Impact Lab – Page 300 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

JACK IN THE BOX IS PILOTING MISO’S HAMBURGER-COOKING ROBOT

May 3, 2022

You’ve got to hand it to Miso — the company knows how to sell the sizzle, as they say in the meat-cooking business. The robotics firm has been striking high-profile deals with some of the U.S.’s biggest fast food chains, from White Castle to Panera Bread. Today it adds Jack in the Box to that list.

The king of the late-night hamburger/taco combo is set to pilot a pair of Miso robots. That includes the newish drink machine, Sippy and the company’s old standby, Flippy 2, which helps augment line cook roles by flipping burgers. It’s still an extremely limited pilot, at one of the chain’s San Diego locations, but if things go well, there will be a further rollout in “the months ahead.”

“This collaboration with Miso Robotics is a steppingstone for our back-of-house restaurant operations. We are confident that this technology will be a good fit to support our growing business needs with intentions of having a positive impact on our operations while promoting safety and comfort to our team members,” said Jack in the Box COO Tony Darden.

Robots, Science & Technology News

ZIPPEDI IS USING ROBOTS TO DIGITIZE INVENTORY FOR LAST-MILE DELIVERY

May 3, 2022

By Brian Heater

Luis Vera believes the third time is the charm. The self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur admits that his vision for digitizing retail was a decade or two early when he started his journey in the 90s. Through a pair of startups — Prospect and SCOPIX — he tried a variety of methods to help capture store inventory, including placings cameras on shelves and a ceiling-based system where one ran on tracks.

He was, effectively, attempting to compete with Amazon well before Amazon was, well, Amazon — at least in any meaningful sense. Computer vision, machine learning and the like have caught up a lot since then, of course. The notion of competing directly against Amazon is a seemingly impossible order, but Zippedi’s vision utilizes the geographical benefit of brick and mortal locations to help facilitate last-mile deliveries.

The company utilizes an inventory robot to keep tabs of what’s on shelves, creating a “digital twin” online. When someone orders something for, say, DoorDash, a shopper knows not only what is on the shelf, but where to find it. The system can both offer direction to items and provide a prioritized shopping list, so they can be in and out as quickly as possible. It’s easy to see how the company could incorporate AR in the future (and that’s on the roadmap), but we’re getting ahead of ourselves a bit here.

Futurati Podcast, Science & Technology News

Ep. 82 with eric yates

May 3, 2022

Watch our interview with Eric Yakes on Youtube or listen on the Futurati Podcast website.

Eric Yakes graduated with a double major in finance and economics from Creighton University, and 3 years later earned his CFA charter. He began his career at FTI Consulting in their Corporate Finance and Restructuring group and then moved to Lion Equity Partners, a distressed buyout private equity fund. All the while he intently followed Bitcoin, and its development eventually led him to author the book “The 7th Property: Bitcoin and the Monetary Revolution”.

Breakthrough Thinking

Startup Plans Nuclear-Powered Data Centers on the Moon

May 2, 2022

Lonestar Data Holdings to launch RISC-V servers to the Moon.

By Anton Shilov

Modern datacenters consume loads of power, require extremely complex cooling, and are physically vulnerable to natural disasters and military conflicts. Datacenters 10 years from now will get even more complex, power hungry, and hot. There are several radical ways to solve power and cooling problems, but one startup plans to solve the problem by putting data centers on the Moon, and it already has two spaceflights booked to place equipment on the moon. The end goal is to have a network of servers on the moon that’s fed by a nuclear reactor.

As it turns out, Lonestar Data Holdings plans to establish a network of data centers on the Moon, reports DataCenterKnowledge. In fact, the company has already contracted with Intuitive Machines for its first two missions to the lunar surface and to build its first proof-of-concept data services payload, thus building the first data center on the Moon. The actual RISC-V-based machines will be built by Skycorp.

“Data is the greatest currency created by the human race,” said Chris Stott, Founder of Lonestar. “We are dependent upon it for nearly everything we do and it is too important to us as a species to store in Earth’s ever more fragile biosphere. Earth’s largest satellite, our Moon, represents the ideal place to safely store our future.”

There are numerous challenges with installing a data center on the lunar surface. Of course, the expenses associated with delivering the servers to the Moon are one of them, but powering the servers and connecting them to the Internet are two other challenges.

