Meet EMILY: The Remote-Controlled Buoy that May Serve as Your Next Lifeguard

EMILY to the Rescue: The next lifeguard hitting the beach this summer may be EMILY — the Emergency Integrated Lifesaving Lanyard — a remote-controlled buoy that recently helped rescue nearly 300 Syrian migrants from drowning in the waters near the Greek island of Lesbos. A collaboration between the U.S. Navy and maritime robotic company Hydronalix, EMILY can travel up to 22 mph and is outfitted with two-way communication radios, a live-streaming video camera and lights for use at night. Source: Engadget and Military.com

$12.7M Using data believed to be stolen from a South African bank and printed on 1,600 counterfeit credit cards, hackers stole millions of dollars from ATMs over a two-hour period in Japan. Authorities think that more than 100 people participated in the heist and said it’s possible that data-stealing skimmers may have been used to collect the information. Source: Gizmodo

wind-turbine-pink.jpgClean Living

Portugal met a clean-energy milestone: The country ran entirely on solar, wind and hydro power for 107 straight hours in May. Last year renewable energy sources provided nearly half (48 percent) of Portugal’s electricity, with wind power accounting for 22 percent.  Source: The Guardian

And the Award Goes to ...

Computers may be an integral part of the workforce in the future, but for now at least, artists are safe. Dartmouth College’s Neukom Institute for Computational Science held a series of Turing tests that sought to determine if algorithms can produce “human-quality” works of art like sonnets, short stories and dance music sets. A group of judges, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, did not find any AI-produced pieces to be award-worthy, which would have required a majority of the judges to rate a machine-generated piece as being composed by a human. “Our algorithms seem not yet able to imitate human kinds of poetry, but the code that was submitted was still amazing,” said Daniel Rockmore, a professor of mathematics and one of the event’s organizers. Source: Dartmouth Now