Since the lack of personnel is a hard truth for most employers worldwide, Hyundai found a way to reduce its security staff, especially during after hours. 8 photos
While most guards that are working the night shifts are taking a nap every now and then, a robot won’t do that. It also won’t drink, or eat, or watch games when on duty. Boston Dynamics already had a quadruped robot named Spot, which proved to be very creative thanks to its AI functions.
Built with an integrated thermal camera and 3D LiDAR, the robot can detect high-temperature areas and alert the fire department for potentially hazardous situations. In addition, its integrated 3D map allows it to roam around the factory and check for opened doors or detect uninvited guests. Of course, it won’t fire at them (yet), but at least it can spread the image thanks to its live stream images sent to a secured webpage.
Summary: A newly identified gene therapy pathway has the potential to protect us against dementia and cancer, researchers report.
Source: University of Sheffield
Researchers from the University of Sheffield have discovered a new gene therapy pathway that has uncovered an important regulatory mechanism to keep our genome healthy. This pathway has the potential to protect us against serious life-limiting diseases such as cancer and dementia.
Cancer and neurodegeneration are two major health challenges currently affecting the population, and they constitute two sides of the same coin – one is caused by uncontrolled cell proliferation due to genome damage, and the other is caused by excessive genome damage that causes cell death. This new pathway impacts both and offers new therapeutic opportunities to help the fight against disease.
Published in Nature Communications, the research found that when cells in our body read DNA to build proteins, they often make mistakes that can damage our genome, causing disease such as cancer and dementia.
However, by investigating how cells fix damage in the DNA to keep us healthy, scientists have discovered the benefits of three proteins working together as a team. The three proteins, called USP11, KEAP1 and SETX, receive instructions from their coach to direct their function in space and time with remarkable harmony, to keep our DNA healthy.
The volatile nature of space rocket engines means that many early prototypes end up embedded in dirt banks or decorating the tops of any trees that are unfortunate enough to neighbour testing sites. Unintended explosions are in fact so common that rocket scientists have come up with a euphemism for when it happens: rapid unscheduled disassembly, or RUD for short.
Every time a rocket engine blows up, the source of the failure needs to be found so that it can be fixed. A new and improved engine is then designed, manufactured, shipped to the test site and fired, and the cycle begins again – until the only disassembly taking place is of the slow, scheduled kind. Perfecting rocket engines in this way is one of the main sources of developmental delays in what is a rapidly expanding space industry.
Today, 3D printing technology, using heat-resistant metal alloys, is revolutionising trial-and-error rocket development. Whole structures that would have previously required hundreds of distinct components can now be printed in a matter of days. This means you can expect to see many more rockets blowing into tiny pieces in the coming years, but the parts they’re actually made of are set to become larger and fewer as the private sector space race intensifies.
Autonomous driving startup WeRide unveiled China’s first self-driving cargo van capable of level 4 autonomy — that is, the ability to act without any human intervention in the vast majority of situations — on September 9.
WeRide is developing the new vehicle, dubbed the Robovan, in partnership with Chinese automaker Jiangling Motors and Chinese delivery company ZTO Express. WeRide and Jiangling Motors will help develop the vehicle for mass production on JMC’s customized assembly lines, which ZTO Express aims to use in urban logistics applications.
“WeRide has always emphasized that autonomous driving technologies should be used effectively in reality to serve the society. With the introduction of Robovan, the very first level 4 self-driving cargo van in China, we have heralded a new era of autonomous driving for urban logistics in the country,” Tony Han, the founder and CEO of WeRide, said in a statement. “We are aiming to deliver both smart mobility and smart logistics for cities in the future.”
The company was founded to commercialise a peptide ligation reaction developed by Jeffrey Bode’s research group
BY VANESSA ZAINZINGER
Bright Peak Therapeutics makes modified protein drugs from scratch.
Jeffrey Bode from ETH Zurich in Switzerland has a fitting analogy for why synthetic proteins are a compelling next step for the development of therapeutic molecules. ‘Almost all modern antibiotics have been found or produced in nature, but were then modified with synthetic chemistry to make a better drug,’ he says. ‘In the same way, natural proteins often have fantastic biological activity but limitations in terms of, for example, toxicity. They can be made better and safer by using synthetic chemistry.’
Bode is a co-founder of Bright Peak Therapeutics, a privately held biotechnology company based in San Diego, US, and Basel, Switzerland, that is commercialising fully synthetic proteins for use in cancer immunotherapy and autoimmune diseases.
The company’s most advanced product is a synthetic version of cytokine signalling protein interleukin-2 called BPT-143. It is currently in chemistry, manufacturing and controls (CMC) manufacturing – an integral part of any pharmaceutical product application to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), in which the manufacturing process, testing regimes and and product characteristics are developed to ensure they are consistent across batches. ‘As far as we know, no one has brought such a sophisticated synthetic molecule so far along clinical development,’ Bode says.
Australian in-space transportation provider, Space Machines Company (SMC) has announced two deals, linking with an Italian satellite services provider and committing to deploy Fleet Space nanosatellites in orbit next year.
