Impact Lab – Page 386 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

NCSU researchers’ 3D-printable jelly could boost biomedical materials

May 24, 2021

Researchers develop a 3D-printable jelly that is strong and flexible. Photo courtesy of Orlin Velev, NC State University.

by Mick Kulikowski .

RALEIGH – 3D-printable gels with improved and highly controlled properties can be created by merging micro- and nano-sized networks of the same materials harnessed from seaweed, according to new research from North Carolina State University. The findings could have applications in biomedical materials – think of biological scaffolds for growing cells – and soft robotics.

Described in the journal Nature Communications, the findings show that these water-based gels – called homocomposite hydrogels – are both strong and flexible. They are composed of alginates – chemical compounds found in seaweed and algae that are commonly used as thickening agents and in wound dressings.

Merging different-size scale networks of the same alginate together eliminates the fragility that can sometimes occur when differing materials are merged together in a hydrogel, says Orlin Velev, S. Frank and Doris Culberson Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State and corresponding author of the paper.

Ford Motor Company, Science & Technology News

Ford follows Tesla into in-car gaming with new software update, also adds Amazon Alexa

May 24, 2021

Updates available to about 100,000 owners of 2021 model year F-150s, Mustang Mach-Es and the upcoming Bronco

By Frank Miles

Ford says it is starting to send out in-car gaming with over-the-internet software updates to some of its newer models as the auto giant moves to offer technology to match electric car maker Tesla.

For now, the updates are only available to about 100,000 owners of 2021 model year F-150s, Mustang Mach-Es and the upcoming Bronco, but Ford plans to spread the tech across its entire lineup as models are updated. It plans to make 33 million vehicles with the capability by 2028.

Aviation, Science & Technology News

World’s First Electric Luxury Commuter Plane Alice Aims to Reinvent Air Mobility

May 23, 2021

By Elena Gorgan

The electric revolution is slow in coming to the automotive industry, but that’s nothing compared to the snail-like crawl it’s displaying in aviation. Alice wants to change all that and, in the process, shake up the game.

Alice is dubbed the world’s first electric luxury commuter airplane. It’s the first aircraft from Israeli-American company Eviation, and it comes with an estimated delivery date for 2024. This year, Eviation hopes to take Alice on its first test flights ahead of a 2023 certification.

Alice has been around for years, in one form or another, and it’s one of those few projects of this type that are both instantly memorable and extremely promising. It’s a proper passenger plane, so not an eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft), and it’s meant for commuting across short distances. It’s also very luxurious and quite beautiful.

First announced in 2017, Alice is now officially gearing up to take to the skies. A prototype was developed and unveiled in 2019, but it burned down in a fire in 2020. A static model was presented at the Paris Air Show and, had it not been for the health crisis of 2020, Alice would have started test flights. Not that 2020 was able to put a damper on its progress: Eviation has been working hard to advance the project and, at the same time, keep investors and potential customers in the loop.

Augmented Reality, Science & Technology News

First spinal surgery with augmented reality headset takes place

May 23, 2021

Dr. Kornelis Poelstra, director of The Robotic Spine Institute of Las Vegas, recently led the first-ever spinal surgery procedure using an xvision augmented reality headset paired with a surgical robot.

Dr. Poelstra and his practice, in partnership with The Nevada Spine Clinic, completed the posterior lumbar fusion procedure on a patient using a combination of Medtronic’s Mazor X robotic platform integrated with Augmedics’ newly FDA-approved xvision.

Normally a fairly invasive and lengthy surgery lasting anywhere between six to seven hours, this particular patient’s procedure using the xvision headset in tandem with the Mazor X robot brought the surgery time down to just under two hours.

This is because the xvision headset allows for the surgeon and his team to more precisely identify and pinpoint where to place the implants, in this case a proprietary superalloy MoRe (Molybdenum-Rhenium) lower-profile 4.5mm rod, paired with the MiRusEuropa Pedicle Screw System.

brain hacking, Science & Technology News

Man paralyzed from neck down uses AI brain implants to write out text messages

May 23, 2021

Read my blips

By Katyanna Quach

A combination of brain implants and a neural network helped a 65-year-old man paralyzed from the neck down type out text messages on a computer at 90 characters per minute, faster than any other known brain-machine interface.

The patient, referred to as T5 in a research paper published [preprint] in Nature on Wednesday, is the first person to test the technology, which was developed by a team of researchers led by America’s Stanford University.

