Measuring

Claire Boteler. Credit: Dalhousie University The ocean controls our climate. It is the largest carbon sink on the planet, absorbing 40% of human fossil fuel emissions and almost all the excess heat generated by global warming. There is an urgent need for more data on this critical carbon-absorbing function, particularly in the…

An international team of astrophysicists and cosmologists, using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), one of the world’s most powerful astronomical cameras, and data from the first three years of the HSC sky survey, have spent the past year studying dark matter.Using the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), a team led by <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Princeton University</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Founded in 1746, Princeton…

I’ve developed an odd fascination with body-measuring technology, especially as it relates to the fashion world. Many companies are working on infrastructure that will hopefully one day let us buy clothes custom-tailored for the exact contours of our bodies. That should make people like me, who feel very under-served by the traditional fashion industry, a lot happier. It should also help to reduce the waste generated by the overproduction of clothes nobody wants to buy, which is a problem both for businesses and the…

With digital technologies transforming industries, companies adopt Agile and other practices to gain a competitive advantage. DevOps is one such method that has changed software development as we know it. The new-age approach helps accelerate productivity and also enables better collaboration between the development and operation teams. But the biggest benefit of adopting DevOps is faster time-to-market. It has helped around 83% of organizations unlock business value and deliver customer value faster. However, the brutal…

Even though the new PyArrow backend for Pandas is bringing exciting features, it still looks disappointing in terms of speed.Image by author via MidjourneyPeople have been complaining about Pandas' speed ever since they tried reading their first gigabyte-sized dataset with read_csv and realized they had to wait for - gasp - five seconds. And yes, I was one of those complainers.Five seconds might not sound a lot, but when loading the dataset itself takes that much runtime, it usually means subsequent operations will take…

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNETA tool that I use a lot for day-to-day diagnostics and troubleshooting is the humble multimeter. My go-to unit for the past few years has been the super reliable, super useful Kaiweets HT206D, and its smaller sibling, the PokitMeter The leads ratchet out of the body of the PokitMeter. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNETAnd when you're done, they wind themselves back into the meter with a press of a button -- like a measuring tape! and $129 for the PokitMeter that I…

June Wan/ZDNETSamsung on Tuesday unveiled its first ultra-wideband (UWB) chipset, Exynos Connect U100, aimed at short-range communications. The South Korean tech giant says the chipset is just single-digit centimeters in size and can measure as precisely as under five-degree accuracy for sharing precise distance and location information in mobile, automotive, and IoT devices.Also: Samsung is looking at satellite connectivity for 5G phonesThe overarching Exynos Connect brand is also new, and Samsung plans to promote…

A cloud of users' opinions with its center of mass marked with a red square and the main components as arrows with lengths proportional to their explained variances. Credit: Samuel Martín-Gutiérrez Germany, India, Mexico, and Spain. As multiparty democracies, these countries present a more complex picture of what brings people together—or divides them. Using social media data, a group of researchers proposes a novel approach…

Determining the passage of time in our world of ticking clocks and oscillating pendulums is a simple case of counting the seconds between 'then' and 'now'.Down at the quantum scale of buzzing electrons, however, 'then' can't always be anticipated. Worse still, 'now' often blurs into a haze of vagueness. A stopwatch simply isn't going to work for some scenarios.A potential solution could be found in the very shape of the quantum fog itself, according to a 2022 study by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden.Their…

One way to judge the impact of Western economic pressure on Russia is by how many Western companies stop doing business there.Measuring that impact has produced an unusually bitter dispute between a group of academics at Yale University and another at two Swiss universities. The two groups have produced widely divergent estimates of the scale of corporate departures from Russia since it invaded Ukraine a year ago.  Yale’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute first began publishing estimates of how many major multinational…