new technology – Page 15

3D Printer, Engineering, new technology, Science & Technology News

Multimaterial 3-D printing manufactures complex objects, fast

November 22, 2019

Multimaterial multinozzle 3D printheads. Credit: Nature (2019). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1736-8

3-D printers are revolutionizing manufacturing by allowing users to create any physical shape they can imagine on-demand. However, most commercial printers are only able to build objects from a single material at a time and inkjet printers that are capable of multimaterial printing are constrained by the physics of droplet formation. Extrusion-based 3-D printing allows a broad palette of materials to be printed, but the process is extremely slow. For example, it would take roughly 10 days to build a 3-D object roughly one liter in volume at the resolution of a human hair and print speed of 10 cm/s using a single-nozzle, single-material printhead. To build the same object in less than 1 day, one would need to implement a printhead with 16 nozzles printing simultaneously!

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Healthcare, new technology, Robotics, Robots, Science & Technology News

Robot overlords? More like co-verlords. The future is human-robot collaboration

November 22, 2019

Davinci surgical system at Magdeburg University Hospital

It’s the classic trope of buddy cop movies: you introduce two characters with little in common aside from the job that they do. Maybe one’s old and the other’s young. Maybe one’s black and the other’s white. Maybe one’s a maverick and the other is a stickler for doing things by the book. At first they don’t get along. Perhaps one is new to the precinct and the other fears that they’re being phased out as a result. But, wouldn’t you know it, they turn out to be a great team. The strengths of one are the weaknesses of the other. The police chief might get pissed at their zany antics, but they’re much better friends than they are enemies. Could the same be true of humans and their relationship with robots?

The typical narrative, as cliché as any Lethal Weapon buddy cop movie ripoff, is that robots are here to steal our jobs. Unless you’re one of the people lucky enough to be building or selling the robots, you should view robots as the flashy new rival in town, hovering in the wings to replace you. But while there are certainly jobs that robots will take from humans (hopefully the dirty, dull, and dangerous jobs humans don’t really want), there are plenty of other jobs in which robots working alongside humans could greatly increase human productivity.

In doing so, they won’t just augment our abilities; they’ll make it possible to scale jobs in a way that was unimaginable in the pre-robot age.

Continue reading… “Robot overlords? More like co-verlords. The future is human-robot collaboration”

Children, DNA, Medicine, new technology, Science & Technology News

The world’s first Gattaca baby tests are finally here

November 19, 2019

The DNA test claims to let prospective parents weed out IVF embryos with a high risk of disease or low intelligence.

Anxious couples are approaching fertility doctors in the US with requests for a hotly debated new genetic test being called “23andMe, but on embryos.”

The baby-picking test is being offered by a New Jersey startup company, Genomic Prediction, whose plans we first reported on two years ago.

The company says it can use DNA measurements to predict which embryos from an IVF procedure are least likely to end up with any of 11 different common diseases. In the next few weeks it’s set to release case studies on its first clients.

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drones, Environment, new technology, Science & Technology News

How cheap robots are transforming ocean exploration

November 16, 2019

Backed by billionaire philanthropists and Silicon Valley venture capitalists, a wave of entrepreneurs are developing high-tech, low-cost technologies to probe the watery realms we still barely understand. Are the oceans finally getting their moon-shot moment?

The robot was born out of a treasure hunt.

It all started in 2010, when Eric Stackpole was a promising young engineer designing satellite technology as an intern at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California. He was simultaneously working toward a master’s degree at nearby Santa Clara University and was prone to procrastinating. Lately, he’d become taken with the idea of building his own underwater robot.

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Military, new technology, Science & Technology News, Weapons

ATHENA laser weapon counters multiple drones in full-integration test

November 16, 2019

The ATHENA system shown here destroyed multiple drones in a real-world demonstration for the Air ForceLockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin’s Advanced Test High Energy Asset (ATHENA) laser weapon engaged and destroyed multiple drone threats in a recent field test at a US government test range at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The laser weapon system being developed for the US Air Force was used against a mix of fixed-wing and rotary drones with the aid of government command and control systems.

The development of laser weapons requires more than just creating more and more powerful beam generators. Such systems must also be compact, portable, and robust enough to deploy in the field; able to track and lock onto a target; and be able to keep the beam stable over long distances.

In addition, to be practical, such weapons must be able to integrate with existing command and control systems and radar sensors. It was to demonstrate this that was the focus of the Fort Sill test, where the ATHENA laser was operated by airmen, who were given radar tracks of the drones, which then allowed ATHENA’s beam director to slew, acquire, track, and shoot down the targets using its high-energy laser.

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Healthcare, new technology, Science & Technology News, Video

MIT scientists develop a way to recover details from blurry images

October 26, 2019

A group of MIT researchers have developed a way to recover lost details from images and create clear copies of motion-blurred parts in videos. Their creation, an algorithm called a “visual deprojection model,” is based on a convolutional neural network. They trained that network by feeding it pairs of low-quality images and their high-quality counterparts, so it could learn how the latter can produce blurry, barely visible footage.

When the model is used to process previously unseen low-quality images with blurred elements, it analyzes them to figure out what in the video could’ve produced the blur. It then synthesizes new images that combine data from both the clearer and blurry parts of a video. Say, you have footage of your yard with something moving on screen — the technology can create a version of that video that clearly shows the movement’s sources.

