Science & Technology News – Page 112

Artificial Intelligence, Science & Technology News

New AI Technique Can Generate 3D Holograms in Real-Time

March 23, 2021

Holographic display prototype used in the experiments

Not only can this technique run on a smartphone but it also needs less than 1 megabyte of memory.

Virtual reality has been around for decades, and every year, headlines all over the internet announce it to be the next big thing. However, those predictions are yet to become a reality, and VR technologies are far from being widespread. While there are many reasons for that, VR making users feel sick is definitely one of the culprits.

Better 3D visualization could help with that, and now, MIT researchers have developed a new way to produce holograms thanks to a deep learning-based method that works so efficiently that cuts down the computational power need in an instant, according to a press release by the university.

A hologram is an image that resembles a 2D window looking onto a 3D scene, and this 60-year-old technology remade for the digital world can deliver an outstanding image of the 3D world around us.

“People previously thought that with existing consumer-grade hardware, it was impossible to do real-time 3D holography computations,” explains Liang Shi, the study’s lead author and a Ph.D. student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “It’s often been said that commercially available holographic displays will be around in 10 years, yet this statement has been around for decades.”

Robotics, Science & Technology News

Ocean floor mapping robotics startup Bedrock announces an $8M raise

March 23, 2021

By Brian Heater

“It seems quite odd that no one has built the SpaceX equivalent for the ocean,” Anthony DiMare tells TechCrunch. “There’s no big, modern technology company that fits the space yet.”

DiMare cofounded Bedrock Ocean Exploration last year, with Charles Chiau. The latter brought a depth of robotics expertise to the space, while DiMare has experience with the oceans. His previous company, Nautilus Labs, which specialized in ocean fleet logistical planning, raised an $11 million Series A back 2019.

After leaving the startup, DiMare says he met up with Chiau at a San Francisco diner, where the pair discussed the challenges and opportunities in mapping the ocean floor. Today Bedrock is announcing that it has raised an $8 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures, Primary Venture Partners, Quiet Capital and R7.

The company notes that more than 80% of the ocean remains unmapped. And those parts are often at fairly low resolution. As the CEO puts it in a press release tied this morning’s news, “A far greater percentage of the surfaces of the Moon and Mars have been mapped and studied than our own ocean floor has.”

3D Printer, Science & Technology News

ICON’s First 3D Printed Homes for Sale in Austin, Texas

March 22, 2021

Written by Eric Baldwin

Kansas City developer 3Strands has announced U.S.A’s first 3D printed homes for sale, the company’s first multi-home project in Austin, Texas. Built with construction technology company ICON, the housing development includes two to four-bedroom homes in one of the fastest-growing cities in America. Designed by Logan Architecture, the project utilizes the Vulcan construction system to build each home.

Science & Technology News, Shopping

Here’s how you’ll shop in 2030

March 22, 2021

BY ELIZABETH SEGRAN

If the fashion industry cleans up its act.

If you’re worried about the planet, clothes shopping can feel like navigating a minefield. There are so many things to worry about when buying a T-shirt—from the carbon emissions to the wastewater generated during its manufacturing. But imagine a world where fashion labels cleaned up their act and the industry actually made the planet greener?

That’s the premise of a new report from Bain and Positive Luxury, a company that offers sustainability certifications to brands. The report explores the many initiatives brands are currently working on to become more eco-friendly and considers what the world would be like in 2030 if these became norms. At a time when many consumers are just beginning to reckon with the fashion industry’s devastating impact on the planet, the report offers a hopeful glimpse into the future—if the industry makes some changes.

Artificial Intelligence, Science & Technology News

Gartner: 75% of VCs will use AI to make investment decisions by 2025

March 22, 2021

By Kyle Wiggers

By 2025, more than 75% of venture capital and early-stage investor executive reviews will be informed by AI and data analytics. In other words, AI might determine whether a company makes it to a human evaluation at all, de-emphasizing the importance of pitch decks and financials. That’s according to a new whitepaper by Gartner, which predicts that in the next four years, the AI- and data-science-equipped investor will become commonplace.

Increased advanced analytics capabilities are shifting the early-stage venture investing strategy away from “gut feel” and qualitative decision-making to a “platform-based” quantitative process, according to Gartner senior research director Patrick Stakenas. Stakenas says data gathered from sources like LinkedIn, PitchBook, Crunchbase, and Owler, along with third-party data marketplaces, will be leveraged alongside diverse past and current investments.