Two widgets were attached to the surface of T5’s brain; the devices featured hundreds of fine electrodes that penetrated about a millimetre into the patient’s gray matter. The test subject was then asked to imagine writing out 572 sentences over the course of three days. These text passages contained all the letters of the alphabet as well as punctuation marks. T5 was asked to represent spaces in between words using the greater than symbol, >.

Signals from the electrodes were then given to a recurrent neural network as input. The model was trained to map each specific reading from T5’s brain to the corresponding character as output. The brain wave patterns recorded from thinking about handwriting the letter ‘a’, for example, were distinct from the ones produced when imagining writing the letter ‘b’. Thus, the software could be trained to associate the signals for ‘a’ with the letter ‘a’, and so on, so that as the patient thought about writing each character in a sentence, the neural net would decode the train of brain signals into the desired characters.

With a data set of 31,472 characters, the machine learning algorithm was able to learn how to decode T5’s brain signals to each character he was trying to write correctly about 94 per cent of the time. The characters were then displayed so he was able to communicate.

Higher Education, Science & Technology News

Why the Business Education of the Future Won’t be at Wharton or Stanford

May 22, 2021

In that same study, 97% of companies said customer education impacts their overall revenue by increasing brand awareness, boosting product usage and decreasing churn. Yet 68% believe they could be using customer education to derive even more value—a gap that Academy Builders aims to fill.

By Emily Hubbell

As you read this article, 31.7 million small businesses are operating across the United States, delivering the goods and services that fuel a strong economy. The lifeblood of the nation, these small businesses employ 60.6 million workers; that’s nearly 50% of all U.S. employees. They create two-thirds of new jobs and represent 44% of our domestic economic activity.. Think those statistics are impressive? Get ready to watch them explode.

Before COVID-19, Bain & Company predicted that the number of entrepreneurs and small businesses in the U.S. would skyrocket to 70 million by 2030. Now, the number of Americans who own a company could eclipse 100 million in that same timeframe—a shift triggered more by necessity than opportunity. Artificial intelligence could eliminate more than 20% of current jobs by the end of the decade. And then there’s the recession, which has historically inspired high levels of entrepreneurship. But no matter the impetus for starting a business, there’s one common thread: More entrepreneurs than ever are entering the role unprepared—and unable to afford business school as a source of training.

Business owners are good for the economy. They fuel innovation, increase competition and create high-quality jobs. But as the number of entrepreneurs skyrockets, it raises a critical question: How can we educate small business owners affordably and at scale? For a growing group of innovators, the answer is “customer education:” a market segment that shifts small business training away from universities and toward the companies that entrepreneurs do business with. Among the leaders shaping this emerging space is Scott Duffy, whose Academy Builders, Inc., is launching as the race to disrupt entrepreneur education accelerates.

quantum computing, Science & Technology News

New Intel Horse Ridge Cryogenic Chip Offers High-Fidelity Two-Qubit Control: A Major Quantum Computing Breakthrough

May 22, 2021

By Griffin Davis

Intel collaborates with QuTech, an advanced research center for quantum internet and quantum computing, to develop a new cryogenic control SoC called the Horse Ridge. The tech giant manufacturer claimed that this new chipset is a breakthrough in quantum computing.

A “Mistral” supercomputer, installed in 2016, at the German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ, or Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum) on June 7, 2017 in Hamburg, Germany. The DKRZ provides HPC (high performance computing) and associated services for climate research institutes in Germany. Its high performance computer and storage systems have been specifically selected with respect to climate and Earth system modeling.

Right now, researchers and experts are finding it hard to understand quantum computations since they are complex mathematical equations. On the other hand, they also deal with quantum states, specifically superposition and entanglement.

Because of these, traditional computers are currently unable to perform quantum computations because they don’t have the ability to harness the phenomenon of quantum mechanics. Since this is the case, experts are forced to create quantum supercomputers that are specifically developed to perform quantum computing.
And now, Intel also developed a new SoC that could be used in these special desktops.

To help you have more idea about it, here are other details of Intel’s new Horse Ridge.

Batteries, Science & Technology News

‘HOLY GRAIL’ BATTERY BREAKTHROUGH SEES SCIENTISTS SOLVE 40-YEAR PROBLEM

May 22, 2021

Lithium-metal batteries hold far more energy and charge in a fraction of the time compared to those used in smartphones and electric cars

By Anthony Cuthbertson

Researchers have demonstrated a solution to a 40-year problem regarding the creation of a “holy grail” battery that could radically transform the electric car industry.

