NASA has opened a new website to host the photographs of the Earth taken by the DSCOVR (Deep Space Climate Observatory) satellite from its orbit, about a million and a half kilometers (about 930,000 miles) from the planet. This mission, jointly managed by NASA, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and U.S. Air Force, has its main aim in monitoring solar wind but it also takes pictures of the Earth.
After the rumors in recent days came the official confirmation of the agreement that will allow Dell to buy EMC, also known as EMC Corporation or EMC². There was talk of huge figures, around $50 billion, but this prediction has been largely superseded because Dell will pay a total of $67 billion. The payment will be of $33.15 for each EMC share of which 24.05 in cash and the rest in stock tracking, which are equity offerings linked to the evolution of the shares of VMware, a subsidiary of EMC that remains independent. This is the biggest acquisition in the technology world.
This week IBM announced the birth of a new business unit based on its cognitive computing system Watson. It’s called IBM Cognitive Business Solutions and intends to leverage this intelligence artificial to provide business consulting. The term cognitive business represents according to the company an application in this field of Watson, which becomes a kind of digital assistant that can provide suggestions based on the analysis of massive amounts of data.
IBM announced a leap forward in the realization of carbon nanotubes circuits. It’s one of the most promising technologies in electronics but so far many problems in its practical application prevented its practical use. IBM now claims to have discovered a way to use it to create transistors to replace the current silicon-based ones.
Google introduced a new compression algorithm called Brotli in order to reduce the traffic of web pages. The idea is that web sites transmit everything that composes the various pages in this compressed format allowing in this way also a higher loading speed. Google released Brotli as free / open source software under the Apache 2.0 license and put the source code available to anyone on GitHub.
