Singularitarian

With the most powerful computers ever known , you’d think that modern codebreakers would have utterly smashed our forefathers’ puny ciphers. Well…no. There are quite a number of antique documents that remain mysterious, despite cryptologists’ best efforts. Code breaking still relies on good guesses and flashes of insight more than brute force.

Since the late 1800s, biologists have used petri dishes primarily to grow cells. In the medical field, they are used to identify bacterial infections, such as tuberculosis. Conventional use of a petri dish requires that the cells being cultured be placed in an incubator to grow. As the sample grows, it is removed—often numerous times—from the incubator to be studied under a microscope.

Combat drones - aka remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) - are now seen by US combat commanders as one of their most valuable - if not the most valuable - military asset in the inventory. It is certainly seen as a very important element of the current Administration’s counter-terrorism policy.

Want a sandwich? Yeah, me too. PR2 has learned how to fetch sandwiches, which is great and all, but thanks to a technique called semantic search, it can now bring you a sandwich when it’s not even sure where the sandwich is.

MIT researchers just officially unveiled a device that uses sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The device builds upon a breakthrough hydrogen producing technology developed in 2008, and they are calling it an “artificial leaf” because of it capacity to create chemical fuels directly from sunlight. The cell is also made from common materials like silicon, cobalt and nickel, which means that the “leaf” could potentially be mass-produced.