2019 – Page 86 – Impact Lab

Aviation, Engineering, Record Breaker, Science & Technology News, Travel

Airlander 10: prototype of world’s longest aircraft retired

January 29, 2019

The Airlander 10 in flight at Cardington airfield in Bedfordshire in 2016.

UK firm behind plane-airship hybrid says it will ‘rethink the skies’ to build new model.

A prototype of the world’s longest aircraft, the Airlander 10, will not be rebuilt but engineers are set to “rethink the skies” with a production-ready model.

Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV), the Bedford-based company that created Airlander 10, has already received Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) approval, and it is hoped the new airship model will take to the skies by the early 2020s.

“Our focus is now entirely on bringing the first batch of production-standard, type-certified Airlander 10 aircraft into service with customers,” said Stephen McGlennan, the company’s chief executive.

Continue reading… “Airlander 10: prototype of world’s longest aircraft retired”

Automation, Automobiles, Electric Vehicles

Hyundai and Kia unveil driverless car-charging and parking concept

January 28, 2019

The companies intend to launch this technology when electric vehicles reach level 4 autonomy, which is expected around 2025. — Hyundai

This week Hyundai Motor Company and Kia Motors Corporation shared a video outlining the features of EV wireless charging and automated valet parking concept systems that could park your car without you or any other driver.

Continue reading… “Hyundai and Kia unveil driverless car-charging and parking concept”

Automation, Electric Vehicles, Solar Power, Transportation

India’s first solar-powered, driverless bus has made its maiden journey

January 28, 2019

Students of Lovely Professional University (LPU) at Jalandhar has designed this bus with the uses of GPS and Bluetooth for navigation

Jalandhar (Urban Transport News): India’s first solar-powered, driverless bus made its maiden journey at the Indian Science Congress in last week Thursday. A team of students of Lovely Professional University (LPU) at Jalandhar has designed this bus with the uses of GPS and Bluetooth for navigation.

According to the project head Mandeep Singh, the camera installed on top of the bus allows for image processing. It senses the road pattern and the bus moves accordingly.

“We have been working on this project for the last five years. Around 300 students, from departments of electronics, electrical and civil and mechanical engineering, have been part of it. It was a huge project and bringing everyone together itself was a huge challenge,” said Mandeep Singh.

Continue reading… “India’s first solar-powered, driverless bus has made its maiden journey”

Automation, Automobiles, Self-driving Cars, Transportation

AUTONOMOUS CARS: ALTERING ONE IN NINE JOBS

January 28, 2019

It seems clear that driverless vehicles are coming, although the timeline for their arrival remains unclear. David Beede, Regina Powers and Cassandra Ingram of the Economics and Statistics Administration at the US Department of Commerce look at one aspect, “The Employment Impact of Autonomous Vehicles,” in ESA Issue Brief #05-17 (August 11, 2017). They set the stage this way:

“In September 2016, the U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published policy guidelines for AVs [autonomous vehicles], recognizing their potential as “the greatest personal transportation revolution since the popularization of the personal automobile nearly a century ago” (NHTSA 2016). … The worldwide number of advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), such as backup cameras and adaptive cruise control, increased from 90 million to 140 million units between 2014 and 2016. Consumers have indicated a willingness to pay $500-$2,500 per vehicle for ADAS. Sensor technologies are rapidly advancing to provide sophisticated information to vehicle operating systems about the surrounding environment, such as road conditions and the location of other nearby vehicles. However, slower progress has been made in developing software that can mimic human driver decision-making, so that fully autonomous vehicles may not be introduced for another ten or more years …”

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Automobiles, Science & Technology News, Transportation, Uber

Despite Uber and Lyft, urban car ownership is growing

January 28, 2019

In a Reversal, ‘Car-Rich’ Households Are Growing

Despite ride-hailing’s promise, vehicle ownership (and traffic) is on the rise in America’s biggest, most transit-oriented cities. So how is mobility really changing?

There is no doubt that ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are remaking how people get around major American cities. The growing availability of shared bikes, e-bikes, and e-scooters is further changing the personal mobility story. The transformation is partly personal, offering a wealth of options for getting around town. It’s also supposed to be societal, ameliorating clogged traffic and boosting transit ridership.

Continue reading… “Despite Uber and Lyft, urban car ownership is growing”

Analysis, Children, City Planning

Which U.S. cities have the most families with kids?

January 25, 2019

Spoiler alert: It’s simply not the case that families with kids have disappeared from urban America.

Look around a hip neighborhood in Lower Manhattan or downtown San Francisco, and you’ll see lots of young people, and Baby Boomers whose kids have left the nest. There are also some stylish moms (or nannies) pushing tots in strollers. But you won’t see many traditional nuclear families with school-age children.

There’s a growing consensus that our cities are becoming “childless.” This past October, Axios ran a story on the ”great family exodus,” showing data that the share of families with children under the age of 20 has fallen in 53 large cities across the country. As far as I can tell, the phrase “childless cities” was first advanced in 2013 by Joel Kotkin in an essay of that title for City Journal.

Several factors are said to be pushing families with kids out of cities: the expensiveness of city living; the lagging performance of urban versus suburban public schools; and the preference of immigrant families for the suburbs over urban locations. But just how childless are our cities, really?

