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Driverless cars, Science & Technology News

Honda’s Now Selling the World’s First Production Car with Level 3 Self-Driving Tech

March 14, 2021

IN A MOVE FEW SAW COMING, HONDA IS THE NEW LEADER IN ADVANCED DRIVER-ASSISTANCE TECH.

Carmakers have strived for the SAE’s third tier of vehicular autonomy for years, but none had achieved it yet. Not Tesla, not Cadillac and not Audi, which pledged its new A8 flagship would be Level 3-capable before eventually backing down on its promise. Yet out of the blue came Honda with an enhanced version of its Honda Sensing advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS) called Honda Sensing Elite, which will become the first commercially available SAE Level 3 system in Honda’s domestic-market Legend sedan.

SAE Level 3 crucially differs from Level 2 in that it’s a graduation from partial automation—like in Tesla’s Autopilot—to conditional automation, which means a car can read its environment and make decisions based on what it sees. This allows a car equipped with a Level 3 system like Honda Sensing Elite to act on its own accord (no pun intended) based on the situation at hand—sometimes with the driver’s hands off the wheel, and in a few cases, with their eyes off the road.

Driverless vehicles, Science & Technology News

Europe’s first full-sized self-driving urban electric bus has arrived

March 14, 2021

The bus has a maximum carrying capacity of 60 passengers.

By Sean Fleming

Málaga is the first place in Europe to trial full-size autonomous buses.
China has recently changed the law to allow trials of its own.
In Norway, where electric cars are already popular, two trials have been underway.

The electric, self-driving bus is coming to cities. In some parts of the world, it has already arrived. One of the latest cities to run a live-trial of autonomous buses is Málaga, in southern Spain.

Málaga is the sixth largest city in Spain and is a thriving tourist destination – in pre-pandemic times, at least. Now, a 12-metre self-driving bus will make an eight kilometre round-trip from the city centre to the port, six times daily.

The bus has a maximum carrying capacity of 60 passengers and is kitted out with sensors that allow it to respond to the environment around it. “The bus knows at all times where it is and what is around it,” Rafael Durban Carmona, from the Spanish transport company Avanza, told The Guardian newspaper.

Alzheimer's Disease, Science & Technology News

Artificial intelligence reveals current drugs that may help combat Alzheimer’s disease

March 13, 2021

PET scan of a human brain with Alzheimer’s disease.

New treatments for Alzheimer’s disease are desperately needed, but numerous clinical trials of investigational drugs have failed to generate promising options. Now a team at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has developed an artificial intelligence-based method to screen currently available medications as possible treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. The method could represent a rapid and inexpensive way to repurpose existing therapies into new treatments for this progressive, debilitating neurodegenerative condition. Importantly, it could also help reveal new, unexplored targets for therapy by pointing to mechanisms of drug action.

“Repurposing FDA-approved drugs for Alzheimer’s disease is an attractive idea that can help accelerate the arrival of effective treatment—but unfortunately, even for previously approved drugs, clinical trials require substantial resources, making it impossible to evaluate every drug in patients with Alzheimer’s disease,” explains Artem Sokolov, Ph.D., director of Informatics and Modeling at the Laboratory of Systems Pharmacology at HMS. “We therefore built a framework for prioritizing drugs, helping clinical studies to focus on the most promising ones.”

Science & Technology News, Space Flight

Space Race: China to Launch New Space Station; Trains Astronauts for Crewed Flights

March 13, 2021

The central module for China’s proposed orbital space station has passed a flight approval examination. It will launch in the coming months, kicking off a whirlwind of major missions for the region.

IN SPACE – MAY 23: In this handout image provided by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, the International Space Station and the docked space shuttle Endeavour orbit Earth during Endeavour’s final sortie on May 23, 2011 in Space. Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli captured the first-ever images of an orbiter docked to the International Space Station from the viewpoint of a departing vessel as he returned to Earth in a Soyuz capsule.

China Manned Space, the world’s human spaceflight agency, announced on January 14 as the country prepares to begin work on its own three-module space station.

