The Thinking Machine by Stephen Witt: Forget Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg - meet the mogul in tech you have never heard of
Stephen Witt pulls back the curtain on Jensen Huang, the man in tech you have probably never heard of, and whose company is worth $3 trillion.
£20m operation to raise doomed tycoon Mike Lynch's superyacht begins - nearly a year after it sank in a freak storm, killing seven
The yacht sank in a freak storm off the fishing village of Porticello, Sicily, last August, killing seven, including British billionaire tech tycoon Mike Lynch, 59, and his daughter Hannah, 18.
Thank you to a true giant for inspiring me and my family... Prince William's tribute as 'guiding light' David Attenborough turns 99 this week
Speaking to The Mail on Sunday, William hailed the naturalist's 'lifetime of extraordinary service to our planet'.
Popular fruit can reverse erectile dysfunction and boost your sex drive, study reveals
Eating the fruit may help boost men's sex lives according to new research published in the journal Current Research in Food Science.
MPs calling for ban on choking in pornography as they warn the aggressive act is being 'glamourised'
An amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill seeks to include 'non-fatal strangulation' in its definition of extreme pornography.
Co-op calls in UK's FBI as 'DragonForce' hackers gloat they have the private information of 20m customers
Cyber experts from the National Crime Agency - Britain's equivalent to the FBI - are hunting computer hackers who claim to have stolen the private information of 20 million Co-op customers.
Monthly injection 'keeps third-biggest killer disease in the UK at bay'
Trials have shown that a monthly injection of mepolizumab significantly reduces severe symptoms of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
AI-Driven Robot Installs Nearly 10,000 Solar Modules in Australia
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares an article from Renewables Now: Chinese tech company Leapting has successfully completed its first commercial deployment of photovoltaic (PV) modules with an AI-driven solar module mounting robot in Australia. The Chinese company was tasked with supporting the installation of French Neoen's (EPA:NEOEN) 350-MW/440-MWp Culcairn Solar Farm in New South Wales' Riverina region. Shanghai-based Leapting said this week that its intelligent robot has installed almost 10,000 modules at an "efficient, safe, and stable" pace that has "significantly" reduced the original construction timeline. Litian Intelligent was deployed at the Australian project site in early February. The machine has a 2.5-metre-high robotic arm sitting on a self-guided, self-propelled crawler. Equipped with a navigation system, and visual recognition technology, it can lift and mount PV panels weighing up to 30 kilograms. By replacing labour-intensive manual operations, the robot shortens the module installation cycle by 25%, while the installation efficiency increases three to five times as compared to manual labour and is easily adapted to complex environments, Leapting says.
Or, as Clean Technica puts it, "Meet the robot replacing four workers at a time on solar projects."
This is part of a broader industrial trend. In the United States, Rosendin Electric demonstrated its own semi-autonomous system in Texas that allowed a two-person team to install 350 to 400 modules per day, a clear step-change from traditional methods. AES Corporation has been developing a robot called Maximo that combines placement and fastening with computer vision. Trina Solar's Trinabot in China operates in a similar space, with prototype systems demonstrating 50-plus modules per hour... In an industry where time-to-energy is critical, shaving weeks off the construction schedule directly reduces costs and increases net revenue...
[T]he direction is clear. The future of solar construction will be faster, safer, and more precise — not because of human brawn, but because of robotic repetition. There will still be humans on-site, but their role shifts from lifting panels to managing throughput. Just as cranes and excavators changed civil construction, so too will robots like Leapting's define the next era of solar deployment.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Britain's Got Talent's Golden Buzzer act Stacey Leadbeatter gets through to FINAL after being struck down with illness and fearing she wouldn't be able to sing
Britain's Got Talent star Stacey Leadbeatter has got through to the final after fearing she wouldn't be able to sing in Saturday's semi-final after some health woes.
Shocking moment Star Wars fans cheer and clap during traumatic scene in 20 year anniversary screening of Revenge of the Sith
Revenge of the Sith has returned to big screens across the world in a series of 20th anniversary showings after its initial release on May 19, 2005.
Snakes alive! Former truck mechanic who allowed himself to be bitten by deadly snakes more than 200 times... to make ultimate antidote
Tim Friede, 57, has also been injected with the venom of mambas, cobras and taipans more than 700 times, raising hopes researchers can develop a universal treatment.
