Automation, Robotics, Robots, Science & Technology News, Space, Space Flight

GITAI aims to bring autonomous robot workers to space

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An artist’s rendering brings to life GITAI’s vision of robots working on the International Space Station.

GITAI will conduct a technical demonstration of autonomous robot, S1, aboard the ISS in 2021.

Upon hearing the phrase, “robots in space,” one might have an image flash of a corny 60s sci-fi movie, but startup GITAI has its sights on making that a reality in 2021. The space robotics company, which was founded in 2016, is on track for conducting a technical demonstration on the International Space Station (ISS), in collaboration with Nanoracks.

Since its start, GITAI has focused its efforts on various robots for space. Its G1, which is a humanoid torso, was its most advanced machine. It was designed to be controlled by an immersive telepresence system. For the technical demonstration, the company is moving toward more autonomous methods with its S1, a mountable robotic arm with 8 degrees of freedom and 1-meter reach that has an integrated sensing and computing system.

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Automation, Employment, Food, Science & Technology News

A smarter, more capable Flippy robot knows how to fry 19 things

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It makes all the fries.

The restaurant industry has never been for the faint of heart, what with the razor-thin profit margins and continuous churn of employees. Combine that with the economic devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic and, well, it’s no surprise that tens of thousands of eateries across the country have shuttered permanently over the last seven months alone. However, Miso Robotics (makers of Flippy, the burger-flipping robot chef) argue that the path back to financial stability for America’s restaurants will require an autonomous revolution.

Buck Jordan, founder and CEO of Miso Robotics, points out to Engadget that the switch from full-service dining to exclusively take out and delivery has many restaurants “operating a loss and just trying to hang on,” especially when delivery apps like UberEats and DoorDash take upwards of a 30 percent cut out of each order.

“You can see why closing up shop is really the only option for many once your revenue is coming from delivery orders,” he continued. “There’s just so much pressure on the bottom line.”

That’s why the company announced on Tuesday that it is making the latest iteration of Flippy available commercially across the globe. But this isn’t the Flippy that we saw at White Castle in July. This one is smarter, more capable and armored against airborne infection.

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Military, Science & Technology News, Space, SpaceX, Weapons

Work begins on Starlink-like constellation of small hypersonic missile-tracking satellites

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The Pentagon’s grand space strategy envisions a shift from larger, expensive satellites to massive constellations of smaller, easier to replace ones.

 The U.S. military has hired L3Harris and SpaceX to build small satellites with powerful infrared sensors capable of spotting and tracking ballistic missiles and hypersonic weapons. These satellites could become part of a large and broader early warning constellation with hundreds of space-based sensors and communications nodes watching for incoming threats, monitoring their flight, and potentially providing targeting data to missile defense assets.

The Pentagon announced that the Space Development Agency (SDA) had awarded the contracts to L3Harris and SpaceX, worth around $193.5 million and just over $149 million, respectively, on Oct. 5, 2020. Each company will be responsible for building four satellites, each with a wide field of view (WFOV) overhead persistent infrared (OPIR) sensor, in support of work on what SDA calls Tranche 0 of the Tracking Layer of the planned overarching early warning constellation.

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Great New Product, Health & Fitness, new technology, Science & Technology News

This extremely slippery VR treadmill could be your next home gym

The Virtuix Omni One is supposed to ship next year

Virtual reality startup Virtuix is building a VR treadmill for your home. The Omni One is an elaborate full-body controller that lets you physically run, jump, and crouch in place. Following an earlier business- and arcade-focused device, it’s supposed to ship in mid-2021 for $1,995, and Virtuix is announcing the product with a crowdfunding investment campaign.

The crowdfunded Virtuix Omni started development in 2013. It’s not a traditional treadmill — it’s a low-friction platform that’s used with special low-friction shows or shoe covers and a harness. (You may remember the overall VR treadmill concept from Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One.) As an Omni One prototype video demonstrates, the device basically holds you in place while your feet slide across the platform, and that movement gets translated into a VR environment. We’ve tried earlier iterations of the Omni, and it’s an awkward yet fascinating experience.

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Automobiles, Energy, Global Warming, Green Friendly, Science & Technology News, Transportation

Hyundai delivers first fuel cell trucks to Switzerland

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LUCERNE, Switzerland (Reuters) – South Korean carmaker Hyundai on Wednesday presented the first seven hydrogen-powered trucks to customers in Switzerland, out of 50 such vehicles scheduled this year to bring zero-emission commercial vehicles to European roads.

For long haul, proponents say hydrogen-powered trucks have an advantage over electric rivals as they have a greater range and require less charging times but their uptake and mass production has been slow because they are expensive.

However, a McKinsey study in January said that once relative efficiencies of the power sources and lifetime costs of a truck are factored in, green hydrogen could reach cost parity with diesel by 2030.

Hyundai has been partnering with Swiss companies to build a value chain covering the production of green hydrogen from hydropower, hydrogen charging stations and the service and maintenance of the trucks.

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AI, Healthcare, Medicine, Science & Technology News

AI tool could predict how drugs will react in the body

 

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“The safety of a drug does not depend only on the drug itself but also on the metabolites
that can be formed when the drug is processed in the body,” says Eleni Litsa

A new deep learning-based tool called Metabolic Translator may soon give researchers a better handle on how drugs in development will perform in the human body.

