CuriouTech

Machine learning (ML) has numerous potential applications in the soap manufacturing industry, contributing to process optimization, quality control, resource management, and more. Here are some examples: 1. Quality Control : ML algorithms can be trained to analyze images of soap bars to detect defects such as cracks, air bubbles, or inconsistent coloring. By automating the inspection process, manufacturers can ensure that only high-quality products reach the market, reducing waste and enhancing customer satisfaction. 2. Predictive Maintenance : ML models can analyze sensor data from manufacturing equipment to predict when maintenance is needed. By detecting potential issues before they cause equipment failure, manufacturers can minimize downtime and reduce repair costs. 3. Supply Chain Optimization : ML algorithms can analyze historical data on raw material prices, demand forecasts, and production schedules to optimize inventory management and procurement decisions. This helps minimize...

Opportunity, the intrepid NASA rover that spent 15 years on Mars climbing in and out of craters to gather evidence of the planet's watery past, has been brought down by tiny particles of dust. After weeks of trying to revive the veteran Mars rover in the wake of a blinding dust storm, NASA has given up on ever hearing from it again. It's a humble ending for a machine that survived a 300-million-mile journey through space, executed a hole-in-one landing, and set a record by driving more than 28 extraterrestrial miles. Opportunity's last transmission to Earth occurred on June 10 amid an epic Martian dust storm. Still, NASA engineers remained hopeful that when the dust settled, the rover would recharge its solar-powered batteries and resume its superlative mission. Opportunity landed on Mars in January 2004 for a mission that was supposed to last 90 Martian days. Its twin rover, Spirit, had landed three weeks earlier on the other side of the planet. "Wit...

A totally new insulation material has been developed that is totally weightless but can still withstand high temperature, that would not be tolerated by other materials and destroy it. The porous aerogel is at least 99 percent open space , with the rest made up of an atomically thin ceramic called hexagonal boron nitride. The design proves extremely durable under high temperatures and rapid temperature shifts of over 1,000 degrees Celsius.  “It’s notoriously hard to make materials that are not just lightweight, but can also be heavily heat resistant,” says Deep Jariwala, an engineer at the University of Pennsylvania.  The new ultralight insulator may be especially well suited to shielding components on spacecraft , which must endure extreme temperature swings when turning toward or away from the sun or re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, he says.  The aerogel comprises a network of tiny air pockets, with each pocket separated by two atomically thin layers ...

Medical techniques for looking inside our bodies have come a long way, but in the future it looks like doctors may be able to see absolutely everything going on under our skin. Researchers have invented a new kind of camera that can actually see through structures inside the human body, detecting light sources behind as much as 20 centimetres (7.9 inches) of bodily tissue. The current prototype, developed by researchers from the University of Edinburgh in the UK, is designed to work in conjunction with endoscopes – long, slender instruments that are often equipped with cameras, sensors and lights to peer inside hollow cavities inside the human body. Endoscopes are valuable tools for all sorts of medical procedures, but up until now it's been difficult to externally confirm exactly where in the body the instrument is looking, without resorting to things like X-ray scans. Now that's no longer a problem, due to the new camera's capability to detect sources of light inside ...

Smacc , which uses AI to automate accounting, has secured a 3.5 million Series A round from Cherry Ventures, Rocket Internet, Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures, Grazia Equity and business angels. Smacc offers small and medium-sized enterprises a platform to digitize and automate accounting and financial processes. The founding trio Uli Erxleben, Janosch Novak and Stefan Korsch came up with the idea after find accounting to be the most painful part of their own startup. Erxleben managed Rocket Internet’s US ventures in New York and San Francisco, and is also the founder of Berliner Berg , a craft beer startup. Customers submit their receipts to Smacc, which are turned into a machine-readable format, encrypted, then allocated to an account. The platform gradually also self-learns, tracking invoices, sales and costs, as well as their liquidity. The system checks against some 64 data points, verifies the invoice, checking, for example, that the math adds up, and even if the VAT...

Last year saw record worldwide investment and implementation of clean energy such as wind, solar and hydropower. Some 147 Gigawatts of renewable electricity came online in 2015 - the largest annual increase ever and as much as Africa’s entire power generating capacity. Clean energy investment increased to $286bn (£198bn), with solar energy accounting for 56% of the total and wind power for 38%. Overall, more than twice as much money was spent on renewables than on coal and gas-fired power generation ($130bn in 2015), the REN21 global status reportfound. Christine Lins, REN21’s chief, said: “What is truly remarkable about these results is that they were achieved at a time when fossil fuel prices were at historic lows, and renewables remained at a significant disadvantage in terms of government subsidies. For every dollar spent boosting renewables, nearly four dollars were spent to maintain our dependence on fossil fuels.” For the first time, emerging economies outs...

SpaceX chief Elon Musk shed light on his new plan to send an unmanned spaceship to Mars as early as 2018, as part of his quest to some day colonize the Red Planet. He appeared to be referring to an upgraded version of the California-based company's Dragon cargo capsule, which is currently used as an unmanned spacecraft to shuttle food and supplies to and from the International Space Station. In a new exclusive this week with The Washington Post, the entrepeneur drew parallels between people crossing the oceans in centuries past to unknown worlds. The months-long journey is sure to be "hard, risky, dangerous, difficult," Musk told the Post, but he was confident people would sign up to go because "just as with the establishment of the English colonies, there are people who love that. They want to be the pioneers." Before that can happen, however, unmanned travel and a supply chain must be developed successfully. "Essentially what we're saying is we...

