Impact Lab – Page 242 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

AI

Here’s how AI and AR could transform real estate marketing

December 20, 2022

Augmented reality and artificial intelligence are making their mark in tech, but they could also change the face of real estate marketing.

By April Bingham

I hate seeing bland houses as the default.

I don’t mean that I swan about pooh-poohing all over other peoples’ tastes…publically…often. Genuinely, if you LIKE cream and gold ‘Live Laugh Love’ prints and framed jerseys, you should HAVE them. We can’t all live in homes that look like a Screamin Jay Hawkins meets Howl Jenkins fever dream.

Not least because it presents a severe tripping hazard….

My problem is more institutional. Best practices say you can’t sell a house even to ‘fun’ people without taking the time to strip all the personality out of it, and that’s disappointing. I promise I understand that certain colors in certain rooms straight up make more money. Just…at what cost? It’s definitely the bitter renter and serial anthropomorphizer in me, but it makes me a little sad seeing whole houses stripped down and painted up before anyone else will love them.

However, AI could change all that for the better!

I’m as surprised as you are, but it finally happened – I found a use for AI-generated images that I actually like. Go figure, it’s for customization-based marketing.

With image generators like Dall-E and MidJourney, Realtors who aren’t also picture-perfect digital artists can change the color and furniture and lighting of a room to suit their client’s desires in a context that doesn’t pass off artificially amalgamated work as their own creation OR come saddled with the reasonable expectation that a talented full-time designer should be paid for doing that work.

I love the idea of walking into a virtual pre-tour of homes tailored to inspire me specifically before I actually schlep myself around the physical locations. Imagine clients walking in, taking a quick look at their aesthetics, and hitting settings like ‘Art Goth’ or ‘Bro-core’ to make it even easier for them to fall in love with a location!

Robots

THIS ROBOT IS ON A MISSION TO ELIMINATE SHORT CAR TRIPS

December 19, 2022

The Gitamini ”follow” robot has a cargo hold that allows its users to walk further without having to carry heavy items.

By Kyle Stock

The Gita “follow” robot aims to replace driving for Americans’ quickest daily errands. But progress has been slow.

When my six-year-old son first “woke up” the Gitamini robot, I was surprised he didn’t flinch — robots these days tend to be ominous. But as November leaves swirled around the sidewalk meet-cute, the squat personal droid gave a friendly “chirp” and popped up on its two large wheels, ready to follow a new friend.

The three of us were walking to a bookstore across Princeton University’s campus, and I charged my son with loading up the robot. Pokemon cards, snacks and non-negotiable stuffed animals were crammed into the Gitamini’s hollow center cavity. As we set off, with the cream-colored droid following about six feet behind, my son glanced back to monitor Gitamini’s loyalty, occasionally prodding it with a “C’mon.” An hour later, the snacks and stuffed animals had company: a handful of new books and a pile of leaves deemed too beautiful to leave behind.

Service robots are now an $11 billion industry, according to the International Federation of Robotics, with nearly 200 new fleets launched during the pandemic. Most of those bots are in hospitals — assisting in surgery, for example — and many can be found trundling around warehouses and factories. But Gitamini wasn’t designed to pack boxes, pick oranges or strip minerals from treacherous mines. It has a more straightforward mission: to forestall short car trips. Americans make nearly four such trips per day on average, according to government statistics, and 35% of them are less than two miles.

Gita — Italian for “trip” — hopes to be a 28-pound solution to a 5,000-pound problem. “These trips are totally walkable, but nobody’s walking two miles with a bag of dog food,” says Greg Lynn, chief executive officer of Gitamini-maker Piaggio Fast Forward. “We definitely want to be part of the ecosystem where you don’t have to take a two-ton thing to carry two bags of stuff.”

Children

Exclusive: Concept Unveiled for the World’s First Artificial Womb Facility

December 19, 2022

BY MARCIA WENDORF

In late 2021, Elon Musk tweeted his fears about the end of humanity. “We should be much more worried about population collapse….If there aren’t enough people for Earth, then there definitely won’t be enough for Mars,” he opined. Musk’s statements brought the world’s falling birthrate to the forefront of social consciousness.

For nearly a century, fertility rates have been decreasing globally. The result is what scientists are describing as a “worldwide infertility crisis.” But there’s a solution looming on the horizon — artificial wombs.

