Apr 27
White dwarf stars are a fascinating part of the sprawling universe around us, representing the end stage of a star already billions of years old.
Apr 27
Belkin’s partnership with Wi-Charge is set to revolutionize charging — and make it easier than ever to charge devices from further away.
Apr 27
If you’re looking to take your amateur videos to the next level, upgrading to a capable camera and a high-quality lens is just the tip of the iceberg. A little camera movement goes a long way when it comes to making footage more compelling, and now Edelkrone has made its JibONE crane even smaller. With it, no matter…
Apr 27
Star Wars animation is everywhere lately, from the climax of Clone Wars to the arrival of The Bad Batch, to things like Visions, Galaxy of Adventures, and Galactic Pals in between. But… there is another: Tales of the Jedi.
Apr 27
TV Line reports that actor Melissa McBride has exited the upcoming Walking Dead spin-off series that was going to be focused on her character Carol and TWD’s other fan-favorite series regular Daryl, played by Norman Reedus. Now, the show will focus exclusively on Daryl, which… uh… was likely the only possible…
Apr 27
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness is a week away, and we’re happy to report it starts very strong. Marvel Studios screened 20 minutes from the film at CinemaCon 2022, and it drops you right back into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with several exciting action scenes right from the start. We’ll describe them…
Apr 27
Elon Musk — the tech billionaire known for talking smack and trolling on Twitter — isn’t allowed to publish tweets about his deal to take over Twitter if he belittles the company or its representatives, according to a new filing on the transaction submitted by Twitter to the Securities and Exchange Commission on…
Apr 27
These eyes have seen a sight I never thought I’d see: a trailer for Avatar 2. After over a decade of development and production, writer-director James Cameron finally debuted the teaser trailer for his long-awaited, highly anticipated sequel at CinemaCon in Las Vegas. And while you can’t see it just yet, you’ll see it…
Apr 27
‘The Batman 2’ Has Officially Been Confirmed. Here’s What You Need To Know.
Posted in: Today's ChiliThe caped crusader is coming back for another round.
Apr 27
They may not be able to shout “Eureka!” like their human colleagues but AI/ML system have shown immense potential in the field of compound discovery — whether that’s sifting through reams of data to find new therapeutic compounds or imagining new recipes using the ingredients’ flavor profiles. Now a team from Meta AI, working with researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have created an AI that can devise and refine formulas for increasingly high-strength, low-carbon concrete.
Traditional methods for creating concrete, of which we produce billions of tons every year, are far from ecologically friendly. In fact, they generate an estimated 8 percent of the annual global carbon dioxide emission total. Advances have been made in recent years to reduce the concrete industry’s carbon footprint (as well as in make the material more rugged, more resilient and even capable of charging EVs) but overall its production remains among the most carbon intensive in modern construction.
Reducing the amount of carbon that goes into concrete could be as simple as changing the ingredients that go into concrete. The material is made from four basic components: cement, aggregate, water and admixture (which act as doping agents). Cement is far and away the most carbon-intensive ingredient of the four so research has been made into reducing the amount of cement needed by supplementing it with lower-carbon materials like fly ash, slag, or ground glass.
Similarly, aggregate materials like gravel, crushed stone, sand might be replaced with recycled concrete. The problem is that there are dozens of potential ingredient materials that could be used and the ratio of their amounts all interact to influence the structural profile of the resulting concrete. In short, there are a whole slew of possible combinations for researchers to test, select, and refine; and working through those myriad options sequentially, at human speed, is going to take forever. So the Meta folks trained an AI to do it, much faster.
Working with Prof. Lav Varshney, electrical and computer engineering department, and Prof. Nishant Garg, civil engineering department, both of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the team first trained the model using the Concrete Compressive Strength data set. This set includes more than 1,000 concrete formulas as well as their structural attributes, including seven-day and 28-day compressive strength data. The team determined the resulting concrete mixture’s carbon footprint using the Cement Sustainability Initiative’s Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) tool.
Of the generated list of potential formulas, the research team then selected the five most promising options and iteratively refined them until they met or exceeded the 7- and 28-day strength metrics while dropping carbon requirements by at least 40 percent. The refinement process took mere weeks and ended up generating a concrete formula that exceeded all of those requirements while replacing as much as 50 percent of the required cement with fly ash and slag. Meta then teamed with concrete company Ozinga, the folks who recently built Meta’s newest datacenter in Illinois, to further refine the formula and conduct real world testing.
Looking ahead, the Meta team hopes to further improve the formula’s 3- and 5-day strength profiles (basically ensuring it dries faster so the rest of the construction can move ahead sooner) and get a better understanding of how it cures under varying weather conditions like wind or high humidity.
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