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PlanetTech aggregates the very best in science and tech news from around the web and presents it beautifully for your convenience.In China, You Can No Longer Buy A Smartphone Without A Face Scan
Posted in Business on 14th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
Despite a outcry on Chinese social media, it seems unlikely that critics will prove successful in pushing against it/
UK To Send 'walking' Spider Robot To The Moon In Its First Lunar Rover Mission
Posted in Hardware, Science on 13th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
The UK's first ever moon rover will launch into space in 2021 in a bid to unlock the secrets of the lunar surface.
America's Deadly Obesity Epidemic
Posted in Medicine on 13th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
A public health emergency is shortening lives and supersizing health-care costs.
Deep Learning Networks Can’t Generalize; But They’re Learning From The Brain
Posted in Software on 11th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
Without a slew of correct assumptions to guide the deep neural nets in their learning, “generalization is impossible.”
California Officially Bans Police Use Of Facial Recognition In Body Cameras
Posted in Business, Software on 11th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
Continuing the growing pushback against facial recognition technology, California has now passed a new law banning the tech in connection with data gathered by police body cameras. The law comes into effect at the beginning of 2020 and will expire after three years.
AI Startups On Pace To Break Funding Records In 2019
Posted in Business, Software on 11th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
Artificial intelligence’s potential to transform a growing range of industries has venture capitalists writing checks to promising startups at a rate that will likely set a new record in 2019 for the industry.
Google Brain’s ROBEL Benchmark Lets Devs Track AI Quality On Affordable Robots
Posted in Business, Hardware, Software on 11th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
More affordable robots designed to work with platforms and performance benchmarks make adoption more likely by developers, students, or startups interested in iterating to advance the field.
NASA Tests Mars 2020 Rover Descent Stage Separation
Posted in Hardware, Science on 7th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
NASA engineers have completed a successful separation test of the Mars 2020 rover and its descent stage that will deliver it to the surface of the Red Planet.
SpaceX Will Go To Orbit With Starship ASAP After 20 Km Test Works
Posted in Hardware, Science on 7th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
Elon Musk indicates that SpaceX will for orbit with Starship as soon as possible after the 20-kilometer test. The timing is based upon building the increased number of Raptor engines.
Smartphone App Can Detect Eye Diseases In Children With 80 Percent Accuracy
Posted in Hardware, Medicine, Software on 4th Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
An app designed to detect early signs of several eye diseases in children has surpassed an 80 percent accuracy threshold equaling the sensitivity of devices used by trained ophthalmologists.
Google’s Highly Scalable AI Can Generate Convincingly Humanlike Speech
Posted in Software on 2nd Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
Their model not only generates high-fidelity speech with “naturalness” but that it’s highly parallelizable, meaning it’s more easily trained across multiple machines compared with conventional alternatives.
Schizophrenia As Whole-body Disorder – The 100-year-old Idea Only Now Being Proven
Posted in Medicine on 2nd Oct, 2019
by Alex Muller
For some time, scientists have observed strong associations between schizophrenia and poor physical health.