The erosion and bad road structure in Edo State was further exposed as Independent and National Electoral Commission officers and other personnel had difficulties in accessing designated areas.
INEC officials and over 30 police officers had to pull their trousers and shoes to cross a very large flood at Udaba Ekperi village ( Estako Central LGA ).
“As bad as it may, they had to carry their weapons and equipment on their heads” an eyewitness said.
The election in Edo State has progressed peacefully with the All Progressives Congress candidate, Godwin Obaseki leading the race.
On Tuesday, September 27, the Oluwo of Iwo, Oba Abdul Rasheed Adewale Akanbi Telu 1, made a shocking revelation about the superiority of traditional Obas in Yoruba land over the political office leaders and religious leaders, in Nigeria.
Oba Adewale Akanbi made this known at the 1st City People Culture lecture held at Bowen University, Iwo, Osun state. He disclosed that the importance of a traditional Oba cannot be over emphasized because the words of the Oba holds more divine relevance than any man who is not a king.
He said: “The power that god almighty bestowed upon a king cannot be overemphasized. Sadly, the highly placed throne of a traditional king has been relegated due to loss of value for culture and misconception of history. Any nation that relegates the title of Oba has lost every sense of leadership that represents a divine purpose of the almighty. The pastors and Imams are not the representative of god but the Obas are a religious leader such as pastor Adeboye or bishop Oyedepo can only pray but do not have the authority to decree. Obas don’t pray, they decree. They represent the almighty god here on earth and the crown is the symbol and gods supremacy that we carry as kings.”
Now we know how Elon Musk plans to get 1 million people to Mars.
At a conference in Mexico today (Sept. 27), the SpaceX founder and CEO unveiled the company's Interplanetary Transport System (ITS), which will combine the most powerful rocket ever built with a spaceship designed to carry at least 100 people to the Red Planet per flight.
If all goes according to plan, the reusable ITS will help humanity establish a permanent, self-sustaining colony on the Red Planet within the next 50 to 100 years, Musk said at the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara. [SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport for Mars in Images]
"What I really want to do here is to make Mars seem possible — make it seem as though it's something that we could do in our lifetimes, and that you can go," he said.
Mars transport system
A cutaway look at SpaceX's Interplanetary Transport System spaceship to ferry humans to Mars and beyond.
Credit: SpaceX
The ITS rocket will be more or less a scaled-up version of the first stage of SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster, Musk said. But the 254-foot-tall (77.5 meters) ITS booster will feature 42 Raptor engines, whereas the Falcon 9 is powered by nine Merlins. When combined with its crewed spaceship, the ITS will stand a full 400 feet (122 m) high, Musk wrote on Twitter. That would make it the largest spaceflight system ever built, taller even than NASA's legendary Saturn V moon rocket.
The Raptor engine, which SpaceX recently test-fired for the first time, is about the same size as Merlin but three times more powerful, Musk said. ITS will therefore be an incredibly potent machine, capable of lofting 300 tons to low-Earth orbit (LEO) — more than two times more than Saturn V could lift. (That's for ITS's reusable version; an expendable variant could launch about 550 tons to LEO, Musk said.)
The spaceship, which sits atop the booster, will be 162 feet (49.5 m) tall and 56 feet (17 m) wide and will have nine Raptors of its own. The booster will launch the spaceship to Earth orbit, then return to make a soft landing at its launch site, which is currently envisioned to be Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. [Fly Through SpaceX's Interplanetary Spaceship | Video]
The spaceship will lift off with little if any fuel on board, to maximize the payload — people, cargo or a combination of both — that the craft is able to carry to orbit. An ITS booster will therefore launch again, topped with a tanker, and rendezvous with the orbiting spaceship to fill its tank.
Then, when the timing is right — Earth and Mars align favorably for interplanetary missions just once every 26 months — the spaceship portion of the ITS will turn its engines on and blast from Earth orbit toward the Red Planet.
The spaceship will be capable of transporting at least 100 and perhaps as many as 200 people, Musk said. It will also likely feature movie theaters, lecture halls and a restaurant, giving the Red Planet pioneers a far different experience than that enjoyed by NASA's Apollo astronauts, who were crammed into a tiny capsule on their way to the moon.
