Tech

Lockpicking With Sound

Researchers at the National Unviersity of Singapore have developed a system called SpiKey that can predict 10 possible options of a key design just by recording the sound of a key in a lock. Of the 586,584 possible key combinations for a 6-pin lock, SpiKey can be used on approx. 56% of them to generate candidate key options that will open the lock.

Audio

Innovation

Tech

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Power Bricks

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Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a method to turn mason bricks into batteries. By soaking the bricks in a PEDOT conductive polymer, the bricks become capable of storing and conducting energy. One brick can be charged to 3 Volts in 10 seconds and then power a LED light for 10 minutes!

Innovation

Tech

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747 Floppy Disks

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Floppy disks are still used to update the navigational databases on Boeing 747 aircraft every 28 days!

Tech

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Trello Tips

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The Trello blog published a huge list of Trello tips to use to get the most out of the online management and collaboration tool.

Business

Tech

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Ireland Donates COVID Green App To Linux Foundation

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Ireland's Health Service Executive (HSE) has donated the COVID-19 Tracker app developed by NearForm as OpenSource software to the not-for-profit Linux Foundation, to allow other countries and jurisdictions to deploy the successful coronavirus tracing app quickly. The open source app has been named COVID Green, and the source code is available on GitHub.

Innovation

Life

Tech

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Podcast of the Week: Artificial Intelligence with Lex Fridman - Stephen Wolfram

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I recently discovered the Artificial Intelligence with Lex Fridman podcast via Find That Pod. It's like the Tim Ferris podcast but very heavy on the science detail. Lex interviews a range of the world's leading scientists, theorists and technologists and digs deep into their topics. I enjoyed his interview with Stephen Wolfram. Most of the podcast episodes leave me with questions and the want to learn more, which is great!

Podcast

Science

Tech

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Climate Strike Software Licence

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The Climate Strike Licence is a software usage licence that software developers can apply to their open source projects to prohibit the use of their code by applications or companies that threaten to accelerate climate change through fossil fuel extraction.

Environment

Tech

Web Dev

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Github Buries 21TB In The Arctic

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Github deposited 21TB of silver halides QR code data on archival polyester reels into Arctic World Archive, down the road from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The 186 archival film reels will be stored 250m below the permafrost and are due to last 1000 years.

Environment

Life

Tech

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Data Structures & Algorithms In Real Life

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Gergely Orosz published an interesting post describing which computer science data structures and algorithms he has used in real life while working at tech companies such as Skype, Skyscanner and Uber. The article is in response to criticism of overly complicated algorithm technical interview questions.

Tech

Web Dev

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Solar Flow Battery

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Researchers at University of Wisconsin-Madison have created a new device called a solar flow battery. The device combines a silicon/perovskite tendem solar cell with a chemical based redox flow battery. The device produces consistent 20% energy efficiency from a charge at any time.

Environment

Innovation

Tech

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