Space Machines linked up with Italian satellite services provider Leaf Space to support its Optimus-1 satellite launch timed for next year.
Optimus-1, the largest commercial satellite under construction in Australia, is an orbital transfer vehicle providing cost-effective insertion of small satellites into low Earth orbit.
Today Space Machines confirmed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to test the deployment of nanosatellites from Fleet Space Technologies, the Adelaide nanosatellite manufacturer for the Internet of Things (IoT).
The first mission will analyse the suitability of Optimus to deliver Fleet’s satellites into orbit.
Recently, Iteris announced the development of a new AI-powered sensor system that can detect, monitor, and manage traffic. What challenges do growing cities face, what does the system provided by Iteris offer, and what problems can integrated smart systems face?
As the world population grows, so does the demand for transportation services, whether it be increased use in buses, taxis, or privately owned vehicles. While the current climate crisis is changing how vehicles are made and what sources of energy they use, it has little impact on the increasing number of vehicles. Using public transport may be better for the environment, but poor availability and inconvenience leads many to privately own vehicles.
Most roads around the world were laid during a time of significantly fewer vehicles, and these roads may have been designed with a few decades of vehicle growth in mind. If the demand on a road increases to the point where traffic starts to build up, it is often impossible to widen the road and add lanes as roads often have buildings on either side.
This leads us to a new challenge where modern road networks are quickly becoming congested. Congested traffic is not only bad for waiting times, but it also results in increased emissions from vehicles and can increase the chances of collisions and accidents.
For traffic management to improve, smart cities will need to be introduced, which involve the placement of sensors and smart technologies that allow computers to take over control in real-time. Simply put, a smart city would recognise key areas of congestion and then redirect traffic to improve safety while reducing waiting times. Furthermore, a smart city would be able to more efficiently control signals at traffic lights to prevent severe congestion forming while making better decisions on when to let pedestrian’s crossroads.
Global digital wound care provider Swift Medical, today announced the launch of a new application specifically designed to help pharma and med device researchers conduct decentralized clinical trials. Since patients are now doing more trials at home, study coordinators have had trouble tracking skin side effects remotely — or trusting patients to conduct adequate analysis and recording on themselves.
– Swift Medical’s first product, Swift Skin and Wound, provides an AI-powered, digital wound platform that allows any patient or clinician to easily capture high-precision images of skin or wound conditions with any smartphone camera. Swift Skin and Wound autonomously determines clinical characteristics, tracks disease progression, enables remote communication, and securely shares patient data in real-time.
To date, Swift Medical’s technology is used by more than 4,000 healthcare organizations internationally, including health systems and providers of all kinds, academic institutions, research organizations and pharmaceutical companies.
The current pandemic exposes many gaps in the healthcare supply chain, leading many to look for innovative solutions. Wingcopter undergoes drone delivery testing for blood samples to help this.
Wingcopter completes a successful test transport of blood samples in Germany via drone delivery, speeding up important healthcare drop offs in rural areas. Without technologies such as this, life saving deliveries can be difficult in rural areas, making innovative projects like this so timely. The journey for the Wingcopter drone was roughly 16 miles, or 26 kilometers, in just 18 minutes with a pneumatic tube including 250 grams of blood samples in tow.
If you are like most managers, you probably frequently ask yourself:
“How do I get the best out of my team?”
“What truly motivates them?”
“How can I help them unlock their potential?”
You may also ask, especially around performance review time, “How can I manage their performance without a lot of stress or sweaty-palm-inducing conversations?”
There have been reams of information written about employee motivation and performance over the last 100 years. But we’ve found there are nine key factors that impact these metrics—and they are much more important than pay and benefits.
I call these nine factors the Currencies of Choice. I discovered them as the result of reverse-engineering during 5,000 exit interviews I conducted with an international team of recruiters over the course of 15 years.
This research, along with numerous studies from organizations and managers who regularly use the Currencies of Choice model, shows that intrinsic motivators are much more effective in keeping employees motivated and engaged—and helping them perform well and realize their potential—than pay and benefits.
WASHINGTON — The British Army is leaning heavily into robotics, artificial intelligence and hybrid-power technology as part of a new acquisition process dubbed Mercury, according to a British Army leader involved in future procurement planning.
The Army is grappling with how to acquire technologies that it believes it will need in the future, how to spiral in those technologies across its equipment programs and how to cultivate skills in its soldiers to use capabilities as they come online, Col. Christopher Coton, the service’s assistant head for concepts, said at the DSEI defense exhibition in London on Sept. 15.
Driving innovation to achieve its goals, the Army must better identify technologies that will likely change the way the service operates and fights, Coton said. This would be done by drawing on traditional and nontraditional suppliers, the officer added, and the service needs to better articulate what it needs to both small and large companies capable of helping to co-develop technology along the way.
This is East 17th Street, a collection of homes that range in size and style. It’s got beautiful construction, lovely walkways and landscaping. But what truly makes this Austin, Texas project unique is that these are the first 3D-printed homes for sale in America. Yes, you read that correctly. These homes were all made with a 3D printer.