Cyber criminals hold Britain's boardrooms to ransom
Cyber attacks have cost UK companies £44 billion in lost revenue over the past five years and have affected 52 per cent of firms, says insurance broker Howden.
LORD BLUNKETT: My plan to rekindle the spirit of the VE Day generation, by getting our lost youngsters in the habit of working
LORD BLUNKETT: As we celebrate the 80th anniversary this week of VE Day, it is worth reflecting on the courage, commitment and resilience of those who made it possible.
Now British drone troops destined to aid Ukraine's war effort face new enemy: Health and safety!
Troops have been told to stop flying drones that weigh more than 250g (9oz) - the weight of a cucumber - over their comrades while training on Salisbury Plain.
Kemi Badenoch urged to be bold as critics warn she has a year to restore Tory hopes from the 'existential' threat of Reform UK
The Tory leader is lining up a set of proposals, including on sentencing and social media, after criticism she has been too slow to develop policies.
Ex-BBC chief claims corporation's Arabic channel is the 'media wing of Hamas' as Tim Davie faces calls to clamp down on output
Tim Davie has been written to by Danny Cohen, the former director of BBC Television, in the wake of a string of controversies about contributors to BBC Arabic.
No wonder Nigel is hoovering up votes - my party has abandoned its core supporters, writes Labour MP DAN CARDEN
DAN CARDEN: Thursday's local elections mean that it is now life or death for this Labour government - and for the Labour Party.
Peggy lived in fear nightly as German bombers roared overhead. Then, on the day she turned ten in 1945, peace in Europe was declared, giving her the best birthday EVER
Celebrations and parties were almost unheard of for the youngster, born in 1935, who had little memory of anything other than the daily trials of living through the Second World War.
Scientists Simulate First-Ever 'Black Hole Bomb' Laboratory Analog
"Researchers have created the first laboratory analog of the 'black hole bomb'," reports ScienceAlert, "a theoretical concept developed by physicists in the 1970s..."
There's no black hole involved; their experiment just simulates the "electromagnetic analogue" of the theoretical concept — the "exponential runaway amplification of spontaneously generated electromagnetic modes."
Or, as ScienceAlert puts it, "It doesn't, just to set your mind at ease, pose any danger. It consists of a rotating aluminum cylinder, placed inside layers of coils that generate magnetic fields that rotate around it, at controllable speeds."
As Roger Penrose proposed in 1971, the powerful rotational energy of a spinning black hole could be used to amplify the energy of nearby particles. Then, physicist Yakov Zel'Dovich figured out that you didn't need a black hole to see this phenomenon in action. An axially symmetrical body rotating in a resonance chamber, he figured, could produce the same energy transfer and amplification, albeit on a much smaller scale. Later work by other physicists found that, if you enclose the entire apparatus in a mirror, a positive feedback loop is generated, amplifying the energy until it explodes from the system.
This concept was named the black hole bomb, and a team of physicists led by Marion Cromb of the University of Southampton in the UK now claim to have brought it to life. A paper describing their experiment has been uploaded to preprint server arXiv... [W]hat the team's experiment does is simulate it, using magnetic fields as a proxy for the particles, with the coils around the system acting as the reflector to produce the feedback loop. When they ran the experiment, they found that, when the cylinder is rotating faster than, and in the same direction as, the magnetic field, the magnetic field is amplified, compared to when there is no cylinder. When the cylinder rotates more slowly than the magnetic field, however, the magnetic field is dampened. This is a really interesting result, because it demonstrates a very clear amplification effect, based on the theories described decades ago...
Because we can't probe black holes directly, analogs such as this are an excellent way to understand their properties... [T]he experiment could represent a significant step towards better understanding the physics of the most gravitationally extreme objects in the Universe.
"The exponential amplification from noise supports theoretical investigations into black hole instabilities," the researchers write, "and is promising for the development of future experiments to observe quantum friction in the form of the Zeldovich effect seeded by the quantum vacuum..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Half of Britons 'would not fight for their country under any circumstances today'
Anyone out in central London early yesterday morning got an exclusive look at the pageantry of the Armed Forces as bands rehearsed for this week's VE Day procession.