I always take the email option. I know I giving up a little privacy when I do that
because the store now has my email and can send me offers. The stores that have offered are clothing stores and
Yesterday one of my local grocery stores Shoprite sent me an email letting me know that it will be offering digital receipts.
According to Shoprite's website this is a new program that is being tested so Il still be receiving paper receipts for now.
Now that a grocery store is going to start doing it I suddenly want everyone to do it. Aside from the environmental benefit of paper and ink being saved the ability to access receipts
Returns aren the only convenience ereceipts offer though For tax purposes if every purchase I made at a brick
and mortar store gave me a digital receipt it would be wonderful. If I received a digital receipt every time
I bought office supplies or picked up a prescription or paid for a restaurant meal
I not going to take the time to stop pull out my phone take a picture of the receipt
#World's fastest supercomputers could take science to the next level With computing technology continually getting smaller,
you may look at modern day room-sized supercomputers and balk. But if you're impressed with all the things your tablet can do,
imagine the power of a computer so big that it needs its own room. The announcement that the U s. Department of energy is planning to spend $425 million to build two supercomputers that are 5 to 7 times faster than any supercomputer in history is big news
and it could lead the way to major advancements in science research, reports Reuters. Most of that cash,
$325 million of it, will be designated for the construction a supercomputer to be named"Summit,"for Oak ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee,
and another to be named"Sierra"at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The remaining $100 million will go toward research into future supercomputing advances to eventually build computers that are even faster.
Summit and Sierra will operate at 150 petaflops and 100 petaflops respectively, which is the unit of measurement for supercomputer performance.
Basically that means that the machines can perform as many as 150 million billion floating-point operations (or FLOP) per second.
By comparison, the world's highest performing computer at present, the Tianhe-2 in China, performs at"just"55 petaflops. The first-ever supercomputer to reach 1 petaflop was built as recently as 2008.
So Summit and Sierra are significant upgrades. Plans are for Sierra to be the exclusive domain of The National Nuclear Security Administration,
which will use its new super-toy for ensuring"the safety, security and effectiveness of the nation nuclear deterrent without testing,"
"according to a press release by Nvidia, one of the manufacturers of the new computers'components. Summit, however, will be made available to researchers worldwide who can apply for time with the powerful technology.
as researchers can use Summit to model everything from climate change and weather behavior to materials science and nuclear-weapons performance.
The faster the computer, the more detailed models that can be created. Natural systems, such as Earth's climate, are extremely difficult to model because of their immense complexity."
"There is a real importance of having the larger systems, and not just to do the same problems over and over again in greater detail,"said Julia White,
and even how long his mouse hovered over an object Amazon could predict what hel buy
According to Techcrunch the company may put a item it anticipates a customer buying on a delivery truck
and keep it in ear continuous transit on trucks until a customer makes a purchase. trying to think of what item I might need so quickly that
so that a nearby delivery person could have it to my house within minutes or a few hours of ordering.
There really only one that comes to mind printer ink. It never fails that when one of my sons needs to print out something for a big school project the ink runs out.
and he said he going to start hovering his mouse over a computer that he wants and an Xbox One.
Just hit'print'From working guns to bionic ears 3-D printers are creating a variety of objects
But 3-D printers aren't just laying down plastics resins and nanoparticles they're also printing with dough vegetables and even meats.
Both engineers and gourmet chefs are experimenting with creating foods from 3-D printing. The technique allows them to produce foods in unique shapes
and textures and to streamline repetitive tasks like filling ravioli. 3-D food printers don't look like traditional printers.
Theye more like industrial fabrication machines with syringes. Users load the syringes with raw food ink dough chocolate
or anything with a liquid consistency and the machine prints the food by depositing layers of liquids to build the desired object.
Just like a regular printer the machine takes its instructions from a computer. Using software a 3-D representation of the food is created
and divided into printable layers. Designers of commercial 3-D printers believe that in the near future we'll be able to download such recipes and print them in our home kitchens.
Barcelona-based company Natural Machines says it hopes its Foodini machine (pictured right) will promote more home cooking by managing the difficult
or time-consuming parts of preparing homemade food. Rather than buying prepackaged processed snacks like pretzels breadsticks crackers
Printed foods could also lead to more sustainable food sources according to Dutch technology company TNO. Its researchers have experimented with creating foods from algae insects and grasses.
or insects Kjeld van Bommel a TNO researcher told Popular Mechanics. In one example his group printed shortbread cookies made with milled mealworms.
