Impact Lab – Page 372 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Augmented Reality, Science & Technology News

The Future of Vision: Augmented reality contact lenses will make you bionic

March 10, 2021

Augmented reality contact lenses have been “around the corner” for years. They’re finally set to arrive.

A decade ago, Google’s ambitions seemed unchecked: The company would design self-piloting cars through Waymo, sponsor moonbases, and even conquer death. One of the company’s plans: Smart contact lenses to measure the glucose level of your tears — and perhaps help reduce the damage caused by diabetes. “It’s still early days for this technology, but we’ve completed multiple clinical research studies, which are helping to refine our prototype,” wrote Google’s Brian Otis and Babak Parvizback in 2014.

Seven years later, the company’s ego remains just as inflated, but Verily’s smart contact lenses are nowhere to be seen; the side project of Google parent Alphabet was officially abandoned in 2018. Yet smart lenses are finally becoming a reality, thanks to the efforts of countless scientists and engineers. And the future of this intriguing technology is nothing like what you might expect.

Electric Vehicles, Science & Technology News

The Futuristic Car Looks Like a Small Spaceship and Might Be Distributed by the End of the Year

March 8, 2021

The electric car features an aerodynamic design with only three wheels and two seats.

By Pitney Bowes

Do you remember the futuristic car that we could set aside with 2,000 Mexican pesos? It looks like we will soon see Aptera Motors start distributing them.

The vehicle manufacturing company has just closed a round of four billion dollars and now its plans to start its distribution at the end of this year 2021 seem more real, as we mentioned in December of last year.

“The Aptera must undergo safety testing before the company can begin distribution, which it hopes to do later this year. Even then, it is not clear that consumers want to buy something that looks like a cross between the Batmobile and a beetle,” wrote The Washington Post .

Aviation, Science & Technology News

NASA’s Experimental Electric Airplane Edges Closer to Its First Flight

March 8, 2021

Concept art of the electric, 14-motor X-57 Maxwell in flight.

By Isaac Schultz

Looking every bit like a winged tube of toothpaste, NASA’s X-57 Maxwell experimental plane sits in a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The is NASA’s first crewed experimental plane in 20 years; it runs solely on electric power, an agency first, and it’s about to undergo high-voltage functional testing in advance of its first flight, scheduled for later this year.

“Currently, we have a battery emulator that we’re using to provide power to the aircraft,” said Nick Borer, an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in a video call. “But this is the first time we’ve had the low-voltage and high-voltage systems operating together.”

NASA’s compendium of experimental aircraft, or X-planes, speaks to the agency’s long history of sussing out the future of flight. They range from kite-shaped, Bush-era combat drones to the Eisenhower administration’s autogyro, which sounds like a Greek dish that eats itself but looks more like a tricked-out tricycle combined with a helicopter. The new electric craft certainly looks more like a plane than any of them, and will have 14 propellers.

quantum computing, Science & Technology News

Artificial ‘Magnetic Texture’ in Graphene May Add New Spin to Quantum Computers

March 9, 2021

The image shows eight electrodes around a 20-nanometer-thick magnet (white rectangle). The graphene, not show, is less than 1 nanometer thick and next to the magnet. (Image: University at Buffalo.)

Graphene is incredibly strong, lightweight, conductive … the list of its superlative properties goes on.

It is not, however, magnetic — a shortcoming that has stunted its usefulness in spintronics, an emerging field that scientists say could eventually rewrite the rules of electronics, leading to more powerful semiconductors, computers and other devices.

Now, an international research team led by the University at Buffalo is reporting an advancement that could help overcome this obstacle. The researchers added that the advance may lead to powerful spintronic devices, such as semiconductors and quantum computers.

In a study published today in the journal Physical Review Letters, researchers describe how they paired a magnet with graphene, and induced what they describe as “artificial magnetic texture” in the nonmagnetic wonder material.

Science & Technology News, Space Flight

Kentucky firm plans orbital mini space station in two years

March 7, 2021

by Paul Brinkmann

A Kentucky space firm that conducts science experiments on the International Space Station has plans to launch its own miniature, automated orbital research platform in about two years.

Lexington-based Space Tango has small research containers, or CubeLabs, on the space station. Bustling business and growing need for such experiments in microgravity led the company to plan its own space station, founder and CEO Twyman Clements said.

“As the scale of our business grows across a number of uses, having a dedicated spacecraft for manufacturing is the way to go,” Clements said in an interview Friday.

He declined to say how much the company would spend on the project or how much each spacecraft might cost.

DNA, Science & Technology News

Experimental CRISPR Treatment Cuts Cholesterol in Mice by Up to 57% in a Single Shot

March 7, 2021

By PETER DOCKRILL

Scientists have improved upon a form of gene-editing therapy, creating an experimental treatment that looks to hold great promise for treating high cholesterol – a diagnosis affecting tens of millions of Americans, and linked to a number serious health complications.

In new research conducted with mice, researchers used an injection of a newly-formulated lipid nanoparticle to deliver CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing components to living animals, with a single shot of the treatment reducing levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol by up to 56.8 percent.

In contrast, an existing FDA-approved lipid nanoparticle (or LNP; a tiny, biodegradable fat capsule) delivery system could only manage to reduce LDLs by 15.7 percent in testing.

Of course, these results have so far only been demonstrated in mice, so the new therapy will take a lot of further testing before we know it’s both safe and equally effective in humans. But based on these results so far, signs are promising.

AI, Science & Technology News

Sonantic uses AI to infuse emotion in automated speech for game prototypes

March 8, 2021

By Dean Takahashi

Sonantic has figured out how to use AI to turn written words into spoken dialogue in a script, and it can infuse those words with the proper emotion.

