Impact Lab – Page 379 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Sidekicks holographic AI companion robot

June 28, 2021

Sidekicks are a unique take on the trend for AI companion robots” offering a holographic artificial intelligent friend which is voice-enabled and equipped with emotions and more. Equipped with a holographic display the Sidekick artificial intelligent companion has been designed to interact with its owner offering a variety of different features. Launched via Kickstarter this month the project has already raised is required pledge goal thanks to over 160 backers with still 23 days remaining. The AI companion is available as a digital application or can be housed in its own special environment.

Specially priced early bird pledges are now available for the innovative project from roughly $69 or £50 (depending on current exchange rates). If the Sidekicks campaign successfully raises its required pledge goal and fullfilment progresses smoothly, worldwide shipping is expected to take place sometime around January 2022. To learn more about the Sidekicks holographic AI companions.

Science & Technology News, Virtual Reality

Varjo Reality Cloud lets you virtually experience a real place via ‘teleportation’

June 28, 2021

By Dean Takahashi

Varjo is unveiling its Reality Cloud platform for virtual teleportation. That means one person can capture the reality of a space in a particular location and share that reality in extreme detail for a remote person to experience, virtually.

The Varjo Reality Cloud shares the details of a room in photorealistic detail, showing someone remotely located a view of the room in real time. Yes, you read that. Varjo lets one person scan a 3D space and another person experience it virtually at almost the same time, as it can transfer the necessary data in compact streams of 10 megabits-to-30 megabits per second with almost no time delays, the company said.

It’s a pretty amazing technology that comes from the pioneering work that Varjo has done in creating high-end virtual reality and mixed reality headsets for enterprises such Volvo, which uses it to design cars in virtual environments.

The caveat, of course, is if the tech really works as envisioned.

Driverless vehicles, Science & Technology News

Infineon creates radar sensors to monitor people in self-driving cars

June 28, 2021

Infineon’s radar sensors can detect human movement in self-driving cars.

By Dean Takahashi

When self-driving cars hit the market, they will need to monitor the well-being of the “driver” and passengers in the car. Today, Infineon Technologies is announcing some sensors that can do just that using radar technology.

The radar can detect subtle movements from people in a car, including noticing children who may have been inadvertently left behind, drivers who are having a heart attack or some other emergency, and passengers who have simply fallen asleep in the car.

With this data, the intelligent car can send out emergency alerts or make adjustments, such as ensuring seat belts and emergency air bags are in the correct positions.

Medicine, Science & Technology News

Third Rock-backed startup launches to develop cell therapies for MS, diabetes

June 27, 2021

“T Regulatory Cells” [Microscope image].

By Ned Pagliarulo

Five cancer cell therapies are approved in the U.S. Scores more are in clinical testing as drugmakers work to repurpose human cells as a platform for new medicines, many of which are similarly targeted at different types of cancer.

Military, Science & Technology News

DoD Pioneering NextGen Satellites, Sensors in Space

June 27, 2021

The Department of Defense (DoD) is pioneering a slew of next-generation satellites and sensors to deliver critical data to military command centers from space, and to track and target missile threats and other time-sensitive targets, officials from the Space Development Agency (SDA) and the Missile Defense Agency (MDA) said at the Defense One Tech Summit on June 22.

drones, Science & Technology News

This drone tracks human screams (to save lives)

June 27, 2021

By I. Bonifacic

A team of researchers from Germany’s Fraunhofer FKIE institute has created a drone that can locate screaming humans. While it sounds like the stuff of dystopian fiction, it’s actually something they set out to create to make it easier for first responders to find survivors following a natural disaster.

“(Drones) can cover a larger area in a shorter period of time than rescuers or trained dogs on the ground,” Macarena Varela, one of the lead engineers on the project, told The Washington Post. “If there’s a collapsed building, it can alert and assist rescuers. It can go places they can’t fly to or get to themselves.”

To create their drone, the researchers first recorded themselves screaming, tapping and producing other sounds that someone in need of help might make. They then used those recordings to train an artificial intelligence algorithm and tweaked the software to filter out ambient sounds like the hum of the drone’s rotors. Outside of software and UAV, the rest of the system isn’t that complicated. The team used the type of microphones you might find on your smartphone, mainly because they wanted to keep the drone light and agile.

Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

A Bioprinted Pancreas Could Spell the End for Diabetes

June 26, 2021

The newly printed pancreas secretes a spectrum of critical hormones like insulin.

By Loukia Papadopoulos

We have all heard of diabetes and its debilitating effects on those afflicted with it. Scientists have been looking for a cure for this disease for years and they may have now stumbled on one in the form of a bioprinted pancreas.

How does it work? And who is leading this medical breakthrough? Readily3D, a spin-off of EPFL, has engineered a new method to print biological tissues using a biological gel that contains the patient’s stem cells.

Science & Technology News, Tesla

Tesla to launch ridesharing app, with Tesla’s Driver Insurance

June 26, 2021

While Uber and Lyft have been dominating the ridesharing industry and revolutionizing urban mobility, they’re likely to meet a new top competitor in Tesla.

