Tag: japan

Some of Earth’s oxygen escapes to the moon every month

The Earth and the moon share more than an orbit around the Sun. Turns out that bits of atmosphere manage to travel the 240, 000 miles out to our nearest celestial neighbor, and have been for more than 2 billion years, according to data gathered by Japan’s moon-orbiting Kaguya spacecraft. In a study published on Monday to the journal Nature Astronomy , planetary scientist Kentaro Terada of Osaka University observes that ionized oxygen particles escape from the upper atmosphere for five days every month to bombard the surface of the moon. Terada’s data suggests that oxygen atoms in the upper atmosphere are first ionized by ultraviolet light and then accelerated into the magnetosphere , the planet’s magnetic envelope. The magnetosphere extends more than 370, 000 miles away from the Sun, fully enveloping the moon’s own orbit around the Earth. For five days every month when the moon passes through the magnetosphere, it is blasted with these ionized particles. The Osaka University team estimates that every square centimeter of the moon’s exposed surface is struck by approximately 26, 000 oxygen ions every second over the five day period. While this isn’t enough for the moon to develop a breathable atmosphere of its own, this discovery suggests that the moon’s surface could hold clues to Earth’s ancient atmosphere — much like ice cores being dug out of the Greenland and Antarctic permafrost. Source: Science News

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Some of Earth’s oxygen escapes to the moon every month

Foxconn Considers $7 Billion Screen Factory In US, Which Could Create Up To 50,000 Jobs

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturing company best known for its partnership with Apple, has said that it is mulling a $7 billion investment in U.S. manufacturing that could create between 30, 000 and 50, 000 jobs. According to The Wall Street Journal, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou says the company is talking with the state of Pennsylvania among others about getting the land and electricity subsidies it would need to build a factory. “If U.S. state governments are willing to provide these terms, and we calculate and it is cheaper than shipping from China or Japan, then why wouldn’t Sharp build a factory in the U.S.?” said Gou. The factory would build flat-panel screens under the Sharp name — Foxconn bought Sharp around this time last year for $5.1 billion. Sharp President Tai Jeng-wu hinted in October of 2016 that U.S. manufacturing could be a possibility for Sharp, and he also indicated that Apple could begin using OLED display panels in future iPhones. Apple currently uses OLED in the Apple Watch and in the new MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar, but otherwise it hasn’t pushed to adopt the technology as some Android phone manufacturers have. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Foxconn Considers $7 Billion Screen Factory In US, Which Could Create Up To 50,000 Jobs

Japanese White-Collar Workers Are Already Being Replaced by Artificial Intelligence

Most of the attention around automation focuses on how factory robots and self-driving cars may fundamentally change our workforce, potentially eliminating millions of jobs. But AI that can handle knowledge-based, white-collar work is also becoming increasingly competent. From a report on Quartz: One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with “IBM Watson Explorer, ” starting by this month. The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Japanese White-Collar Workers Are Already Being Replaced by Artificial Intelligence

Verizon and AT&T Prepare to Bring 5G To (Select) Markets In 2017

An anonymous reader quotes IEEE Spectrum: This year, Verizon and AT&T plan to deliver broadband internet to select homes or businesses using fixed wireless networks built with early 5G technologies. These 5G pilot programs will give the public its first glimpse into a wireless future that isn’t due to fully arrive until the early 2020s. With 5G, carriers hope to deliver data to smartphone users at speeds 10 times as fast as on today’s 4G networks, and with only 1 millisecond of delay… Over the past year, companies have completed a flurry of lab tests and trials to figure out what types of radios, antennas, and signal processing techniques will work best to deliver 5G in hopes of bringing those technologies and their capabilities to market as soon as possible. The article notes that standards groups are halfway through their eight-year process of finalizing technical specifications (set to finish in 2020), but “With so much cash on the line, and facing pressure from data-hungry customers, carriers are moving fast.” In Japan, NTT Docomo has even tested dozens of programmable antennas simultaneously transmitting signals, resulting in transmissions at 20 gigabits per second. “At that speed, a complete 2-hour, 1080p, high-definition movie can be transmitted in a second and a half.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Verizon and AT&T Prepare to Bring 5G To (Select) Markets In 2017

Japan Just Scrapped a $9 Billion Nuclear Reactor That Never Really Worked

The Monju nuclear reactor. (Image: Nife/Wikimedia) The government of Japan has decided to decommission the experimental Monju nuclear reactor, which worked for just 250 days out of its total 22-year lifespan. Read more…

