Impact Lab – Page 401 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

US Navy’s solar satellite can open the way for solar farms in space

March 25, 2021

(Natural News) Researchers with the Navy are testing a space-based solar panel in a bid to install a solar farm in orbit around Earth. Known as the Photovoltaic Radiofrequency Antenna Module (PRAM), the solar panel is no bigger than a pizza box but can be scaled up to generate large amounts of energy.

The Navy launched PRAM to space in May last year aboard its unmanned space plane X-37B. The solar panel now loops around Earth every 90 minutes, capturing sunlight that could one day be transmitted to any place on Earth.

Science & Technology News, Space Flight

British start-up lands state backing to build interplanetary plasma thrusters

March 25, 2021

The new technology could dramatically improve satellite propulsion and be used to advance space travel

By Michael Cogley

A British start-up that is developing interplanetary plasma thrusters to propel satellites through space has received government funding.

Magdrive, which is based in the Harwell Campus near Oxford, has been granted £64,200 to develop its tech as part of a funding round from the UK Space Agency.

The global space propulsion market is already worth around $5.8bn (£4.15bn) but has been tipped to grow to $19.3bn by 2027. Growth in the sector is likely to be driven by demand for lost-cost small satellites, which can be used for anything from communications to data gathering.

Magdrive, which was founded in 2019, has built a thruster for the satellites that will allow them to move in space and navigate space debris.

The plasma thrusters, which were developed alongside Rocket Engineering, are around the size of a can of coffee.

The company, which closed a £1.4m seed round in December, claims its technology will allow satellite companies to operate on completely different business models. Advertisement

Magdrive claims its plasma thruster burns 100 times hotter than that of a rocket with the outlay contained by a magnetic field.

In a plasma state, the propellant becomes highly electrically reactive by moving through magnetic coils. This hot plasma exhaust provides the thrust.

The technology has the potential to replace existing electrical and chemical alternatives, which face problems around thrust and efficiency.

AI, Science & Technology News

Luum’s AI-based Lash Robot can delicately extend eyelashes for customers in beauty salons

March 25, 2021

By Dean Takahashi

Luum has created an AI-based Lash Robot that can delicately extend eyelashes for customers in beauty salons.

I’ll let you absorb that for a minute. Luum CEO Philippe Sanchez said in an interview with VentureBeat that the lash extension procedure is ideal for robotics because it’s a tedious job for humans, who often have to bend over while adding extensions to each individual lash, which takes a lot of dexterity and concentration over two or three hours.

The Luum robot can do the same procedure — where it grabs someone’s eyelash and adds an extension to it — in under 20 minutes.

“This is a treatment that is semi-permanent that women do once,” Sanchez said. “It takes about two hours to three hours to be applied by a lash expert. And you look very natural and beautiful. And the advantage for a woman is that you do that once. And the whole treatment lasts for about a month or so.”

Augmented Reality, Science & Technology News

Almost a fifth of Facebook employees are now working on VR and AR: report

March 25, 2021

Nearly 10,000 employees in the Reality Labs division

By Sam Byford

Facebook has nearly 10,000 employees in its division working on augmented reality and virtual reality devices, according to a report in The Information based on internal organizational data. The number means the Reality Labs division accounts for almost a fifth of the people working at Facebook worldwide.

This suggests that Facebook has been significantly accelerating its VR and AR efforts. As UploadVR noted in 2017, the Oculus VR division accounted for over a thousand employees at a time when Facebook’s headcount was 18,770 overall, indicating a percentage somewhere north of five percent.

Since then, Facebook has shifted its VR focus away from Oculus Rift-style tethered headsets by releasing the Oculus Quest and Quest 2, which are standalone wireless devices that don’t require a PC. The $299 Quest 2 was preordered five times as much as its predecessor, with developers seeing a boost in sales of their existing titles.

Driverless vehicles, Science & Technology News

Waymo study: Robot drivers would avoid crashes

March 25, 2021

By Joann Muller

Waymo, which pointedly stopped using the term “self-driving” to describe its technology this year, has released a study intended to prove that its robot drivers are safer than humans.

Why it matters: With about 40,000 Americans dying in vehicle accidents every year, AV operators are trying to convince consumers and regulators that autonomous vehicles would make the roads safer.

What’s happening: Waymo, which operates a limited driverless taxi service near Phoenix, reconstructed 72 fatal accidents that occurred over the past decade in its geo-fenced operating area.

It then fed the data from those real-life crashes into its simulation system, and substituted the “Waymo driver” for the human driver.

What we know: Waymo’s autonomous technology avoided or mitigated collisions in almost all cases.

When the Waymo driver replaced the “instigator” of the accident — a drunk driver speeding through a red light, for example — the crash was avoided because the robotaxi is engineered to obey the law.
When the Waymo driver replaced “the responder” — someone reacting to a bad driver — its perception systems anticipated the situation earlier and responded to avoid it.
The few instances where the Waymo driver couldn’t avoid the accident was where it was struck from behind.

brains, Science & Technology News

GUT MICROBES COULD BE THE FUTURE OF BRAIN HEALTH

March 24, 2021

“We might end up being able to correct a behavioral deficiency by what we put in a milkshake.”

By KATIE MACBRIDE

THE EVIDENCE FOR A CONNECTION between gut health and brain health is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. A new study adds to the mountain: In the paper, a team of scientists at Baylor College of Medicine link gut bacteria to specific brain conditions.

But beyond this, the team may have unlocked how to leverage the connection to treat brain conditions that affect social behavior.

WHAT’S NEW — The new research suggests hacking that connection via the vagus nerve by changing the composition of microbes in the gut. This nerve functions as a kind of fiber-optic cable that carries messages between the gut and the brain. Specifically, the team behind this paper looked at the microbiome’s role in hyperactivity seen in mice lacking a gene associated with autism. What they found suggests that altering the population of gut microbiota through food may in turn alter behavior.

