Speqtre, an innovative secure communications cubesat, has passed a major milestone in its journey to space.
The mission, which will demonstrate quantum key distribution (QKD) from space, has passed its critical design review. This means that the team can now build and test a full model of the satellite.
Continue reading… “Quantum encryption spacecraft closer to launch”A single colony of bees can pollinate up to 300 million flowers daily. And that includes human-managed honeybees. That means that, unlike some livestock or agricultural practices, this is a human activity that is beneficial to the environment and key to the food system’s sustainability. Now, robotics, artificial intelligence, and big data will bolster the collaboration between humans and bees. That is the proposal of an Israeli startup.
Continue reading… “Smart Beehives Will Monitor their Colonies with AI”Immersive technology could change the hospitality industry forever.
by Kyle Melnick
Moxy Hotels, a chain of stylish hotels owned by Marriot, today announced the Moxy Universe, Play Beyond, an augmented reality (AR) experience that allows guests to interact with the hotel in a variety of unique ways.
Starting now until the end of the year, visitors can use their mobile devices to explore 12 Moxy Hotels from Shanghai to Tokyo using a virtual avatar. Ahead of their stay, guests can use the Moxy mobile app to begin customizing their digital persona with different outfits, accessories, and hairstyles.
Continue reading… “AR-Powered Hotels Have Officially Arrived”UK to plan world’s biggest automated drone superhighway connecting cities and towns for mail package delivery
The UK is setting up the world’s biggest automated drone superhighway within two years, which will be used on a 164-mile Skyway project that will connect towns and cities.
The project, according to BBC, is part of a £273 million funding package for the aerospace sector.
Drone mail delivery to the Isles of Scilly and across Scotland is also part of other projects being planned, which will include delivering medicines to patients in remote regions.
The chief operating officer of the aviation technology company Altitude Angel, Chris Forster, said that the drone superhighway will not only be used for business logistics but will also help “police and medical deliveries of vaccines and blood samples”.
Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng will officially make the announcement of the project at the Farnborough International Airshow. He believes the funding will “help the sector seize on the enormous opportunities for growth that exist as the world transitions to cleaner forms of flight”.
Continue reading… “UK to have the world’s biggest automated drone superhighway”Here come windows that can generate power from the sun.
Transparent solar cells, which have the potential to convert windows, greenhouses, glass panels of smart devices, and more into energy harvesting devices, have taken another step toward becoming a reality.
A team of scientists from the Tohoku University in Japan has created a near-invisible solar cell using indium tin oxide (ITO) as a transparent electrode and tungsten disulfide (WS2) as a photoactive layer.
Remarkably, the cell has the potential to achieve a transparency of 79 percent and can help take the TMD-based near-invisible solar cells from the basics to truly industrialized stages, according to the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.
Continue reading… “Scientists create a nearly invisible solar cell with up to 79% transparency”Taken in pill form, the drug would eliminate cells in the human body that are responsible for advancing the ageing process – potentially doubling our lifespan. But is this desirable?
Are you ready to live an additional hundred years?
British computational biologist Dr Andrew Steele has published a new book on the longevity of human life, arguing it is entirely feasible for us to live well beyond a single century with the help of a certain kind of drug.
In the book, he states that research in the field of senolytics – drugs that work to eliminate cells that degrade tissue function – are already showing promising results and could become available on the market within the next decade.
‘I don’t think there is any kind of absolute cap on how long we can live,’ said Dr Steele. ‘I can’t see a physical or biological reason why people couldn’t live to 200 — the challenge is whether we can develop the biomedical science to make it possible.’
Once perfected, the drug would destroy ‘zombie cells’, scientifically known as senescent cells. These cells stop dividing over our lifespan, accumulate inside our bodies, and eventually release compounds that speed up processes of ageing.
In a 2020 trial, mice who were administered the drug showed improved physical function and extended health and lifespan. Given that gene functions in humans and mice are almost identical, many believe we could reap the same benefits.
