Impact Lab – Page 327 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

SpinLaunch Successfully Throws A 10-Meter Dart Toward Space

December 31, 2021

It’s not like we are doing any mining for exotic materials on the Moon or Mars, so I suspect that this interesting intellectual capital might sit on a shelf for a few decades.

By Michael Barnard

SpinLaunch is playing with a different, electric model for mass launching to orbit. It is trying to throw mass into space, but there are challenges.

In October, a company called SpinLaunch threw a 10-meter long dart at the sky, reaching roughly 10,000 meters in altitude. So what, you might ask. Well, it did it in a novel and interesting way, which one day might actually be useful for throwing stuff into orbit using electricity instead of rocket fuel.

new technology

Scientists Create Mind-Blowing Tool to ‘See’ Millions of Brain Cell Connections in Mice

December 31, 2021

Every green glowing area is one synapse in a living mouse’s brain. The image shows dense constellations of millions of synapses throughout the mouse cortex. Credit: Austin Graves, Johns Hopkins Medicine

To solve the mysteries of how learning and memory occur, Johns Hopkins Medicine scientists have created a system to track millions of connections among brain cells in mice — all at the same time — when the animals’ whiskers are tweaked, an indicator for learning.

Researchers say the new tool gives an unprecedented view of brain cell activity in a synapse — a tiny space between two brain cells, where molecules and chemicals are passed back and forth.

“It was science fiction to be able to image nearly every synapse in the brain and watch a change in behavior,” says Richard Huganir, Ph.D., Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience and Psychological and Brain Sciences at The Johns Hopkins University and director of the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

A summary of the research was published online first Oct. 18 and in its final form Nov. 25 in the journal eLife.

Cancer

Nanoparticle therapeutic enhances cancer immunotherapy

December 29, 2021

Summary:Researchers have discovered that a nanoparticle therapeutic enhances cancer immunotherapy and is a possible new approach in treating malignant pleural effusion (MPE). MPE is the accumulation of fluid between the chest wall and lungs and is accompanied by malignant cells and/or tumors.

Researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine have discovered that a nanoparticle therapeutic enhances cancer immunotherapy and is a possible new approach in treating malignant pleural effusion (MPE). MPE is the accumulation of fluid between the chest wall and lungs and is accompanied by malignant cells and/or tumors.

Results from the study are published in the current issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

Amazon.com

Electric Cargo Planes: The Next Stage Of Amazon’s Delivery Transformation

December 29, 2021

Flying cars, also known as electric air taxis, have been around us for a long time thanks to sci-fi staples such as “Back to the Future” and “The Jetsons.” But with major brands like Boeing (NYSE:BA), Airbus (OTCPK:EADSF), Hyundai, and Toyota (NYSE:TM) now promising to whisk riders through the skies in flying taxis and receiving a heady dose of Wall Street endorsement, the dream is increasingly getting closer to reality.

Indeed, many experts are now upbeat that air mobility over short distances is closer to becoming a reality than ever before in history, thanks mainly to massive advancements in battery technologies and autonomous flight. And make no mistake about it: Flying taxis have real potential to completely restructure public and private transportation, decongest our roads, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, a Morgan Stanley Research study says the autonomous urban aircraft market will continue to mature during the current decade and then boom globally to reach $1.5 trillion by 2040.

This year, we have witnessed two electric aircraft startups go public: Joby Aviation Inc. (NYSE:JOBY), which went public in August, and Archer Aviation Inc. (NYSE:ACHR), which was listed in September, both via SPAC deals.

And, it appears there’s no shortage of electric aircraft companies in the IPO pipeline: Amazon and UPS-backed Beta Technologies have developed Alia, an electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, or “eVTOL,” helicopter-like aircraft that can take off and land without runways.

Aviation

Archer’s Maker eVTOL performs first hover flight

December 29, 2021

By VYTE KLISAUSKAITE

Archer Aviation’s electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) demonstrator Maker has completed its first hover flight, marking the company’s first full and complete systems validation.

“The past six months have been an incredible journey, from unveiling Maker to watching it take its first flight,” said Brett Adcock, Archer co-founder and co-CEO. “It’s been humbling to build a leading eVTOL company and educate the public on clean transportation alternatives.”

Archer’s Maker demonstrator is an autonomous two-seater eVTOL vehicle that has been certified for flight testing by the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The next step is to test Maker’s capabilities of forward flying.

AI

DeepMind’s New AI With a Memory Outperforms Algorithms 25 Times Its Size

December 28, 2021

By Edd Gent – Dec 20, 202131,578

Bigger is better—or at least that’s been the attitude of those designing AI language models in recent years. But now DeepMind is questioning thisrationale, and says giving an AI a memory can help it compete with models 25 times its size.

When OpenAI released its GPT-3 model last June, it rewrote the rulebook for language AIs. The lab’s researchers showed that simply scaling up the size of a neural network and the data it was trained on could significantly boost performance on a wide variety of language tasks.

Since then, a host of other tech companies have jumped on the bandwagon, developing their own large language models and achieving similar boosts in performance. But despite the successes, concerns have been raised about the approach, most notably by former Google researcher Timnit Gebru.