Take a look at the variety of food that can be made with 3-D printers. The Foodini made these chickpea nuggets as a healthier alternative to meat options.
TNO has experimented with printing pureed vegetables back into their original shape. Cornell University's Fab@Home can print ramen noodles in a variety of artistic shapes.
Photo: Natural Machinesmaking homemade ravioli can be a time-consuming process but Foodini prints each individual piece and even keeps them warm until it's time to cook.
#Quantum computer technology now capable of holding data with 99 percent accuracy Perhaps the zaniest property of quantum mechanics is that of entanglement,
in order to create superfast computers that can communicate and transfer data instantaneously, but learning to control the quantum data has proven difficult.
The latest breakthrough in quantum computing, however, brings the technology much closer to reality. Australian scientists have developed the first silicon quantum technology capable of holding data with over 99 percent accuracy
reports PC Mag. It's particularly significant because silicon is the same material used to build conventional computers,
meaning that the technology could potentially be mass-produced using the same sort of equipment currently used for chip manufacturing.
Development of the new technology came in two steps. First, the scientists refined a technique used to turn phosphorous atoms into qubits, the units of measurement for quantum information.
Second, they manufactured an"artificial atom"using a silicon resistor. Taken together, the two methods improved the reliability of data retention from just 50 percent to over 99 percent
an extraordinary upgrade.""We have demonstrated that with silicon qubit we can have needed the accuracy to build a real quantum computer.
That's the first time this has been done in silicon, "explained Andrew Dzurak of the University of New south wales, one of the study's authors.
The trick to improving the accuracy of the technology was to select for specific silicon isotopes that have no magnetic spin,
because magnetic spin can mess with the phosphorous atoms that the qubits are made of.""In natural silicon each atom also has its own spin
which affects the phosphorous atom, which is why the accuracy was only 50 per cent,
"The capability of building a quantum computer from materials already widely used for building conventional computers might be this study's most significant accomplishment, however.
#Robots learn to cook with a little help from Youtube When it comes to learning how to cook,
We both turn to Youtube for online tutorials on how to chop garlic or how to whisk mashed potatoes.
Researchers at the University of Maryland, funded by the DARPA's Mathematics of Sensing, Exploitation and Execution (MSEE), are teaching robots how to process visual data
and manipulate the correct kitchen tools and use them to complete specific tasks with great accuracy,
And, this exercise requires no additional programming from humans. The robots learned how to complete tasks, such as picking up a pitcher,
""This system allows robots to continuously build on previous learning such as types of objects and grasps associated with them
and training,"explained Ghanadan.""Instead of the long and expensive process of programming code to teach robots to do tasks, this research opens the potential for robots to learn much faster, at much lower cost and,
to the extent they are authorized to do so, share that knowledge with other robots. This learning-based approach is a significant step towards developing technologies that could have benefits in areas such as military repair and logistics."
"This ability to perform a task after observing it being done marks a huge leap forward in the field of robotics.
And, according to Yiannis Aloimonos, University of Maryland professor of computer science and director of the Computer Vision Lab, cooking was the perfect skill to test the robots'progress."
This could potentially save humans from doing dangerous work by sending robots in their place.
which robots are able to defuse bombs and clean up nuclear disasters.""By having flexible robots, we're contributing to the next phase of automation.
This will be said the next industrial revolution the researchers c
#Metal surface is so water-repellent that drops of water bounce off it like balls Researchers at the University of Rochester have created a metal surface so hydrophobic that water bounces off it
as if repelled by a rubbery force field reports Time. The incredible breakthrough could lead to everything from better nonstick kitchenware to waterproof electronics.
To get an idea of just how water-repellent this metal is you may have to see it to believe it.
Luckily the University of Rochester researchers have provided a demonstration: Water dropped over the metal appears like candy-dispenser bouncy balls as it richochets off.
It's the most water-repellent metallic surface yet created and unlike the surfaces of the nonstick pans you might use at home these new surfaces are chemical free.
To create the effect researchers used lasers to etch nanoscale structures into the metal surface that repel the water.
