Breakthrough Thinking – Page 4

Breakthrough Thinking, Cinema, Coronavirus, Entertainment, Films, Science & Technology News

Walmart’s movie plan will transform parking lots into drive-in theaters

July 6, 2020

Walmart just made a surprising announcement: it will turn some of its store parking lots into drive-in movie theaters, using its existing real estate to revive a largely defunct way to view movies. The drive-in theaters will start going live in early August, according to the company, but they won’t be available at every Walmart destination. In case you’re wondering: yes, there will be popcorn.

Walmart announced the new plan on Twitter and has already launched a website dedicated to the new move. The drive-in theaters will arrive in partnership with Tribeca, according to Walmart, which says that its new plan will help the public watch movies while maintaining social distancing.

Continue reading… “Walmart’s movie plan will transform parking lots into drive-in theaters”

Breakthrough Thinking, Health & Fitness, Human Behavior, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

How to build a ‘rest ethic’ that is as strong as your work one

June 30, 2020

The authors of a new book offer creative and thoughful ways to maximize your time off that will gift you with inspiration, ideas, and recovery.

Take in a deep breath and hold it. Keep holding. How long can you hold your inhale until it gets uncomfortable? Thirty seconds? A few minutes? It doesn’t take long until we all, eventually, need to exhale.

Think of your work ethic as the inhale (it is, in a way, as essential to your career as air is to your body). With a good work ethic, we make, execute, coordinate, manage, fulfill, and get things done. Task list—inhale. Project execution—inhale. Making our ideas come to life—inhale. But we can’t keep inhaling forever. Eventually we have to exhale. This exhale is your rest ethic, and it is just as essential.

A solid rest ethic gifts us inspiration, ideas, and recovery. It allows us to build up our enthusiasm and sustain our passion. Gaining a fresh perspective—exhale. Project ideation and “aha” moments—exhale. Letting big ideas incubate in your mind—exhale. And just as a deep exhale prepares you for a better inhale, your rest ethic enables you to have a better work ethic.

Continue reading… “How to build a ‘rest ethic’ that is as strong as your work one”

Breakthrough Thinking, Engineering, quantum computing, Science & Technology News

New recipe for single-atom transistors may enable quantum computers with unparalleled memory and processing power

May 29, 2020

Single-Atom Transistor

Linking multiple copies of these devices may lay the foundation for quantum computing.

Once unimaginable, transistors consisting only of several-atom clusters or even single atoms promise to become the building blocks of a new generation of computers with unparalleled memory and processing power. But to realize the full potential of these tiny transistors — miniature electrical on-off switches — researchers must find a way to make many copies of these notoriously difficult-to-fabricate components.

Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues at the University of Maryland have developed a step-by-step recipe to produce the atomic-scale devices. Using these instructions, the NIST-led team has become only the second in the world to construct a single-atom transistor and the first to fabricate a series of single electron transistors with atom-scale control over the devices’ geometry.

Continue reading… “New recipe for single-atom transistors may enable quantum computers with unparalleled memory and processing power”

brain hacking, Breakthrough Thinking, Machine Learning, new technology, Science & Technology News

Researchers unveil electronics that mimic the human brain in efficient learning

May 6, 2020

Researchers unveil electronics that mimic the human brain in efficient learning

A graphic depiction of protein nanowires (green) harvested from microbe Geobacter (orange) facilitate the electronic memristor device (silver) to function with biological voltages, emulating the neuronal components (blue junctions) in a brain. Credit: UMass Amherst/Yao lab

Only 10 years ago, scientists working on what they hoped would open a new frontier of neuromorphic computing could only dream of a device using miniature tools called memristors that would function/operate like real brain synapses.

But now a team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has discovered, while on their way to better understanding protein nanowires, how to use these biological, electricity conducting filaments to make a neuromorphic memristor, or “memory transistor,” device. It runs extremely efficiently on very low power, as brains do, to carry signals between neurons. Details are in Nature Communications.

