Hewlett Packard Enterprise developing 'The Machine'

Business Insider reports: [edited]

HPE has come a big step closer to launching a computer that it's been talking about, researching, and developing since 2014.

It uses a new kind of memory to be able to store and instantly analyse mind-boggling amounts of data. The current prototype that HPE is showing off today contains 160 terabytes (TB) of memory, enough to store and work with every book in the Library of Congress five times over.

But this new kind of memory can expand far beyond that. HPE expects to be able to build a machine that reaches up to 4,096 yottabytes, enough to hold 250,000 times all the data currently stored in the world. The Machine can crunch through "every digital health record of every person on earth; every piece of data from Facebook; every trip of Google’s autonomous vehicles; and every data set from space exploration all at the same time", HPE CEO Meg Whitman wrote in a blog post.

Not only has the company invented a new kind of memory to build this computer, but the company is breaking from its long-standing partnership with Microsoft and building a new operating system, based on Linux, to run this computer. It is also using ARM chips as the main processor, not Intel chips.
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Jim Kovaleski – Urban Nomadic Gardener

Boing Boing reports: [edited]

Justin Rhodes profiles Jim Kovaleski, an urban market gardener who leases other people's residential yards for planting produce, which he harvests and sells up and down the east coast of the United States.
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Glowee Bioluminescent Light

InnoEnergy reports: [edited]

Glowee develops a lighting system that does not consume any electricity, requires no power supply, and produces very little CO2 or light pollution.

Twenty-five-year-old design graduate Sandra Rey is a woman with a mission. For three years she has had a vision of a world lit by an inexhaustible, living and eco-friendly source of bioluminescence, the phenomenon that enables fireflies to glow and anglerfish to lure their prey. “I want to see a world where bioluminescence is part of everyday life,” says Sandra. Glowee, the company she founded, develops biological systems that reproduce this chemical reaction.

What Glowee makes is a gel made up of (nonpathogenic and nontoxic) bacteria in a nutrient solution in which the microbes thrive. The resulting culture comes in transparent pods of various shapes and sizes that emit a glow until the microorganisms eventually die.

Sandra claims that the product’s entire life cycle equates to half the CO2 emissions of an equivalent LED system. What’s more, the cold, soft light it emits will not disturb urban fauna and the system’s inherent portability makes it suitable for isolated communities and facilities. The product has a host of marketing applications, from shop windows to road signs and street furniture. In the longer term, it may be used in building materials and even in paints.

Originally translated from La Tribune.
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