In the paper that led to her being forced out of the company, Gebru and colleagues highlighted that the sheer size of these models and their datasets makes them even more inscrutable than your average neural network, which are already known for being black boxes. This is likely to make detecting and mitigating bias in these models even harder.

Augmented Reality

New haptic device communicates emotion with nearly 80% accuracy of human touch

December 28, 2021

by Amy Blumenthal

With the spread of the omicron variant, not everyone can or is eager to travel for the winter break. But what if virtual touch could bring you assurance that you were not alone?

At the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, computer scientist and roboticist Heather Culbertson has been exploring various methods to simulate touch. As part of a new study, Culbertson a senior author on this study, along with researchers at Stanford, her alma mater, wanted to see if two companions (platonic or romantic), could communicate and express care and emotion remotely. People perceive a partner’s true intentions through in-person touch an estimated 57 percent of the time. When interacting with a device that simulated human touch, respondents were able to discern the touch’s intention 45 percent of the time. Thus, devices in this study appear to perform with approximately 79 percent accuracy of perceived human touch.

brain hacking

Scientists taught a petri dish of brain cells to play pong faster than an AI

December 28, 2021

By Hope Corrigan

Move over Alder Lake, this is a new kind of hybrid chip.

As a lover of tough single player games, I’m quite accustomed to getting my butt handed to me by AI, and usually not even a real one. I also happen to be the owner of a full sized human brain. Though it’s not without its problems, the human brain’s ability to learn and change is usually why I eventually overcome those difficult in-game challenges.

So when I read about a few human brain cells in a petri dish that are already performing much better at a videogame than AI can, it’s concerning to me and my gaming future. New Scientist reports that a team in Australia has been growing these small puddles of brain and now one has learnt to play Pong, in fairly impressive time.

Cortical labs is a company working on integrating biological neurons with your more traditional silicon based computing hardware. They grow brain cells on microelectronic arrays, so the cells can be stimulated. These hybrid chips are said to be able to learn and restructure themselves to get past problems, like stopping a sneaky ball that wants in your goal.

3D Printer

World’s First 3D-Printed House Made Of Local Raw Earth – And it Closes the Roof With a Dome

December 27, 2021

By Andy Corbley

Inspired by the potter wasp, an Italian architecture firm has used 3D printing to make the domed, beehive-like structure of a house out of zero-emissions clay in the hope of showing what heights of sustainability can be reached with the technology.

Like the industrious wasps, the houses are made using the clay from wherever they are being built, which also means if they have to be knocked down, the only waste is the plumbing, gas, and electrical components.

Futurati Podcast, Science & Technology News

Futurati Podcast With Brad Templeton

December 27, 2021

View on Youtube

Listen on the Futurati Podcast website

Brad Templeton is chairman Emeritus of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is one of the founding computing faculty of Singularity University, and thinks about autonomous vehicles, nanotechnology, privacy, and digital rights, among many other things.

quantum computing

Quantum computing: Forget about qubits, here come qutrits

December 29, 2021

Rigetti unveils 80-qubit processor quantum computer consisting of two 40-qubit computers, and experiments with ‘third state’ in quantum processors.

By Liam Tung

US quantum computer outfit Rigetti Computing has announced the Aspen-M, an 80-qubit processor quantum computer that consists of two connected 40-qubit chips.

The Aspen-M, available in a private beta, is the culmination of Rigetti’s particular take on large-scale quantum computers.

The firm is pursuing multi-chip quantum processors and announced plans earlier this year to offer it to customers through its Quantum Cloud Services platform.

Instead of scaling up a single quantum processor, it’s been linking smaller chips to create a modular processor with a larger number of qubits – the quantum version of bits in classical computers, characterized by 1s and 0s, which can achieve superposition where a bit can be both 1 and 0 or any combination inbetween those states.

Green Friendly

OF HEMP’S MANY USES, ONE OF THE MOST PROMISING COULD BE IN CONSTRUCTION

December 26, 2021

Although not a direct replacement for concrete, hempcrete has many benefits as a building material.

By Nate Berg

It has become almost a cliché to discuss the benefits of hemp, the supposed wonder plant with almost endless uses— from woven fibers to edible seeds to bioplastics. “Of course, hemp is that magic crop that does everything,” says Nicholas Carter, an environmental researcher who, along with Tushar Mehta, a Toronto-based doctor, runs the website Plant Based Data. His work involves reading through scientific papers and studies and summarizing the most important work supporting plants as a source of food and other important uses. Given the hype, Carter wondered just how much power hemp really had. “I wanted to see the research out there on it, to see what’s actually real, what’s actually backed by evidence,” he says.

Magic? Not exactly. But Carter came away from his attempted debunking a hemp believer. And one of the most promising of its many uses, he found, is its application as a building material known as hempcrete.

Like its namesake concrete, hempcrete is a material mixed with a binder that hardens it into a solid in the form of blocks and panels. Made from the dried woody core of hemp stalks and a lime-based binder, hempcrete can be cast just like concrete. But unlike concrete and its binding cement, which accounts for about 8% of human-generated carbon dioxide emissions annually, hempcrete actually sequesters CO₂. According to a recent study, hempcrete can sequester 307 kilograms of CO₂ per cubic meter (19 pounds per cubic foot), roughly the equivalent of the annual carbon emissions of three refrigerators.