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Breakthrough Thinking, Coronavirus, Healthcare, Science & Technology News, Wearables

Sweat-analyzing patch could help spot biomarkers linked to COVID-19

April 30, 2020

When you think about wearable tech, chances are that your mind goes to a device like the Apple Watch long before it does the Band-Aid-style smart patch developed by Epicore Biosystems. But the company, which spun out of Northwestern University’s Querrey Simpson Institute for Bioelectronics and professor John A. Rogers’ laboratory, has been hard at work creating sweat-sensing smart patches which could be used to help measure sweat components in athletes and a variety of other individuals — and could even have potential application for medical use in helping keep tabs on crucial biomarkers for patients suffering from COVID-19.

“We have [created] two versions of the wearable sensor patch in development suitable across different applications,” Roozbeh Ghaffari, Epicore’s CEO and co-founder, told Digital Trends. “One is a color-changing wearable microfluidics patch used by athletes. The other is a Bluetooth-enabled patch that tracks the sweat biomarkers of workers in construction, on oil rigs, and in factories, plus other physically intense occupations — for the ‘industrial athletes.’”

Continue reading… “Sweat-analyzing patch could help spot biomarkers linked to COVID-19”

Aviation, Breakthrough Thinking, Energy, Science & Technology News, Transportation

This electric aircraft concept uses stratospheric air-friction as a power source!

March 13, 2020

If you’ve ever seen a jet blaze through the sky leaving a perfect line of smoke behind it, you’ve probably wondered why that smoke holds its shape so perfectly for so long, but doesn’t hold true on land when a motorbike or car zooms down the road. Air movement anywhere above the troposphere (the lowest region of our atmosphere) is extremely negligible. Jets, which fly in the stratosphere, leave behind that trail of smoke because the air there doesn’t move to disrupt the smoke trails. This also means that there’s immense amounts of friction when a jet travels at high speeds, cutting through the motionless air particles. Designer Michal Bonikowski believes that friction could actually be a source of clean energy that a plane could harness to reduce its carbon footprint.

Continue reading… “This electric aircraft concept uses stratospheric air-friction as a power source!”

Batteries, Breakthrough Thinking, Energy, Science & Technology News

MIT’s solid-state battery breakthrough may see phones last for days

February 11, 2020

A breakthrough in battery architecture could lead to lithium batteries with far greater energy densities than those used today

One of the many ways scientists hope to improve the performance of today’s lithium batteries is by swapping out some of the liquid components for solid ones. Known as solid-state batteries, these experimental devices could greatly extend the life of electric vehicles and mobile devices by significantly upping the energy density packed inside. Scientists at MIT are now reporting an exciting advance toward this future, demonstrating a new type of solid-state battery architecture that overcomes some limitations of current designs.

In a regular lithium battery, a liquid electrolyte serves as the medium through which the lithium ions travel back and forth between the anode and cathode as the battery is charged and discharged. One problem is that this liquid is highly volatile and can sometimes result in battery fires, like those that plagued Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 smartphone.

Replacing this liquid electrolyte for a solid material wouldn’t just make batteries safer and less prone to fires, it could also open up new possibilities for other key components of the battery. The anode in today’s lithium batteries is made from a mix of copper and graphite, but if it were made of pure lithium instead, it could break the “energy-density bottleneck of current Li-ion chemistry,” according to a recent study published in Trends in Chemistry.

Continue reading… “MIT’s solid-state battery breakthrough may see phones last for days”

Breakthrough Thinking, Energy, Engineering, Science & Technology News

New quantum switch turns metals into insulators

February 10, 2020

Artist’s impression of the dissolving of the electronic ‘traffic jam.’ The red atoms are different in their quantum nature and allow transport of electrons in their surroundings.

Most modern electronic devices rely on tiny, finely-tuned electrical currents to process and store information. These currents dictate how fast our computers run, how regularly our pacemakers tick and how securely our money is stored in the bank.

In a study published in Nature Physics, researchers at the University of British Columbia have demonstrated an entirely new way to precisely control such electrical currents by leveraging the interaction between an electron’s spin (which is the quantum magnetic field it inherently carries) and its orbital rotation around the nucleus.