The company has had its own ridesharing app in the works for some time. Uber and Lyft are at a disadvantage, as neither of them has made a profit.

Much of this has been attributed to how they’ve relied heavily on venture capital and IPO filings to stay afloat which has put them in a bind.

A loss of $1 billion like Uber took in 2019 will take its toll.Uber’s profit margins have been a point of increasing concern for investors. The company collects fares from each ride to pay off its revenue and operating costs, but the amount it earns doesn’t even cover that expense.

Therefore, Uber has continued to lose money every quarter since their IPO in 2017. The debate over whether the Transportation Network Companies (TNC) will remain unprofitable or could be a booming new industry of the future continues.

A new competitor with something greater to offer entering the picture could change all of that. This has led many to keep their eyes on Tesla to see how it performs because of its advancements. While talk of an autonomous driving network is on the horizon, Tesla is set to launch their ridesharing app with drivers.

Because of this, the company will be able to utilize one of its latest services — a car insurance program. Drivers for the Tesla network will be covered directly through the company.

It is believed that a human-driven ridesharing app will give Tesla multiple advantages over the competition, especially when it comes to financial and insurance efficiency.

3D Printer, Science & Technology News

3D Printed, AI Controlled BioPods Can Grow Food in Space

June 26, 2021

Artistic depiction of BioPods deployed in space

By Ameya Paleja

BioPods use inflatable membrane and need no supervision.

As we prepare for a future in space where crewed missions are expected to reach Mars and we begin settling on our Moon and other planets, the issue of supplying food in space crops up. Carrying large quantities of food aboard spacecraft might not be feasible and the environment on these space rocks is likely to be hostile to agriculture. French- American company Interstellar Lab may have found the right answer in their BioPods, the most advanced greenhouses ever built.

new technology, Science & Technology News

New method converts carbon into graphene or diamond in a flash

June 25, 2021

Researchers have developed a way to use “flashes” of electricity to convert carbon into different forms such as graphene or nanodiamonds

By Michael Irving

Researchers at Rice University have developed a way to turn carbon from a variety of sources straight into useful forms such as graphene or diamond. The technique uses a “flash” of electricity to heat the carbon, converting it into a final form that’s determined by the length of the flash.

The technique is known as flash joule heating (FJH), and the team first described it in January 2020. An electrical current is passed through carbon-containing materials, heating them to about 2,727 °C (4,940 °F), which converts the carbon into pristine, turbostratic graphene flakes.

Now the researchers have refined the process to create other materials. The original flashes lasted 10 milliseconds, but the team found that by changing the duration between 10 and 500 milliseconds they could also guide the carbon to convert into other forms, too. That includes nanodiamond, and “concentric carbon” where carbon atoms form a shell around a nanodiamond core.

Science & Technology News, Space Flight

A Gigantic “Space Balloon” Just Completed Its First Flight

June 25, 2021

Would you be willing to ride to the edge of space in this balloon?

By Chris Young

Space tourism company Space Perspective successfully conducted the first flight test of its prototype stratospheric passenger balloon, reaching an altitude of 108,409 feeton Friday, June 18, the company announced in a press statement.

The balloon prototype, called Neptune One, lifted off at 5:23 a.m. EDT from the Space Coast Regional Airport near Kennedy Space Center, Florida, before splashing down 6 hours and 39 minutes later in the Gulf of Mexico.

The first test kicks off an extensive test campaign to assess Neptune One’s feasibility as a passenger balloon for space tourists.

“This test flight of Neptune One kicks off our extensive test flight campaign, which will be extremely robust because we can perform tests without a pilot, making Spaceship Neptune an extremely safe way to go

to space,” co-CEO and founder Taber MacCallum said in the press release.

AI, Science & Technology News

Tesla Shows Off Its Brand New AI-Training Supercomputer

June 25, 2021

The new machine will be a close relative to Tesla’s upcoming Dojo supercomputer.

By Chris Young

Tesla’s Senior Director of AI, Andrej Karpathy, unveiled the electric vehicle automaker’s new supercomputer during a presentation at the 2021 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR).

Last year, Elon Musk highlighted Tesla’s plans to build a “beast” of a neural network training supercomputer called “Dojo”.

For several years, the company has been teasing its Dojo supercomputer, which Musk has hinted will be the world’s fastest supercomputer, outperforming the current world leader, Japan’s Fugaku supercomputer which runs at 415 petaflops.

The new supercomputer seems to be a predecessor to the Dojo project, with Karpathy stating that it is the number five supercomputer in the world in terms of floating-point operations per second (FLOPS).

This supercomputer is certainly not lacking in the processing department. As Karpathy highlights in his presentation, the supercomputer has 720 nodes of 8x A100 80GB (5760 GPUs total). It also has 1.8 EFLOPS (720 nodes * 312 TFLOPS-FP16-A100 * 8 gpu/nodes), 10 PB of “hot tier” NVME storage @ 1.6 TBps, and 640 Tbps of total switching capacity.