Science & Technology News – Page 62

Israel tests AI-powered Floating Solar Panels

June 5, 2022

he new project is being carried out in collaboration with Israel’s national water provider, Mekorot.

Israel announces that it plans to test a new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered floating solar panels system to generate clean energy, reports Nocamels.

Developed by Israeli startup Xfloat, the solar photovoltaic (PV) system is meant to move and monitor the sun while floating on reservoir water. The company has developed an intelligent water management system that accurately tilts and tracks water loads and pumps.

The data acquired from sensors is subsequently refined and directed to a knowledge-based machine learning process for PV performance prediction, and O&M. Countries across the globe are launching new initiatives to generate clean energy as a step to control global warming.

Genes, Science & Technology News

Gene-edited super tomato may provide the vitamin punch to fight Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and cancer

June 5, 2022

NORWICH, United Kingdom — A genetically engineered “super” tomato that may have the power to fight Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and cancer has been created by British scientists. The modified fruit is packed with vitamin D — which also boosts bones, teeth, and muscles.

Estimates show more than four in 10 Americans may have a vitamin D deficiency, which can increase their risk of developing a host of illnesses. Now, a team at the John Innes Centre in Norwich has engineered a variety of tomato that produces more.

They used a gene editing technique known as CRISPR, enabling them to make precise changes in DNA at specific locations. The procedure blocked the action of an enzyme that normally converts the vitamin to cholesterol.

“We’ve shown that you can biofortify tomatoes with provitamin D3 using gene editing, which means tomatoes could be developed as a plant-based, sustainable source of vitamin D3,” says corresponding author Professor Cathie Martin in a media release.

“Forty percent of Europeans have vitamin D insufficiency and so do one billion people world-wide. We are not only addressing a huge health problem, but are helping producers, because tomato leaves which currently go to waste, could be used to make supplements from the gene-edited lines.”

Futurati Podcast, Science & Technology News

Ep. 87 With Scott Ruoti

June 3, 2022

Youtube or on the Futurati Podcast website.

Scott Ruoti is an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, where he focuses on security and privacy, usability, and human-computer interaction. He takes a diverse and multidisciplinary approach in studying everything from optimized emailing systems to the distributed ledger, and we are thrilled to get his perspective on use cases for the blockchain.

Pairs Well With

Our interview with Eric Yakes on whether Bitcoin will become a global reserve currency.
Trent Fowler answering the question ‘What is the blockchain?’
How could blockchain be used for real estate?

Science & Technology News, Space Flight

Jeff Bezos’s Rocket Company Tests America’s Largest Rocket Engine

May 29, 2022

Blue Origin’s BE-4 oxygen-rich, liquefied-natural-gas-fueled, staged-combustion rocket engine as part of a test at 100% power levels earlier this month while also displaying its ‘gimbaling’ capabilities. Gimbaling allows a rocket engine to slightly change its angle in order to aid the rocket to adjust orientation during flight

By Ramish Zafar

Retail billionaire Jeff Bezos’s aerospace firm Blue Origin has successfully tested the largest rocket engine in America. Blue Origin, Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX) and the United Launch Alliance (ULA) are the only three American firms that are developing next-generation, heavy-lift rockets to kick off the space race, alongside the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Space Launch System (SLS) which will form the backbone of the agency’s Artemis program aimed at developing and sustaining a human presence on the Moon.

Science & Technology News, Space

Scientists Grow Plants in Moon Soil for First Time: ‘Everything Sprouted’

May 29, 2022

A plant grown during the experiment is transferred to a vial for analysis.

By Eric Mack

Are we looking at our future lunar lunch?

When NASA launches Artemis astronauts back to the surface of the moon in the years to come, they should be able to grow their own salad. That’s just one ramification of a historic experiment in which scientists used samples of lunar surface material, called regolith, to grow plants here on Earth.

The scientists planted seeds of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, which is related to mustard greens, in tiny samples of the regolith collected on three different Apollo missions a half century ago.

But while the seeds germinated and grew, they didn’t exactly thrive.

drones, Science & Technology News

Postie of the future? Royal Mail is building a fleet of 500 DRONES to carry mail to remote communities in the UK including the Isles of Scilly and the Hebrides

May 27, 2022

By JONATHAN CHADWICK

Royal Mail will create over 50 new postal drone routes over the next three years
Long term, the ambition is to deploy a fleet of 500 servicing all parts of the UK
It has already successfully trialed drone deliveries over Scotland and Cornwall

Royal Mail is building a fleet of 500 drones to carry mail to remote communities all over the UK, including the Isles of Scilly and the Hebrides.

The postal service, which has already conducted successful trials over Scotland and Cornwall, will create more than 50 new postal drone routes over the next three years as part of a new partnership with London company Windracers.

They offer an alternative to currently-used delivery methods that can be affected by bad weather – ferries, conventional aircraft and land-based deliveries.

They can also take off from any flat surface (sand, grass or tarmac) providing it is long enough.

Drones are usually thought of as small devices, but each of Royal Mail’s craft have a hefty wingspan of over 30 feet (10 metres).

Science & Technology News

Hyundai Wants to Build Terrifying Walking Cars in Montana

May 23, 2022

Hyundai’s New Horizons Studio will research “Ultimate Mobility Vehicles” — in other words, cars with legs.

BySteve DaSilva

Look, we all love cars. But have you ever felt they’re missing something? We see faces in their front ends, the side mirrors can pass as ears, but where are the bodies? And, even more importantly, these are ambulatory — where are the legs? Hyundai, it seems, wants to right this grievous wrong of car design.