Because they are etched in at such a microscopic level they do not rub off meaning that metals etched with these structures never lose their water-resistance.
The number of applications for such a technology are mind-boggling. Clearly kitchenware will never be the same and without the potential toxicity of conventional nonstick surfaces.
Electronic devices can also be made more waterproof than ever before and touchscreens could be made that resist finger grease and other similar causes of smudges.
Also airplanes etched in these nanostructures could potentially avoid the dangers of water freezing on the wings.
More efficient water recollection systems could even be designed for use in underdeveloped countries. The possibilities are numerous.
Though perhaps it's simply enough to be dazzled by displays of water bouncing around like balls. he material is so strongly water-repellent the water actually gets bounced offsaid Chunlei Guo a professor of optics
and co-author of the study. hen it lands on the surface again gets bounced off again
reports Princeton News. The minuscule device is powered by individual electrons that tunnel through artificial atoms known as"quantum dots,
an associate professor of physics at Princeton who led the study. The successful maser demonstration represents a breakthrough in efforts to build a quantum computer out of semiconductor materials.
Basically, the device makes it possible to use double quantum dots two quantum dots joined together as quantum bits,
or qubits, which are the basic units of information in quantum computers.""I consider this to be a really important result for our long-term goal,
which is entanglement between quantum bits in semiconductor-based devices, "said collaborator Jacob Taylor, an adjunct assistant professor at the Joint Quantum Institute, University of Maryland-National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Essentially, the maser allows the double quantum dots to communicate with each other. To construct the tiny contraption,
researchers placed two double dots about 6 millimeters apart in a cavity made of a superconducting material, niobium,
When turned on, electrons flow single-file through each double quantum dot which causes them to emit photons in the microwave region of the spectrum.
The photons can then be channeled into a coherent beam of light using mirrors. Aside from its importance in the development of quantum computers, the maser could also lead to advancements in a variety of fields such as communications, sensing and medicine,
or any other discipline that utilizes technology which relies on coherent light sources.""In this paper the researchers dig down deep into the fundamental interaction between light
and the moving electron,"said Claire Gmachl, professor of electrical engineering at Princeton.""The double quantum dot allows them full control over the motion of even a single electron,
and in return they show how the coherent microwave field is created and amplified. Learning to control these fundamental light-matter interaction processes will help in the future development of light sources
#How the world's largest satellite network will deliver global Internet access With a majority of the world still without access to the Internet (roughly 60 percent as of 2014) private companies are announcing ambitious plans to close the gap.
Google is exploring the use of high-altitude balloons Facebook is eyeing autonomous drones and now Richard Branson and Virgin galactic are pursuing microsatellite clusters.
Earlier this week the 64-year-old billionaire announced a partnership with satellite-system designers Oneweb to use Virgin galactic's Launcherone rocket to create a massive satellite constellation in space.
The project would deploy a fleet of 648 microsatellites capable of providing low-latency high-speed Internet access directly to small user-based terminals all around the world.
In addition to providing access via current standards (Wifi LTE 3g or 2g connections) the Oneweb network would also give much-needed global emergency and first responder access for natural disasters refugee camps and other humanitarian needs.
Imagine the possibilities for the three billion people in hard to reach areas who are connected currently not Branson said in a statement.
The Launcherone rocket while still in the design and testing phase hopes to eventually deliver payloads from 250 pounds to 500 pounds into space for less than $10 million per flight.
The cluster which would be the world's largest satellite network will then talk to receivers on the ground measuring a tiny 36 centimeters by 16 centimeters
and capable of delivering 50 megabits per second Internet access. As a comparison the average global broadband speed currently is only 21.9 Mbps. Oneweb is expected to cost between $1. 5 billion to $2 billion a relative bargain compared to
what it hopes to achieve. The opportunity to improve access to education health care financial systems and employment will take a revolution one that we are tremendously proud to be said part of Branson.
Providing affordable high-speed Internet access for the world unconnected populations is a huge challenge but one we can wait to achieve
#This stick could be the end of the personal computer as we know it Fifteen years ago,
when I was working as a real estate developer, I would see people move into apartments and fill their living rooms with a big desktop computer, a big TV and a stereo system with giant CD racks.