Cancer, Science & Technology News

Tiny swallowable cameras will check for cancer in ‘sci-fi’ development

March 24, 2021

The disposable device take more than 57,000 pictures as it works its way through the digestive tract, replacing uncomfortable endoscopies

By Henry Bodkin

Swallowable cameras the size of capsules will be given to NHS patients in a “sci-fi” bid to check for cancer.

Taking more than 57,000 pictures as they work through the digestive system, the disposable devices are intended to replace complicated and uncomfortable endoscopies.

They will be handed out initially to 11,000 patients in more than 40 locations in England.

NHS leaders hope the revolutionary devices will help turn the tide of missed and late cancer diagnoses caused by disruption from the pandemic.

Users will wear an accompanying shoulder bag containing a data recorder, meaning they can carry on their lives as normal while the camera is at work. Known as colon camera endoscopy, the technology can provide a diagnosis within hours.

Science & Technology News, Transportation

Tech It Out: What is the future of high-speed maglev?

March 24, 2021

By Dong Yi, Yang Xiao, Yang Zhao

China already possesses the world’s largest high-speed railway network, and it will only expand more ambitiously, according to the country’s new Five-Year Plan. But it’s not just the railroads that are extending. China may also get a major boost in the speed of its bullet trains. A prototype maglev train recently unveiled at Southwest Jiaotong University in Chengdu, Sichuan Province aims to set a new speed record for trains – the current record of 603 kilometers per hour is held by Japan’s SCMaglev. China’s answer to it is 620.

This maglev train deploys what’s known as “high-temperature superconductive” technology, or HTS. It takes advantage of two unique properties of high-temperature superconductors: the “Meissner effect” which allows a superconductor to completely repel the magnetic fields around it to achieve levitation, and “flux pinning,” which keeps the superconductor steady above its magnetic tracks, so it never falls off.

Unlike China’s existing high-speed railway technology and the country’s most iconic maglev line in Shanghai – both technologies which are largely imported, China’s new HTS maglev is 100 percent developed by its own top scientists. It took over 20 years for this technology to emerge from a university lab to become a real prototype.

Robots, Science & Technology News

Meet Digit: The ostrich-legged robot that might one day deliver you packages

March 23, 2021

By Luke Dormehl

What’s the robot equivalent of Rocky Balboa running up the 72 stone steps leading up to the entranceway of the Philadelphia Museum of Art? It could well be the sight of Agility Robotics’ biped robot, Digit, climbing up a wet, muddy, and not-all-that-grippable grassy hill at the company’s new HQ in Tangent, Oregon.

While the video is partly designed to show off this new home for Agility, it also demonstrates just how far its Digit tech has developed. If Rocky’s famous climb signifies the everyman overcoming great odds, Agility Robotics’ recent video is a reminder of just how impressively far robots have traveled in being able to traverse the real world. Both figuratively and literally.

Artificial Intelligence, Science & Technology News

New AI Technique Can Generate 3D Holograms in Real-Time

March 23, 2021

Holographic display prototype used in the experiments

By Derya Ozdemir

Not only can this technique run on a smartphone but it also needs less than 1 megabyte of memory.

Virtual reality has been around for decades, and every year, headlines all over the internet announce it to be the next big thing. However, those predictions are yet to become a reality, and VR technologies are far from being widespread. While there are many reasons for that, VR making users feel sick is definitely one of the culprits.

Better 3D visualization could help with that, and now, MIT researchers have developed a new way to produce holograms thanks to a deep learning-based method that works so efficiently that cuts down the computational power need in an instant, according to a press release by the university.

A hologram is an image that resembles a 2D window looking onto a 3D scene, and this 60-year-old technology remade for the digital world can deliver an outstanding image of the 3D world around us.

“People previously thought that with existing consumer-grade hardware, it was impossible to do real-time 3D holography computations,” explains Liang Shi, the study’s lead author and a Ph.D. student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “It’s often been said that commercially available holographic displays will be around in 10 years, yet this statement has been around for decades.”

Robotics, Science & Technology News

Ocean floor mapping robotics startup Bedrock announces an $8M raise

March 23, 2021

By Brian Heater

“It seems quite odd that no one has built the SpaceX equivalent for the ocean,” Anthony DiMare tells TechCrunch. “There’s no big, modern technology company that fits the space yet.”

DiMare cofounded Bedrock Ocean Exploration last year, with Charles Chiau. The latter brought a depth of robotics expertise to the space, while DiMare has experience with the oceans. His previous company, Nautilus Labs, which specialized in ocean fleet logistical planning, raised an $11 million Series A back 2019.

After leaving the startup, DiMare says he met up with Chiau at a San Francisco diner, where the pair discussed the challenges and opportunities in mapping the ocean floor. Today Bedrock is announcing that it has raised an $8 million seed round led by Eniac Ventures, Primary Venture Partners, Quiet Capital and R7.

The company notes that more than 80% of the ocean remains unmapped. And those parts are often at fairly low resolution. As the CEO puts it in a press release tied this morning’s news, “A far greater percentage of the surfaces of the Moon and Mars have been mapped and studied than our own ocean floor has.”

3D Printer, Science & Technology News

ICON’s First 3D Printed Homes for Sale in Austin, Texas

March 22, 2021

Written by Eric Baldwin

Kansas City developer 3Strands has announced U.S.A’s first 3D printed homes for sale, the company’s first multi-home project in Austin, Texas. Built with construction technology company ICON, the housing development includes two to four-bedroom homes in one of the fastest-growing cities in America. Designed by Logan Architecture, the project utilizes the Vulcan construction system to build each home.