Science & Technology News – Page 67

brain-computer interfaces, Science & Technology News

Egyptian researcher develops brainwave-controlled wheelchair for those with paralysis: All you need to know

February 26, 2022

An electric wheelchair for people with tetraplegia, a condition when patients are unable to move their upper or lower body, was designed by an Egyptian researcher

By Abdelrahman Omran

Egyptian researcher Abdelrahman Omran designed a wheelchair for people with tetraplegia which operates by receiving users’ brainwaves. Reuters

An electric wheelchair for people with tetraplegia, a condition when patients are unable to move their upper or lower body, has been designed by an Egyptian researcher Abdelrahman Omran, reported Reuters.

The device will help those with paralysis by using head movements or brainwaves to operate the chair.

3D Printer, Science & Technology News

Cryobioprinting could make off-the-shelf tissue-engineered structures a reality

February 24, 2022

A new cryogenic 3D printing technique could one day enable fabrication of off-the-shelf artificial muscle fibres, according to research published in Advanced Materials.

By Katie Fegan

Printing synthetic tissue that mimics the structure of muscle remains a major challenge in tissue engineering. Muscle fibres are anisotropic, meaning that their physical properties, including the ability to transmit mechanical forces, are direction dependent. Introducing a temperature gradient during the fabrication process, from sub-zero temperatures upwards, is a simple way of creating tissue scaffolds with anisotropic microscale pores. However, the freezing process is harmful to cells encapsulated within the scaffold.

Enter cryobioprinting: an all-in-one fabrication and preservation technique developed by scientists at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Cryobioprinting combines a customized freezing plate with cryoprotected bioinks to produce cell-laden structures with anisotropic microchannels. The scaffolds can be stored in liquid nitrogen for several months and revived on demand, a feature that would allow pre-made products to be used in a clinical setting.

“Cryobioprinting can give bioprinted tissue an extended shelf life and allows convenient transport of tissue between sites, which is something conventional bioprinting methods do not readily enable,” says senior author Y Shrike Zhang. “[Cryobioprinting] may have broad application in tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, drug discovery and personalized therapeutics.”

Electric Automobile, Science & Technology News

Solar-powered car that can ‘drive for months without charging’ to hit roads this summer

February 20, 2022

The five -seater Lightyear One is designed to be an ‘off-the-grid, clean, and convenient mobility solution’(Lightyear)

By Anthony Cuthbertson

Lightyear One costs €150,000 and aims to be on roads by mid-2022.

A solar-powered car has travelled hundreds of kilometres on a single charge, marking a major milestone towards bringing the “world’s most efficient and sustainable” vehicle to the market.

The Lightyear One drove 400km (248 miles) at 130kph before needing to recharge during tests in the Italian town of Aprilia last month. Previous tests carried out at a lower speed saw the electric car travel more than 700km.

Lightyear claims its car will allow customers to “drive for months without charging”, and hopes to deliver the first vehicles to customers by mid 2022.

Reservations for the Lightyear One can already be made through the company’s website, requiring a €150,000 down payment.

“We have achieved an energy consumption of 141-watt hours per kilometre. What this means is that on one charge, you’d be able to drive for over 400km. For example, that ‘s from Amsterdam all the way to Luxembourg,” said Megan Parfitt, vehicle test coordinator at Lightyear.

“Comparing that to other vehicles on the market right now, that’s about one-and-a-half times further than a directly-comparable vehicle can do with the same battery size… It shows we’re well on our way to achieving our target of being the most efficient car on the market, not just in legislative cycles but also in real-world conditions that the customer will experience.”

Green Friendly, Science & Technology News

‘Game-changing’ tech can extract 99% of carbon dioxide directly from the air

February 17, 2022

The fuel cell could be a ‘game changer’, researchers believe.

By Rob Waugh

A new system powered by hydrogen can capture 99% of carbon dioxide (CO2) from air, according to scientists.

Researchers at University of Delaware said the breakthrough, in a device the size of a soft drink can, could be a “significant advance” for CO2 capture.

It could also lead to more efficient fuel cells for use in cars.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is one of the new technologies that scientists hope will play an important role in tackling the climate crisis.

It involves the capture of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels in power generation, which is then stored underground.

