Impact Lab – Page 380 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

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.

brain hacking, Science & Technology News

Implantable brain device relieves pain in early study

June 24, 2021

Cerebellum of CIVM postnatal rat brain atlas.

by NYU Langone Health

A computerized brain implant effectively relieves short-term and chronic pain in rodents, a new study finds.

The experiments, conducted by investigators at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, offer what the researchers call a “blueprint” for the development of brain implants to treat painsyndromes and other brain-based disorders, such as anxiety, depression, and panic attacks.

Publishing June 21 in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, the study showed that device-implanted rats withdrew their paws 40 percent more slowly from sudden pain compared with times when their device was turned off.

According to the study authors, this suggests that the device reduced the intensity of the pain the rodents experienced. In addition, animals in sudden or continuous pain spent about two-thirds more time in a chamber where the computer-controlled device was turned on than in a chamber where it was not.

Researchers say the investigation is the first to use a computerized brain implant to detect and relieve bursts of pain in real time. The device is also the first of its kind to target chronic pain, which often occurs without being prompted by a known trigger, the study authors say.

“Our findings show that this implant offers an effective strategy for pain therapy, even in cases where symptoms are traditionally difficult to pinpoint or manage,” says senior study author Jing Wang, MD, Ph.D., the Valentino D.B. Mazzia, MD, JD Associate Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology at NYU Langone Health.

Robotics, Science & Technology News

Robot-assisted surgery: Putting the reality in virtual reality

June 24, 2021

by Chinese Association of Automation

Cardiac surgeons may be able to better plan operations and improve their surgical field view with the help of a robot. Controlled through a virtual reality parallel system as a digital twin, the robot can accurately image a patient through ultrasound without the hand cramping or radiation exposure that hinder human operators. The international research team published their method in IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica.

“Intra-operative ultrasound is especially useful, as it can guide the surgery by providing real-time images of otherwise hidden devices and anatomy,” said paper author Fei-Yue Wang, Director of the State Key Laboratory of Management and Control of Complex Systems, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. “However, the need for highly specialized skills is always a barrier for reliable and repeatable acquisition.”

Wang noted that the availability of onsite sonographers can be limited, and that many procedures requiring intra-operative ultrasound also often require X-ray imaging, which could expose the operator to harmful radiation. To mitigate these challenges, Wang and his team developed a platform for robotic intra-operative trans-esophageal echocardiography (TEE), an imaging technique widely used to diagnose heart disease and guide cardiac surgical procedures.

drones, Science & Technology News

New BAE ‘pseudo satellite’ can remain aloft at 70,000 feet for a year

June 24, 2021

By Bruce Crumley

British aeronautic and defense giant BAE Systems has developed a solar-powered, stratosphere-flying drone that can act as a backup option to disabled communications satellites.

Dubbed Phasa-35, the so-called “pseudo satellite” is designed to operate at altitudes of up to 70,000 feet – far above weather systems that could block its solar source of power. The High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) craft will most frequently be used to provide continual high-quality images of terrestrial locations, as well as for monitoring, surveillance, security, and conventional communications services.

But in the case of disruption or destruction of a satellite, the Phasa-35 can also act as a stand-in to relay information between ground stations or airborne planes – or, in war situations, between troops and remote commanders.

BAE says the drone “will provide both military and commercial customers with capabilities that are not currently available from existing air and space platforms.” Using 5G and other communications technologies, it says, the Phasa-35 can also be a far more affordable tool to disaster relief and border protection services than traditional satellite options.

Cancer, Science & Technology News

BioNTech Now Aims Its mRNA Technology at Cancer

June 23, 2021

Following its success against COVID-19, BioNTech is now focused on its cancer vaccines.

By Ameya Paleja

Buoyed by the success of its mRNA technology against COVID-19, BioNTech is now focused on its cancer vaccines. The company recently began dosing patients for its Phase II trial for an advanced melanoma vaccine in the European Union.

