Flying cars and flying taxis are closer than you think. So how will these airborne vehicles make the transition from land to air? Goodyear thinks it knows, and is showing off the Aero — a tire than will be able to both run vertically as a tire and horizontally as a propeller — at the Geneva International Auto Show this week.
The propeller blades serve a dual purpose; as the necessary support for the weight of the car, and as a source of lift for the car when the driver wishes to go airborne.
A new type of tiny motor can help shuttle life-saving vaccines to where they need to go. For infants or those of us who are squeamish around needles, that could mean a future with fewer shots and more effective medicine.
The problem with oral vaccines — ones that take pill form — is that they can sometimes get broken down by stomach acid or get spit right back up by a child. That’s why researchers are interested in tiny, molecular motors that can propel the pills through the body to their target, making orally-consumed medication more effective than ever before.
The latest game changer in diabetes research might not be a new drug or a therapy. Instead, it could be a system of human blood vessels virtually identical to the ones currently transporting blood throughout your body.
What makes these blood vessels special is that they are the first ones grown in a lab — and they’ve already generated a new lead in diabetes treatment.
A desk-sized turbine can power 10,000 homes using carbon dioxide.
10,000 Homes
Engineers from GE Global Research unveiled a turbine that could provide power for 10,000 homes. But what’s truly remarkable about this turbine is its potential to solve the world’s energy challenges.
Typically, turbines weigh tons and use steam to run—this one is no bigger than the size of your desk, weighs around 68 kg (150 pounds), and runs on carbon dioxide. “This compact machine will allow us to do amazing things,” said Doug Hofer, lead engineer on the project, in Albany, New York. He continues, “the world is seeking cleaner and more efficient ways to generate power. The concepts we are exploring with this machine are helping us address both.”
Company called Energy Vault has an agreement to build a pilot tower in India in 2019.
A mock-up of what Energy Vault’s tower looks like.
Energy Vault
A company called Energy Vault has proposed a new utility-scale battery that is both old and new at the same time. The “battery” is mechanical, rather than chemical, and stores energy much like pumped hydro does, but it does it with bricks.
If you’re not familiar with pumped hydro, it works like this. The system pumps water from a lower elevation to a higher elevation when electricity is plentiful and cheap. When electricity becomes more expensive, operators release that water through a hydroelectric turbine to give the grid some extra juice. Similarly, Energy Vault wants to build a system of six cranes, which will electrically stack heavy bricks into a tower when electricity is cheap and plentiful. When electricity becomes more scarce and expensive, the cranes will release each brick and harvest the energy from their fall.
How many times have you endured a dry-as-dust PowerPoint presentation or clicked through a tired e-learning course only to realize, despite hours of ‘teaching,’ you remember virtually nothing? It’s easy to blame yourself when this happens; you may feel guilty or even harbor doubts about your ability to retain knowledge. Don’t. There’s a good chance that the material simply wasn’t practical, engaging or relevant enough – flaws magnified when you are spoken at, instead of with, in a stale classroom environment.
I am not suggesting school-style learning should be outlawed, as it certainly has its merits. But some subjects, particularly those with a large technical element, demand a more innovative approach. Without doubt, cybersecurity falls into this category – something I first observed while delivering GCHQ’s Cyber Summer School. It was evident that people enjoyed completing practical exercises requiring analytical thinking and problem solving. It was also clear that when people had fun, they learned more.
When it comes to poverty alleviation in the developing world, cash transfer schemes have been at the center of a difficult debate. For years, donor agencies and governments were urged to integrate the poor into their economies by providing them with a basic amount of cash. Yet those programs have been dogged by controversies, with critics arguing they encourage dependency, negatively impact labor, and pit community members against each other.
Using evidence collected in eight countries in sub-Saharan Africa over a decade, a new paper dispels some of these common misperceptions about unconditional cash transfers in Africa. The research was conducted through the Transfer Project, a multi-partner initiative that includes the UN agencies for children and food, national governments besides national and international researchers. Unconditional cash transfers, or UCT, are different from universal basic income in that they are time-bound and are given to poor households who make spending decisions consistent with their needs.
The world’s first bio-brick made using human urine was unveiled at UCT this week. In picture are (from left) the Department of Civil Engineering’s Dr Dyllon Randall and his students, Vukheta Mukhari and Suzanne Lambert.
The world’s first bio-brick grown from human urine has been unveiled by University of Cape Town (UCT) master’s student in civil engineering Suzanne Lambert, signalling an innovative paradigm shift in waste recovery.
Your family and friends will be able to interact with a digital “you” that doles out advice—even when you’re gone.
Hossein Rahnama knows a CEO of a major financial company who wants to live on after he’s dead, and Rahnama thinks he can help him do it.
Rahnama is creating a digital avatar for the CEO that they both hope could serve as a virtual “consultant” when the actual CEO is gone. Some future company executive deciding whether to accept an acquisition bid might pull out her cell phone, open a chat window, and pose the question to the late CEO. The digital avatar, created by an artificial-intelligence platform that analyzes personal data and correspondence, might detect that the CEO had a bad relationship with the acquiring company’s execs. “I’m not a fan of that company’s leadership,” the avatar might say, and the screen would go red to indicate disapproval.
The warping of spacetime, in the General Relativistic picture, by gravitational masses is what causes the gravitational force. It is assumed, but not experimentally verified, that antimatter masses will behave the same as matter masses in a gravitational field.LIGO/T. PYLE
One of the most astonishing facts about science is how universally applicable the laws of nature are. Every particle obeys the same rules, experiences the same forces, and sees the same fundamental constants, no matter where or when they exist. Gravitationally, every single entity in the Universe experiences, depending on how you look at it, either the same gravitational acceleration or the same curvature of spacetime, no matter what properties it possesses.
At least, that’s what things are like in theory. In practice, some things are notoriously difficult to measure. Photons and normal, stable particles both fall as expected in a gravitational field, with Earth causing any massive particle to accelerate towards its center at 9.8 m/s2. Despite our best efforts, though, we have never measured the gravitational acceleration of antimatter. It ought to accelerate the exact same way, but until we measure it, we can’t know. One experiment is attempting to decide the matter, once-and-for-all. Depending on what it finds, it just might be the key to a scientific and technological revolution.