In 2017, scientists created a “BioBag” that functioned as an artificial womb, and they used it to grow a baby lamb. Now, a new concept has been unveiled exclusively to Science and Stuff showing how the same could be done for humans. In recently released footage, Hashem Al-Ghaili shows what childbirth might look like tomorrow. Specifically, he created an artificial womb facility named EctoLife.

Its purpose? In an exclusive interview with Science and Stuff, Al-Ghaili says he thinks the EctoLife concept could one day supplant traditional birth. In so doing, he said society would finally be able to meet the needs of parents who are “tired of waiting for a response from an adoption agency” and those who are “worried about pregnancy complications.” But most importantly, he says EctoLife could allow us to confront the infertility crisis head-on.

SpaceX

SpaceX launches internet satellites for London-based rival company OneWeb

December 18, 2022

SPACEX LAUNCHED INTERNET SATELLITES FOR A COMPETITOR THURSDAY, STEPPING IN TO HELP AFTER THE LONDON-BASED ONEWEB COMPANY HALTED ITS FLIGHTS WITH RUSSIA OVER THE INVASION OF UKRAINE

SpaceX launched internet satellites for a competitor Thursday, stepping in to help after the London-based OneWeb company halted its flights with Russia over the invasion of Ukraine.

The Falcon rocket blasted off at sunset with 40 mini satellites bound for polar orbit. They will expand OneWeb’s constellation to just over 500, nearly 80% of the planned total of about 630 satellites.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has more than 3,200 Starlink satellites in orbit, providing high-speed, broadband internet to remote corners of the world. Amazon plans to launch the first of its internet satellites early next year from Cape Canaveral.

With the market for global internet service growing exponentially, there’s room for everyone, said Massimiliano Ladovaz, OneWeb’s chief technology officer.

SpaceX agreed to launch satellites for OneWeb after the British company broke ties with Russia in March. Russian Soyuz rockets already had launched 13 batches of OneWeb satellites, beginning in 2019.

Healthcare

Introducing Dentaverse, a virtual reality platform that is changing the future of dentistry

December 18, 2022

Dentaverse is a virtual environment where users can interact with one another, attend and host events and even present and learn about dental treatments and products.

By Jeremy Booth

BRUSSELS, Belgium: On 1 December, dental professionals from around the world gathered for the launch of a new, virtual reality (VR) environment called Dentaverse. Based on Web3 technologies, Dentaverse aims to create a meeting point for the global community of dentists, dental students and dental industry professionals. According to its founder and CEO, Martin Ravets, the platform has the potential to bridge the gap between physical and virtual oral care and to overcome the barriers of time and distance in order to create a truly inclusive international dental community.

Dental Tribune International (DTI) spoke with Ravets just hours before the launch using video call technology that connected DTI’s editorial office in Leipzig in Germany with Dentaverse’s headquarters in Brussels. Popularised during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, streaming and video call platforms can only take connectivity to a certain point. Commenting on the immersive experience that Dentaverse offers—including through the use of VR headsets—Ravets said: “If we were meeting there, we would have eye contact and you could see and follow my gestures and body language, and I yours. It would be a completely different type of interaction.”

Let us take a step back and explain exactly what Dentaverse is. Popular community-based web tools—such as Instagram and LinkedIn—underpin the platform, and these are mixed with new Web3 technologies, like blockchain, metaverse and cryptocurrency payment, in order to create a virtual environment where users can interact with one another, attend and host events, and even present and learn about dental treatments and products.

Solar Power

Paper-Thin Solar Cell Can Turn Any Surface Into A Power Source

December 18, 2022

MIT researchers have developed a scalable fabrication technique to produce ultrathin, lightweight solar cells that can be stuck onto any surface.

By Andrew McCollum

MIT engineers have developed ultralight fabric solar cells that can quickly and easily turn any surface into a power source.

These durable, flexible solar cells, which are much thinner than a human hair, are glued to a strong, lightweight fabric, making them easy to install on a fixed surface. They can provide energy on the go as a wearable power fabric or be transported and rapidly deployed in remote locations for assistance in emergencies. They are one-hundredth the weight of conventional solar panels, generate 18 times more power-per-kilogram, and are made from semiconducting inks using printing processes that can be scaled in the future to large-area manufacturing.

