Uber’s First Self-Driving Fleet in Pittsburgh This Month

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Near the end of 2014, Uber co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick flew to Pittsburgh on a mission: to hire dozens of the world’s experts in autonomous vehicles. The city is home to Carnegie Mellon University’s robotics department, which has produced many of the biggest names in the newly hot field. Sebastian Thrun, the creator of Google’s self-driving car project, spent seven years researching autonomous robots at CMU, and the project’s former director, Chris Urmson, was a CMU grad student.

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This tiny solar-powered device kills 99.999 percent of bacteria

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Water is our most precious resource. We may take this for granted, in developed regions but some 2.8 billion people around the world are affected by the scarcity of clean drinking water.

A tiny new device may help change that. Developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator at Stanford University, the device is about half the size of a postage stamp and uses solar energy to disinfect water with bacterial contamination. The researchers reported their experiments in a paper this week in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

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Nanorobots target cancerous tumors with precision

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Researchers from Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal and McGill University have just achieved a spectacular breakthrough in cancer research. They have developed new nanorobotic agents capable of navigating through the bloodstream to administer a drug with precision by specifically targeting the active cancerous cells of tumours. This way of injecting medication ensures the optimal targeting of a tumour and avoids jeopardizing the integrity of organs and surrounding healthy tissues. As a result, the drug dosage that is highly toxic for the human organism could be significantly reduced.

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Introducing the Doohan EV3 iTank 3-Wheeled Electric Scooter

With its powerful motor and unique 3-wheeled design, Doohan EV3 iTank electric scooter is able to deal with both city streets and gravel roads, and charming appearance makes you become the focus on the road.

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China working on hypersonic spaceplane with horizontal takeoff

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China is planning to take space exploration to a new level, as it develops a new “spaceplane” that could take off from a runway and fly at hypersonic speed before blasting into space and back.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CATSC) is behind the project of a plane/spacecraft hybrid that will travel back and forth between the runway and space orbit at hypersonic speeds, Popular Science reported.

Development and testing is scheduled for the next three to five years. The first deployment date is estimated for 2030.

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VR and exoskeletons help paraplegics regain movement

 

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After twelve months, eight patients and 2,052 sessions spread over 1,958 hours, Duke University is publishing some promising results from a study seeking to demonstrate the ability for brain-machine interfaces to help restore mobility in humans.

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AI’s Healing Power

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Artificial intelligence originally aspired to replace doctors. Researchers imagined robots that could ask you questions, run the answers through an algorithm that would learn with experience and tell whether you had the flu or a cold. However, those promises largely failed, as artificial intelligent algorithms were too rudimentary to perform those functions.

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Space Mining Company Plans to Launch Asteroid-Surveying Spacecraft by 2020

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Artist’s rendering of Prospector-1, which is expected to launch by
the end of the decade. The water-powered spacecraft will visit
an asteroid and assess its potentially mineable resources.

Within a few years, the first commercial mining mission beyond Earth’s orbit could be underway. Asteroid mining company Deep Space Industries has announced that it will be sending a spacecraft called Prospector-1 out in search of resources by the end of the decade.

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Ray Kurzweil: Radical Life Extension Will Be Better Than You Think

According to Ray Kurzweil, we’re approaching a time when humans will begin to radically extend their lifespans. This sounds good on the surface, but will we have enough resources to support everyone? And won’t living indefinitely get boring eventually? Not so much, Kurzweil says.

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Have We Uploaded Enough Data To Digitally Clone Ourselves?

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In an episode of the British dystopian sci-fi show Black Mirror, titled “Be Right Back,” a man who dies in a car crash leaves behind enough social media and other data traces to be digitally recreated, first online and then as a creepily life-like robot. Turns out, that scenario is not so far-fetched.

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Wall-Crawling Robots Could Weave A Room For You

Last May, researchers at ICD Stuttgart revealed the Elytra Filament Pavilion—a vast, carbon fiber structure woven with the industrial arm of a modified Kuka robot. Now, in a thesis project led by Maria Yablonina, the same lab has managed to shrink the scale, from massive industrial-line robots, to a pair of drones that can crawl up your wall to weave smaller structures like tag-teaming spiders spinning silk.

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‘Neural Dust’ Could Monitor Your Brain Wirelessly

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Science fiction that features wires connecting brains to computers might now be obsolete. Wireless powered implants, each smaller than a grain of rice, could serve as “neural dust” that can one day scan and stimulate brain cells. Such research could one day help lead to next-generation brain-machine interfaces for controlling prosthetics, exoskeletons and robots, as well as “electroceuticals” to treat disorders of the brain and body.

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Discover the Hidden Patterns of Tomorrow with Futurist Thomas Frey
Unlock Your Potential, Ignite Your Success.

By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.

Learn More about this exciting program.