When you take a medication, you want to know precisely what it does. Pharmaceutical companies go through extensive testing to ensure that you do.

Metabolic Translator, a computational tool that predicts metabolites, the products of interactions between small molecules like drugs and enzymes could help improve the process.

The new tool takes advantage of deep-learning methods and the availability of massive reaction datasets to give developers a broad picture of what a drug will do. The method is unconstrained by rules that companies use to determine metabolic reactions, opening a path to new discoveries.

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Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Farming, Farms, Robots, Science & Technology News

Robot reapers and AI: Just another day on the farm

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Pressures on agriculture have forced a technological revolution that are driving a new age of farming.

The agriculture industry has hit a turning point. Faced with a massive labor crunch and environmental instability, aggressive technology deployments are no longer an option for outliers in the sector, but a necessary and critical element in the success of the farm.

Enabling the transformation are a host of new developers, but also legacy companies with deep roots in agriculture. Smart technology from companies like John Deere, for example, is helping farmers to produce more with less and create more successful crops, all while having a smaller impact on the land and environment. In contrast to prevailing wisdom that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, John Deere is employing AI and machine learning in its equipment to identify and enable needed actions at a scope and speed beyond human capacity, automating farming actions through smart robotics to enable consistent and precise actions at large scale, and providing precise, geospatial intelligence generated with machine technology and coupled with cloud-stored data to enable sustainable farming.

In other words, it’s like farming with technologies that might be more commonly associated with NASA than a tractor company. I caught up with Dr. Cristian Dima, Lead of Advanced Algorithms, John Deere Intelligent Solutions Group, to discuss the changes underway in the farming sector and what we can expect going forward.

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Batteries, Internet, new technology, Science & Technology News, Solar Energy

We are approaching the fastest, deepest, most consequential technological disruption in history

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We are approaching the fastest, deepest, most consequential technological disruption in history

 In the next 10 years, key technologies will converge to completely disrupt the five foundational sectors—information, energy, food, transportation, and materials—that underpin our global economy. We need to make sure the disruption benefits everyone.

Suppose we told you that solutions to the world’s most intractable problems are possible in the next decade. Poverty. Inequality. Climate change. You’d probably say impossible, preposterous, unthinkable. We’ve heard that about our predictions before. But we have been proven right.

Now, we are predicting the fastest, deepest, most consequential technological disruption in history and with it, a moment civilization has never encountered before. In the next 10 years, key technologies will converge to completely disrupt the five foundational sectors—information, energy, food, transportation, and materials—that underpin our global economy, and with them every major industry in the world today. Costs will fall by 10 times or more, while production processes become an order of magnitude (10x) more efficient, using 90% fewer natural resources and producing 10 times to 100 times less waste.

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Coding, communication, Engineering, Internet, Science & Technology News

The quantum internet will blow your mind. Here’s what it will look like

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The next generation of the Internet will rely on revolutionary new tech — allowing for unhackable networks and information that travels faster than the speed of light.

Call it the quantum Garden of Eden. Fifty or so miles east of New York City, on the campus of Brookhaven National Laboratory, Eden Figueroa is one of the world’s pioneering gardeners planting the seeds of a quantum internet. Capable of sending enormous amounts of data over vast distances, it would work not just faster than the current internet but faster than the speed of light — instantaneously, in fact, like the teleportation of Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk in Star Trek.

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2020 Predictions, Coronavirus, Future, Science & Technology News, Trending

10 tech predictions that could mean huge changes ahead

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CCS Insights published 100 tech predictions for the next few years, and the COVID-19 pandemic lurks behind many of them.

An ongoing health crisis and a global recession: even for the most attuned of analysts, the past months have brought in a load of unexpected events that have made the coming years especially difficult to envision.

Yet research firm CCS Insights has taken up the challenge and delivered a set of 100 tech predictions for the years 2021 and beyond. The exercise is an annual one for the company, which last year anticipated, among many other things, that the next decade could see the rise of deep fake detection technology, or the adoption of domestic robots in some households.

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Children, Human Behavior, Legal Issues, Science & Technology News

The US should brace itself for a “national wave of fertility fraud”

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A new field of litigation has evolved in the United State: denouncing fertility fraud. In the latest episode, a nation-wide firm, Peiffer Wolf Carr Kane & Conway, announced that it was pursuing two fertility doctors who allegedly used their own sperm a generation ago to get women pregnant and without informing them.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, according to Adam Wolf, the lawyer handling the cases. He claims that hundreds of fertility fraud cases will emerge across the US as people begin to investigate their geneology using home DNA testing kits.

In the first case, a San Francisco woman discovered that both of her children were the offspring of her fertility doctor, Dr Michael S. Kiken. Furthermore, through Kiken, the children are carriers of Tay Sachs disease.

In the second case a San Diego woman sought the help of Dr Philip Milgram in 1988 for artificial insemination, which resulted in the birth of their son. Milgram told her that he had used the sperm of a healthy and anonymous sperm donor — but he allegedly used his own instead.

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