"It'll be, like, really fun to go," Musk said. "You'll have a great time."
This SpaceX graphic shows how the capabilities of the company's Interplanetary Transport for Mars stacks up to NASA's massive Saturn V moon rocket.
Credit: SpaceX
The powerful Raptors will allow the ship to make the trip in as little as 80 days initially, depending on exactly where Earth and Mars are at the time, Musk said. That's a pretty quick trip; it takes six to nine months for spacecraft to reach the Red Planet using currently available technology. And Musk said he eventually thinks the ITS ship will be able to cut the travel time to just 30 days or so.
There won't be just one ship making the journey. When the ITS is really up and running, 1,000 or more of the ships will zoom off to Mars every 26 months.
"The Mars colonial fleet would depart en masse," Musk said.
This fleet would land on Mars using "supersonic retropropulsion," slowing down enough to touch down softly by firing onboard thrusters rather than relying on parachutes. SpaceX said it plans to test this landing technique duringthe company's upcoming "Red Dragon" mission, which aims to launch SpaceX's uncrewed Dragon capsule toward Mars in May 2018.
Not a one-way trip
SpaceX also plans to build a solar-powered factory on Mars that will use the carbon dioxide and water ice in the planet's air and soil, respectively, to generate methane and oxygen — the propellant used by the Raptor engine. (Musk didn't discuss other aspects of the Mars colony; SpaceX is concentrating on the transportation architecture, reasoning that the colonists themselves will build most of the city they live in.) [SpaceX's Interplanetary Ship Could Go Beyond Mars | Video]
The ITS spaceships will be refueled on Mars and will launch back to Earth from there, meaning prospective colonists don't have to stay on the Red Planet forever if they don't want to. (Getting off Mars doesn't require a big rocket, because the planet is much smaller than Earth and therefore has a weaker gravitational pull.)
"We need the spaceship back, so it's coming," Musk said. "You can jump on board or not."
Each ITS spaceship will probably be able to fly at least a dozen times, and each booster should see even more action, Musk said. This reusability is the key component of SpaceX's plan, and should be the chief driver in bringing the price of a Mars trip — which Musk said would cost about $10 billion per person using today's technology — down to reasonable levels.
"The architecture allows for a cost per ticket of less than $200,000," Musk said. "We think that the cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000."
Coming soon?
Fewer than 5 percent of SpaceX's personnel are working on the ITS at the moment, Musk said. And the company is currently spending just a few tens of millions of dollars on the project every year, which Musk estimated would ultimately require a company investment of about $10 billion.
But that should change as SpaceX wraps up work on the final version of the Falcon 9 and its crewed Dragon capsule, which will carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station for NASA (and perhaps ferry folks to other destinations close to Earth), Musk said.
Within two years, Musk aims to be devoting most of SpaceX's engineers to ITS, and to be spending perhaps $300 million annually on the project. He envisions other organizations eventually aiding SpaceX in Mars colonization as well, saying the effort will be a "huge public-private partnership."
He said he hopes to complete the first development of the spaceship within four years, then start suborbital testing shortly thereafter. If everything goes really well, Musk said, the ITS could be launching on its first Mars mission "within the 10-year time frame."
In the meantime, SpaceX plans to keep launching Dragons toward the Red Planet every 26 months using the company's Falcon Heavy rocket, to test technology and to establish a "steady cadence" of robotic missions that scientists could take advantage of to send experiments to Mars, Musk said.
The ITS could also be used for many other things, possibly enabling human exploration of Jupiter's ocean-harboring moon Europa or allowing cargo to get from New York to Tokyo in just 25 minutes, Musk said. But for now, the main goal is colonizing Mars, which Musk has long said is the reason he started SpaceX back in 2002.
"The objective is to become a spacefaring civilization and a multiplanet species," the billionaire entrepreneur said, adding that doing so will make humanity far less susceptible to extinction. "The main reason I'm personally accumulating assets is to fund this."
A brain-inspired computing component provides the most faithful emulation yet of connections among neurons in the human brain, researchers say.
