Growing food in space will rely on innovative agricultural technologies. Credit: NASA
By Lenore Newman and Evan Fraser
Could we feed a city on Mars? This question is central to the future of space exploration and has serious repercussions on Earth too. To date, a lot of thought has gone into how astronauts eat; however, we are only beginning to produce food in space.
Space launches are quite expensive. And with the growing desire to establish a human presence in space, we are going to have to consider food production in space. But the challenges are vast, requiring research into how plants respond to a variety of changes including to gravity and radiation.
As food and agriculture researchers, we explored this question in our latest book, Dinner on Mars. We believe that a sustainable Martian food system is possible—and that in building it, we’ll change food systems on Earth. However, this will take some out-of-the-box thinking.
Concept art of the Bimodal Nuclear Thermal Rocket.
By MATT WILLIAMS
We live in an era of renewed space exploration, where multiple agencies are planning to send astronauts to the Moon in the coming years. This will be followed in the next decade with crewed missions to Mars by NASA and China, who may be joined by other nations before long.
These and other missions that will take astronauts beyond Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and the Earth-Moon system require new technologies, ranging from life support and radiation shielding to power and propulsion.
And when it comes to the latter, Nuclear Thermal and Nuclear Electric Propulsion (NTP/NEP) is a top contender!
NASA and the Soviet space program spent decades researching nuclear propulsion during the Space Race.
A few years ago, NASA reignited its nuclear program for the purpose of developing bimodal nuclear propulsion – a two-part system consisting of an NTP and NEP element – that could enable transits to Mars in 100 days.
Researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and MIT stand in front of a CT scanner at MGH, where some of the validation data was generated. Left to right: Regina Barzilay, Lecia Sequist, Florian Fintelmann, Ignacio Fuentes, Peter Mikhael, Stefan Ringer, and Jeremy Wohlwend
By Alex Ouyang
Deep-learning model takes a personalized approach to assessing each patient’s risk of lung cancer based on CT scans.
The name Sybil has its origins in the oracles of Ancient Greece, also known as sibyls: feminine figures who were relied upon to relay divine knowledge of the unseen and the omnipotent past, present, and future. Now, the name has been excavated from antiquity and bestowed on an artificial intelligence tool for lung cancer risk assessment being developed by researchers at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, Mass General Cancer Center (MGCC), and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital (CGMH).
Lung cancer is the No. 1 deadliest cancer in the world, resulting in 1.7 million deaths worldwide in 2020, killing more people than the next three deadliest cancers combined.
“It’s the biggest cancer killer because it’s relatively common and relatively hard to treat, especially once it has reached an advanced stage,” says Florian Fintelmann, MGCC thoracic interventional radiologist and co-author on the new work. “In this case, it’s important to know that if you detect lung cancer early, the long-term outcome is significantly better. Your five-year survival rate is closer to 70 percent, whereas if you detect it when it’s advanced, the five-year survival rate is just short of 10 percent.”
Although there has been a surge in new therapies introduced to combat lung cancer in recent years, the majority of patients with lung cancer still succumb to the disease. Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scans of the lung are currently the most common way patients are screened for lung cancer with the hope of finding it in the earliest stages, when it can still be surgically removed. Sybil takes the screening a step further, analyzing the LDCT image data without the assistance of a radiologist to predict the risk of a patient developing a future lung cancer within six years.
OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI tool ChatGPT, announced on Monday that it has secured an additional investment running into billions of dollars from Microsoft.
Nairametrics understands that the investment will allow OpenAI to continue its independent research towards developing AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.
Note that the latest investment extends the partnership between the two tech companies.
Status quo remains: OpenAI also noted that the investment by Microsoft will not change its status as a capped-profit company, saying:
“In pursuit of our mission to ensure advanced AI benefits all of humanity, OpenAI remains a capped-profit company and is governed by the OpenAI non-profit. This structure allows us to raise the capital we need to fulfil our mission without sacrificing our core beliefs about broadly sharing benefits and the need to prioritize safety.
“Microsoft shares this vision and our values, and our partnership is instrumental to our progress.”
Summary: Combining new wearable technology and artificial intelligence, researchers are better able to track motion and monitor the progression of movement disorders.
Source: Imperial College London
A multi-disciplinary team of researchers has developed a way to monitor the progression of movement disorders using motion capture technology and AI.