Continue reading… “Which U.S. cities have the most families with kids?”

Batteries, Elon Musk, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy, Solar Power, Tesla

Tesla proposes microgrids with solar and batteries to power Greek islands

January 25, 2019

Tesla has met with the Greek government to propose ways to modernize the electric grid of the country’s many islands in the Mediterranean sea with microgrids and renewable energy to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels.

Several Greek islands are relatively remote and rely heavily on fossil fuels to power their electric grid.

Over the years, Tesla has acquired some experience in building microgrids to power remote islands using solar panels and its energy storage systems, like the Powerpack.

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China, Health & Fitness, Healthcare, Medicine

Ping An Good Doctor launches commercial operation of One-minute Clinics in China

January 25, 2019

Ping An Good Doctor’s first One-minute Clinic in Wuzhen, outside of Shanghai. Credit: Ping An Good Doctor.

The company announced last week then it had placed its One-minute Clinics across 8 provinces and cities in China and signed service contracts for nearly 1,000 units.

Last year, Ping An Good Doctor, a one-stop healthcare ecosystem platform from China, piloted unstaffed clinics that employ artificial intelligence called “One-minute Clinics” in the Wuzhen Scenic Area outside of Shanghai, which connect patients with a clinician on Ping An Good Doctor’s in-house medical team. Just last week, the company announced that it had placed its One-minute Clinics across 8 provinces and cities in China and signed service contracts for nearly 1,000 units, providing healthcare services to more than 3 million users.

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AI, Analysis, Artificial Intelligence, DNA, Medical Breakthrough

Face-scanning A.I. can help doctors spot unusual genetic disorders

January 25, 2019

Facial recognition can help unlock your phone. Could it also be able to play a far more valuable role in people’s lives by identifying whether or not a person has a rare genetic disorder, based exclusively on their facial features? DeepGestalt, an artificial intelligence built by the Boston-based tech company FDNA, suggests that the answer is a resounding “yes.”

The algorithm is already being used by leading geneticists at more than 2,000 sites in upward of 130 countries around the world. In a new study, published in the journal Nature Medicine, researchers show how the algorithm was able to outperform clinicians when it came to identifying diseases.

The study involved 17,000 kids with 200-plus genetic disorders. Its best performance came in distinguishing between different subtypes of a genetic disorder called Noonan syndrome, one of whose symptoms includes mildly unusual facial features. The A.I. was able to make the correct distinction 64 percent of the time. That is far from perfect, but it is significantly better than human clinicians, who identified Noonan syndrome correctly in just 20 percent of cases.

Continue reading… “Face-scanning A.I. can help doctors spot unusual genetic disorders”

3D Printer, Biotech, Medical Breakthrough

Bio-Printers are churning out living fixes to broken spines

January 25, 2019

A new study showed that 3D-printing a spinal cord implant, shown here, restored movement in injured rats.UCSD JACOBS SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING

FOR DOCTORS AND medical researchers repairing the human body, a 3D printer has become almost as valuable as an x-ray machine, microscope, or a sharp scalpel. Bioengineers are using 3D printers to make more durable hip and knee joints, prosthetic limbs and, recently, to produce living tissue attached to a scaffold of printed material.

Researchers say that bio-printed tissue can be used to test the effects of drug treatments, for example, with an eventual goal of printing entire organs that can be grown and then transplanted into a patient. The latest step toward 3D-printed replacements of failed human parts comes from a team at UC San Diego. It has bio-printed a section of spinal cord that can be custom-fit into a patient’s injury.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

A neural network can learn to organize the world it sees into concepts—just like we do

January 25, 2019

Generative adversarial networks are not just good for causing mischief. They can also show us how AI algorithms “think.”

GANs, or generative adversarial networks, are the social-media starlet of AI algorithms. They are responsible for creating the first AI painting ever sold at an art auction and for superimposing celebrity faces on the bodies of porn stars. They work by pitting two neural networks against each other to create realistic outputs based on what they are fed. Feed one lots of dog photos, and it can create completely new dogs; feed it lots of faces, and it can create new faces.

As good as they are at causing mischief, researchers from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab realized GANs are also a powerful tool: because they paint what they’re “thinking,” they could give humans insight into how neural networks learn and reason. This has been something the broader research community has sought for a long time—and it’s become more important with our increasing reliance on algorithms.

Continue reading… “A neural network can learn to organize the world it sees into concepts—just like we do”

Coding, Education, Higher Education, Internet, New Viewpoints

How to get a world-class education for free on the internet

January 26, 2019

As crucial as a university degree has become for working in the modern economy, it is not the only route forward into a wildly lucrative and satisfying career—just ask famous dropouts Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg.

In the future, a single bachelor’s degree in a particular subject will no longer suffice for many of us anyway. As robots and automation sweep the global workforce, hundreds of millions of people—the majority of whom do not have the time or money to go pick up a brand-new four-year degree—will have to “re-skill” in order to land new jobs. The question that employees and employers alike face is how to get that done quickly, efficiently, and, most importantly to many, cheaply.

The internet, luckily, is already a booming resource. Whether you find yourself seeking new employment mid-career, curious about alternatives to a college education, or simply are interested in learning for learning’s sake, Quartz At Work has compiled some of the most dependable, high-quality materials you can access to learn anything on the internet.

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