“This data is increasingly being used to build sophisticated models that can better determine the viability, strategy, and potential outcome of an investment in a short amount of time. Questions such as when to invest, where to invest, and how much to invest are becoming almost automated,” Stakenas said. “The personality traits and work patterns required for success will be quantified in the same manner that the product and its use in the market, market size, and financial details are currently measured. AI tools will be used to determine how likely a leadership team is to succeed based on employment history, field expertise, and previous business success.”

Augmented Reality, Science & Technology News

Inside Facebook Reality Labs: The Next Era of Human-Computer Interaction

March 21, 2021

TL;DR: In today’s post — the first in a series exploring the future of human-computer interaction (HCI) — we’ll begin to unpack the 10-year vision of a contextually-aware, AI-powered interface for augmented reality (AR) glasses that can use the information you choose to share, to infer what you want to do, when you want to do it.

Imagine a world where a lightweight, stylish pair of glasses could replace your need for a computer or smartphone. You’d have the ability to feel physically present with friends and family — no matter where in the world they happened to be — and contextually-aware AI to help you navigate the world around you, as well as rich 3D virtual information within arm’s reach. Best of all, they’d let you look up and stay present in the world around you rather than pulling your attention away to the periphery in the palm of your hand. This is a device that wouldn’t force you to choose between the real world and the digital world.

It may sound like science fiction, but it’s a future that Facebook is building inside our labs. And today, we’ll share our vision for how people will interact with that future.

Robotics, Science & Technology News

This Fingertip for Robots Uses Magnets to ‘Feel’ Things

March 21, 2021

By sensing the subtle changes in the finger’s own magnetic field, this new technology could one day make for ultra-sensitive prosthetic hands.

By MATT SIMON

IMAGINE, IF YOU will, the home robot of the future. It picks clutter off the floor, sweeps, and does the dishes. And it has to do so perfectly: If the robot has an error rate of just 1 percent, it will drop one dish out of a hundred. Totally unacceptable. In no time, your floor would be covered in shards and the robot would get stuck in a sad, vicious feedback loop, dropping dishes and sweeping them up and dropping more dishes, ad infinitum.

To avoid this domestic nightmare, engineers will have to give robots a keen sense of touch. And for that, the machines will need fingertips, perhaps like the one recently described in the journal Science Robotics. It feels in a decidedly nonhuman way, by sensing the subtle changes in the finger’s own magnetic field, and it could one day make for ultra-sensitive prosthetic hands and robots that don’t maim tableware (or people) because they can’t control their grasp.

You, a human, can feel pressures and textures with your fingertips, thanks to specialized sensory cells in the skin called mechanoreceptors. These, along with the nervous system at large, translate mechanical information from the environment into signals your brain can comprehend as the perception of “touch.” Combined with thermoreceptors (which sense temperature) and nociceptors (which sense pain), you’re able to manipulate the world around you without hurting yourself.

Energy, Science & Technology News

Toyota creates hydrogen fuel-cell module to power buses, trains, ships

March 21, 2021

By STEPHEN EDELSTEIN

In addition to selling hydrogen fuel-cell cars, Toyota hopes to become a supplier of fuel-cell tech to other companies. To that end, the automaker has developed a modular fuel-cell system for use in other types of vehicles, including buses, trains, and ships, as well as stationary generators.

The goal is to grow the use of fuel cells by making a plug-and-play solution available to companies for the widest-possible array of applications, a Toyota press release said.

The modules are based on components from the second-generation Toyota Mirai sedan. While they include some ancillaries, such as power control, air supply, cooling, and hydrogen lines, the modules don’t include hydrogen tanks, leaving it up to each third-party user to figure out packaging.

Toyota plans to offer vertical and horizontal configurations, each with an output of 60 kilowatts (80 horsepower) or 80 kw (107 hp). The vertical version weighs about 550 pounds, while the horizontal version weighs about 530 pounds, according to Toyota.

Employment, Science & Technology News

The Looming Long-Term Unemployment Crisis

March 20, 2021

A San Francisco restaurant. New data shows that nearly 80 percent of new jobless claims in California last month were from people cycling in and out of employment.

By Ben Casselman

Why Are Jobless Claims Still High? For Some, It’s the Multiple Layoffs.

Jobs are coming back. Businesses are reopening. But a year after the pandemic jolted the economy, applications for unemployment benefits remain stubbornly, shockingly high — higher on a weekly basis than at any point in any previous recession, by some measures.

And headway has stalled: Initial weekly claims under regular and emergency programs, combined, have been stuck at just above one million since last fall, and last week was no exception, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

“It goes up a little bit, it goes down, but really we haven’t seen much progress,” said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist for the career site Indeed. “A year into this, I’m starting to wonder, what is it going to take to fix the magnitude problem? How is this going to actually end?”

