This week’s great tech stories from around the web (until June 11th)

COMPUTER

Photonic chip performs image recognition at the speed of light
Charles Q. Choi | IEEE spectrum
“In a new study, researchers have developed a photonic deep neural network that can directly analyze images without the need for a clock, sensor or large memory modules. It can classify an image in less than 570 picoseconds, which is comparable to a single clock cycle in state-of-the-art microchips. “It can classify nearly 2 billion images per second,” said lead study author Firooz Aflatouni.

AUTOMATION

How the Mayflower became the first autonomous ship to cross the Atlantic Ocean?
Susan Karlin | Fast company
“Some 400 years after the original Mayflower sailed across the Atlantic, its unmanned robotic descendant has completed the first transatlantic crossing at its own discretion. After seven years of planning and 40 days at sea, the Mayflower Autonomous Ship (MAS400) finally entered Halifax, Nova Scotia on June 5, after a journey of 3,500 miles from Plymouth, UK.”

LIFESPAN

Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging
Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review
“The oil kingdom fears that the population is aging at an accelerated rate and hopes to test drugs to fix the problem. The first may be the diabetes drug metformin. … The sum, if the Saudis can spend it, could make the Gulf state the largest single sponsor of researchers trying to understand the underlying causes of aging — and how to slow it down with drugs.”

CRYPTO CURRENCY

How ‘trustless’ is Bitcoin really?
Siobhan Roberts | The New York Times
“In myth, the cryptocurrency is egalitarian, decentralized and virtually anonymous. The reality is very different, scientists have found. …’Drip-by-drop, information leakage erodes the once impenetrable blocks, creating a new landscape of socioeconomic data,’ report Ms. Blackburn and her collaborators in their new paper, which has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

How DALL-E could fuel a creative revolution
Casey Newton | The edge
“Every few years a technology comes along that neatly divides the world into before and after. … It’s been a few years since I saw the kind of nascent technology that made me call my friends and say, you have to see this† But this week I did as I have a new one to add to the list. It’s an image generation tool called DALL-E, and while I have very little idea how it will end up being used, it’s one of the most exciting new products I’ve seen since I started writing this one. newsletter.”

TRANSPORT

Lightyear says its $263,000 solar-powered car will go into production later this year
Andrew J. Hawkins | The edge
“The Lightyear 0 has five square meters of ‘patented double-curve solar panels’, allowing the vehicle to recharge itself when driving around or just sitting in the sun. Someone with a daily commute of just under 35 km (21 miles) could potentially drive for months without plugging in the vehicle to charge.”

ENERGY

Japan’s Big Boy deep-sea turbine will harness the power of ocean currents
Staff | Popular mechanics
“Japan drops a massive 330-tonne turbine generator on the ocean floor just off the coast of the country in an effort to obtain theoretically unlimited renewable energy. …As Japan has the sixth largest territorial waters in the world, the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization believes that the Kuroshio Current alone can generate 200 gigawatts of energy through submerged turbines – about 60 percent of Japan’s current generation capacity, Bloomberg reports.”

DRONES

The first submarine-launched drone can see far beyond a periscope
Andrew Liszewski | Gizmodo
“The advantage of hiding a giant ship underwater is that it can sneak up on targets undetected. The downside is that it’s hard to keep an eye on what’s happening above the waterline: a problem a company called SpearUAV may have solved with a quadcopter that can be launched from a submarine while it’s still submerged.