And it turns out this is a pretty good way to prototype the audio storytelling in triple-A video games. That’s why the Sonantic technology is finding use with 200 different video game companies for audio engineering.

The AI can provide true emotional depth to the words, conveying complex human emotions from fear and sadness to joy and surprise. The breakthrough advancement revolutionizes audio engineering capabilities for gaming and film studios, culminating in hyper-realistic, emotionally expressive and controllable artificial voices.

“Our first pilots were for triple-A companies, and then when we started building this,” said cofounder Zeena Qureshi in an interview with GamesBeat. “We went a lot more vertical and deeper into just working very closely with these types of partners. And what we found is the highest quality bar is for these studios. And so it’s really helped us bring our technology into a very great place.”

Building upon the existing framework of text-to-speech, London-based Sonantic’s approach is what differentiates a standard robotic voice from one that sounds genuinely human. Creating that “believability” factor is at the core of Sonantic’s voice platform, which captures the nuances of the human voice.

Microsoft, Science & Technology News

Microsoft Mesh aims to bring holographic virtual collaboration to all

March 6, 2021

The platform will let developers easily build apps for cross-platform remote meetings.

By D. Hardawar

Last week, I sat around a table with fellow journalists as Greg Sullivan, Microsoft’s head of Mixed Reality, detailed the company’s vision for the future of virtual collaboration. Nobody was wearing masks or standing apart. We weren’t worried about getting sick. Instead, we were all wearing HoloLens 2 headsets and sitting in different parts of the world. The holographic table was right beside my actual desk, and my media pals were floating around my office as we chatted with our cartoonish avatars. For a second, it felt like mingling in real life during the Before Times.

City Planning, Science & Technology News

Nobody Is Going to Conventions. Convention Centers Are Growing

March 6, 2021

Indianapolis’s convention center hosted the National Rifle Association convention last year, just one of the many events that didn’t go off as usual in 2020.

By Mary Williams Walsh

The pandemic is intensifying the competition among cities, which are rushing to build bigger, more alluring event spaces.

After 20 years of trying, Indianapolis finally landed the American Dental Association convention. Last December, the group agreed to gather there in 2026, promising Indianapolis tens of thousands of visitors and tens of millions of dollars for the local economy.

But there’s a catch: The dentists can back out if the convention center complex does not complete a $550 million expansion: 143,500 square feet of new event and ballroom space as well as two privately financed hotels.

That helps explain why, in the depths of a pandemic that has left many convention centers empty or repurposed into field hospitals or homeless shelters, a 25-member board in Indianapolis voted unanimously in September to add up to $155 million to the public debt.

“We see convention tourism racing back in 2023,” said Chris Gahl, senior vice president of Visit Indy, the nonprofit that markets the Indiana Convention Center and attractions like the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. “When the green flag drops, we’re going to be on the competitive edge.”

Bitcoin, Science & Technology News

Bitcoin is at a tipping point and could become ‘currency of choice’ for global trade, Citi says

March 8, 2021

Ryan Browne

Bitcoin could one day “become the currency of choice for international trade,” Citi said in a research note Monday.
The cryptocurrency is “at the tipping point of mainstream acceptance or a speculative implosion,” the bank added.
Bitcoin’s wild ascent over the last few months has forced big Wall Street players to reevaluate the cryptocurrency.

Citi thinks bitcoin is at a “tipping point” and could one day “become the currency of choice for international trade” as companies like Tesla and PayPal warm to it and central banks explore issuing their own digital currencies.

“There are a host of risks and obstacles that stand in the way of Bitcoin progress,” the U.S. bank’s global perspectives and solutions team wrote in a note Monday.

Agriculture, Science & Technology News

3 TRANSFORMATIVE TECHNOLOGIES THAT WILL REVOLUTIONIZE THE PLANET

March 5, 2021

The next agricultural revolution is coming.

AGRICULTURE’S IMPACT ON THE PLANET is massive and relentless. Roughly 40 percent of the Earth’s suitable land surface is used for cropland and grazing. The number of domestic animals far outweighs the remaining wild populations. Every day, more primary forest falls against a tide of crops and pasture, and each year an area as large as the United Kingdom is lost. If humanity is to have a hope of addressing climate change, we must reimagine farming.

Covid-19 has also exposed weaknesses with current food systems. Agricultural scientists have known for decades that farm labor can be exploitative and hard, so it should surprise no one that farm owners had trouble importing labor to keep farms running as they struggled to ensure food workers stay free from the virus.

Similarly, “just enough, just in time” food supply chains are efficient but offer little redundancy. And pushing farmland into the wilds connects humans with reservoirs of viruses that — when they enter the human population — prove devastating.

To address these challenges, new technologies promise a greener approach to food production and focus on more plant-based, year-round, local and intensive production. Done right, three technologies — vertical, cellular, and precision agriculture — can remake the relationship between land and food.

Science & Technology News, Weapons

THREE WORDS: SUPERSONIC. COMBAT. DRONES.

March 5, 2021

SKYNET IN THE SKY, BASICALLY.

Fly Like an Arrow

A Singapore-based aerospace company has developed a combat drone capable of reaching supersonic speeds.

Kelley Aerospace unveiled their concept for an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) called the Arrow last week, according to Auto Evolution. The drone’s capable of flying more than 2,600 nautical miles at mach 2.1, or 1,611 miles per hour. That means the drone can fly from Los Angeles to Tokyo in a little over three hours — all while breaking the sound barrier.

Oh, and: It looks, straight up, like a UFO.