“We have found a new way to switch the electrical conduction in materials from on to off,” said lead author Berend Zwartsenberg, a Ph.D. student at UBC’s Stewart Blusson Quantum Matter Institute (SBQMI). “Not only does this exciting result extend our understanding of how electrical conduction works, it will help us further explore known properties such as conductivity, magnetism and superconductivity, and discover new ones that could be important for quantum computing, data storage and energy applications.”

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Breakthrough Thinking, Medical Breakthrough, new technology, Science & Technology News

Artificial lifeforms designed by supercomputers are fully programmable

January 14, 2020

This living organism was designed by a supercomputer and assembled in the labSam Kriegman, UVM

Robots are made to mimic living creatures, and as smart as they’re becoming, we can still look at them and understand that they aren’t “living” in any real sense. But that line is now beginning to blur. Researchers at the University of Vermont and Tufts University have essentially created new creatures from frog cells, complete with programmable behaviors.

The new living robots are made of skin and heart cells taken from frog embryos, assembled into stable forms designed by a supercomputer and set loose in a Petri dish. The skin cells work to give the little critters their shape – which kind of resembles a blob with four “legs” – while the heart cells push them around with every pump.

“These are novel living machines,” says Joshua Bongard, co-lead researcher on the project. “They’re neither a traditional robot nor a known species of animal. It’s a new class of artifact: a living, programmable organism.”

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Breakthrough Thinking, Futurist, Report, Science & Technology News

Five principles for thinking like a futurist

January 11, 2020

Thinking about the future allows us to imagine what kind of future we want to live in and how we can get there.

In 2018 we celebrated the fifty-year anniversary of the founding of the Institute for the Future (IFTF). No other futures organization has survived for this long; we’ve actually survived our own forecasts! In these five decades we learned a lot, and we still believe—even more strongly than before—that systematic thinking about the future is absolutely essential for helping people make better choices today, whether you are an individual or a member of an educational institution or government organization. We view short-termism as the greatest threat not only to organizations but to society as a whole.

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Breakthrough Thinking, Engineering, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

Researchers observe brain-like behavior in nanoscale device

December 30, 2019

A device like the one in the study (right), and an electron microscope image showing the device’s neuron-like arrangement of nanowires.

UCLA scientists James Gimzewski and Adam Stieg are part of an international research team that has taken a significant stride toward the goal of creating thinking machines.

Led by researchers at Japan’s National Institute for Materials Science, the team created an experimental device that exhibited characteristics analogous to certain behaviors of the brain—learning, memorization, forgetting, wakefulness and sleep. The paper, published in Scientific Reports, describes a network in a state of continuous flux.

“This is a system between order and chaos, on the edge of chaos,” said Gimzewski, a UCLA distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, a member of the California NanoSystems Institute at UCLA and a co-author of the study. “The way that the device constantly evolves and shifts mimics the human brain. It can come up with different types of behavior patterns that don’t repeat themselves.”

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brain-computer interfaces, Breakthrough Thinking, Elon Musk, Science & Technology News

Elon Musk’s company Neuralink plans to connect people’s brains to the internet by next year using a procedure he claims will be as safe and easy as LASIK eye surgery

December 14, 2019

Elon Musk on Tuesday announced in a livestream that his neurotechnology startup, Neuralink, hoped to begin implanting devices into human brains as early as next year.

Musk has invested $100 million into the secretive company since its founding in 2016, according to The New York Times, and he says he hopes it will achieve “symbiosis with artificial intelligence.”

Musk said the Neuralink system would allow for a tiny chip, known as a brain-machine interface, to be implanted into the minds of willing subjects.

The chip would be designed to stimulate the brain’s neurons using tiny flexible threads of electrodes that would be inserted into the brain in a procedure Musk said would be as safe and painless as LASIK eye surgery.

Continue reading… “Elon Musk’s company Neuralink plans to connect people’s brains to the internet by next year using a procedure he claims will be as safe and easy as LASIK eye surgery”