In two ground-breaking studies, published in Nature Medicine, a cross-disciplinary team of AI and clinical researchers have shown that by combining human movement data gathered from wearable tech with a powerful new medical AI technology they are able to identify clear movement patterns, predict future disease progression and significantly increase the efficiency of clinical trials in two very different rare disorders, Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and Friedreich’s ataxia (FA).
DMD and FA are rare, degenerative, genetic diseases that affect movement and eventually lead to paralysis. There are currently no cures for either disease, but researchers hope that these results will significantly speed up the search for new treatments.
Tracking the progression of FA and DMD is normally done through intensive testing in a clinical setting. These papers offer a significantly more precise assessment that also increases the accuracy and objectivity of the data collected.
The researchers estimate that using these disease markers mean that significantly fewer patients are required to develop a new drug when compared to current methods. This is particularly important for rare diseases where it can be hard to identify suitable patients.
Scientists hope that as well as using the technology to monitor patients in clinical trials, it could also one day be used to monitor or diagnose a range of common diseases that affect movement behavior such as dementia, stroke and orthopedic conditions.
Senior and corresponding author of both papers, Professor Aldo Faisal, from Imperial College London’s Departments of Bioengineering and Computing, who is also Director of the UKRI Center for Doctoral Training in AI for Healthcare, and the Chair for Digital Health at the University of Bayreuth (Germany), and a UKRI Turing AI Fellowship holder, said, “Our approach gathers huge amounts of data from a person’s full-body movement—more than any neurologist will have the precision or time to observe in a patient.
“Our AI technology builds a digital twin of the patient and allows us to make unprecedented, precise predictions of how an individual patient’s disease will progress.
It helps vertical structures to collect and transform energy from the Sun.
Turning buildings into solar-powered generators is the challenge, but researchers and companies are now on the verge of creating new panels that could change the way it stands out in the area. A German company called Heliatek has developed new ultrathin and organic solar panels that could be applied to high-rise structures to become more self-sufficient and eco-friendly.
Harnessing the power of the Sun is one of the present challenges in the world, especially as solar panels are getting more commercialized in society.
Tel Aviv(CNN)The red-headed man wearing what looks like the ultimate Christmas sweater walks up to the camera. A yellow quadrant surrounds him. Facial recognition software immediately identifies the man as … a giraffe?
This case of mistaken identity is no accident — it’s literally by design. The sweater is part of the debut Manifesto collection by Italian startup Cap_able. As well as tops, it includes hoodies, pants, t-shirts and dresses. Each one sports a pattern, known as an “adversarial patch,” designed by artificial intelligence algorithms to confuse facial recognition software: either the cameras fail to identify the wearer, or they think they’re a giraffe, a zebra, a dog, or one of the other animals embedded into the pattern.
“When I’m in front of a camera, I don’t have a choice of whether I give it my data or not,” says co-founder and CEO, Rachele Didero. “So we’re creating garments that can give you the possibility of making this choice. We’re not trying to be subversive.”
“The challenges with water around the world are dramatic.”
By Rachel McGlasson
Clean, renewable drinking water made straight out of thin air almost sounds too wild to be true.
But “hydropanels,” created by the Arizona-based company SOURCE, can do just that. The high-tech panels use the sun to extract moisture from the air, providing safe drinking water for many of the places around the world that need it most.
The technology is fairly straightforward. Fans on each panel draw in ambient air and push it through a water-absorbing material, trapping the vapor from the air. The vapor is then condensed into a liquid using energy from the sun, after which it’s collected in a reservoir. The water is then mineralized with magnesium and calcium to maintain quality and achieve a better taste.
While condensing air into water is not a new idea, the energy used to do it — all coming from the sun — makes these panels more sustainable than other, traditional methods.
Each panel, coming in at $2,000 each, produces about 1.3 gallons of water a day and can operate completely independently of other existing infrastructure, meaning the hydropanels can provide safe drinking water virtually anywhere.
“The challenges with water around the world are dramatic,” Cody Friesen, CEO of SOURCE, told CNN. “We aim to make safe water an unlimited resource around the world.”
This chip is the size of a fingernail and is made on a thin film of lithium niobate. It can be used in a range of applications, including in telecommunications to make our internet faster. Credit: RMIT University
Super-thin chips made from lithium niobate are set to overtake silicon chips in light-based technologies, according to world-leading scientists in the field, with potential applications ranging from remote ripening-fruit detection on Earth to navigation on the moon.
