3D Printer

Desktop Metal launches S-Max Flex – a Robotic Sand 3D Printing technology

Above: ExOne S-Max® Flex is an affordable and easy-to-use robotic additive manufacturing system/Image Source: Desktop Metal

Desktop Metal, a leader in mass production and turnkey additive manufacturing solutions, announced the launch of ExOne S-Max Flex, a scalable, large-format binder jetting system for sand 3D printing used by foundries to quickly cast complex metal designs for the aerospace, automotive, and energy industries, among others.

ExOne (now a part of Desktop Metal) is the leading provider of digital sand printing solutions for foundries. The new S-Max Flex combines ExOne’s sand printing expertise in process and materials with proprietary Desktop Metal SPJ technology in an affordable architecture to bring new value to foundries that have long desired an S-Max but have found the premium price out of reach.

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Elon Musk

Elon Musk Doubles Down On Claim That Brain Chip Can Treat Morbid Obesity

Elon Musk keeps talking about Neuralink as a treatment for morbid obesity, but how likely is it and when will it be available for medical use?

Elon Musk really seems to believe that a brain chip can treat morbid obesity, something that scientists have weighed in on as well. The device is, of course, the Neuralink, a computer interface that’s implanted into the brain. It’s suggested that this might someday be a quick and simple procedure, enabling all sorts of futuristic possibilities. A real chance of bypassing spinal cord injuries to restore movement seems exciting, and has a basis in reality, but other ideas seem less likely to come anytime soon.- Advertisement –

It’s no surprise that Neuralink made headlines since it’s one of Elon Musk’s companies. However, despite its early surge of interest, the company has been relatively quiet since its launch in 2015. Musk occasionally throws out a tidbit of information about progress but only a few demonstrations have been seen so far. Animal tests with rats, pigs, and monkeys have shown that the device is capable of connecting to the brain and picking up signals that can be processed by a computer. Human testing is supposedly the next step.

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Science & Technology News, Space

China Will Test Planetary Defense by Crashing a Spacecraft into An Asteroid

China’s plans are similar to a NASA mission that will slam into an asteroid later this year.

By Becky Ferreira

China plans to crash a spaceship into an asteroid that is potentially hazardous to Earth to alter its trajectory, a maneuver that caps off a multi-step planetary defense strategy that was outlined by a representative of the nation’s space agency on Sunday, reports SpaceNews. 

The asteroid deflection mission is scheduled for launch sometime in the mid-2020s, according to Wu Yanhua, deputy director of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), who described the project during a celebration of China’s Space Day, which commemorates the launch of the nation’s first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, on April 24, 1970.

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Stem cells

Jab inside your ear to restore hearing! New drug prompts stem cells to grow into hair-like cilia cells to reverse hearing loss

By ALICE JAFFE

A gel that’s injected into the ear could reverse hearing loss. Called FX-322, the one-off jab works by encouraging dormant stem cells inside the ear to grow into healthy new auditory cells capable of transmitting sounds to the brain.

Stem cells are immature cells found throughout the body, and many have the capacity to grow into virtually any type of tissue.

The new drug prompts these dormant cells to grow into cilia. These tiny hair-like cells pick up sounds and turn them into electrical impulses that are sent along the auditory nerve to the brain for processing.

Around 11 million people in the UK are affected by hearing loss, eight million of whom are aged 60 or older. Short-term hearing loss can occur as a result of ear infections or wax build-up.

Stem cells are immature cells found throughout the body, and many have the capacity to grow into virtually any type of tissue. The new drug prompts these dormant cells to grow into cilia

But while this is treatable, hearing loss due to damage to the cilia — for example, from repeated exposure to loud noise or changes in the inner ear as we age — is largely untreatable because the cells cannot repair themselves.

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drones

Eindhoven living lab to test five use cases for autonomous drone services over six months

The Dutch High Tech Campus Eindhoven (HTCE) in the Netherlands started the first demonstrations of autonomous drone services in March 2022. HTCE is one of the consortium partners of the EU-funded FF2020 project that is developing a state-of-the-art geospatial UAM ecosystem by incorporating UAM within the geospatial data infrastructure of cities. Besides Eindhoven, FF2020’s solutions will also be tested in another four living labs during the project: Milan (Italy), Oulu (Finland), Tartu (Estonia) and Zaragoza (Spain).

The drone operations will continue until the end of September 2022. The five use cases tested on campus focus on security support, building inspection, meal delivery, express shipping and emergency automated external defibrillator (AED) delivery.

The first use case involves the use of drones for campus surveillance to assist security personnel. In the second use case, drones will be scanning and inspecting buildings to assess their condition. The remaining three use cases concern the last-mile delivery of goods such as meals, packages and AEDs to the rural part of campus.

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Robots, Science & Technology News

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

By Brian Heater

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.

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Robots, Science & Technology News

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

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.

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Futurati Podcast, Science & Technology News

Ep. 82 with eric yates

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”.

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Breakthrough Thinking

Startup Plans Nuclear-Powered Data Centers on the Moon

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. 

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AI

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

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.

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Employment, Science & Technology News

Work is broken. Can we fix it?

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? 

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