BioNTech calls itself a “next-generation immunotherapy company pioneering in therapies for cancer and other serious diseases.” The COVID-19 vaccine was a minor detour for the company. The company’s product pipeline is filled with mRNA vaccines targeting different types of cancers, most of which are in preclinical stages. BioNTech recently began the Phase II trial of BNT111, which will test its mRNA vaccine in combination with an antibody-drug, Libtayo, in patients with anti-PD1-relapsed Stage III/ IV melanoma. Libtayo is the commercial name for cemiplimab, co-developed by Regeneron and Sanofi, and is an anti-PD-1 monoclonal antibody.

Coronavirus, Science & Technology News

Universal vaccine targets coronaviruses to prevent future pandemics

June 23, 2021

David Martinez, PhD., in the lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health, studies a new universal vaccine that’s effective against a group of coronaviruses.

by University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Scientists at the University of North Carolina Gillings School of Global Public Health have developed a universal vaccine that protected mice not just against COVID-19 but also other coronaviruses and triggered the immune system to fight off a dangerous variant.

While no one knows which virus may cause the next outbreak, coronaviruses remain a threat after causing the SARS outbreak in 2003 and the global COVID-19 pandemic.

To prevent a future coronavirus pandemic, UNC-Chapel Hill researchers designed the vaccine to provide protection from the current SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and a group of coronaviruses known to make the jump from animals to humans.

The findings were published in Science by lead authors David Martinez, a postdoctoral researcher at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and a Hanna H. Gray Fellow at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist at UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and professor of immunology and microbiology at the UNC School of Medicine, whose research has sparked new therapies to fight emerging infectious diseases.

Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

New molecules could be used to treat autoimmune diseases in the future

June 23, 2021

by Barry Fitzgerald , Eindhoven University of Technology

When something is awry with your immune system, your digestion or your endocrine systems, nuclear receptors, as they are called, may well be involved. If need be, the operation of these regulator proteins can be altered with medicinal drugs, but this carries the very real risk of unpleasant side effects. Doctoral candidate Femke Meijer looked for—and found—molecules that might well be used as medications for autoimmune diseases, but with fewer side effects. Meijer defends her thesis at the department of Biomedical Engineering on June 23.

Our body has exactly 48 types of nuclear receptor. These are proteins that float about in our cells and can be activated by all sorts of signal molecules such as hormones. When this happens, the nuclear receptor in question issues an instruction in the cell nucleus to produce other particular proteins. Shutting down or conversely activating these nuclear receptors is the mechanism by which one in six medicines achieves its intended effect. The best-known example is most probably the contraceptive pill. “This acts on the estrogen and progesterone receptors,” says doctoral candidate Femke Meijer.

As part of her research, Meijer studied another nuclear receptor, RORỿt, which regulates the production of cytokines and as such plays a role in the genesis of inflammatory reactions. Certain drugs for autoimmune diseases, such as rheumatism, psoriasis, asthma, and Crohn’s disease, turn this function to their advantage and aim to shut down this nuclear receptor. “They do this by blocking what’s known as its binding site with a molecule, so that this particular nuclear receptor, RORỿt, is deactivated,” explains Meijer.

Elon Musk, Science & Technology News

Elon Musk’s Starlink Reckons It Can Bring Fast Internet To The Whole World By September

June 22, 2021

By Lavender Baj

Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink says its satellites will be able to provide continuous global internet coverage as soon as September 2021, but will still need to seek regulatory approvals before being able to actually provide the service, Reuters reports.

“We’ve successfully deployed 1,800 or so satellites and once all those satellites reach their operational orbit, we will have continuous global coverage, so that should be like September timeframe,” Starlink president Gwynne Shotwel said.

“But then we have regulatory work to go into every country and get approved to provide telecoms services.”

If Musk’s own assertions about the service are to be believed, this could mean users could experience speeds of up to 300mb/s from as early as September.

“Speed will double to ~300Mb/s & latency will drop to ~20ms later this year,” Musk said earlier this year.

The news comes after Starlink received more than half a million preorders for its highly-anticipated internet service back in May.