The Tianhe central module, which means “harmony of the heavens,” will be the primary living quarters for three-person crews visiting for up to six months.

Following the completion of the space station and the establishment of a national space laboratory, a number of subsequent flight missions will be carried out as planned.

drones, Science & Technology News

Ghana is using drones to deliver coronavirus vaccines to rural communities

March 13, 2021

One of Zipline’s drones.

By Grace Dean

Zipline has started delivering coronavirus vaccines with drone in Ghana.
This tackles one of the biggest problems with the rollout – distributing doses in poorer countries.
Zipline has delivered medical supplies by drone since 2016, and works with Walmart and Novant Health.

Ghana has become the first country to launch a nationwide program to deliver coronavirus vaccines with drones.

Zipline started delivering the shots on Tuesday as part of the WHO’s first shipment of vaccines through COVAX, its program that aims to provide poorer countries with enough doses to cover 20% of their population.

Zipline, a San Francisco startup, has been delivering medical supplies including blood, personal protective equipment, and vaccines since 2016 using patented, autonomous drones.

Doctors can use Zipline’s app to place orders and track shipments.

Electric Automobile, Science & Technology News

A Huge Chunk Of America Is Getting A New Electric Car Charging Network

March 12, 2021

We’ve been jealous of Europe’s burgeoning electric car charging infrastructure for a while now but the U.S. is finally getting some of that sweet, sweet infrastructure of our own with six American utilities across the South and the Midwest announcing a new EV charging network called the Electric Highway Coalition.

The following American energy companies are banding together to develop this new network:

American Electric Power
Dominion Energy
Duke Energy
Entergy Corporation
Southern Company
Tennessee Valley Authority

The network will stretch across 16 states and connect “major highway systems from the Atlantic Coast, through the Midwest and South, and into the Gulf and Central Plains regions,” as outlined in a statement from American Electric Power (AEP), which happens to be one of the U.S’s largest electric companies.

AI, Science & Technology News

Intel’s 3D and AI tech now helps train athletes

March 12, 2021

By Michael Vizard

Intel today revealed that its 3D Athlete Tracking (3DAT) technology is being employed by Exos, a firm that focuses on human performance conditioning, to help train professional athletes aspiring to join the National Football League (NFL) and other organizations.

Intel’s 3DAT technology captures skeletal data when an athlete is sprinting, using a video camera running at 60 frames per second. That data is then analyzed using Intel Deep Learning Boost AI capabilities that have been built into the latest generation of Intel Xeon Scalable processors Intel has deployed in a cloud it manages.

The goal is to make it simpler for coaches and athletes to understand how different types of skeletal structures may give one athlete an edge over another, said Ashton Eaton, two-time Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon and a product development engineer in Intel’s Olympic Technology Group.

“We don’t know why people won or lost,” Eaton said. “There are a lot of unknowns.”

Electric Automobile, Science & Technology News

Volkswagen pilots blockchain to integrate electric vehicles with power grids

March 12, 2021

Energy Web plans to use blockchain technology to help ensure an efficient future for Volkswagen’s electric vehicles.

Automobile makers everywhere are betting big on electric vehicles as the world begins to push for environmentally friendly modes of transportation. For example, while fewer than 1% of cars on the roads in the United States today are electric, a number of automobile manufacturers are aiming to change this by stopping sales of gasoline-powered cars.

At the end of January 2021, General Motors said it would stop selling gas-powered cars and trucks by 2035. In addition, automakers such as Tesla, Ford, Volkswagen and even Porsche have announced plans to introduce new electric models in the coming years. At the same time, President Joe Biden recently announced an executive order to replace the U.S. government’s fleet of about 650,000 vehicles with electric models.

The desire to move away from gas-powered vehicles is clear, but this goal may be easier said than done. Despite the potential for clean energy, major silos exist between EV solutions and global power grids today. For instance, more electric vehicles will surely result in the need for additional charging stations and careful planning from utility companies to accommodate EV requirements. As such, a digital, common frame of reference is needed to integrate EVs into global energy markets.

