Author: Trace Rock

AI

Microsoft launches Project AirSim to train AI drone systems

Project AirSim is a flight simulator for drones which can be used by companies to develop and train software controlling them.

BySahil Pawar

Microsoft has launched a platform named Project AirSim to train the artificial intelligence systems of autonomous aircraft. Project AirSim is a flight simulator for drones that companies can use to develop and train software controlling them.

The platform makes test flights possible in places that are usually considered risky, such as near power lines. Also, millions of flights can be simulated with this platform in the future, and companies can virtually see how the vehicle flies in the rain or how strong winds might affect its battery life.

In a statement announcing the launch, Microsoft said that the platform would show the power of the industrial metaverse, a virtual world where businesses will build, test, and hone solutions and bring them into the real world. The firm envisages using the technology to train the AI systems which fly autonomous air vehicles, from air taxis to delivery drones.

Continue reading… “Microsoft launches Project AirSim to train AI drone systems”
Space Flight

A New Method for Making Graphene has an Awesome Application: A Space Elevator!

The Space Elevator is one of those ideas that seems to have an endless supply of lives. Originally proposed about a century ago, this concept calls for a tether of supermaterial that connects a station in orbit to Earth’s surface. Our planet’s rotation would keep this tether taut, and a system of “climbers” would transport people and payloads to and from space. The engineering challenges and costs associated with such a structure have always been enormous. But every generation or so, new research comes along that causes engineers and space agencies to reevaluate the concept.

The single-greatest challenge has always been the tether since no known material has ever been strong enough to handle the stresses involved. But as it turns out, this issue may finally be resolved! According to scientists with the International Space Elevator Consortium (ISEC), a cost-effective manufacturing process could produce graphene ribbons that are strong enough to fashion a tether! Their latest findings are detailed in a paper they will present at the upcoming 2022 International Astronomical Congress in Paris.

The research was led by Adrian Nixon, a graphene and 2D materials scientist, a Royal Society of Chemistry member, founder and editor of Nixene Publishing, and a board member of StellarModal and the ISEC. He was joined by Dennis Wright – the Vice President of the ISECIBM and a former researcher with the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) National Accelerator Laboratory – and Dr. John Knapman, a former AI specialist with IBM, a member of the British Interplanetary Society, and the Managing Director of the ISEC. 

Continue reading… “A New Method for Making Graphene has an Awesome Application: A Space Elevator!”
Robots

ForSight sees a world without cataracts with its surgery robot

By Haje Jan Kamps

Worldwide, more than a billion people suffer from vision impairment and entirely avoidable blindness. Cataracts — and the surgery to correct them — is one of the most common surgical procedures in the world, with more than 28 million performed worldwide, every year. The problem is, even though the surgery is relatively simple, there aren’t enough surgeons, and not enough money to pay those surgeons, especially in developing countries. ForSight Robotics wants to address that issue and just raised a $55 million Series A to continue develop its surgery robots. The round comes around 18 months after its seed round.

The surgery robot platform is called Oryom,  which means “daylight” in Hebrew. It leverages cutting-edge technologies (pun intended) in microsurgical robotics, computer vision and machine learning. The platform aims to automate ophthalmic surgeries that treat diseases underlying preventable blindness. With the power of robotics on its side, the company claims to be 10 times more accurate than the human hand.

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Robots

Florida county rolls out BeBot, a beach-cleaning robot with a message for humans

A remote-controlled robot named BeBot rolls over a patch of sand in Indian Shores during a cleanup demonstration on Thursday, July 14, 2022. BeBot is part of a campaign by Keep Pinellas Beautiful to raise awareness about debris left by humans that lurks under the beach surface and eventually winds up in the Gulf of Mexico. (Aya Diab/TNS)

By Chris Kuo, Tampa Bay TimesTribune News Service

A new solar-powered, beach-cleaning robot has arrived in Pinellas County, drawing attention to all the debris lurking just beneath the beach surface.

Overseen by Keep Pinellas Beautiful, BeBot will visit 14 locations this month, from Clearwater to St. Pete Beach. The remote-controlled robot collects small pieces of litter — cigarette butts, plastic straws, bottle caps, food wrappers and more.

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of trash that we found. It’s astonishing,” said Patricia DePlasco, executive director of Keep Pinellas Beautiful, a nonprofit that focuses on environmental cleanup. “We look across the beach and we think we have a nice clean beach and we don’t realize what’s under that top layer of sand.”

DePlasco and a team of about 30 volunteers gathered Thursday at an Indian Shores beach to watch a BeBot demonstration.

Continue reading… “Florida county rolls out BeBot, a beach-cleaning robot with a message for humans”
Stem cells

Scientists aim to grow billions of stem cells aboard the International Space Station

This is the latest effort to overcome one of the key hurdles for widespread stem cell therapies.

By Chris Young

Scientists from Cedars-Sinai Medical in Los Angeles are investigating how to grow large batches of a specific type of stem cell.

Their mission has taken them orbital — to the International Space Station — and it could help unlock a whole host of stem cell therapies to combat deadly diseases.

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One of the researchers, Dhruv Sareen, even donated his own stem cells for the experiment, a press statement reveals. If all goes to plan, the scientists hope to eventually grow billions of stem cells in space.

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Farming

Dubai is now home to the largest vertical farm in the world

The building will produce 2 million pounds of greens per year, in a country that currently imports nearly all of its food.