There was almost no room left for furniture. I thought there was an opportunity to clean up this mess,
and worked with Toronto's Julia West Home to design beautiful furniture that turned your computer into an entertainment center, much like those console Hi-fi systems from the'50s.
It didn catch on. Flat-screen monitors were not available yet (that SGI 17-inch monitor in the photo was the first one sold
and it cost $3, 500) and the ipod and the laptop got rid of the big desktop and the stereo system.
Then the smartphone came along, and I became convinced that it was going to become our default computer, writing in Treehugger:
Your office is in your pants: How the smartphone is changing the way we live and work.
I made a number of predictions, including that the big-screen television was going to follow the piano to the dump.
I was wrong again. Flat-screen LED TVS got so cheap and so big that people are now wallpapering their walls with them;
everybody has a home theater that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars just a few years ago.
After five years of using my computer monitor for entertainment, even I broke down and bought 42 inches of fun.
Now Intel has introduced the Compute Stick, a complete computer that runs Windows 8. 1 (or Linux) that you can plug into the HDMI port of your big TV.
It not exactly a gamer rig, with an Atom processor and 2gb of ram and a 32 GB solid state drive,
but it's also only $149 including Windows, which retails on its own for $154. 99 at my local computer store.
The device connects via Bluetooth to your keyboard and mouse. No doubt the souped-up gamer version will follow shortly.
Intel calls it solution with plenty of storage and performance needed for light productivity, social networking, web browsing,
and streaming media, such as Netflix, Hulu, or games. I think it's a lot more than that.
I look at this with a mix of bemusement and astonishment. Just over a decade ago,
I was building powerful computers into pretty boxes to act as entertainment centers; today I can just plug a computer that costs less than a retail box of software into my TV if
I need a computer at all, which except for work I don't. Now I can spend all day on the sofa in front of the TV
and nobody can complain, because the computer has ceased to be a thing. It now just an accessory.
In 1977, the late Ken Olsen, CEO of minicomputer manufacturer DEC, famously said here is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.
He was quoted out of context but he still had to live that down for the rest of his life.
It is a shame he died in 2011, because he would have had the last laugh;
he turns out to have been right
#How do you measure sustainability? Autocase software tool has got its number It a running theme in our discussion of the smart home:
that it is smarter to design it properly in the first place then it is to add things afterward.
The same is true for the smart city. In the Economist Autodesk head of sustainability Emma Stewart writes about how the smart thing to do is to figure it out before you build.
This is really hard. So many of the decisions that are made about our cities and the huge infrastructure investments in them are made on a whim for political reasons for pork a highway here and a bridge to nowhere there.
If there are data to back up these decisions it's based on an engineer traffic counts or an estimator dollar estimates.
Hard numbers. The three prongs of the triple bottom line Photo: Wikipedia) But there are other costs involved with anything we do the social and environmental costs the effect on people and the planet as well as the profit.
That the triple bottom line first proposed 20 years ago by John Elkington and argued about ever since.
Critics ask ow can you put a numeric value on human life? or hat the value of happiness?
In fact you can. If your senator wants to cancel a high-speed rail line and expand a highway
instead there are hard data on how much it will cost to treat the asthma cases that are caused by the extra pollution.
If you put in a bike lane instead of a car lane there are data that show how it increases the health of the population.
You can put a dollar value on happiness and people have been doing it for years.
However it takes time and money to do these studies and you can do hat ifanalyses of alternatives.
Which is all a very long-winded background to an interesting product that was announced today. Architects and engineers don really draw anymore;
they use software like Autocad to build the structure in the computer piece by piece.
It called BIM or Building Information Modelling. This lets them make changes and see the results on the fly;
or increase the column spacing and they'll know immediately how much more or less steel and concrete might be needed and its impact on cost.
Autocase from Impact Infrastructure adds triple bottom line analysis into the mix. Founder and CEO John Williams explained in an interview that it utomates the process for valuing
what have traditionally been considered intangible benefits such as air pollution property values and recreational space. It plugs right in to the Autocad that many civil engineers use.
Right now the system is capable of dealing with stormwater which at first glance I thought was a small niche in the design world.
As Stewart noted in her Economist articlethey are following up with modules for transit roads highways and buildings.
or rip out another bike lane there are real data that people can show on the true costs both economic and social.