The so-called memristor, an electrical component whose resistance relies on how much charge has passed through itin the past, mimics the way calcium ions behave at the junction between two neurons in the human brain, the study said. That junction is known as a synapse. The researchers said the new device could lead to significant advances in brain-inspired — or neuromorphic — computers, which could be much better at perceptual and learning tasks than traditional computers, as well as far more energy efficient.
"In the past, people have used devices like transistors and capacitors tosimulate synaptic dynamics, which can work, but those devices have very little resemblance to real biological systems. So it's not efficient to do it that way, and it results in a larger device area, larger energy consumption and less fidelity," said study leader Joshua Yang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain]
Previous research has suggested that the human brain has about 100 billion neurons and approximately 1 quadrillion (1 million billion) synapses. A brain-inspiredcomputerwould ideally be designed tomimic the brain's enormous computing powerand efficiency, scientists have said.
"With the synaptic dynamics provided by our device, we can emulate the synapse in a more natural way, more direct way and with more fidelity," he told Live Science. "You don't just simulate one type of synaptic function, but [also] other important features and actually get multiple synaptic functions together."
Mimicking the human brain
In biological systems, when a nerve impulse reaches a synapse, it causes channels to open, allowing calcium ions to flood into the synapse. This triggers the release of brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters that cross the gap between the two nerve cells, passing on the impulse to the next neuron.
The new "diffusive memristor" described in the study consists of silver nanoparticle clusters embedded in a silicon oxynitride film that is sandwiched between two electrodes.
The film is an insulator, but when a voltage pulse is applied, a combination of heating and electrical forces causes the clusters to breakup. Nanoparticles diffuse through the film and eventually form a conductive filament that carries the current from one electrode to the other. Once the voltage is removed, the temperature drops and the nanoparticles coalesce back into clusters.
Because this process is very similar to how calcium ions behave in biological synapses, the device can mimic short-term plasticity in neurons, the researchers said. Trains of low-voltage pulses at high frequencies will gradually increase the conductivity of the device until a current can pass through, but if the pulses continue, this conductivity will eventually decline. [Super-Intelligent Machines: 7 Robotic Futures]
The researchers also combined their diffusion memristor with a so-called drift memristor, which relies on electrical fields rather than diffusion and is optimized for memory applications. This allowed the scientists to demonstrate a form of long-term plasticity called spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP), which adjusts connection strength between neuronsbased on the timing of impulses.
Previous studies have used drift memristors by themselves to approximate calcium dynamics. But these memristors are based on physical processes very different from those in biological synapses, which limits their fidelity and the variety of possible synaptic functions, Yang said.
"The diffusion memristor is helping the drift-type memristor behave similarly to a real synapse," Yang said. "Combining the two leads us to a natural demonstration of STDP, which is a very important long-term plasticity learning rule."
Accurately reproducing synaptic plasticity is essential for creatingcomputers that can operate like the brain. Yang said this is desirable because the brain is far more compact and energy efficient than traditional electronics, as well as being better at things like pattern recognition and learning. "The human brain is still the most efficient computer ever built," he added.
How to build it
Yang said his group uses fabrication processes similar to those being developed by computer memory companies to scale up memristor production. Not all of these processes can use silver as a material, but unpublished research by the team shows that copper nanoparticles could be used instead, Yang said.
Hypothetically, the device could be made even smaller than a human synapse, because the key part of the device measures just 4 nanometers across, Yang said. (For comparison, an average strand of human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide.) This could make the devices much more efficient than traditional electronics for building brain-inspired computers, Yang added. Traditional electronics need roughly 10 transistors to emulate one synapse.
The research is the most complete demonstration of an artificial synapse so far in terms of the variety of functions it is capable of, said neuromorphic computing expert Ilia Valov, a senior scientist at the Peter Grunberg Institute at the Jülich Research Centre in Germany.
He said the approach is definitely scalable and single-unit systems should certainly be able to get down to the scale of biological synapses. But he added that in multiunit systems, the devices will likely need to be bigger due to practical considerations involved in making a larger system work.