During the team’s tests, the model was able to recreate 24 frames of a video showing a particular person’s gait, their size and the position of their legs. Before you get excited and think that it could one day make CSI’s zoom and enhance a reality, the researchers are more focused on refining the technology for medical use. They believe it could be used to convert 2D images like X-rays into 3D images with more information like CT scans at no additional cost — 3D scans are a lot more expensive — making it especially valuable for developing nations.

“If we can convert X-rays to CT scans, that would be somewhat game-changing. You could just take an X-ray and push it through our algorithm and see all the lost information.”

Via Engadget.com

Drone, drones, new technology, Programming, Robotics, Science & Technology News

SwarmTouch: A tactile interaction strategy for human-swarm communication

October 11, 2019

A user manipulating the formation of a swarm of drones using SwarmTouch. Credit: Tsykunov et al.

SwarmTouch: a tactile interaction strategy for human-swarm communication

Researchers at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia have recently introduced a new strategy to enhance interactions between humans and robotic swarms, called SwarmTouch. This strategy, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, allows a human operator to communicate with a swarm of nano-quadrotor drones and guide their formation, while receiving tactile feedback in the form of vibrations.

“We are working in the field of swarm of drones and my previous research in the field of haptics was very helpful in introducing a new frontier of tactile human-swarm interactions,” Dzmitry Tsetserukou, Professor at Skoltech and head of Intelligent Space Robotics laboratory, told TechXplore. “During our experiments with the swarm, however, we understood that current interfaces are too unfriendly and difficult to operate.”

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Batteries, Energy, Engineering, new technology, Science & Technology News

First fully rechargeable carbon dioxide battery is seven times more efficient than lithium ion

October 3, 2019

Lithium-carbon dioxide batteries are attractive energy storage systems because they have a specific energy density that is more than seven times greater than commonly used lithium-ion batteries. Until now, however, scientists have not been able to develop a fully rechargeable prototype, despite their potential to store more energy.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago are the first to show that lithium-carbon dioxide batteries can be designed to operate in a fully rechargeable manner, and they have successfully tested a lithium-carbon dioxide battery prototype running up to 500 consecutive cycles of charge/recharge processes.

Their findings are published in the journal Advanced Materials.

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Aviation, new technology, Science & Technology News, Space Flight, Travel

This ‘Spaceplane’ could get you from Sydney to London in four hours

October 1, 2019

There are plans to start running test flights of the ‘hypersonic’ jet in the mid-2020s.

Developers are working on a “hypersonic” jet engine that could see commuters flying from Sydney to London in four hours, and London to New York in one. It’s called a SABRE—that is, Synergetic Air Breathing Rocket Engine—and it allows planes to hit speeds of Mach 5.4 (6400 kilometres per hour). Hence the “hypersonic” moniker: whereas “supersonic” refers to a rate of travel that simply exceeds the speed of sound, “hypersonic” speeds typically exceed it five or six times over.

The hybrid hydrogen-oxygen engine is also way greener and cheaper than current air travel, The Telegraph reports, and will give aircraft the potential to fly in space.

Continue reading… “This ‘Spaceplane’ could get you from Sydney to London in four hours”

Healthcare, Inventions, Medical Breakthrough, new technology, Science & Technology News

Faster super-resolution microscope can see virus particles moving through a cell

September 28, 2019

This image taken by the new microscope shows a living bone cancer cell with nucleus (blue), mitochondria (green) and cytoskeleton (magenta).

When you want to look at something small up close, you use a microscope. And when you want to look at something really really small, you use a super-resolution microscope. These tools can look in resolutions of a millionth of a millimeter, but they work slowly due to the volume of image data that they need to record. Now, researchers have developed a way to speed up the process by creating a method which can record data at this microscopic scale in real-time.

Continue reading… “Faster super-resolution microscope can see virus particles moving through a cell”

Engineering, Inventions, new technology, Science & Technology News

Graphene nanoribbons lay the groundwork for ultrapowerful computers

September 28, 2019

Graphene nanoribbons on silicon wafers could help lead the way toward super fast computer chips. Image courtesy of Mike Arnold.

Smaller, better semiconductors have consistently allowed computers to become faster and more energy-efficient than ever before.

But the 18-month cycle of exponential increases in computing power that has held since the mid 1960s now has leveled off. That’s because there are fundamental limits to integrated circuits made strictly from silicon—the material that forms the backbone of our modern computer infrastructure.

As they look to the future, however, engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are turning to new materials to lay down the foundations for more powerful computers.

They have devised a method to grow tiny ribbons of graphene—the single-atom-thick carbon material—directly on top of silicon wafers.

Continue reading… “Graphene nanoribbons lay the groundwork for ultrapowerful computers”

communication, Employment, Internet, new technology, Science & Technology News

How 5G will reinvent “working from home”

September 24, 2019

It’s 10:00 am. Do you know where your employee is? No doubt they are working—somewhere.

Thanks to greatly improved internet connectivity and workforce applications, employees in an increasing number of professions can work just about anywhere they want—in their home, at a coffee shop, on a plane. And chances are they’re more productive and more engaged than they would be if they were in the office. They may even be planning to stay in their job longer because of their flexible work location. In 2017, Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom, in a TED Talk, went so far as to call work-from-home potentially as innovative as the driverless car.

Now, work-from-home is itself about to be disrupted, by the coming of 5G and its ability to enable virtual reality (VR) anywhere through what’s known as XR, the combination of extended, augmented, virtual, and mixed reality technologies. Fifth-generation (5G) communications networks, with their exponentially faster connection speeds, capacity, and communication response times (known as latency), will make possible an astonishing range of innovative new products and services.

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