Impact Lab – Page 248 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Unmanned, solar-powered US military space plane returns from record 908-day flight

November 25, 2022

The robot craft – which has now clocked up over 1.3 billion miles in orbit across its six missions – was carrying experiments for the US Air Force, Navy and also NASA.

By IAN RANDALL

United States Space Force: ULA launch X-37B spaceplane.

An unmanned, solar-powered US military space plane returned from its sixth mission on Saturday, having spent a record-breaking 908 days in orbit. Built by Boeing, the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle — which resembles a miniature space shuttle — was developed to test space technologies. It was launched on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida back in May 2020. The craft landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the same complex from which the Artemis I Moon rocket will hopefully be blasting off early tomorrow morning.

For the first time, the space plane carried a so-called service module designed to increase the total number of payloads it could carry. This carried scientific experiments for partners including the Naval Research Laboratory and the US Air Force Academy.

To ensure a safe landing, the module was jettisoned from the vehicle before it left orbit. The space plane and the module then returned to Earth separately.

Boeing Space and Launch senior vice president Jim Chilton said: “Since the X-37B’s first launch in 2010, it has shattered records and provided our nation with an unrivalled capability to rapidly test and integrate new space technologies.

“With the service module added, this was the most we’ve ever carried to orbit on the X-37B and we’re proud to have been able to prove out this new and flexible capability for the government and its industry partners.”

NASA

NASA’s quiet supersonic X-59 now has a jet engine

November 24, 2022

Lockheed Martin’s X-59 aircraft

By Ameya Paleja

The first flight is likely in 2023.

The jet engine for NASA’s ambitious X-59 aircraft that will demonstrate the Quiet Supersonic Technology (QueSST) has now been installed, the space agency said in a press release.

NASA has teamed up with Lockheed Martin and General Electric Aviation to bring this ambitious plan to reality that could one day revive supersonic travel for the general public. While fighter aircraft can routinely fly at speeds much higher than sound speed, commercial airliners flying over populated areas cannot do the same.
The reason is the sonic boom, the shockwaves created by an object traveling faster than the sound, which has enough energy to shatter windows and sound like thunderclaps to the human ear. The now-defunct Concorde flights faced the same problem two decades ago and could never truly unlock the full potential of supersonic flight.

Electric Vehicles

Flywheel energy will help charge rental EVs in New York

November 24, 2022

Chakratec flywheel-based Kinetic Energy Storage systems for EV charging, grid-balancing

By STEPHEN EDELSTEIN

Zooz Power will use its flywheel technology to charge electric rental cars at New York City’s LaGuardia airport, the Israel-based company formerly known as Chakratec announced earlier this month.

Zooz recently announced a memorandum of understanding with an unnamed car rental company to pilot flywheel energy charging at LaGuardia beginning in the second quarter of 2023.

The partner rental company “is operating thousands of car rental sites in over 100 countries,” Zooz said in a press release, adding that more sites will be considered if the 12-month New York pilot program is successful.

Medical Breakthrough

Electrical zaps can ‘reawaken’ lost neural connections, helping paralyzed people walk again

November 24, 2022

Scientists identified the specific neurons needed for people to recover the ability to walk after spinal cord injuries.

By Nicoletta Lanese

Scientists identified specific spinal nerve cells that people likely need to regain the ability to walk after paralyzing injuries.

People with paralyzing spinal cord injuries can walk again with the help of medical devices that zap their nerves with electricity. But the designers of these new implants weren’t completely sure of how they restored motor function over time — now, a new study provides clues.

The new study of humans and lab mice, published Nov. 9 in the journal Nature, pinpoints a specific population of nerve cells that seems key to recovering the ability to walk after a paralyzing spinal cord injury. With a jolt of electricity, an implant can switch these neurons on and thus jumpstart a cascade of events in which the very architecture of the nervous system changes. This cellular remodel restores the lost lines of communication between the brain and the muscles needed for walking, allowing once-paralyzed people to walk again, the researchers concluded.

Understanding how the nerve-zapping system, called epidural electrical stimulation (EES), “reshapes spinal circuits could help researchers to develop targeted techniques to restore walking, and potentially enable the recovery of more-complex movements,” Eiman Azim, a principal investigator at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and Kee Wui Huang, a postdoctoral fellow in Azim’s lab, wrote in a commentary.

Nine people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries participated in the new study. Six were mostly or completely unable to move their legs but retained some feeling in the limbs; the other three participants had no motor control or sensation from the waist down.

Solar Power

Is Space-Based Solar Power Ready for Its Moment in the Sun?

November 23, 2022

An artistic depiction of sunlight-harvesting satellites supplying electricity from Earth orbit by beaming power to ground-based receiving stations.

By Leonard David

When inventor Charles Fritts created the first crude solar photovoltaic cells in the 1880s, one might have thought the achievement would rapidly revolutionize global electricity production. There is, after all, no power source cheaper, cleaner and more ubiquitous than sunlight. Yet despite enormous (and ongoing) technical advances making solar power ever more capable and affordable, some 140 years on it still supplies less than 5 percent of the world’s electricity. For all its benefits, solar power does have drawbacks that can limit its use—chief among them the fact that half the planet’s surface is in darkness at any given time.