Nanotechnology, Science & Technology News

Filming a 3-D video of a virus with ‘instantaneous light’ and AI

March 11, 2021

Elastic strain analysis Credit: POSTECH

by Pohang University of Science & Technology

It is millions of trillions of times brighter than sunlight and a whopping 1,000 trillionth of a second, appropriately called ‘instantaneous light’—the X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) light that opens a new scientific paradigm. Combining it with AI, an international research team has succeeded in filming and restoring the 3-D structure of nanoparticles that share structural similarities with viruses. With the fear of a new pandemic growing around the world due to COVID-19, this discovery is attracting attention among academic circles for imaging the structure of the virus with both high accuracy and speed.

An international team of researchers from POSTECH, National University of Singapore (NUS), KAIST, GIST, and IBS have successfully analyzed the structural heterogeneities in 3-D structures of nanoparticles by irradiating thousands of nanoparticles per hour using the XFEL at Pohang Accelerator Laboratory (PAL) in Korea and restoring 3-D multi-models through machine learning. The research team led by Professor Changyong Song and Ph.D. candidate Do Hyung Cho of Department of Physics at POSTECH has driven the international research collaboration to realize it.

Automation, Science & Technology News

This Startup’s Cooking Robot Can Prepare Indian Meals From Scratch

March 11, 2021

By Monit Khanna

Mannu Amrit who showcased a rather interesting food robot named Julia. They’ve created an automated cooking robot that will cook a variety of Indian meals for you.In the series of short videos, you see him pick a recipe that he’d like to eat, from options like chicken curry, rice kheer, curd rice, gajar halwa, he finalised on paneer bhurjiLater he revealed that the dish was ready in around 25 minutes, whereas cutting veggies and prepping beforehand took 5-10 minutesNymble’s Julia cooking robot is still under the early alpha testing stage and it will take time for it to actually be available in the market

Indian food thought tasty is quite cumbersome to make. However, an Indian startup from Bengaluru dubbed Nymble’s cooking robot Julia will make this a thing of the past.

Science & Technology News, Stem cells

PATIENT’S OWN STEM CELLS MAY REPAIR SPINAL CORD INJURY

March 11, 2021

“The idea that we may be able to restore function after injury to the brain and spinal cord using the patient’s own stem cells has intrigued us for years,” says Stephen G. Waxman. “Now we have a hint, in humans, that it may be possible.”

Intravenous injection of bone marrow derived stem cells in patients with spinal cord injuries led to significant improvement in motor functions, according to anew study.

For more than half of the patients, researchers observed substantial improvements in key functions—such as ability to walk, or to use their hands—within weeks of stem cell injection with no reported side effects.

Science & Technology News, SpaceX

SpaceX moon mission to take eight people ‘further than any human has ever gone’ from Earth

March 10, 2021

Bankrolled by a Japanese millionaire, the DearMoon mission plans to transport eight people around the moon and back in 2023

By Jackson Ryan

The SpaceX Starship prototype, flying high above the launch facility in Boca Chica, TexasSpaceX

In 2023, will civilians fly around the moon for the first time? According to Japanese entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa, the answer is yes. He is bankrolling the DearMoon mission, which is intended to take a group of eight people to the moon on SpaceX’s still-in-development Starship and loop around Earth’s natural satellite on a six-day mission.

The project, announced by Maezawa and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk in 2018, originally planned to invite artists from around the world to experience. The criteria for “artists” was never clearly defined, but on Tuesday, in a new promotional video for the mission, Maezawa announced that DearMoon would be opened up to practically everyone across the globe.
“I began to think that maybe every single person who is doing something creative could be called an artist,” he says in the video, which you can view below.

Maezawa outlines “two key criteria” for the civilian passengers. These seem fairly flexible, too.

“Whatever activity you are into, by going to space, I hope that you can push its envelope, to help other people and greater society in some way.”
“You have to be willing and able to support other crew members who share similar aspirations.”