The Delaware research team, led by Professor Yushan Yan, reported its method in Nature Energy.

Fuel cells work by converting fuel chemical energy directly into electricity and are used in hybrid or zero-emission vehicles.

Health & Fitness, Science & Technology News

Chemicals in everyday plastic items may lead to weight gain

February 14, 2022

New research explores the effect of chemicals in everyday plastic items on mouse fat cells.

Changes in diet and exercise do not fully explain the steep rise in overweight and obesity over recent decades.
One theory claims that chemicals in everyday plastic products promote weight gain by changing human metabolism.
A new study found that a range of plastic household items contain thousands of chemicals, many of them unknown.
One-third of the items contained chemicals that, after extraction, caused the growth and proliferation of mouse fat cells in the lab.

Chemicals in plastic household items such as drinks bottles, yogurt pots, and freezer bags may be contributing to the global epidemicTrusted Source of obesity, a new study suggests.

The chemicals may alter human metabolism by promoting the growth of fat cells, or adipocytes.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO)Trusted Source, the number of people with obesity has nearly tripled globally since 1975.

The WHO estimates that in 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults were overweight. Of these individuals, more than 650 million had obesity.

Having excess body weight increases a person’s risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, hypertension, non-alcohol-related fatty liver disease, stroke, and certain types of cancer.

Research suggests that factors such as changes in diet are insufficient to explain the scale of the obesity epidemic and the speed with which it has spread around the world.

One possible culprit is the effect of synthetic chemicals in our environment called endocrine disruptors. These influence the endocrine system, which includes the hormones that regulate appetite, metabolism, and weight, among other bodily functions.

Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

At Last: New Synthetic Tooth Enamel Is Harder and Stronger Than the Real Thing

February 14, 2022

Delivering what has been so challenging to produce, researchers present an engineered analog of tooth enamel – an ideal model for designing biomimetic materials – designed to closely mimic the composition and structure of biological teeth’s hard mineralized outer layer. It demonstrates exceptional mechanical properties, they say.

Natural tooth enamel – the thin outer layer of our teeth – is the hardest biological material in the human body. It is renowned for its high stiffness, hardness, viscoelasticity, strength, and toughness and exhibits exceptional damage resistance, despite being only several millimeters thick.

Science & Technology News, Space Flight

Billionaire space barons want to build ‘mixed-use business parks’ in low Earth orbit

February 12, 2022

Three full-fledged commercial space stations could be in orbit by the end of the decade

By A. Tarantola @terrortola

Axiom’s ISS-grown space station
Nanoracks’ Starlab
Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef
Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus-based space station

The Space Race is no longer a competition between the global superpowers of the world — at least not the nation-states that once vied to be first to the Moon. Today, low Earth orbit is the battleground for private conglomerates and the billionaires that helm them. With the Mir Space Station having deorbited in 2001 after 15 years of service and the ISS scheduled for retirement by the end of the decade, tomorrow’s space stations are very likely to be owned and operated by companies, not countries. In fact, the handover has already begun.

“We are not ready for what comes after the International Space Station,” then-NASA-administrator Jim Bridenstine explained at a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee in October. “Building a space station takes a long time, especially when you’re doing it in a way that’s never been done before.”

NASA is on board with this transference, having drafted and published its Plan for Commercial LEO Development (CLD) in 2019, which calls for “a robust low-Earth orbit economy from which NASA can purchase services as one of many customers,” as part of the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate at Johnson Space Center. The CLD plan lays out the agency’s necessary steps towards establishing a commercial space station ecosystem. These start with allowing private corporations “to purchase ISS resources,” i.e. lease space on the station for commercial activities, “allow companies to fly private astronauts to the ISS,” which SpaceX did last April, as well as initiating “a process for developing commercial LEO destinations” and working to “stimulate demand” for those destinations and services.

Blockchain, Science & Technology News

FDA: Blockchain-Based Food Tracking Bound for Widespread Adoption

February 9, 2022

By VICTORIA CAMPISI

A new rule could boost blockchain-based food tracking.

The rule, expected next November, would require the food industry to maintain records associated with the critical tracking events on the supply chain, according to Frank Yiannas, deputy commissioner for food policy and response at FDA, as reported by The Wall Street Journal (Feb. 1).

