint, reduce solvent emissions by 20 percent, consume 15 percent less energy, and complete the work 5 percent faster than conventional painting processes. In other words, there goes another job once occupied by humans!

“The first half of the project has been completed,” researcher Oliver Tiedje told Digital Trends. “That means that the scanning, simulation, path-planning, painting, and film build measurement modules have been separately developed, while we hope that the interactions and interfaces will be developed by the start of 2019.”

Still, regardless of our fears about an AI job takeover, you cannot help but think SelfPaint would be a pretty sweet addition to any self-respecting “maker” studio. We await the inevitable Kickstarter in a couple of years!

Modder saws the Raspberry Pi 3 down to create a compact, credit card-sized PC

Why it matters to you

Here is another cool project using the affordable Raspberry Pi 3 computer board, but you many need a 3D printer and saw.

The Raspberry Pi 3 (Model B) is already an extremely small single-board computer sold for $35 and there is an even smaller version, Raspberry Pi Zero, packing lower performance for a cheaper price. But one modder set out to combine the best of both worlds: A single-board computer sporting the same reduced size as the Raspberry Pi Zero but retain the high-performance hardware of the Raspberry Pi 3.

For starters, the prototype consists of a protective black case that roughly consumes the same physical footprint as the Raspberry Pi 3, but measures 7mm thick. On the top, you will find a grilled vent so heat can vertically dissipate freely from the hardware components inside. The case bottom provides a slot for loading the Micro SD card and three Micro USB ports line up along the front edge.

Mounted inside the case is a modified Raspberry Pi 3 board. A comparison with the original shows that the modder removed the four USB ports, the Ethernet port, the strip of 40 pins, the HDMI port, and all the other protruding hardware components. In fact, the whole section of the Raspberry Pi 3 board that previously played host to the USB and Ethernet ports was sawed completely off.

With the Raspberry Pi 3 mounted into the super-slim case, the modder filled the empty void with three Micro USB breakout boards that are soldered and wired directly to the main board. The middle Micro USB port serves as the power connection while the two outer ports are for connecting devices. Users can purchase a USB on-the-go (OTG) adapter for connecting peripherals and storage devices to the prototype device.

“Depending on what you’re doing it could work well for a general headless system or server application. The small size also means it is more portable, and I could imagine it working well for some kind of wireless access point, pirate box, or a general node of some sort,” the modder states.

Called the Raspberry Pi 3 Slim, the prototype is an open-source project that can be accessed on Github here. There, visitors will find two STL files for 3D printing the top and bottom portions of the project’s black case.

If you are not familiar with the Raspberry Pi 3, here are the current specifications:

Processor:
Broadcom BCM2837 at 1.2GHz (4-core)
Memory:
1GB
Storage:
Micro SD card slot
Connectivity:
Wireless N
Bluetooth Low Energy
Ports:
4x USB 2.0 Type-A
1x HDMI
1x Ethernet
1x 4-pole audio/VGA jack
Other outputs:
40-pin extended GPIO
CSI camera port
DSI display port

The Raspberry Pi computer board has served as a highly popular, affordable foundation for countless (and totally awesome) projects since its launch in 2012. These include a programmable Minecraft-themed PC for kids, an unofficial NES Classic console, a miniature Macintosh computer, and even a physical remake of Bethesda’s Pip-Boy seen in the Fallout games. Just recently, Microsoft managed to stuff artificial intelligence onto the board to catch sneaky squirrels stealing flower bulbs and bird seeds.

Dell’s massive Canvas display for artists is available for $1,800

If you’re looking for a giant digital drawing display, but don’t have the money to spend on Microsoft’s lovely but expensive Surface Studio, Dell is ready to take your cash. The Dell Canvas, a massive, touch-sensitive 27-inch display, is now on sale. Of course, it’s not exactly cheap: the Canvas will set you back $1,799. That’s less than the $2,000 we heard back at CES in January, but it’s still a major investment.

Unlike the Surface Studio, the Dell Canvas doesn’t even come with a computer attached — it is simply a display with a quad-HD (2,560 x 1,440) resolution that lays horizontally on your desk. It’s got some big bezels, but Dell says that’s intentional. They received feedback from artists who said they preferred big bezels to rest their palms on while drawing. The Canvas also comes with a digital pen as well as the “totem,” a circular dial meant to be placed on the screen that was clearly inspired by Microsoft’s own Surface Dial.

So while the Canvas doesn’t have the same extreme screen resolution as the Surface Studio and also doesn’t include the PC you’ll need to run it, it’s worth noting that it’s a full $1,200 less than the Studio. If you already have a PC that works for you, this could be a solid way for artists to get an immersive digital drawing tool on their desk.

Source: Dell (PR Newswire)

FCC offers ‘reverse-auction’ to expand rural broadband access

The FCC got the go ahead for its rural broadband subsidy plan, Connect America Fund, in 2014. The fund — intended to bring high-speed internet access to the least served communities in the US — has since directed $170 million to New York, and AT&T has already added more access, too, starting in Georgia. The FCC just took the next step in the process with a “reverse-auction” that will allocate close to $2 billion over 10 years for telecommunication companies to provide to expand broadband internet access to more rural areas.

The auction will begin in 2018 and is the first time the FCC has used this mechanism to allocate Connect America funds for rural internet. The budget includes $198 million in annual support, with $170.4 million in total set aside for the New NY Broadband Program, currently in phase 3. While the exact deployment schedule of services funded via the auction will be up to the individual carriers, there are some rules. A company participating in providing subsidized service in rural areas must offer at least one commercial voice and broadband service each, with rates to be comparable to similar offerings in urban areas.

The FCC recognizes that many businesses attending the event will never have participated in an FCC auction before. “Recognizing that, the FCC’s Rural Broadband Auctions Task Force, along with the Wireline Competition Bureau and Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, plan to provide detailed educational materials and hands-on practice opportunities in advance of the auction,” the agency wrote in a statement.

Source: FCC