The team at Google Brain has made an impressive breakthrough for increasing the resolution of images. They’ve managed to turn 8×8 grids of pixels into monstrous approximations of human beings. Read more…
Taken from:
Google Brain Cleans Up Low-Res Photos by Turning Everyone Into a Glitched Out Monster
We already saw how the new $1.6 billion sarcophagus —the 843-foot wide, 354-foot tall steel shield that entombs the radioactive material leaking from the damaged nuclear reactor left over from the Chernobyl disaster—was going to be put in place to replace the old concrete structure that enclosed the damaged reactor… Read more…
More here:
Watch Chernobyl’s Huge Radiation Shield Slide in and Enclose the Damaged Nuclear Reactor
(credit: NASA ) We live and die by data these days. Data rates and latencies are everything, with data centers and chips designed to maximize communication speeds. The hero in the world of data is the optical fiber. Thanks to light’s very high base frequency, it is possible to modulate it very quickly without using a huge amount of bandwidth. Optical fiber’s ability to modulate light quickly allows network designers to choose a wavelength band, divide it up into slots, and use each slot to communicate its own data. So a typical fiber will carry several channels, each operating at multi-gigabit-per-second speeds. This approach, already many, many years old, has served us very well. But all good things come to an end. Researchers are always looking for ways to carry more information, and one idea—that one, at the back of the class, ignored by all the other ideas—is to use special states of light to encode information. These orbital angular momentum (OAM) states have the potential to vastly increase bandwidth, but they are difficult to handle. Some recent research, however, suggests that we might well be using OAM states before too long. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments
View article:
Orbital angular momentum states may vastly increase fiber’s bandwidth
Have some vinyl you want to listen to anywhere in the house? The folks over at Mozilla (yes, that Mozilla ) wanted to find a way to get one record player to stream audio throughout the entire office. Their solution was a Raspberry Pi. Read more…
More:
Stream Music from a Record Player to Any Computer In the House With a Raspberry Pi
KeePass isn’t the most popular password manager around here, but many of our readers use it . The next time you download an update for it, you may want to verify it yourself to prevent a malicious attack. Read more…
View the original here:
KeePass Vulnerability Could Let Attackers Steal Your Passwords With Shady Updates
Two decades after its original release, System Shock is being remade . Night Dive Studios, the developer in charge of the project, released some pre-alpha footage, and it looks great. If you’ve never played the original, it’s a hugely influential atmospheric first-person RPG in a sci-fi horror setting. A great game in its own right, it spawned a more successful (and arguably better) sequel, System Shock 2 . Some of the minds behind the originals went on to create games you’ve almost certainly heard of. Ken Levine made BioShock , considered by many to be a spiritual successor, while Warren Spector made Deus Ex , which also leans heavily on the System Shock 2 formula. Night Dive’s video describes the game as System Shock 1 Remastered , but it’s clear that this is more remake than remaster. The original artist is on board to help upgrade the original assets, and with that some of the level layout is changing. Speaking with Polygon , the developer explained that many people’s only exposure to the series is through BioShock , so it’s making some tweaks to cater to modern gamers’ tastes. That means the tone of the narrative is also set to shift, as is some of the gameplay. but the overall plot will remain. System Shock is due for release in 2017. A bonafide sequel, System Shock 3, is also in the early stages of development, with Spector at the helm . Source: Night Dive (YouTube)
See the article here:
Here’s an early taste of the ‘System Shock’ remake
Hallie Siegel writes: According to the non-profit Autonomous Undersea Vehicle Applications Center, there are over 250 different configurations of unmanned undersea vehicles (UUVs) in service today. That number is likely to grow in the coming years as the technology improves — note that the US Navy has made UUVs a priority and is planning to launch a whole squadron of them by 2020. Dan Gettinger from the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College gives an overview of this technology. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
More:
US Navy Is Planning To Launch a Squadron of Underwater Drones By 2020
Google Calendar’s been updated so now you don’t need to refresh for new appointments to appear. Finally. Read more…
Read the article:
Google Calendar’s been updated so now you don’t need to refresh for new appointments to appear.
Over the past thirty years, few cities have undergone the transformation that Shanghai has. It went from a vertically challenged city filled with greenery to mutant New York on speed and steroids. Claire and Max illustrate how much has changed by eliminating the current buildings from the skyline and then drawing them in and putting them back. Read more…
Link:
Cool video illustrates how much Shanghai has changed over the years
Forget about all the company’s work on its incredibly durable Gorilla Glass . No one’s going to care if their smartphone’s screen gets scratched when Corning’s other major innovation hits consumers. Because when their device is covered in Fibrance , a fiber-optic thread-like material that glows in any color and looks like a prop straight out of the TRON universe, they’ll be too distracted to care. Read more…
Originally posted here:
TRONify Anything With This New Colorful Glowing Thread