Because they are so thin and lightweight, these solar cells can be laminated onto many different surfaces. For instance, they could be integrated onto the sails of a boat to provide power while at sea, adhered onto tents and tarps that are deployed in disaster recovery operations, or applied onto the wings of drones to extend their flying range. This lightweight solar technology can be easily integrated into built environments with minimal installation needs.

“The metrics used to evaluate a new solar cell technology are typically limited to their power conversion efficiency and their cost in dollars-per-watt. Just as important is integrability—the ease with which the new technology can be adapted. The lightweight solar fabrics enable integrability, providing impetus for the current work. We strive to accelerate solar adoption, given the present urgent need to deploy new carbon-free sources of energy,” says Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology, leader of the Organic and Nanostructured Electronics Laboratory (ONE Lab), director of MIT.nano, and senior author of a new paper describing the work.

Joining Bulović on the paper are co-lead authors Mayuran Saravanapavanantham, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student at MIT; and Jeremiah Mwaura, a research scientist in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. The research is published today in Small Methods.

Green Friendly, Science & Technology News

Water-splitting device solves puzzle of producing hydrogen direct from seawater

December 17, 2022

BY VICTORIA ATKINSON

A combined desalination–electrolysis system that can produce green hydrogen directly from seawater has been developed by a team in China. This integrated process uses a low-energy method to purify seawater, making it one of the first viable approaches to use salt water as a source of hydrogen. The purification step uses phase transitions to remove impurities and could have additional applications in wastewater treatment and resource recovery.

Splitting water with electricity has been experimented with for over 200 years and the reactions involved are well-understood: at the cathode, H+ ions gain electrons to form hydrogen gas whilst OH- loses electrons at the anode to form oxygen. But despite the simplicity of the underlying chemistry, effective electrolysis is a particularly complicated process. Water splitting is thermodynamically unfavourable and requires both specifically designed catalytic electrodes and a significant input of energy to drive the reaction. Even trace impurities can damage the delicate structure of the cell, leading to membrane pores becoming blocked, expensive electrodes corroded and unwanted byproducts formed.

Chloride ions in seawater are a particular problem and undergo competing oxidation at the anode to produce chlorine. Not only does this side reaction reduce the electrochemical efficiency of the cell, but chlorine is an extremely corrosive gas which rapidly degrades the electrodes and inactivates the cell. ‘Approaches to suppress corrosion by coating catalysts have had modest success,’ explains Heping Xie, an energy chemist at Shenzhen University in China. ‘But the composition of seawater changes [with] location, season [and] human behaviour so electrolysers can’t be universally compatible.’ With an average salt concentration of around 3.5%, the chloride content of seawater makes direct electrolysis unfeasible.

drones, Science & Technology News

Swoop Aero to create ‘world’s largest’ drone delivery network in Queensland

December 17, 2022

By Bruce Crumley

Melbourne-based international drone delivery company Swoop Aero is ending 2022 on a high note in its domestic market, receiving an Australian government grant to extend its operation in Southern Queensland into what the firm says will be the world’s largest aerial logistics network of its kind.

The development comes as part of a wider national government effort to improve various kinds of transport in Queensland, which features both traffic-clogged cities and smaller towns separated by what are often vast spaces. Officials are providing a total $1.8 million to help finance Swoop Aero extend its existing drone logistics and delivery activity into a network covering 175,000 square kilometers, and capable of spreading to a full 400,000 square kilometers.

The project is open to all kinds of partners – including commercial businesses – though the initial focus will primarily be on using Swoop Aero’s delivery drones to speed and improve healthcare services across Southern Queensland.

Continue reading…Swoop Aero to create ‘world’s largest’ drone delivery network in Queensland“

AI, Science & Technology News

AI learns to write computer code in ‘stunning’ advance

December 17, 2022

Snippets of code in white come from the AlphaCode artificial intelligence system, whereas the purple code snippets were written by humans trying to solve similar problems.

BY MATTHEW HUTSON

DeepMind’s AlphaCode outperforms many human programmers in tricky software challenges.

Software runs the world. It controls smartphones, nuclear weapons, and car engines. But there’s a global shortage of programmers. Wouldn’t it be nice if anyone could explain what they want a program to do, and a computer could translate that into lines of code?