Elon Musk claims that humans are at risk of becoming the dumb "house pets" of artificial intelligence, unless we implant technology into our brains to help us compete with machine learning of the future. Musk announced that a 'neural lace' - which is basically a brain implant that can augment natural intelligence by hooking us up to computers - will be the key to maintaining our authority as a species. Musk is one of the biggest supporters of AI, but he hasn't been shy in the past about his concerns over the future of machine learning, with the tech entrepreneur last year penning an open letter - along with Stephen Hawking and dozens of other researchers - on the need to investigate the societal impacts of AI. His biggest worry is that AI will one day become smarter than humans - which could be a good thing when it comes to using them to help us cure diseases and solve global problems - but it also means that machines could one day come to think of us as lit...

On Wednesday night, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and announced that the speediest way to terraform Mars and allow humans to live outside of an airlock dome would be to nuke it. "The fast way is to drop thermonuclear weapons over the poles," Musk told Colbert, prompting the host to call him a super villain. But is the idea that crazy? The basis of the bomb plot is that the nukes would melt the frozen CO2 on the Red Planet's poles, releasing it as gas into the atmosphere. This would help to thicken up the Red Planet's thin atmosphere, which could be enough to heat the planet and allow water to exist in a liquid form. Essentially, the bombs would kick-start something similar to the global warming that's happening here on Earth, and hopefully trigger a cascade effect - so the more ice that melts, the more CO2 that's released, which warms the planet and melts more ice, and so on. However, there are some...

NASA scientists  have reported  that they've successfully tested an engine called the electromagnetic propulsion drive, or the EM Drive, in a vacuum that replicates space. The EM Drive experimental system could take humans to Mars in just 70 days without the need for rocket fuel, and it's no exaggeration to say that this could change everything. But before we get too excited (who are we kidding, we're already freaking out), it's important to note that these results haven't been replicated or verified by peer review, so there's a chance there's been some kind of error. But so far, despite a thorough attempt to poke holes in the results, the engine seems to hold up. The engine is controversial because it seems to violate one of the fundamental concepts of physics - the conservation of momentum, which states that for something to be propelled forward, it needs some kind of propellant to be pushed out in the opposite direction. But the EM Drive doesn't...

German car manufacturer Audi has reportedly invented a carbon-neutral diesel fuel, made solely from water, carbon dioxide and renewable energy sources. And the crystal clear 'e-diesel' is already being used to power the Audi A8 owned by the country’s Federal Minister of Education and Research, Johanna Wanka. The creation of the fuel is a huge step forward for sustainable transport, but the fact that it’s being backed by an automotive giant is even more exciting. Audi has now set up a pilot plant in Dresden, Germany, operated by clean tech company Sunfire, which will pump out 160 litres of the synthetic diesel every day in the coming months. Their base product, which they’re calling 'blue crude' is created using a three-step process. The first step involves harvesting renewable energy from sources such as wind, solar and hydropower. They then use this energy to split water into oxygen and pure hydrogen, using a process known as reversible electrolysis. This hyd...

Three-dimensional holographic images are a mainstay in many sci-fi films. But in real life, we’ve struggled to achieve the same effect without the use of annoying 3D glasses. Now scientists from Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia have used a graphene-based material to create a full-colour, pop-up, 3D floating display - visible from a wide angle with the naked eye. The effect was created using a graphene oxide, and could be applied to the touch-screen surface of smartphones or watches, the authors Min Gu and Xiangping Li explain over at The Conversation. Holograms work by bending light off the screen in a carefully controlled way so that, instead of bouncing directly back into your eye, it makes it appear as though it's projected off a separate display. The Swinburne researchers were able to create the floating 3D display by tweaking the refractive index - the measure of how much light bends as it passes through a medium - of graphene...

Aerogels have long been one of those ‘gee whiz’ materials that gets people to take notice—watching a solid float on air tends to do that. To accomplish their remarkable feats, aerogels are essentially a gel in which the liquid component of the gel has been replaced with gas. We’ve seen them used in applications from “ invisibility cloaks ” to  oil spill remediation . Now researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) have produced an aerogel out of graphene  that could have applications ranging from electronics to energy storage. Boosting the ‘gee whiz’ factor: the new material is produced through  3-D printing . In research published in  Nature Communications , the LLNL research team were able to produce a predetermined architecture for a graphene-based aerogel, which previously had always been random, by using 3-D printing. By being able to define the architecture, the researchers were able to improve the material’s performance. ...

A new study has narrowed the theoretical speed limit for how quickly quantum computers of the future will be able to transmit and process information. Quantum computing systems have the potential to perform certain calculations exponentially faster than classical computers. As such, they could offer enormous advantages for solving complex problems, like searching expansive databases, cracking modern encryption, and modelling atomic-scale systems for drug development. The fundamental building blocks of these computers are quantum bits, or qubits. While several candidate particles exist, most - if not all - qubits are single atoms. Information is stored on the magnetic spin of these atomic particles, which can point either "up" or "down" - states that are considered equivalent to the 0 and 1 of binary code. Importantly, qubits can harness a strange quantum phenomenon called superposition, which allows the spin to exist in both states simultaneously. A scal...