However as an architect who was an early adopter of Computer aided design (CAD) over 30 years agowhen all it did was draw
I am in awe of a system that can not only quantify steel and concrete costs but that now can also produce real data on social value pollution health and yes even happiness a
#Watch Bill gates drink a big glass of filtered poop water Sedro-Woolley, a slightly Twin peaks-y logging outpost located about two hours north of Seattle in Skagit County,
Of course, the disease-eradicating, condom-reinventing Microsoft cofounder didn actually drink human excrement Sedro-Woolley-produced sewage sludge at its finest.
He sipped on potable purified poop water that, just a few moments before, looked nothing like the clear liquid you expect to come out of your kitchen faucet."
"It's water,"the billionaire philanthropist announced, deadpan, to a rapt crowd of onlookers after he took a polite swig of the stuff without grimacing.
a large machine/small waste treatment plant developed by Janicki Bioenergy (an offshoot of Sedro-Woolley-based Janicki Industries)
and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the foundation ongoing mission to bring clean drinking water and safe means of sanitation to developing parts of the world.
the Gates Foundation launched the Reinventing the Toilet Challenge, a competition that yielded, among other things,
a winning solar-power commode designed by students at Caltech. Designed as a low-cost sewage treatment plant, the Omniprocessor was developed to tackle the same problem but on a larger scale.
Although you can watch the informative video above to learn more about exactly how the Omniprocessor works, here the gist of it.
but electricity used to power the machine itself. Any leftover electricity generated through the process is fed back into the power grid.
The small amount of solid waste that comes out on the other end is no longer poop
but sterile ash that can be used to fertilize crops. Referring to the Omniprocessor as a lean repository for human waste,
Gates himself describes the waste-to-water process on his Gates Notes blog: I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin.
They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result:
As Gates explains, that machine will be able to handle the waste of 100, 000 people and, from that, produce 86,000 liters of clean water on a daily basis while also generating a net 250 kilowatts of electricity.
If all goes well in Senegal, the Gates Foundation will promote the building of self-powered Omniprocessor facilities in other parts of the world (Gates specifically mentions India) where clean drinking water
and modern plumbing is scarce. As Gates notes, poor sanitation claims the lives of upwards of 700,000 children in developing areas every year,
usually via drinking water supplies that have been contaminated by human waste. Gates envisions that each Omniprocessor will be built and operated using a micro-entrepreneurial model where local residents would benefit economically from the facilities. he processor wouldn just keep human waste out of the drinking water;
it would turn waste into a commodity with real value in the marketplace. It the ultimate example of that old expression:
one man trash is another man treasure, "Gates explains. We'll drink to that
#How low can you go?:Nature News The ones and zeroes that propel the digital world the fording of electrons across a transistor,
or hard drives reliant on electrons'intrinsic spin are getting packed into smaller and smaller spaces. The limit was thought to be set:
no more than one bit of information could be encoded on an atom or electron. But now, researchers at Stanford university in Palo alto, California, have used another feature of the electron its tendency to bounce probabilistically between different quantum states to create holograms that pack information into subatomic spaces.
By encoding information into the electron's quantum shape, or wave function, the researchers were able to create a holographic drawing that contained 35 bits per electron."
"Our results will challenge some fundamental assumptions people had about the ultimate limits of information storage,
"says graduate student Chris Moon, one of the authors of the work published in Nature Nanotechnology1.
Pushing the limit The researchers have built on a tradition of inscribing information in small spaces that began
when eminent physicist Richard Feynman asked in 1959, "Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?".
when researchers at IBM manipulated individual xenon atoms on a nickel plate to spell out the letters'IBM'across a space just a dozen nanometres wide2.
The researchers read the hologram using the microscope to measure the energy state of a single electron wave function.
They showed they could read out an'S'for Stanford with features as small as 0. 3 nanometres.
They teased out the individual pages by scanning the hologram for electrons at different energy levels.
This led the Stanford team to think about the creation of quantum circuits. In encoding the'S',the researchers were concentrating the electron density at certain points and energy levels.
And a concentration of electrons in space is, in essence, a wire. That led study co-author Hari Manoharan to think about using the holograms as stackable quantum circuits
"You would change the energy level and you would have a different set of a wiring,
"says Alexander Sergienko, a quantum-optics physicist at Boston University in Massachusetts. But he says that the technique is a long way from having any practical use.
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