cutting edge – Page 3

Augmented Reality, brain-computer interfaces, cutting edge, Science & Technology News

Artificial skin could help rehabilitation and enhance virtual reality

October 10, 2019

Artificial skin could help rehabilitation and enhance virtual reality

EPFL scientists have developed a soft artificial skin that provides haptic feedback and—thanks to a sophisticated self-sensing mechanism—has the potential to instantaneously adapt to a wearer’s movements. Applications for the new technology range from medical rehabilitation to virtual reality. Artificial skin could help rehabilitation and enhance virtual reality.

Just like our senses of hearing and vision, our sense of touch plays an important role in how we perceive and interact with the world around us. And technology capable of replicating our sense of touch—also known as haptic feedback—can greatly enhance human-computer and human-robot interfaces for applications such as medical rehabilitation and virtual reality.

Scientists at EPFL’s Reconfigurable Robotics Lab (RRL), headed by Jamie Paik, and Laboratory for Soft Bioelectronic Interfaces (LSBI), headed by Stéphanie Lacour at the School of Engineering, have teamed up to develop a soft, flexible artificial skin made of silicone and electrodes. Both labs are part of the NCCR Robotics program.

The skin’s system of soft sensors and actuators enable the artificial skin to conform to the exact shape of a wearer’s wrist, for example, and provide haptic feedback in the form of pressure and vibration. Strain sensors continuously measure the skin’s deformation so that the haptic feedback can be adjusted in real time to produce a sense of touch that’s as realistic as possible. The scientists’ work has just been published in Soft Robotics.

Continue reading… “Artificial skin could help rehabilitation and enhance virtual reality”

AI, Artificial Intelligence, cutting edge, Science & Technology News

100,000 free AI-generated headshots put stock photo companies on notice

September 26, 2019

For all your royalty-free photo needs

It’s getting easier and easier to use AI to generate convincing-looking, yet entirely fake, pictures of people. Now, one company wants to find a use for these photos, by offering a resource of 100,000 AI-generated faces to anyone that can use them — royalty free. Many of the images look fake but others are difficult to distinguish from images licensed by stock photo companies.

The project’s Product Hunt page lists the team at Icons8, a designer marketplace for icons and photographs, as the creator of the project. The AI-produced images are intended to be used as design elements in anything from presentations to websites and mobile apps. Everything is free to use with link attribution back to generated.photos.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, cutting edge, Science & Technology News

A breakthrough for A.I. technology: Passing an 8th-grade science test

September 16, 2019

SAN FRANCISCO — Four years ago, more than 700 computer scientists competed in a contest to build artificial intelligence that could pass an eighth-grade science test. There was $80,000 in prize money on the line.

They all flunked. Even the most sophisticated system couldn’t do better than 60 percent on the test. A.I. couldn’t match the language and logic skills that students are expected to have when they enter high school.

But on Wednesday, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a prominent lab in Seattle, unveiled a new system that passed the test with room to spare. It correctly answered more than 90 percent of the questions on an eighth-grade science test and more than 80 percent on a 12th-grade exam.

Continue reading… “A breakthrough for A.I. technology: Passing an 8th-grade science test”

cutting edge, Engineering, Robotics, Robots, Science & Technology News

A cave is no place for humans, so DARPA is sending in the robots

September 3, 2019

DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge aims to make cave exploration a more robotic affair.

Outside its cavernous passageways, the mine’s entrance is emblazoned in red lettering that reads “Safety Research Coal Mine.” This site is just one of two mine systems at the Bruceton Research Center in Pittsburgh. They were once part of a full mine system but were split apart for research purposes after the U.S. Bureau of Mines leased 38 acres of land from the Pittsburgh Coal Company in 1910.

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

Physicists use light waves to accelerate supercurrents, enable ultrafast quantum computing

July 18, 2019

Scientists have discovered that terahertz light — light at trillions of cycles per second — can act as a control knob to accelerate supercurrents. That can help open up the quantum world of matter and energy at atomic and subatomic scales to practical applications such as ultrafast computing.

Jigang Wang patiently explained his latest discovery in quantum control that could lead to superfast computing based on quantum mechanics: He mentioned light-induced superconductivity without energy gap. He brought up forbidden supercurrent quantum beats. And he mentioned terahertz-speed symmetry breaking.

Then he backed up and clarified all that. After all, the quantum world of matter and energy at terahertz and nanometer scales — trillions of cycles per second and billionths of meters — is still a mystery to most of us.

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cutting edge, Engineering, new technology, Science & Technology News, security

Move over, silicon switches: There’s a new way to compute

May 9, 2019

Logic and memory devices, such as the hard drives in computers, now use nanomagnetic mechanisms to store and manipulate information. Unlike silicon transistors, which have fundamental efficiency limitations, they require no energy to maintain their magnetic state: Energy is needed only for reading and writing information.