AI

John Deere is slowly becoming one of the world’s most important AI companies

May 2, 2022

Nothing runs (autonomously) like a Deere

By Tristan Greene

John Deere has been in business for nearly 200 years. For those in the agriculture industry, the company that makes green tractors is as well-known as Santa Claus, McDonald’s, or John Wayne.

Heck, even city folk who’ve never seen a tractor that wasn’t on a television screen know John Deere. The company’s so popular even celebrities such as Ashton Kutcher and George Clooney have been known to rock a Deere hat.

What most outsiders don’t know is that John Deere’s not so much a farming vehicle manufacturer these days as it is an agricultural technology company. And, judging by how things are going in 2022, we’re predicting it’ll be a full-on artificial intelligence company within the next 15 years.

Employment, Science & Technology News

Work is broken. Can we fix it?

May 2, 2022

The Future of Work issue of the Highlight looks at the workers Americans dubbed “essential” and then largely left behind in the work revolution. Can we make work better for the nation’s crucial workforce?

“We often begin to understand things only after they break down. This is why, in addition to being a worldwide catastrophe, the pandemic has been a large-scale philosophical experiment,” Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, writes in this month’s issue of the Highlight.

What has broken down, of course, is work, and what American workers, policymakers, and employers now can see plainly are the countless truths the pandemic laid bare: that productivity does not actually require an air-polluting, hourlong daily drive to a soulless downtown office building; that a fair and just society ought not put the poorest, most vulnerable Americans in danger in the name of capitalism; that the entire economy might just be held together by a rapidly dwindling sea of people — child care workers — earning roughly $13 an hour, with no benefits.

In this month’s Future of Work issue, the Highlight and Recode teamed up to explore the precarity faced by those workers whom the Great Resignation did not offer much in the way of increased power or security. We look beyond simply what is broken about their working lives, asking policy experts and workers themselves: What could make work better?

Elon Musk, Science & Technology News

ELON MUSK’S BORING COMPANY RAISES $675M TO SCALE LOOP PROJECTS

May 1, 2022

By Rebecca Bellan

The Boring Company, Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s project to build underground highways to alleviate traffic congestion, has raised a $675 million Series C round, bringing its valuation up to $5.7 billion.

The round was led by Vy Capital and Sequoia Capital, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, 8VC, Craft Ventures, and DFJ Growth. The company says it will use the funds to significantly increase hiring across engineering, operations and production in order to build and scale Loop projects and accelerate the research and development of Prufrock, the company’s next generation tunnelling machine.

In October, The Boring Company (TBC) received initial approval to build a transportation system that would shuttle passengers in Tesla vehicles via a network of tunnels under Las Vegas beyond its current 1.7 mile footprint that currently connects the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) campus to a 29-mile route that would hit all the best tourist spots in the city of sin. Operation on the updated Vegas loop should commence this year, according to the company.

Robots

Autonomous robot performs laparoscopic soft tissue surgery with minimal assistance from a surgeon

May 1, 2022

By Emily Henderson, B.Sc.

What if your next surgery was planned and performed by a robot? A team at Johns Hopkins University is working to turn this idea into reality.

The concept of robot-assisted surgery is not new: several systems have already been developed and are being used to treat human patients. One example is the da Vinci surgical system, a laparoscopic device with robotic arms that are remotely controlled by a surgeon. This system is not autonomous-;the robot does not perform any surgical tasks independently. Other robotic systems with higher levels of autonomy have been developed, such as the TSolution One^®, which uses a robot to precisely cut bone according to a pre-specified plan. Existing autonomous robotic systems have largely been used to assist in surgeries involving hard tissues, such as drilling into bone for hip or knee implants. But these systems haven’t been used for soft tissue surgeries, which pose unique challenges, like accounting for unpredictable tissue motions that occur when the patient breathes, or size limitations of the surgical tools.

Now, NIBIB-funded researchers are developing an autonomous robot that can perform bowel surgery with minimal assistance from a surgeon. What’s more, the robot outperformed expert surgeons when compared head-to-head in preclinical models. A study detailing the development of this robot, which showcases the first known autonomous laparoscopic soft tissue surgery, was recently published in Science Robotics.

Driverless cars

Elon Musk Says Tesla Robotaxi Coming In 2024, Will Have No Steering Wheel: Report

May 1, 2022

Elon Musk told shareholders during Tesla’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday that the company plans to begin mass production of the self-driving taxis in 2024.