In 1968 U.S. aerospace engineer Peter Glaser detailed a potential solution to these problems that was not only “outside the box” but entirely outside Earth’s atmosphere. Instead of building gigantic solar farms across vast, ecologically vulnerable tracts of land, Glaser proposed to loft the photovoltaics into orbit on fleets of solar power satellites. In orbit—unattenuated by clouds and freed from planetary cycles of day and night—sunlight could be harvested with optimum efficiency, then beamed as microwaves to ground-based “rectifying antennas” (rectennas). Back on Earth, the microwaves would be converted to electricity and channeled into power grids across the globe.

At the time and for decades afterward, however, the cost of space launches was too high and the performance of photovoltaics was too low to make Glaser’s bright idea a reality. But now technological advances, paired with the growing need for clean energy, are reinvigorating the concept of space-based solar power (SBSP), with pilot projects emerging in the U.S., China, Europe and Japan. As a new wave of research begins, the question lingers: Will SBSP ever be ready for its moment in the sun?

quantum computing

The unimon, a new qubit to boost quantum computers for useful applications

November 23, 2022

Artistic impression of a unimon qubit in a quantum processor.

A group of scientists from Aalto University, IQM Quantum Computers, and VTT Technical Research Center have discovered a new superconducting qubit, the unimon, to increase the accuracy of quantum computations. The team has achieved the first quantum logic gates with unimons at 99.9% fidelity—a major milestone on the quest to build commercially useful quantum computers. This research was just published in the journal Nature Communications.

Of all the different approaches to build useful quantum computers, superconducting qubits are in the lead. However, the qubit designs and techniques currently used do not yet provide high enough performance for practical applications. In this noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era, the complexity of the implementable quantum computations is mostly limited by errors in single- and two-qubit quantum gates. The quantum computations need to become more accurate to be useful.

“Our aim is to build quantum computers which deliver an advantage in solving real-world problems. Our announcement today is an important milestone for IQM, and a significant achievement to build better superconducting quantum computers,” said Professor Mikko Möttönen, joint Professor of Quantum Technology at Aalto University and VTT, and also a Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at IQM Quantum Computers, who was leading the research.

Metaverse

Red Wing Shoes wants virtual homes designed in Roblox to become real homes

November 23, 2022

This is a tiny home designed in Roblox.

Talk about moving from the metaverse to real life.

Red Wing Shoes is launching the Builders Exchange Program so that people can design “tiny houses” in the virtual world of Roblox that could become actual homes in the real world.

For every five skilled trades workers leaving the industry, only one is joining. But Red Wing Shoes figured out people are building but not in the traditional way we all think about; millions of young people are building in the virtual world in places like Roblox.

Space Flight

The World’s First Floating Spaceport Will Launch Travelers Into the Stratosphere in 2024

November 21, 2022

MS Voyager will be the waterborne launchpad for Spaceship Neptune.

Spaceship Neptune’s inspiring journey from MS Voyager to the edge of space.

By MICHAEL VERDON

Talk about a new kind of pleasure vessel. Space Perspective plans to launch the first-ever Marine Spaceport named, appropriately, MS Voyager, for test flights in early 2023. The Cape Canaveral-based firm plans to start testing its Spaceship Neptune—a cockpit tethered to a giant space balloon—next year for six-hour civilian journeys in 2024 that will go high into the stratosphere. Unlike competitors Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, the space balloon won’t involve rockets or ten-minute spaceflights.

The 292-foot Voyager is designed to be a floating “spaceport,” which gives Space Perspective the option of launching Spaceship Neptune from either land or water. The company has a land-based launch site on Florida’s Space Coast for its initial flights in 2024, but its long-term plans include other destinations around the world.

AI

How Generative AI Is Changing Creative Work

November 21, 2022

By Thomas H. Davenport and Nitin Mittal

Summary. Generative AI models for businesses threaten to upend the world of content creation, with substantial impacts on marketing, software, design, entertainment, and interpersonal communications. These models are able to produce text and images: blog…more

Large language and image AI models, sometimes called generative AI or foundation models, have created a new set of opportunities for businesses and professionals that perform content creation. Some of these opportunities include:

Automated content generation: Large language and image AI models can be used to automatically generate content, such as articles, blog posts, or social media posts. This can be a valuable time-saving tool for businesses and professionals who create content on a regular basis.
Improved content quality: AI-generated content can be of higher quality than content created by humans, due to the fact that AI models are able to learn from a large amount of data and identify patterns that humans may not be able to see. This can result in more accurate and informative content.
Increased content variety: AI models can generate a variety of content types, including text, images, and video. This can help businesses and professionals to create more diverse and interesting content that appeals to a wider range of people.
Personalized content: AI models can generate personalized content based on the preferences of individual users. This can help businesses and professionals to create content that is more likely to be of interest to their target audience, and therefore more likely to be read or shared.