Continue reading… “Drug that increases human lifespan to 200 years is in the works”By Rhoda Madson, Mayo Clinic
July is Sarcoma Awareness Month, bringing attention to a group of cancers that begin in the bones or soft tissues of the body. There are more than 70 types of sarcoma, including bone cancer. Treatments for bone cancer include surgery, chemotherapy, radiation, or proton beam therapy that targets the cancer.
Proton beam therapy is a type of radiation therapy that is more precise than traditional X-ray treatment that delivers radiation to everything in its path. Proton beam therapy uses charged particles in an atom—protons—that release their energy within the tumor. Because proton beams can be much more finely controlled, specialists can use proton beam therapy to safely deliver higher doses of radiation to tumors. This is especially important for bone cancers.
“Bone tumors need much higher doses of radiation than a sarcoma that arises purely in the muscle, which we call a soft tissue sarcoma,” says Safia Ahmed, M.D., a radiation oncologist at Mayo Clinic. “These high doses of radiation often exceed what the normal tissues around the area can tolerate. Proton therapy allows us to give this high dose of radiation while protecting the normal tissues.”
Continue reading… “Proton beam therapy for bone cancer spares surrounding tissue”Researchers believe mechanical arms in light-sensitive manufacturing environments could become capable of detecting when conditions change, thanks to the new technology
A new form of flexible photodetector could provide future robots with an electronic skin capable of ‘seeing’ light beyond the range of human vision.
Engineers at Glasgow University announced their breakthrough development, involving a new method of printing microscale semiconductors made from gallium arsenide onto a flexible plastic surface.
According to the team, their material provides performance equivalent to the best conventional photodetectors on the market, and is capable of withstanding hundreds of cycles of bending and flexing.
In a paper published in Advanced Materials Technology, researchers outlined how they developed the technology, which allows the skin to detect light from a broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Continue reading… “Robots could ‘see’ using new electronic skin tech”The chargers will be built at Pilot and Flying J truck stops
General Motors announced a “coast-to-coast” network of fast electric vehicle chargers installed at Pilot and Flying J truck stops and managed by EV charging company EVgo. The announcement is the latest sign that legacy automakers will need to spend their own money to shore up the US’ fractured EV charging infrastructure in order to build customer demand for new plug-in vehicles.
GM and Pilot Company say the new network will include 2,000 DC fast chargers installed at up to 500 truck stops and travel centers, capable of offering speeds of up to 350kW. The charging stalls will be built along US highways with the expressed purpose of meeting the needs of long-haul trucking and road-trippers.
The chargers will be in addition to the 3,250 chargers that GM is currently installing with EVgo, which the automaker has said will be completed by the end of 2025. The automaker has said it would spend $750 million in total on EV charging infrastructure. GM AND PILOT COMPANY SAY THE NEW NETWORK WILL INCLUDE 2,000 DC FAST CHARGERS INSTALLED AT UP TO 500 TRUCK STOPS AND TRAVEL CENTERS
Listen on Futurati Podcast
As futurists, Thomas Frey and Trent Fowler take a great interest in studying the disciplines which best elucidate the major trends shaping humanity’s direction, disciplines like economics, physics, and computer science. It’s rare to find anyone conversant in two of these fields, and rarer still to find a person conversant in all of them, and many more besides.
Well, tonight’s guest is someone who has done a remarkable job of uniting disparate ideas into compelling visions of the future, generating concepts like futures markets, the great filter, and grabby aliens which have shaped thinking on problems ranging from the Fermi Paradox to governance.
Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He has a doctorate in social science from the California Institute of Technology, master’s degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA.
Pairs Well With
An artist’s illustration of two suited crew members working on the lunar surface. The one in the foreground lifts a rock to examine it while the other photographs the collection site in the background. Credit: NASA
The suits, supplied by Axiom Space and Collins Aerospace, will be used in NASA’s upcoming Artemis lunar missions and will protect space travellers from micrometeoroids, moon dust and even vomit.