The continued high rate of unemployment applications has been something of a mystery for many economists. With the pandemic still suppressing activity in many sectors, it makes sense that joblessness would remain high. But businesses are reopening in much of the country, and trends on employment and spending are generally improving. So shouldn’t unemployment filings be falling?

New evidence from California may offer a partial explanation: According to a report released Thursday by the California Policy Lab, a research organization affiliated with the University of California, nearly 80 percent of the unemployment applications filed in the state last month were from people who had been laid off earlier in the pandemic, gotten back to work, and then been laid off again.

Science & Technology News, Space

HARVARD SCIENTISTS PROPOSE SUPER-TALL TOWERS TO POWER MOON BASE

March 20, 2021

WITH THE MOON’S LOW GRAVITY, YOU COULD BUILD INCREDIBLY TALL TOWERS.

by VICTOR TANGERMANN

Moon Tower

Scientists have come up with an ambitious new idea to provide bases on the Moon’s surface with solar power, New Scientist reports: massive, kilometer-high towers constructed from lunar concrete and almost entirely covered in solar panels.

The team, led by Sephora Ruppert from Harvard University, suggest in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper that the towers could be constructed by mixing lunar soil and heating it to bind it together, not too dissimilar from regular concrete.

“We choose concrete as the capital cost of transporting large masses of iron or carbon fiber to the Moon is presently so expensive that profitable operation of a power plant is unlikely,” the researchers write in the paper. “Concrete instead can be manufactured in situ from the lunar regolith.”

Aviation, Science & Technology News

Rolls-Royce Gets Into the eVTOL Game, Will Power Vertical Aerospace Machines

March 20, 2021

By Daniel Patrascu

When the words Rolls-Royce come up, the mind immediately links them to the British maker of luxury automobiles for some reason. But the same name has been behind some of the aviation industry’s biggest advancements over the decades, and it will probably continue to do so in the years ahead. The same name, but not the same company, as Rolls-Royce keeps reminding people.

It is Rolls-Royce Holdings plc, an aerospace and defense company we’re here to talk about today. Together with Vertical Aerospace, also a British company, they’re on the verge of developing one of the world’s first certified passenger carrying eVTOLs.

eVTOL stands for electric vertical take-off and landing vehicle, and according to some people, this will be one of the main means of transportation in the near future. VA-4X is how Vertical’s upcoming flying machine is called, a flying contraption equipped with no less than eight propellers.

Vertical plans to take the VA-4X to the skies for the first time by the end of the year and targets the start of production in 2024. When ready, the machine will be capable of taking up to four people on 120-mile (193-km) journeys at speeds of up to 200 mph (322 kph).

App, Science & Technology News

Meet Blinkist, The App All The Intellectuals Are Using

March 19, 2021

The founders of Blinkist (from left): Niklas Jansen, Tobi Balling, and Holger Seim (Not pictured: Sebastian Klein)

by Tom Farrar | Mar 10 2021

Blinkist is an app used by top thinkers around the world –– it provides genuine value for people who love to learn.

As a young man, Abraham Lincoln would stay up for hours every night reading — it played a major role in him becoming a revolutionary, a top thinker, and one of America’s most important presidents. Nowadays, no longer do we need to burn the midnight oil to stay on top of our reading — thanks to the Blinkist app which allows us to get through books like never before. At Blinkist, we gather the key insights from nonfiction books into 15-minute reads and listens.

There are over 4500 titles across 27 unique categories, cementing our app as the go-to destination for big thinkers. Professor, intellectual and founder Sarah Schupp is a big fan of Blinkist. Here’s why she’s a huge advocate of the app: “I use Blinkist when I’m in between meetings and can’t get a giant task done, but at least I can be productive.” – Sarah Schupp, Professor & Founder of UniversityParent.com Even Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, recently stopped by the Blinkist office to get a glimpse of the hype, and to check out how the award-winning startup works.

At the beginning, the Blinkist co-founders all wanted a way to read more books and figured out a way to make that possible. Today, more than 17 million people are expanding their horizons with Blinkist, and the app was named a Global Leader in Learning and Education by The United Nations.

‘Blinkist encourages you to read more nonfiction books. The app contains cleverly written digests — called blinks — where books are broken down into their main arguments.’ – The New York Times More than 17 million people are expanding their horizons with Blinkist, with thousands of knowledge hunters downloading the app everyday. Although ‘intellectual’ is a term that used to just apply to an academic few, since the internet has made information readily available, it’s now come to mean anyone who’s curious about the world around them.

Blinkist makes it easy to access trustworthy ideas from bestselling nonfiction in minutes. So, what exactly is it that top thinkers like about Blinkist?