How adept is this technology at mimicking human efforts at creative work? Well, for an example, the italicized text above was written by GPT-3, a “large language model” (LLM) created by OpenAI, in response to the first sentence, which we wrote. GPT-3’s text reflects the strengths and weaknesses of most AI-generated content. First, it is sensitive to the prompts fed into it; we tried several alternative prompts before settling on that sentence. Second, the system writes reasonably well; there are no grammatical mistakes, and the word choice is appropriate. Third, it would benefit from editing; we would not normally begin an article like this one with a numbered list, for example. Finally, it came up with ideas that we didn’t think of. The last point about personalized content, for example, is not one we would have considered.

Artificial Intelligence

Cerebras Reveals Andromeda, a 13.5 Million Core AI Supercomputer

November 21, 2022

The world’s largest chip scales to new heights.

By Paul Alcorn

Cerebras, the company that builds the world’s largest chip, the Wafer Scale Engine 2 (WSE-2), unveiled its Andromeda supercomputer today. Andromeda combines 16 of the wafer-sized WSE-2 chips into one cluster with 13.5 million AI-optimized cores that the company says delivers up to 1 Exaflop of AI computing horsepower, or 120 Petaflops of 16-bit half-precision.

The chips are housed in sixteen CS-2 systems. Each chip delivers up to 12.1 TB/s of internal bandwidth (96.8 Terabits) to the AI cores, but the data is fed to the CS-2 processors via 100 GbE networking spread across 124 server nodes in 16 racks. In total, those servers are powered by 284 third-gen EPYC Milan processors wielding 64 cores apiece, totaling 18,176 cores.

The entire system consumes 500 KW, which is a drastically lower amount of power than somewhat-comparable GPU-accelerated supercomputers. However, scaling a workload across such massively-parallel supercomputers has long been one of the primary inhibitors — at some point, scaling tends to break down, so adding more hardware results in a rapidly diminishing point of returns.

Robots

Industrial Robots in Automotive Manufacturing: IDTechEx Asks Whether Electric Vehicles will Reduce the Demand

November 21, 2022

The Adoption of Automation Typically Accelerates After Crisis

Robotics and automation have gained significant momentum during the past two decades. However, with the recent global turmoil, the increasing likelihood of recession, unprecedented inflation in many countries, and geopolitical tensions, many challenges in the manufacturing industry have been exacerbated. Nevertheless, IDTechEx believes that automation and robots in the manufacturing industry will regain their fast growth rates according to the historic performance.

The unit sales of industrial robots accelerated quickly from 2003 to 2007 after the dot-com bust. A similar trend also happened after the 2008-2009 financial crisis. With all the uncertainties, such as China/US trade conflict in 2019, supply chain disruption in 2020 and 2021, and a potential recession in 2022 and/or 2023, IDTechEx believes that the post-crisis industrial robots and manufacturing automation will likely gain more momentum after 2023. IDTechEx’s recent research reports, “Collaborative Robots (Cobots) 2023-2043: Technologies, Players & Markets” and “Mobile Robotics in Logistics, Warehousing and Delivery 2022-2042”, have provided a granular market size forecast of what applications are expected to adopt more robots and automation, how the changes in regulations will lead to market size growth, and considers many other factors for adoption.

On the supply side, COVID has significantly limited the accessibility of factory workers. IDTechEx has learned that many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have suffered from labor storage, and the border closure and travel restrictions have further exacerbated this issue over the past two years. In addition, customers are looking for more unique selling points and differentiation from the products they purchase. The increasing variability in manufacturing puts a higher requirement for short-handed manufacturers. Many companies, particularly SMEs, have started to adopt automation to mitigate this issue.

Nanotechnology

Nanotechnology platform can make solid tumor cells more receptive to immunotherapy

November 21, 2022

By Emily Henderson

A team of researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center has developed a nanotechnology platform that can change the way the immune system sees solid tumor cells, making them more receptive to immunotherapy. The preclinical findings suggest this adaptable immune conversion approach has the potential for broad application across many cancer types.

The study, published today in Nature Nanotechnology, details the use of this platform to artificially attach an activation molecule to the surface of tumor cells, triggering an immune response in both in vivo and in vitro models. Wen Jiang, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor of Radiation Oncology, and Betty Kim, M.D., Ph.D., professor of Neurosurgery, co-led the study.

With this new platform, we now have a strategy to convert a solid tumor, at least immunologically, to resemble a hematological tumor, which often has a much higher response rate to immunotherapy treatments. If we are able to translate and validate this approach in the clinic, it may enable us to get closer to the maximum level of activity from immunotherapy drugs with cancers that have not traditionally responded well.”
Wen Jiang, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Radiation Oncology

Immunotherapy has high response rates in blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, but success has been variable across solid tumors. Scientists have been working to further understand the mechanisms prohibiting a better response. One explanation is that varied expression of immune regulatory molecules on blood cancer versus solid tumor cells impact how they interact with immune cells.

The signaling lymphocytic activation molecule family member 7 (SLAMF7) receptor is critical in activating the body’s immune cells against cancer cells, acting as an “eat me” signal. However, it is found almost exclusively on the surface of blood cancer cells and not in solid tumor cells, making it an attractive target for the researchers’ immune conversion approach.