Everybody knows the world’s got a serious carbon dioxide problem, but an ingenious and potentially cost-effective way of dealing with our surplus CO2 could provide the means of tomorrow’s battery technology.
For years scientists have looked at ways of capturing carbon and storing it underground or even potentially in the ocean. But a new system might offer a powerful advantage over these efforts.
A private transportation company seeks to offer a new form of travel connecting Boston and New York in under an hour.
Boston-based Transcend Air Corporation is developing the Vy 400, a six-seat, vertical take-off and landing aircraft. “It takes off and lands straight up and down,” the company said of the aircraft’s design. “This means we don’t need runways and airports. We’re able to depart and arrive right in major city centers.”
Unlike any other autonomous semi trucks concepts out there – from Daimler Trucks, Tesla or California startup Thor – Volvo’s Vera has no driver’s cabin and looks like a flat Tesla S with space for just the powertrain and the battery pack.VOLVO
Volvo Trucks, the world’s second-biggest heavy-duty truck maker behind Daimler Trucks, unveiled Wednesday its first all-electric driverless freight truck, dubbed Vera.
Unlike any other semi trucks concepts out there – from Daimler Trucks, Tesla or California startup Thor – Volvo’s Vera has no driver’s cabin and looks like a semi-truck tractor pod or a flat Tesla S with space for just the drivetrain and the 300 kW lithium-ion battery pack that gives it a range of up to 187 miles (300 kilometers).
“It’s designed to be safe, it’s quiet and totally predictable, down to cost savings,” said Michael Karlsson, vice-president of Autonomous Solutions at Volvo Trucks. “Nothing similar to what you’ve seen from us before. In fact, it’s impossible to drive.”
Ideas on what to do with time not spent on driving
Space 10’s “Spaces on Wheels” concept project explores the future of autonomous vehicles. One of the ideas is a mobile cafe that lets you have coffee and socialize while you travel. SPACE10 & f°am Studio
If you weren’t stuck in gridlock, where might you be? And if you didn’t have to focus on driving, what else might you do? A new autonomous vehicle project by Space10—the Ikea future-forward R&D arm that brought us mealworm meatballs—and the creative agency f°am Studio are proposing answers to those questions.
Look, no hands! Big car and technology companies such as BMW, Apple and Google are investing in driverless technology.
Widespread adoption of driverless cars would release thousands of acres of land for new housing and reduce the strain on transport infrastructure, according to research published today.
The report, centred on Edinburgh, suggests that congestion is costing the city more than £300 million a year in lost time and autonomous vehicles would help to trim that figure.
Ric Fulop, the 43-year-old cofounder and chief executive of Desktop Metal, is eager to show off the skunkworks for the company’s giant 3-D metal printers, which can produce stainless steel, aluminum and other metal alloy parts at assembly-line speeds and in large quantities. It’s the first time he’s taken an outsider to the facility in Nashua, New Hampshire, just across the state line from Desktop Metal’s headquarters in Burlington, Massachusetts. The four machines—which are 16 feet long, 6 feet tall and weigh about as much as an SUV—are in various states of production. They’ll be able to 3-D print 100 times faster than existing high-end 3-D printing systems used for aerospace, and at one-twentieth the cost, without the tooling required for traditional manufacturing processes. “It’s the first metal printing press,” says Fulop, an exuberant, heavyset man with a slight accent from his native Venezuela.
Scientists in Japan made progress recently in the quest to combat infertility, creating the precursor to a human egg cell in a dish from nothing but a woman’s blood cells. The research is an important step toward what scientists call a “game-changing” technology that has the potential to transform reproduction.
The primitive reproductive cell the scientists created is not a mature egg, and it cannot be fertilized to create an embryo. But researchers have already created eggs out of mouse tail cells and fertilized them to produce viable pups, so outside scientists said the research is on track to one day achieve human “in vitro gametogenesis” — a method of creating eggs and sperm in a dish.
MIT computer scientists have developed a system that learns to identify objects within an image, based on a spoken description of the image.
Model learns to pick out objects within an image, using spoken descriptions.
MIT computer scientists have developed a system that learns to identify objects within an image, based on a spoken description of the image. Given an image and an audio caption, the model will highlight in real-time the relevant regions of the image being described.
Unlike current speech-recognition technologies, the model doesn’t require manual transcriptions and annotations of the examples it’s trained on. Instead, it learns words directly from recorded speech clips and objects in raw images, and associates them with one another.
Inanimate objects coming to life — the stuff of nightmares? Not so when you can control the objects thanks to “robotic skin.” Then it’s just really, really cool.
You don’t have to take our word for it, either. Yale researchers have actually created this robotic skin, and they posted a video of it in action on Wednesday— the same day they published their research on the tech in the journal Science Robotics.
UC San Diego researchers develop new protocol for creating human cortical organoids, mini-brains derived directly from primary cells that can be used to better explore and understand the real thing.
Writing in the current online issue of the journal Stem Cells and Development , researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine describe development of a rapid, cost-effective method to create human cortical organoids directly from primary cells.
Gene editing has already given us malaria-resistant mosquitoes and heat-resistant cows. Now, researchers from the University of Chicago may have topped both of those feats with their latest creation: Cocaine-resistant mice. Using the CRISPR-based gene-editing platform to modify the DNA of skin cells, researchers Xiaoyang Wu and Ming Xu have been able not only to create mice that are less likely to seek out cocaine than their counterparts, but are also immune to cocaine overdoses that killed mice without the same CRISPR-edited cells.
The process builds on previous work involving a modified enzyme called butyrylcholinesterase (BCHE), which is capable of naturally breaking down cocaine very rapidly. Unfortunately, its short half-life makes it ineffective in a clinical scenario, since it disappears before it has any long-term impact on the body’s response to cocaine. BCHE cannot be administered orally, which makes it ill-suited for use as a potential treatment.
First, it correctly predicted the top four finishers at the Kentucky Derby. Then, it was better at picking Academy Award winners than professional movie critics—three years in a row. The cherry on top was when it prophesied that the Chicago Cubs would end a 108-year dry spell by winning the 2016 World Series—four months before the Cubs were even in the playoffs. (They did.)
Now, this AI-powered predictive technology is turning its attention to an area where it could do some real good—diagnosing medical conditions.
In a study presented on Monday at the SIIM Conference on Machine Intelligence in Medical Imaging in San Francisco, Stanford University doctors showed that eight radiologists interacting through Unanimous AI’s “swarm intelligence” technology were better at diagnosing pneumonia from chest X-rays than individual doctors or a machine-learning program alone.