A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called AlphaCode is bringing humanity one step closer to that vision, according to a new study. Researchers say the system—from the research lab DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company)—might one day assist experienced coders, but probably cannot replace them.

“It’s very impressive, the performance they’re able to achieve on some pretty challenging problems,” says Armando Solar-Lezama, head of the computer assisted programming group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

AlphaCode goes beyond the previous standard-bearer in AI code writing: Codex, a system released in 2021 by the nonprofit research lab OpenAI. The lab had already developed GPT-3, a “large language model” that is adept at imitating and interpreting human text after being trained on billions of words from digital books, Wikipedia articles, and other pages of internet text. By fine-tuning GPT-3 on more than 100 gigabytes of code from Github, an online software repository, OpenAI came up with Codex. The software can write code when prompted with an everyday description of what it’s supposed to do—for instance counting the vowels in a string of text. But it performs poorly when tasked with tricky problems.

Space

World’s first space rice seeds back from orbit

December 16, 2022

Feat will help scientists find sustainable food source for long-term exploration missions

Chinese astronauts of the Shenzhou XIV mission have returned with the world’s first rice seeds produced in orbit, a feat that will allow scientists to probe the effects of microgravity on rice growth and find a sustainable food source for long-term space explorations.

On Sunday night, astronauts Chen Dong, Liu Yang and Cai Xuzhe touched down at the Dongfeng landing site in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, according to the China Manned Space Agency.

They were in orbit for 183 days, during which they monitored the completion of China’s Tiangong space station and several life science experiments.

One such experiment involved reproducing the entire life cycle of rice for the first time in space, which begins with a seed germinating into a seedling and ends with a mature plant producing new seeds. The experiment began on July 29, and after 120 days in orbit, rice grains were successfully produced.

The new seeds, along with other biosamples, have been delivered to the Technology and Engineering Center for Space Utilization of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. They will be transferred to labs in Shanghai for further research.

Medical Breakthrough

Replicating Myocardial Infarction: Scientists Engineered ‘Heart Attack on a Chip’ Microscale Model for America’s Known Killer

December 16, 2022

Microscale model developed by USC researchers Megan Mccain and Megan Rexius that can replicate key aspects of myocardial infarction and might one day serve as a testbed for new personalized heart drugs.

By Joshua Stan

Scientists at the University of Southern California have developed a “heart attack on a chip” microscale model that can replicate key aspects of myocardial infarction. This device has the potential to serve as a testbed for developing new heart drugs and personalized medicines in the future. USC researchers Megan McCain and postdoc Megan Rexius-Hall engineered the “heart attack on a chip” at the University of Southern California’s Alfred E. Mann Department of Biomedical Engineering.

The device, developed by the researchers, can be used to clearly understand how the heart is changing after a heart attack, allowing for the development and testing of drugs that can limit the further degradation of heart tissue that can occur after a heart attack.

The microscale model can replicate some key features of a heart attack in a simple and easy-to-use system. Megan McCain, a cardiac tissue engineer whose work includes co-developing a heart on a chip, and Rexius-Hall have published their findings in the journal Science Advances in an article titled “A Myocardial Infarct Border-Zone-On-A-Chip Demonstrates Distinct Regulation of Cardiac Tissue Function by an Oxygen Gradient.”

Cancer

How AI found the words to kill cancer cells

December 16, 2022

Scanning electron micrograph of a human T lymphocyte (also called a T cell) from the immune system of a healthy donor.

Using new machine learning techniques, researchers at UC San Francisco (UCSF), in collaboration with a team at IBM Research, have developed a virtual molecular library of thousands of “command sentences” for cells, based on combinations of “words” that guided engineered immune cells to seek out and tirelessly kill cancer cells.

The work, published online Dec. 8, 2022, in Science, represents the first time such sophisticated computational approaches have been applied to a field that until now has progressed largely through ad hoc tinkering and engineering cells with existing—rather than synthesized—molecules.

The advance allows scientists to predict which elements—natural or synthesized—they should include in a cell to give it the precise behaviors required to respond effectively to complex diseases.

“This is a vital shift for the field,” said Wendell Lim, Ph.D., the Byers Distinguished Professor of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, who directs the UCSF Cell Design Institute and led the study. “Only by having that power of prediction can we get to a place where we can rapidly design new cellular therapies that carry out the desired activities.”