The breakthrough involves harnessing the power of lithium-metal batteries, which are capable of holding substantially more energy and charge in a fraction of the time compared to lithium-ion batteries that are currently used in everything from smartphones to Tesla vehicles.

Until now, scientists have been unable to create a lithium-metal battery stable enough to be used in commercial applications.

The development, made by a team at Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS), allows this next-generation batter to be charged and discharge at least 10,000 times, which would increase the lifetime of electric vehicles to that of of their gasoline counterparts – while simultaneously increasing their range and reducing their charge time.

“A lithium-metal battery is considered the holy grail for battery chemistry because of its high capacity and energy density,” said Xin Li, an associate professor at SEAS.

City Planning, Science & Technology News

Toyota’s Futuristic Woven City Will Be Powered by Hydrogen

May 21, 2021

By Cristina Mircea

The fact that Toyota started to build its own 175-acre city of the future it’s already yesterday’s news. It is happening and it’s going to be a society of the future, fully automated, sustainable and interconnected using AI technology. But what we didn’t know up until now was how they’re planning to power the entire ecosystem. Turns out they’re going to use hydrogen energy.

Woven Planet, a subsidiary of Toyota, which is responsible for the prototype city, recently announced in a press release (you can peruse it in its dedicated section below the article) that it partnered with ENEOS, a major Japanese player in the hydrogen business. The goal is to create a hydrogen-based society and to become carbon-neutral at the same time, by 2050, according to their estimates.

Toyota and ENEOS are going to test the hydrogen-based supply chain in and around Woven City, from the production phase to delivery and usage. The Japanese carmaker sees hydrogen as one of the cleanest energy sources available and tries to explore and implement the hydrogen and fuel cell technology as much as it can.

Science & Technology News, Space

Cosmic comms: How the first humans on Mars will communicate with Earth

May 21, 2021

By Georgina Torbet

If you think it’s a pain to get cell reception when you visit your relatives in another state, just imagine trying to communicate with people who are at least 40 million miles away and are constantly moving relative to you. That’s what we’ll have to deal with if we plan to send humans to Mars, when communications won’t just be important – they’ll be vital.

To find out how to create a communications network that covers Mars and beyond, and how current systems are being upgraded to meet the challenge of ever-increasing amounts of data, we spoke to two experts who work on NASA’s current communications system – one on the Earth side and one on the Mars side.

This article is part of Life On Mars, a 10-part series that explores the cutting-edge science and technology that will allow humans to occupy Mars

Blockchain, Science & Technology News

China’s digital currency adds support for AliPay – the Alibaba payment app with over 700 million users

May 21, 2021

And just like that, the Digital Yuan has its route into the mainstream

Simon Sharwood, APAC Editor

Alibaba’s controversial financial services arm, the Ant Group, has been welcomed into trials of China’s digital currency.

China’s state-controlled media on Monday reported that the Alipay app has added a feature allowing transactions in the Digital Yuan. Alipay has over 700 million monthly active users in China alone.

State-backed journal China Securities Journal reports that functionality to link to a bank is currently limited, and that no merchants are listed. Nor has the feature been made available to all users. But the Journal reports that real-time, anonymous, transactions are possible.

A second Journal piece reports that an Ant-Group-backed bank has also linked accounts to the Digital Yuan, as have some other banks.

Aviation, Science & Technology News

World’s First Electric Seaglider Will Cruise the Seas at 180 MPH

May 20, 2021

By Cristina Mircea

Regent plans to take the seas by storm and revolutionize maritime transportation with a new concept of electric vehicle that’s part aircraft, part boat.

The Seaglider is Regent’s new project that promises to combine the technology, speed, and comfort of an aircraft with the convenience and affordability of a boat, as stated in a recent press release (attached below the article). This hybrid vehicle will be an all-electric flying machine capable of reaching speeds of 180 mph (approximately 290 kph). It will be suitable for both passenger transportation and cargo.

The Seaglider will use the wing-in-ground effect and fly at low altitudes, staying within one wingspan of the surface of the water. It will have double the range of an electric aircraft, promising to cover 180 miles (290 km) at the aforementioned speed, with the existing battery technology. But Regent hopes routes will extend to up to 500 miles (805 km), with next-gen batteries.

Also, with the Seaglider being fully electric, it means it will also be a clean, zero-emissions vehicle.