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Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant Unit 2 in Alabama deploys a fuel assembly with 3D printed fastening elements that were made by the experts of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Texas-based company ICON is making an experimental “Martian” building using a proprietary constructional 3D printer. The Mars Dune Alpha project implies refining usage of 3D printing technologies for future Martian buildings with the help of available materials. The project also covers researching the habitability of such buildings.

Multimodality has led the pack in machine learning in 2021. Neural networks are wolfing down images, text, speech and music all at the same time.  OpenAI is, as usual, top dog, but as if in defiance of their name, they are in no hurry to share their models openly.  At the beginning of the year, the company presented the DALL-E neural network, which generates 256x256 pixel images in answer to a written request.  Descriptions of it can be found as articles on arXiv and examples on their blog.  

As soon as DALL-E flushed out of the bushes, Chinese researchers got on its tail.  Their open-source CogView neural network does the same trick of generating images from text.  But what about here in Russia? One might say that “investigate, master, and train” is our engineering motto.  Well, we caught the scent, and today we can say that we created from scratch a complete pipeline for generating images from descriptive textual input written in Russian.

In this article we present the ruDALL-E XL model, an open-source text-to-image transformer with 1.3 billion parameters as well as ruDALL-E XXL model, an text-to-image transformer with 12.0 billion parameters which is available in DataHub SberCloud, and several other satellite models.

RPCS3 is an interesting project that emulates the PS3 console. It is actively evolving. Recently we heard the news that the emulator learned how run all the games from the console's catalog. That's a good excuse to analyze the project. We'll see which errors remained after new fixes were added to the project.

Tools to improve and control code quality can be a key success factor in a complex software project implementation. Static analyzers belong to such tools. Nowadays, you can find various static analyzers: from free open-source to cross-functional commercial solutions. On the one hand, it's great – you can choose from many options. On the other hand – you have to perform advanced research to find the right tool for your team.

Back in 2016 an United States based music composer and performer Sergio Elisondo released an one-man band music album A Winner Is You (know your meme), with multi-instrumental cover versions of tunes from numerous memorable classic NES games. A special feature of this release has been its version released in the NES cartridge format that would run on a classic unmodified console and play digitized audio of the full album, instead of the typical chiptune sound you would expect to come from this humble console. I was involved with the software development part of this project.

This year Sergio makes a return with a brand new music release. This time it is all original music album You Are Error, heavily influenced with the video game music aesthetics. It also comes with a special extra. This time we have raised the stakes, and a new NES cartridge release includes not only the digitized audio, but full motion videos for each song, done in the silhouette cutout style similar to the famous Bad Apple video. Yet again, this project is crowdfunded via Kickstarter. It already got the asked amount in a mere 7 hours, but there is still a little time to jump on the bandwagon and get yourself a copy. In the meantime I would like to share an insight on the technical side of both projects.

This shows the Bacon–Shor subsystem code implemented on a 15-ion chain.

Multiple heads are better than one in real world calculations. Now, a team of University of Maryland-led quantum engineers report that multiple qubits may be better than one when it comes to error-corrections.

In what’s been described as a foundational step toward using quantum computers to tackle practical problems, the team combined nine qubits — a quantum bit — to make a single, improved logical qubit. A logical qubit can be used to probe for mistakes that extremely sensitive quantum computers are subject to, according to the researchers.

In the paper, which was just published in Nature, the team write that “Although fault-tolerant design works in principle, it has not previously been demonstrated in an error-corrected physical system with native noise characteristics. Here we experimentally demonstrate fault-tolerant circuits for the preparation, measurement, rotation and stabilizer measurement of a Bacon–Shor logical qubit using 13 trapped ion qubits.”

Nine of the qubits were termed data qubits and the four remaining are referred to as ancilla — or extra — qubits. The logical qubit was based on a quantum error correction code to easily detect and correct errors and made it to be fault-tolerant, or minimize the negative effects of errors.

“Qubits composed of identical atomic ions are natively very clean by themselves,” said Christopher Monroe, who is a Fellow of the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science and a College Park Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Maryland in a university news release. “However, at some point, when many qubits and operations are required, errors must be reduced further, and it is simpler to add more qubits and encode information differently. The beauty of error correction codes for atomic ions is they can be very efficient and can be flexibly switched on through software controls.”

We often check retro games. In our company, many developers like to find interesting projects for themselves. They feel nostalgic when they're studying these projects. But we need to run retro games on something, right? This time we checked a project that helps to run old games on modern hardware.

Hello! It’s Top 3D Shop and this is Part 2 of our introduction to the world of 3D scanners by Chinese manufacturer Shining. The first part covered the desktop scanners. Now we are going to talk about the handheld line. We will compare the specs, provide overviews and talk about both the strong points and limitations of the devices. 

If you're interested in learning new languages or teaching them, then you probably know such a way as parallel reading. It helps to immerse yourself in the context, increases the vocabulary, and allows you to enjoy the learning process. When it comes to reading, you most likely want to choose your favorite author, theme, or something familiar and this is often impossible if no one has published such a variant of a parallel book. It's becoming even worse when you're learning some cool language like Hungarian or Japanese.

Today we are taking a big step forward toward breaking this situation.

We will use the lingtrain_aligner tool. It's an open-source project on Python which aims to help all the people eager to learn foreign languages. It's a part of the Lingtrain project, you can follow us on Telegram, Facebook and Instagram. Let's start!