One method of controlling magnetism uses electrical current that transports spin to write information, but this usually involves flowing charge. Because this generates heat and energy loss, the costs can be enormous, particularly in the case of large server farms or in applications like artificial intelligence, which require massive amounts of memory. Spin, however, can be transported without a charge with the use of a topological insulator—a material whose interior is insulating but that can support the flow of electrons on its surface.

Continue reading… “Move over, silicon switches: There’s a new way to compute”

cutting edge, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

This injectable gel could one day rebuild muscle, skin, and fat

May 10, 2019

A new injectable gel could help repair damaged soft tissues.

This injectable gel could one day rebuild muscle, skin, and fat

Car crashes, battle wounds, and surgeries can leave people with gaping holes in soft tissue that are often too large for their bodies to repair. Now, researchers have developed a nanofiber-reinforced injectable gel that can rebuild missing muscle and connective tissues by serving as a scaffold and recruiting the body’s wound-healing cells. So far, the team has tested the material only in rats and rabbits. But if it performs as well in humans, it could give reconstructive surgeons a fast and easy way to help patients regenerate lost tissues without scarring or deformity.

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communication, cutting edge, Internet, Science & Technology News

Breakthrough research to revolutionize internet communication

April 28, 2019

Breakthrough research to revolutionize internet communication

A team of University of Otago/Dodd-Walls Centre scientists have created a novel device that could enable the next generation of faster, more energy efficient internet. Their breakthrough results have been published in the world’s premiere scientific journal Nature this morning.

The internet is one of the single biggest consumers of power in the world. With data capacity expected to double every year and the physical infrastructure used to encode and process data reaching its limits, there is huge pressure to find new solutions to increase the speed and capacity of the internet.

Principal Investigator Dr. Harald Schwefel and Dr. Madhuri Kumari’s research has found an answer. They have created a device called a microresonator optical frequency comb made out of a tiny disc of crystal. The device transforms a single color of laser light into a rainbow of 160 different frequencies – each beam totally in sync with each other and perfectly stable. One such device could replace hundreds of power-consuming lasers currently used to encode and send data around the world.

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cutting edge, Entertainment, Science & Technology News, sports

This esports franchise is getting a $50 million arena alongside Philadelphia’s NBA, NFL, and MLB teams

April 7, 2019

Philadelphia Fusion Arena

Comcast Spector and The Cordish Companies plan to build a $50 million arena for the Philadelphia Fusion, an esports team in the Overwatch League.

The Fusion Arena will be located in the center of the Philadelphia Sports Complex, adjacent to the city’s NBA, NFL, and MLB venues.

The venue will span 60,000 square feet and seat 3,500 guests in the main arena; the Philadelphia Fusion training facility, broadcast studio and team offices will be housed in the arena as well.

An esports team will soon have their very own $50 million arena in the heart of the Philadelphia Sports Complex, based on a proposal announced today by Comcast Spectacor and The Cordish Companies. Comcast wants to build the arena to house the Philadelphia Fusion, the team they built to compete in the Overwatch League.

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Aviation, cutting edge, Drone, drones, Science & Technology News

ADIFO: The hyper-agile, omnidirectional, supersonic flying saucer

April 3, 2019

ADIFO could resurrect the idea of flying saucers, promising extreme speed, efficiency and aerial agility

At low speed, it operates like a quadcopter, at high speed, it’s a jet-propelled, highly efficient supersonic aircraft whose entire body acts as a low-drag wing. Those are the claims of the Romanian creators of this flying saucer that’s designed to offer unprecedented aerial agility across a broad range of speeds.

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Crazy Stuff, cutting edge, New Viewpoints, Science & Technology News

Physicists reverse time using quantum computer

March 19, 2019

Researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology teamed up with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland and returned the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past. They also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study comes out March 13 in Scientific Reports.

“This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time: from the past to the future,” commented the study’s lead author Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information Technology at MIPT.

“We began by describing a so-called local perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Then, in December, we published a paper that discusses the violation of the second law via a device called a Maxwell’s demon,” Lesovik said. “The most recent paper approaches the same problem from a third angle: We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.”

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Alzheimer's Disease, cutting edge, Genes, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

A novel dementia treatment will flood people’s brains with a low-risk version of a key gene.

March 7, 2019

No one knows for certain what causes Alzheimer’s disease. But one fact about the condition has gained nearly irrefutable status. Depending on what versions of a gene called APOE you inherit, your risk of the brain disorder can be half the average—or more than 12 times as high.

Sometimes called “the forgetting gene,” APOE comes in three common versions, called 2, 3, and 4. Type 2 lowers a person’s risk, 3 is average, and 4 increases the chance dramatically. The risk is so great that doctors avoid testing people for APOE because a bad result can be upsetting, and there’s nothing to do about it. There’s no cure, and you can’t change your genes, either.

Well, today you can’t. But doctors in New York City say that beginning in May, they will start testing a novel gene therapy in which people with the unluckiest APOE genes will be given a huge dose to their brain of the low-risk version.

Continue reading… “A novel dementia treatment will flood people’s brains with a low-risk version of a key gene.”