TLDR 2019-07-26

eBay will be launching a Managed Delivery service in the US next year. The service will use a network of third-party partners to supply warehousing, packing, and delivery services. Around half of the items listed on eBay will qualify for the new service. Managed Delivery will aim to deliver packages in two to three days. Sellers will be able to focus more on their businesses rather than packing products.

Apple has bought Intel's smartphone modem business for $1 billion. The deal includes the acquisition of intellectual property, equipment, and around 2,200 Intel employees. Intel will continue to develop 5G modems for non-smartphone devices. This deal means that Apple will soon be able to produce its own custom hardware for its smartphones. Apple currently relies on Qualcomm for its hardware, a relationship that has caused problems in the past. Qualcomm requires customers to agree to high patent royalty fees before supplying hardware.

UCLA space scientists have discovered thick ice deposits on the moon. New observations suggest that there may be a massive reservoir of frozen water beneath the surface of the moon. Due to the spin axes of the moon and Mercury, many areas never see the sun, so permanently shadowed regions have thick ice deposits. Both Mercury and the moon are covered by impact craters. When investigating the craters on Mercury, it was found that the craters near the poles were shallower, which was later found to be caused by the accumulation of ice deposits. The formation of the ice deposits on the moon suggests that the deposits may be older than the ice on Mercury.

Speech is a complex process that involves both the motions of the mouth and vibrations from vocal cords within the throat. An artificial throat has been designed that can be worn like a temporary tattoo. It has detectors that are able to measure movements on human skin. The flexible device is about double the size of a person's thumbnail and is made by laser-scribing graphene on a thin sheet of polyvinyl alcohol film. It can be attached to a person's throat with water. The device connects through electrodes to a small armband that houses the hardware needed to translate the signals into sound.

This repository contains a curated list of open source libraries to help deploy, monitor, version, scale, and secure production machine learning. Each link has a description of the library. Videos and ratings are provided if available.

Recurrent Neural Networks are a type of neural network that specializes in processing sequences. A common application of RNNs is for Natural Language Processing due to its effectiveness at handling text. RNNs are able to have variable-length sequences as both inputs and outputs, which sets them apart from other fixed-size type networks. The ability to process sequences makes RNNs very useful, for example, in Machine Translation and Sentiment Analysis. This guide builds an RNN to train it to determine whether a given text string is positive or negative.

Elon Musk announced during a conference call on Wednesday that Tesla co-founder and CTO JB Straubel will be stepping down as an executive at Tesla. Drew Baglino, vice president of technology, will take over his duties. Straubel was responsible for some of Tesla's most important technology, especially around batteries. Unlike other high-profile executives who left Tesla this year to join Apple, Straubel will be involved with a company called Redwood Materials, which focuses on recycling technology.

Google is facing legal action by member of Congress and Democratic presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, due to the suspension of Gabbard's campaign advertising account during the first Democratic presidential debate. It is alleged that Gabbard's account was suspended for several hours during the first Democratic debate when Gabbard was briefly the most-searched candidate on Google. Google claims that the suspension was due to an automated system that flagged the account for unusual activity, and that the account was reinstated shortly after the suspension. Gabbard claims that the suspension was a threat to free speech, fair elections, and to democracy.