In fact, the company is so dedicated that it’s building an entire research and development center in Montana with one explicit goal: Give cars legs.

Hyundai’s new R&D lab, called the New Horizons Studio, will be built at Montana State University’s “Innovation Campus” in Bozeman. The company plans to employ fifty people at the site and spend $20 million over five years with the goal of “redefin[ing] vehicular mobility with robotics and wheeled locomotion technology.”

Blockchain, Science & Technology News

Little by little, blockchain technology is beginning to appear around the house

May 20, 2022

From ecological seafood to Bored Apes, blockchain technology is making its presence felt in homes.

Blockchain technology is familiar to cryptocurrency users and national banks, and awareness of it is spreading fast to gamers. Applications in industry, particularly supply chain management, have been appearing as well. Through them, blockchain technology may improve domestic life in unseen ways, such as ensuring high-quality food, responsibly sourced seafood, or preventing the counterfeiting of pharmaceuticals. Nonetheless, the home may be blockchain’s final frontier.

Blockchain penetration at the household level is so far quite low, but day-to-day utility was no afterthought for blockchain developers. Christoph Jentzsch, Simon Jentzsch and Stephan Tual, who in 2016 created The DAO — the short-lived first decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) — introduced Slock.it, “the first physical implementation of blockchain technology,” the same year. Slock.it technology connected devices on the Internet of Things (IoT), such as locks and payments systems, in a secure, non-intermediated manner that could be used, for example, for renting objects and property. In 2019, Slock.it was acquired by Blockchain.com, which continues to offer those services to this day.

AI, Science & Technology News

UAH collaboration creates self-learning AI platform to discover new drugs

May 19, 2022

A UAH team is applying self-learning artificial intelligence and big data analytics to discover new drugs.

Newswise — HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (May 4, 2022) – A cross-college collaboration at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) has developed a self-learning artificial intelligence (AI) platform that uses big data analytics to discover how new pharmaceutical drugs and various molecules work inside living cells.

The cutting-edge research at UAH, a part of the University of Alabama System, involves Dr. Jerome Baudry, a molecular biophysicist, the Mrs. Pei-Ling Chan Chair in the Department of Biological Sciences and director of the Baudry Lab; Dr. Vineetha Menon, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and the director of the Big Data Analytics Lab; computer science doctoral student Shivangi Gupta, the lead author of a paper on the research; and engineering doctoral student Armin Ahmadi, who is conducting his doctoral research in the Baudry Lab.

Supported by UAH’s Office of Technology Commercialization, the scientists are developing their research into intellectual property for industrial applications in drug discovery.

“This is a strong, integrated collaboration and we all bring our own expertise, but the main novelty in this work is in machine learning and data mining, and the lead on the overall project is Dr. Menon, who is an internationally recognized expert in these areas,” says Dr. Baudry.

Robots, Science & Technology News

Would you trust a robot chef? This innovative one can ‘taste’ food to prepare it exactly as you like it!

May 19, 2022

CAMBRIDGE, England — A robotic chef is learning how to “taste” food as it cooks it — just like humans do to see if their meal has enough seasoning. The new machine can even change the taste of food depending on individual tastes!

Researchers at Cambridge University say this could one day lead to automated robots in food preparation that know exactly what tastes good to most customers. Aiming to nail down the science of the art of cookery has already led to the robot chef being able to make an omelet based on a human taster’s feedback.

The team found by creating a “taste as you go” approach improved the robot’s ability to quickly and accurately assess the saltiness of a dish. To imitate the human process of chewing and tasting in their robot chef, the researchers attached a conductance probe, which acts as a salinity sensor, to a robot arm.

They prepared scrambled eggs and tomatoes, varying the number of tomatoes and the amount of salt in each dish. Using the probe, the robot “tasted” the dishes in a grid-like fashion, returning a reading in just a few seconds.

To imitate the change in texture caused by chewing, the team then put the egg mixture in a blender and had the robot test the dish again. The different readings at different points of “chewing” produced taste maps of each dish.

Science & Technology News, VR

NVIDIA Researchers Demonstrate Ultra-thin Holographic VR Glasses That Could Reach 120° Field-of-view

May 18, 2022

By Ben Lang

A team of researchers from NVIDIA Research and Stanford published a new paper demonstrating a pair of thin holographic VR glasses. The displays can show true holographic content, solving for the vergence-accommodation issue. Though the research prototypes demonstrating the principles were much smaller in field-of-view, the researchers claim it would be straightforward to achieve a 120° diagonal field-of-view.

Published ahead of this year’s upcoming SIGGRAPH 2022 conference, a team of researchers from NVIDIA Research and Stanford demonstrated a near-eye VR display that can be used to display flat images or holograms in a compact form-factor. The paper also explores the interconnected variables in the system that impact key display factors like field-of-view, eye-box, and eye-relief. Further, the researchers explore different algorithms for optimally rendering the image for the best visual quality.

Futurati Podcast, Science & Technology News

Ep. 86: Space exploration (and why it matters) with sarah cruddas

May 16, 2022

Watch our interview with Sarah Cruddas on Youtube or catch it on the Futurati Podcast.

Sarah Cruddas is a space journalist, international TV host, and award winning author. She has an academic background in astrophysics and is a global thought leader in the growing commercial space sector.

Pairs Well With

Our chat with Danica Remy on how we can best protect Earth from asteroids.
My extended interview with Aleksandra Ćiprijanović on galactic mergers and dark energy.
This episode from the archives, number four with Mars Society legend Brian Enke.