BY ADELE PETERS

If you walk into a grocery store in Dubai, the spinach on the shelves will probably be from Europe—or even from as far away as the United States. Because of limited arable land and water, the United Arab Emirates imports about 90% of its food. But inside a warehouse-like building near the Dubai airport, a new vertical farm is now beginning to grow more than 2 million pounds of local leafy greens per year.

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Stem cells

Time-Lapse Footage Shows Neural Stem Cells Grow in 3D Scaffolds

Watch as primordial neural cells dance across, grow into, and even move 3D scaffolds engineered to heal brain injury from stroke and other trauma. Decorating the scaffold with various nutrients and biochemical signals allow researchers to control what types of brain tissues they become. Credit: Katrina Wilson and Ken Kingery, Duke University.


Researchers at Duke University have captured days-long time-lapse videos of young neural cells moving and growing within a novel 3D synthetic biocompatible structure. By literally watching how the cells respond to natural biochemical signals embedded within the material, biomedical engineers hope to develop biogels that can repair and regrow brain tissue after a stroke or other trauma.

The results appear online June 22 in the journal Advanced Materials.

Repairing and regrowing brain tissue is a difficult task. Left to its own devices, the brain does not regenerate lost synapses, blood vessels or other structures after suffering an injury, such as from a stroke. Dead brain tissue is instead absorbed, leaving behind a cavity devoid of anything recognizable as healthy brain tissue.

But that hasn’t stopped researchers from trying to regenerate damaged brains anyway. One common approach used by biomedical engineers is to provide a new medium for the diverse pieces of brain tissue to move into, loaded with various nutrients and biological instructions to encourage growth.

While scientists in the field have historically reached for a homogenous, gelatinous biomaterial to support neural regrowth, Tatiana Segura, professor of biomedical engineering at Duke University, has developed a different approach. Her biomaterial built to encourage all types of healing and growth is made of millions of tiny gelatinous spheres packed together to form a stable scaffold.

Continue reading… “Time-Lapse Footage Shows Neural Stem Cells Grow in 3D Scaffolds”
quantum computing

Photonic Link Could Spark an All-Silicon Quantum Internet, Scalable Quantum Devices

BY MATT SWAYNE

UNIVERSITY RESEARCH NEWS — Researchers at the Simon Fraser University report on research, published in Nature today, that they say could pave the way toward an all-silicon quantum internet and quantum computers that can tackle real-world computational challenges. That internet theoretically will be much more secure and much more powerful than today’s version.

In the study, the scientists describe their observations of silicon ‘T centre’ photon-spin qubits, an important milestone that unlocks immediate opportunities to construct massively scalable quantum computers and the quantum internet that will connect them.

Quantum computing has enormous potential to provide computing power well beyond the capabilities of today’s supercomputers, which could enable advances in many other fields, including chemistry, materials science, medicine and cybersecurity. In order to make this a reality, it is necessary to produce both stable, long-lived qubits that provide processing power, as well as the communications technology that enables these qubits to link together at scale.

Past research has indicated that silicon can produce some of the most stable and long-lived qubits in the industry. Now the research published by Daniel Higginbottom, Alex Kurkjian, and co-authors provides proof of principle that T centres, a specific luminescent defect in silicon, can provide a ‘photonic link’ between qubits.

This comes out of the SFU Silicon Quantum Technology Lab in SFU’s Physics Department, co-led by Stephanie Simmons, Canada Research Chair in Silicon Quantum Technologies and Michael Thewalt, Professor Emeritus.  “This work is the first measurement of single T centres in isolation, and actually, the first measurement of any single spin in silicon to be performed with only optical measurements,” says Stephanie Simmons.

Continue reading… “Photonic Link Could Spark an All-Silicon Quantum Internet, Scalable Quantum Devices”
AI

Smart Beehives Will Monitor their Colonies with AI

A single colony of bees can pollinate up to 300 million flowers daily. And that includes human-managed honeybees. That means that, unlike some livestock or agricultural practices, this is a human activity that is beneficial to the environment and key to the food system’s sustainability. Now, robotics, artificial intelligence, and big data will bolster the collaboration between humans and bees. That is the proposal of an Israeli startup.

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Augmented Reality

AR-Powered Hotels Have Officially Arrived

Immersive technology could change the hospitality industry forever.

by Kyle Melnick

Moxy Hotels, a chain of stylish hotels owned by Marriot, today announced the Moxy Universe, Play Beyond, an augmented reality (AR) experience that allows guests to interact with the hotel in a variety of unique ways.

Starting now until the end of the year, visitors can use their mobile devices to explore 12 Moxy Hotels from Shanghai to Tokyo using a virtual avatar. Ahead of their stay, guests can use the Moxy mobile app to begin customizing their digital persona with different outfits, accessories, and hairstyles.

Continue reading… “AR-Powered Hotels Have Officially Arrived”
drones

UK to have the world’s biggest automated drone superhighway

UK to plan world’s biggest automated drone superhighway connecting cities and towns for mail package delivery

The UK is setting up the world’s biggest automated drone superhighway within two years, which will be used on a 164-mile Skyway project that will connect towns and cities.

The project, according to BBC, is part of a £273 million funding package for the aerospace sector.

Drone mail delivery to the Isles of Scilly and across Scotland is also part of other projects being planned, which will include delivering medicines to patients in remote regions.

The chief operating officer of the aviation technology company Altitude Angel, Chris Forster, said that the drone superhighway will not only be used for business logistics but will also help “police and medical deliveries of vaccines and blood samples”.

Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng will officially make the announcement of the project at the Farnborough International Airshow. He believes the funding will “help the sector seize on the enormous opportunities for growth that exist as the world transitions to cleaner forms of flight”.

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