The First Company to Land on the Moon and Other Future Tech

#HappyThursday It’s been quite some time since we’ve posted the latest future science and technology news. Let’s get started!

The First Company to Land on the Moon

Moon Express, a contender at the Google Lunar XPrize competition, has just received approval to land their MX-1 lander on the moon. The company has won the Landing Prize ($1 million) and the Imaging Prize ($250,000) at the competition.

“Headquartered at the NASA Ames Research Park in Mountain View, CA, Moon Express is forging a new paradigm, combining best practices of traditional aerospace know how with the innovation and entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley,” reads the company’s website, “Moon Express is developing innovative, flexible and scalable new robotic spacecraft that will radically reduce the cost of space exploration and unlock the mysteries and resources of the Moon.”

Once their lander has a successful touchdown, they hope to collect elements which are rare on Earth, claiming they will be “profitable from [their] first mission”.

Dubai to Build Largest Concentrated Solar Plant

We’ve reported a lot about renewable sources of energy and how countries are using it to fight deadly carbon emissions from polluting the atmosphere, such as Portugal which ran on solar power for 4 days straight. Dubai has just announced it will start to take bids for the world’s largest concentrated solar power plant.

“Dubai Water and Electricity Authority (DEWA) has launched the world’s largest concentrated solar power (CSP) project which will generate 1000MW of power when completed. Located within the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, the new project will include five facilities. DEWA has launched a tender for international consultants to submit a proposal for advisory services for the first 200MW plant,” reported Gulf Business.

Facebook’s DeepText Categorizes Everything We Write

Facebook has developed a number of software products and technologies in the past, such as open-source AI hardware and open-source 360 degree cameras, to APIs that employ use of artificial intelligence. Now, the company has unveiled DeepText to better understand words and conversations to offer its user a better experience.

“Text understanding on Facebook requires solving tricky scaling and language challenges where traditional NLP techniques are not effective. Using deep learning, we are able to understand text better across multiple languages and use labeled data much more efficiently than traditional NLP techniques,” reads the website.

“DeepText [is] a deep learning-based text understanding engine that can understand with near-human accuracy the textual content of several thousands posts per second, spanning more than 20 languages. DeepText leverages several deep neural network architectures, including convolutional and recurrent neural nets, and can perform word-level and character-level based learning.

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