Sooner or later, humans will set foot on the moon again—perhaps by the middle of this decade if NASA’s Artemis program proceeds as planned. And beyond that, public or private crewed missions to Mars in the 2030s or 2040s no longer seem solely confined to science fiction. But what will astronauts be wearing when they take those steps on other worlds? Procuring giant rockets and futuristic spacecraft for Artemis has been the most well-publicized hurdle for NASA to overcome, but its efforts to design new spacesuits for the moon have proved equally challenging. Since 2007 the space agency has spent an estimated $420 million on new suit designs without actually fielding any. Finally, after all those unsuccessful attempts, last month NASA announced it has opted to outsource the work and has selected two companies to craft the next generation of haute couture for the high frontier.
Those companies—Axiom Space in Texas and Collins Aerospace in North Carolina—will each independently develop new spacesuits as part of NASA’s Exploration Extravehicular Activity Services (xEVAS) contract. NASA has budgeted a total of $3.5 billion through 2034 for that combined work and plans to purchase its suits from the two companies as a service, which will free both to make and market additional suits for non-NASA commercial missions as well. Following demonstrations of the suits in Earth orbit, they will be used for the first Artemis landing, which is currently scheduled for 2025. That mission, dubbed Artemis III, will feature two astronauts, one man and one woman, who will don suits from one of the two companies to venture out onto the lunar surface. Whichever company isn’t chosen for that first landing will instead supply suits for later Artemis missions.
“This is a historic day for us,” said Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center, in a press conference announcing the award on June 1. “History will be made with these suits when we get to the moon.”
Continue reading… “Astronauts Will Wear These Spacesuits on the Moon—And Maybe Mars, Too”Reusing existing fiber optic infrastructure is (almost) as big a deal as it gets.
A render for a single T centre qubit in the silicon lattice, which supports the first single spin to ever be optically observed in silicon. The constituents of the T centre (two carbon atoms and a hydrogen atom) are shown as orange, and the optically-addressable electron spin is in shining pale blue. (Image credit: Photonics)
Researchers from Simon Fraser University may have just released the photonic springs that accelerate the quantum internet. In a paper published in Nature, the researchers demonstrated an emergent capacity in silicon qubits to produce a “photonic link” between each other. Furthermore, this same photonic capability may be easily integrated with the existing fiber optic infrastructure that already carries data across a reasonable (yet still insufficient) portion of society. That is bound to provide immense savings on deploying a quantum internet – and as we all know, the cost is (mostly) king.
The authors’ paper describes observations carried on particular types of qubits: “T-center” photon-spin qubits, a kind of qubit that takes advantage of a specific luminescent defect in silicon – more specifically, InGaAs (Indium gallium arsenide), also explored in CPU manufacturing technologies. Silicon qubits have already shown remarkable coherence times – which relate to how resistant qubits are to outside interferences that would cause them to collapse and lose their information in the process, becoming unusable for the workload at hand.
And with more fantastic coherence times – and the comparative ease with which these “T center” qubits can be linked – comes the capability to perform more and more significant calculations. In their experiment, the researchers observed the effect in over 1,500 T Center qubits, ensuring they can replicate it – a healthy indicator for the potential scalability of their solution.
“This work is the first measurement of single T centers in isolation, and actually, the first measurement of any single spin in silicon to be performed with only optical measurements,” said Stephanie Simmons, Canada Research Chair in Silicon Quantum Technologies.
“An emitter like the T center that combines high-performance spin qubits and optical photon generation is ideal to make scalable, distributed, quantum computers,” she continued, “because they can handle the processing and the communications together, rather than needing to interface two different quantum technologies, one for processing and one for communications.”
Continue reading… “Breakthrough in Silicon Qubits, Photonics Accelerates Quantum Internet”