Find the texts

At first, we should find two texts we want to align. Let's take two editions of "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee, in Russian and the original one.

Hello! This article will cover 3D printer manufacturer Modix and its professional large-scale 3D printers. The review will include the history of the brand, its products, their functions and possible applications.

My name is Serhii Pimenov. I’m a web developer from Kyiv, Ukraine (maybe you know me by the nickname olton).

Today I'm going to speak about one of my tools for the Mina blockchain - “Mina Monitor”. It’s the first article in the series about Mina and Mina Tools. In this article, I will introduce you to my tool for monitoring the Mina nodes.

In this video, we are making a cable for connecting a quadrature encoder to a Servosila brushless motor controller, and and then running a servo motor in Direct Drive mode. To make the cable we are using a cable assembly kit that can be purchased from the internet store. Alternatively, the components for the cable can be bought in other places. The part numbers are given in the controller's datasheet.

The cable assembly kit consists of a connector and a set of wires with pre-crimped socket blades. If you have a crimper tool, you can also attach the socket blades to wires by yourself.

Lets open a datasheet document that comes with the brushless motor controller. Note that each connector has its first pin clearly marked with a "1" sign. Conventionally, the numbering of pins is done in such a way that there are rows of odd-numbered and even-numbered pins.

The quadrature encoder's electrical interface has 5 wires in total. Positions of the pins of each of the wires are given in the table. The socket blades need to be pushed into the connector until you feel a "click". The blades lock into the connector's sockets. Optionally, primarily for cosmetic reasons, you may want to add a heat-shrink tubing to your cable.

The brushless motor controllers come in two distinct forms, a circular and a rectangular one. Both models are identical in terms of capabilities, features, firmware, and external electrical connectors.

The connector has a locking mechanism that keeps it in place. I soldered a mating connector to the other side of the cable - a connector that my brushless motor needs. Note that your motor will likely require a different connector, or no connector at all. It is always a good idea to test an end-to-end integrity of the cable and its connectors. Lets buzz the wires using a multimeter. The cable is ready.

SEPIC-Ćuk split-rail converter can be used to make positive and negative supplies from a single input voltage for relatively well-matched loads like operational amplifiers.

Transient models are time consuming. Average models reduce modeling time drastically.

The PWM switch average models for current- and voltage-mode are described in details in Christophe Basso’s book “Switch-Mode Power Supplies, Second Edition: SPICE Simulations and Practical Designs”. Using of these models for SEPIC and Ćuk converters is also shown.

This text shows how to use the PWM switch average model to design a split-rail SEPIC-Ćuk converter.

Free money to fund your own business is probably the most cherished dream of every budding entrepreneur.

And getting a grant is what can bring it to life. While small business owners dream of a grant to fund their startup, the process of its obtaining is not as easy and cloudless as it may seem.

However, if you know where to look for the right fund and how to apply, one can significantly nick in the path to getting seed money.

Difference between a grant, attracted investment, and loan.

Nothing and nobody will escape oblivion. Whatever you may say, the history of mankind is a history of automation and the subsequent evolution of workers. This happened both during the first industrial revolution and during the second. The same thing happened with digital revolution. Now machine learning and artificial intelligence are being implemented everywhere. What is the future of software testing?

Hi from RaccoonLab, a team of enthusiasts in field robotics! We want to share our true-HITL UAVCAN-based simulator for PX4.

We believe a unified UAVCAN bus for drone onboard electronics will become a mainstream approach shortly. Our simulator is already based on UAVCAN (in opposition to UART-MAVLINK) and emulates exactly the same messages as real UAVCAN-sensors.

November 10, 2020 was in many ways a landmark event in the microprocessor industry: Apple unveiled its new Mac Mini, the main feature of which was the new M1 chip, developed in-house. It is not an exaggeration to say that this processor is a landmark achievement for the ARM ecosystem: finally an ARM architecture chip whose performance surpassed x86 architecture chips from competitors such as Intel, a niche that had been dominated for decades.

But the main interest for us is not the M1 processor itself, but the Rosetta 2 binary translation technology. This allows the user to run legacy x86 software that has not been migrated to the ARM architecture. Apple has a lot of experience in developing binary translation solutions and is a recognized leader in this area. The first version of the Rosetta binary translator appeared in 2006 were it aided Apple in the transition from PowerPC to x86 architecture. Although this time platforms were different from those of 2006, it was obvious that all the experience that Apple engineers had accumulated over the years, was not lost, but used to develop the next version - Rosetta 2.

We were keen to compare this new solution from Apple, a similar product Huawei ExaGear (with its lineage from Eltechs ExaGear) developed by our team. At the same time, we evaluated the performance of binary translation from x86 to Arm provided by Microsoft (part of MS Windows 10 for Arm devices) on the Huawei MateBook E laptop. At present, these are the only other x86 to Arm binary translation solution that we are aware of on the open market.

Knowing parameters of small-signal control-to-output transfer functions makes it easier for engineers to design compensation networks of DC/DC converters. The equations for SEPIC can be found in different works and Application Notes, but there are differences. A work has been done to solve this problem.

Simplified design equations for SEPIC with Current Mode control (CM) in Continuous Conduction Mode (CCM) suitable for practical design of compensation networks are shown.