New Delhi: Electric car firm Tesla’s “robotaxi” will have no steering wheel or pedals, and it will be as cheap as a bus ride, Elon Musk has said.

According to news reports, Musk told shareholders during the company’s quarterly earnings call Wednesday that Tesla plans to begin mass production of the self-driving taxis in 2024.

“We are also working on a new vehicle that I alluded to at the Giga Texas opening, which is a dedicated robotaxi,” Musk was quoted as saying in a report in The Independent.

“It is going to be highly optimised for autonomy – meaning it will not have a steering wheel or pedals. There are a number of other innovations around it that I think are quite exciting, but it is fundamentally optimised to achieve the lowest fully considered cost per mile or kilometre when counting everything,” he added.

Stem cells

Chinese experts first make human stem cell via chemical reprogramming

April 30, 2022

Chinese scientists have translated human somatic cells back into pluripotent stem cells with chemical molecules. /CFP

Chinese scientists have translated human somatic cells back into pluripotent stem cells, an “adult” version of early embryonic cells, using chemical molecules.

A group of researchers led by Deng Hongkui from Peking University reported finding the chemical cellular reprogramming technique for the first time ever.

The technique can be developed into universal knowhow on how to efficiently cultivate human cells of various functions, offering new possibilities for treating critical illnesses, the researchers said.

Previously, the cell-intrinsic components, including oocyte cytoplasm and transcription factors, were used to reprogram cells in human tissue or organs into pluripotent stem cells that can propagate to give rise to every other cell type in the body.

Inspired by how lower animals like axolotl regenerate its limb, the researchers demonstrated that the highly differentiated human somatic cells could experience plastic changes, triggered by certain chemical molecules, according to the study published recently in the journal Nature.

Space Flight

Small spacecraft electric propulsion opens new deep space opportunities

April 30, 2022

An image of Northrop Grumman’s small electric propulsion thruster first light during testing at NASA Glenn Research Center’s Electric Power and Propulsion Laboratory.

by Nancy Smith Kilkenny

The path to the Moon, Mars, and beyond will require a fleet of spacecraft in many different shapes and sizes, including everything from massive rockets that produce millions of pounds of thrust to pioneering small electric propulsion thrusters that fit in the palm of your hand.

For decades, innovators at NASA’s Glenn Research Center have been developing large, high-power electric propulsion (EP) systems that harness the power of the Sun to energize inert gases and turn them into extremely efficient thrust. Higher fuel efficiency means less propellant is needed, lowering launch costs while allowing spacecraft designers to reduce overall spacecraft weight to carry more payload mass, like technology demonstrations or more powerful scientific instruments.

The agency’s primary EP efforts have centered on large exploration and science missions, like the 7-kilowatt (kW) NEXT-C gridded-ion system currently flying on the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission and the 12-kW Advanced Electric Propulsion System used on the Power and Propulsion Element for NASA’s lunar orbiting space station known as Gateway.

However, over the last five years, the Small Spacecraft Electric Propulsion (SSEP) project at NASA Glenn has been advancing high-performance sub-kilowatt (<1-kW) Hall-effect thruster and power processing technologies to enable smaller spacecraft. By utilizing smaller craft – those that could fit inside the trunk of your car versus being the size of your car – the agency opens more opportunities to conduct ambitious deep space missions at a fraction of the cost.

Virtual Reality

Building Scientifically Accurate Digital Twins Using Modulus with Omniverse and AI

April 30, 2022

By Bhoomi Gadhia

From physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to neural operators, developers have long sought after the ability to build real-time digital twins with true-to-form rendering, robust visualizations, and synchronization with the physical system in the real world by streaming live sensor data. The latest release of Modulus brings us closer to this reality.

Modulus 22.03, the cutting-edge framework for developing physics-based machine learning models, offers developers key capabilities such as novel physics informed and data-driven AI architectures, and integration into the Omniverse (OV) platform.

This release takes a major step toward building precise simulations and interactive visualization capabilities for engineers and researchers with the Modulus OV extension. This enhancement is bolstered by new AI architectures that can learn from data using neural operators. Additional enhancements to facilitate precise modeling of problems such as turbulence have been added in this latest version of Modulus, as well as features to improve training convergence.