They say the artificial crystal offers the platform of choice for these technologies due to its superior performance and recent advances in manufacturing capabilities.
RMIT University’s Distinguished Professor Arnan Mitchell and University of Adelaide’s Dr. Andy Boes led this team of global experts to review lithium niobate’s capabilities and potential applications in the journal Science.
The international team, including scientists from Peking University in China and Harvard University in the United States, is working with industry to make navigation systems that are planned to help rovers drive on the moon later this decade.
As it is impossible to use global positioning system (GPS) technology on the moon, navigation systems in lunar rovers will need to use an alternative system, which is where the team’s innovation comes in.
By detecting tiny changes in laser light, the lithium-niobate chip can be used to measure movement without needing external signals, according to Mitchell.
“This is not science fiction—this artificial crystal is being used to develop a range of exciting applications. And competition to harness the potential of this versatile technology is heating up,” said Mitchell, Director of the Integrated Photonics and Applications Centre.
He said while the lunar navigation device was in the early stages of development, the lithium niobate chip technology was “mature enough to be used in space applications.”
“Our lithium niobate chip technology is also flexible enough to be rapidly adapted to almost any application that uses light,” Mitchell said.
“We are focused on navigation now, but the same technology could also be used for linking internet on the moon to the internet on Earth.”
BOSTON DYNAMICS ON ‘ATLAS’ INTERACTING WITH OBJECTS
Boston Dynamics’ handy helper and humanoid robot Atlas can maneuver obstacles, seamlessly join a choreographed dance party, or jog on its own in the park, and today, he can effortlessly work on construction sites. In the recently released video by the group, Atlas manipulates the world around it as the humanoid robot interacts with objects and modifies the course it is on.
Atlas tests its locomotion, sensing, and athleticism by delivering a bag of tools to a person waiting at the top of a multi-story scaffold and even pushing a cargo box from his position. Atlas grasps, carries, and tosses the tool bag, climbs stairs, jumps between levels, and tips over a large wooden block out of its way before dismounting with an inverted 540-degree flip that project engineers have dubbed the ‘Sick Trick.’
Atlas control lead Ben Stephens says that parkour and dancing were examples of what might be extreme locomotion, and now the team is trying to build upon that research to also do more robotics manipulation. ‘It’s important to us that the robot can perform these tasks with a certain amount of human speed. People are very good at these tasks, so that has required some pretty big upgrades to the control software,’he says.
As science and technology advance, we’re asking our space missions to deliver more and more results. NASA’s MSL Curiosity and Perseverance rovers illustrate this fact. Perseverance is an exceptionally exquisite assemblage of technologies. These cutting-edge rovers need a lot of power to fulfill their tasks, and that means bulky and expensive power sources.
Space exploration is an increasingly energy-hungry endeavour. Orbiters and fly-by missions can perform their tasks using solar power, at least as far out as Jupiter. And ion drives can take spacecraft to more distant regions. But to really understand distant worlds like the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, or even the more distant Pluto, we’ll need to eventually land a rover and/or lander on them just as we have on Mars.
Those missions require more power to operate, and that usually means MMRTGs (Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators.) But they’re bulky, heavy, and expensive, three undesirable traits for spacecraft. Each one costs over $100 million. Is there a better solution?
Stephen Polly thinks there is.
Polly is a research scientist at the NanoPower Research Laboratories at the Rochester Institute of Technology. His work focuses on something most of us have likely never heard of: the development, growth, characterization, and integration of III-V materials by metalorganic vapour phase epitaxy (MOVPE).
Italy-based Urban V, recently announced its intention to develop a flying taxi network for the Caribbean, reports sknvibes.com. The company is owned by Aeroporti di Roma, SAVE Group, Aeroporto di Bologna and Aeroports de la Côte d’Azur in France and has been set up for the development of global Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) infrastructure.
Urban V is presently in discussion with a Caribbean airline regarding a pilot project connecting a number of islands. The company also plans to establish stakeholder partnerships with local airports, cruise ship ports and major hotels and resorts.
Massimiliano Pane, Urban V’s Head of Business Development and Finance, commented, “We have the ambition to be among the first in the world to launch Advanced Air Mobility commercial networks. We plan to activate the first route by the end of 2024 in Rome.”
He continued, “Last October, UrbanV unveiled in Rome, Europe’s first test vertiport adjacent to one of Europe’s busiest airport hubs with crewed public trial flights.”
