Many people may not realize just how big an impact combined smart city technologies could have on the ways we live and work in the coming years.
In abandoned silver mine in Pulpí, in Spain’s south-eastern Almería Province, lies a treasure that’s not made from any precious metal at all. Instead, what’s hidden here is the world’s largest geode – a natural crystal phenomenon that has stunned scientists.
As Mila Carretero, geologist and coordinator of the Pulpí Geode, explained, a geode is a cavity inside a rock that is covered with crystals. Sitting against a backdrop of oversized crystal spars, she broke open a tiny rock with tiny gems inside, to show a comparison. “It’s the same as the one I have behind me, only this one is a super-sized version,” she said with a laugh as she pointed over her shoulder.
The Pulpí Geode is eight metres wide, two metres high and two metres deep. “When it comes to a geode, by definition, this is the biggest ever discovery,” she noted, adding that Pulpí is not to be confused with another crystal marvel, the Naica Mine in Mexico, which has larger spars (15m long compared to Pulpí’s two metres), but which is a cave lined with crystals rather than a geode.
How is the industry reacting?
“Carbon matches 100% of the performance of C++ and aims to provide a significantly better developer experience,” Kaggle master and senior data scientist Mark Tenenholtz tweeted.
This is mainly because Carbon reduces existing libraries’ tech debt and makes extending those libraries easier.
China decided not to guide the booster back through the atmosphere and it’s not clear exactly when or where it will come down to Earth. While it will largely burn up on return, there remains a slight risk of fragments causing damage or casualties.
According to researchers at The Aerospace Corporation “there is a non-zero probability of the surviving debris landing in a populated area—over 88 percent of the world’s population lives under the reentry’s potential debris footprint.”
While China is not alone in such practices, the size of the Long March rocket stage has drawn particular scrutiny.
Medics are on alert for cases of the rare infection that cause can be serious and even deadly to some people.
Project Mosquito barely got underway before it hit a dead end, with potential overseas designs waiting in the wings.
Scientists have just found that using cubic boron arsenide in semiconductors could prove to be much better than silicon. Is silicon on its way out the door?
The Swiss company called K-Team invented a new kind of robot! The engineering team took as a basis the swarm intelligence of ants and created the kilobot swarm. Each of the devices follows a small set of rules, but when placed together, they mold into some sort of a universal mind clever enough to solve complex tasks. In the future, this system will be able to unify not only kilobots but other robots too, the ones we can see only at exhibitions for now.
What will happen if they start swarming around cities of the future all at once? Which robots would come to our aid during the worst disasters? Why is this piece of magnetic slime learning how to sneak into your intestines? And how will robots change our lives in a real city of the future?