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Japan Just Scrapped a $9 Billion Nuclear Reactor That Never Really Worked

Japanese Baseball Player Blasts a Ball Right Through the Stadium’s Roof

An out of the park home run is a feat few ballplayers ever achieve. But Shohei Otani, who plays baseball for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in Japan, managed to blast a home run right through the roof of the Tokyo Dome stadium. Read more…

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Japanese Baseball Player Blasts a Ball Right Through the Stadium’s Roof

Japanese Craftsman Demonstrates Intricate Marquetry Technique

This is a crazy combination of low-tech production methods, precision hand craftsmanship, graphic design and utter patience. Here craftsman Noboru Honma demonstrates a fabrication technique that yields CNC-like visual complexity, yet has been executed for centuries, long before the discovery of electricity: The technique was developed in the Hakone region of Japan during the Edo period (1600s to 1800s). You can learn more about this Hakone Yosegi-Zaiku technique at the Japanese Traditional Culture Promotion and Development Organization’s website .

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Japanese Craftsman Demonstrates Intricate Marquetry Technique

Amazon Japan’s manga-ready Kindle has 8 times the storage

Amazon Japan has an unusual challenge with the Kindle: it not only has to cater to your typical bookworm, but to a local fondness for image-heavy (and thus storage-intensive) manga books . What it’s going to do? Release a special model just for those readers, apparently. The company has introduced a manga version of the Kindle Paperwhite with 32GB of storage, or eight times as much space as the run-of-the-mill 4GB model. You could cram every single volume of Asari-chan , Kochikame and Naruto into this e-reader, Amazon says. On top of that, a 33 percent faster page turning speed promises to keep you engrossed in your comics. The manga Kindle is available for pre-order now, with pricing commanding a slight premium over the usual Paperwhite. You’re spending ¥16, 280 (about $157), or ¥12, 280 ($118) if you’re an Amazon Prime subscriber. The first units ship October 21st, and the update to improve page turning performance should arrive by the end of the month. As you might gather, it’s not very likely that you’ll see this model elsewhere in the world — when the 4GB in regular Kindles is enough to hold thousands of regular books, Amazon doesn’t have much incentive to boost their capacity any time soon. Source: Amazon Japan (translated 1) , (2)

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Amazon Japan’s manga-ready Kindle has 8 times the storage

Scientists Create Fully Functional Eggs from Skin Cells

Using skin cells extracted from mice, researchers in Japan have produced fully functional egg cells that were used to produce healthy mouse pups. Should the method work in humans, it could introduce powerful new ways of treating infertility—and even allow same-sex couples to produce biological offspring. Read more…

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Scientists Create Fully Functional Eggs from Skin Cells

Forget holograms, here’s a ‘floating e-ink’ display

The amount of pixels in a display has been the source of forum flamewars since the advent of HDTV, which makes an experimental display technology from the University of Sussex so interesting. It’s called JOLED and it measures a whopping 7 x 6 voxels high and wide, respectively. Hold on, it gets more interesting. Each voxel is a diminutive multi-colored sphere, and they’re suspended in mid-air by an array of ultrasound speakers that “create high-pitched and high-intensity soundwaves that are inaudible but forceful enough to hold the spheres in place, ” according to the school . That holds the JANUS objects in place, but to make them spin and show different colors at different times is something else entirely. What seems to be the key to the rotation is that the spheres are coated with titanium dioxide — also used to purify air when mixed with concrete — which, when a exposed to an electrical field causes them to rotate. “JOLED could be like having a floating e-ink display that can also change its shape, ” researcher Deepak Sahoo said in a canned press release quote. Maybe don’t expect to have these sitting on your desk, though. The school suggest that it could wind up like many of Disney Research’s projects and be used in commercial or tourism settings. Some examples? Showing the changing patterns of carbon footprints or changes in currency conversion rates. So, don’t expect to watch Luke Cage on one of these in HDR anytime soon is what I’m saying. “We also want to examine ways in which such a display could be used to deliver media on-demand, ” University of Sussex’s Sriram Subramanian said. “A screen appears in front of the user to show the media and then the objects forming the display fall to the ground when the video finishes playing.” The scientists hope to increase the pixel density as well as the amount of colors displayed (sound familiar?), and will be presenting their research next week at Japan’s ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium. Via: TechCrunch Source: University of Sussex

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Forget holograms, here’s a ‘floating e-ink’ display