Beta Bytes: Week of December 19th

Beta Bytes

Dec 17

Snippets of financial news calibrated to science, technology, and engineering as well as our client’s interests.

The Five-hundred-metre Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST)—the only significant instrument of its kind —is about to open its doors for foreign astronomers to use, hoping to attract the world's top scientific talent.
The Chinese installation in Pingtang, Guizhou province, is up to three times more sensitive than the US-owned one, and is surrounded by a five-kilometre (three-mile) "radio silence" zone where mobile phones and computers are not allowed.
Work on the FAST began in 2011 and it started full operations in January this year, working mainly to capture the radio signals emitted by celestial bodies, in particular pulsars—rapidly rotating dead stars.

Richard Socher was the former chief scientist at Salesforce, who helped build the Einstein artificial intelligence platform, now wants to fix consumer search by creating his own search engine.
The new engine is called you.com and will perform general searches with a concentration on complex consumer purchases where you have to open several tabs to compare information.
Socher’s motivation to build his own search stemmed from the mass of information online that nobody can possibly process, and it being impossible to know what you can trust as accurate, with both of those issues having a major impact on society at large.

Given that the built environment is responsible for a high amount of the world’s carbon production, companies involved in large-scale infrastructure and construction projects are turning to a number of technologies in order to mitigate their environmental footprint.
A system called EcoNet has been developed alongside two other companies, Sunbelt Rentals U.K. and Invisible Systems, and functions to control or reduce the energy output from key appliances in cabins, such as those in kitchens, drying rooms and office spaces.
Also this week Enel Green Power Brasil Participacoes, the Brazil-based renewable subsidiary of the Enel Group, announced it had began construction of five renewable energy plants in the northeast.

Multiple lawsuits were filed against Facebook this week, including one from the Federal Trade Commission that seeks to remove Instagram and WhatsApp from the company's control.
The complaint alleges that Facebook has demonstrated a pattern of squashing competition by buying up smaller companies before they can become big enough to pose a real threat to Facebook's market share.
Facebook has responded with a defense of its acquisitions, calling the lawsuits filed against it "revisionist history" and pointing out that the FTC and other relevant overseers approved of the Instagram and WhatsApp deals back when they happened.

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