Events include growing, receiving, transforming, creating and shipping food products.

The Food Safety Modernization Act Proposed Rule for Food Traceability wouldn’t require companies to maintain electronic records. However, it is believed many would employ digital systems including blockchain to comply, Yiannas explained.

Blockchain is the distributed ledger technology supporting bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. It is a decentralized technology spread across many computers that manages and records transactions.

AI, Science & Technology News

DeepMind’s AlphaCode AI writes code at a competitive level

February 9, 2022

By Devin Coldewey

DeepMind has created an AI capable of writing code to solve arbitrary problems posed to it, as proven by participating in a coding challenge and placing — well, somewhere in the middle. It won’t be taking any software engineers’ jobs just yet, but it’s promising and may help automate basic tasks.

The team at DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is aiming to create intelligence in as many forms as it can, and of course these days the task to which many of our great minds are bent is coding. Code is a fusion of language, logic and problem-solving that is both a natural fit for a computer’s capabilities and a tough one to crack.

Of course it isn’t the first to attempt something like this: OpenAI has its own Codex natural-language coding project, and it powers both GitHub Copilot and a test from Microsoft to let GPT-3 finish your lines.

DeepMind’s paper throws a little friendly shade on the competition in describing why it is going after the domain of competitive coding:

Recent large-scale language models have demonstrated an impressive ability to generate code, and are now able to complete simple programming tasks. However, these models still perform poorly when evaluated on more complex, unseen problems that require problem-solving skills beyond simply translating instructions into code.

AI, Science & Technology News

AI “Nanny” Being Created by Chinese Scientists to Grow Babies in Robot Wombs

February 8, 2022

Researchers say the technology could help with imminent population crisis, with birth rates in China at their lowest level in six decades.

The artificial intelligence nanny has arrived. Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) may now be used in conjunction to optimize the generation of human life, marking a significant milestone in the science.

Robotics and artificial intelligence can now assist in the development of newborns via the use of algorithms and artificial wombs, which is eerily similar to what we see in the cult classic, The Matrix.

According to the South China Morning Post, Chinese experts in Suzhou have pioneered the development of the latest technological breakthrough. However, there are concerns about the ethical implications of raising human beings in an artificial environment.

The discoveries were published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Biomedical Engineering by Suzhou-based scientists. The AI nanny, according to the researchers, might aid in the growth of human kids in a “long-term embryo culture device.”

This artificial womb is a big machine containing compartments for individual fetuses. The infants will be fed as they would be in a real womb if they are in the chamber, which will be filled with an optimized mix of “nutritious fluids.”

Futurati Podcast, Science & Technology News

Futurati Podcast with Jeff Booth

February 6, 2022

Watch our interview with Jeff on Youtube.

Jeff Booth is a visionary leader who has lived at the forefront of technology change for 20 years. In January 2020, Jeff released his first book titled “The Price of Tomorrow – Why Deflation is Key to an Abundant Future”, in which he offers his provocative thesis about the current state of our economies and what must happen to enable a brighter future.

Related

Driverless vehicles, Science & Technology News

DARPA’s RACER Program Sends High-Speed Autonomous Vehicles Off-Road

February 5, 2022

For the next three years, robotic vehicles will be pushing the limits of all-terrain racing

By EVAN ACKERMAN

DARPA DARPA has announced the first phase of a shiny new program called RACER, which stands for Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency.

I’m not sure why they couldn’t have just left it at RACE, but that’s government backronyms for you. Anyway, the RACER program is all about high-speed driving in unstructured environments, which is a problem that has not been addressed by the commercial-vehicle-autonomy industry, because we have, you know, roads.

But where DARPA is going there are no roads, and the agency wants autonomous vehicles to be able to explore on their own as well as keep up with vehicles driven by humans. DARPA has announced three teams that will each get funding and vehicles: Carnegie Mellon University, NASA JPL, and the University of Washington.

And if everything goes well, we’ll be seeing some absolutely bonkers off-road autonomous racing over the next three years.The goal of the Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER) program is to develop and demonstrate new autonomy technologies that enable ground combat vehicles to maneuver in unstructured, off-road terrain at speeds that are no longer limited by the autonomy software or processing time, but only by considerations of sensor limitations, vehicle mechanical limits, and safety.