“Impossible” EmDrive engine could make interstellar travel a reality

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Latest research aims to resolve whether the exciting and controversial thruster could actually work.

The EmDrive could usher in an era of interstellar voyages for human beings. Or it could be a failed experiment that unsuccessfully tried to break the laws of physics. A pair of upcoming papers may just settle that decades-long argument.

The EmDrive was first proposed in 2001 by scientist Roger Shawyer. In theory, the drive—also called a radiofrequency resonant cavity thruster—converts electricity into microwaves and forces them through a sealed cone. The microwaves would bounce around the reflective surface of the cone, and since the microwaves carry momentum, they would impart that momentum to that surface. The waves would exert more force on the larger end of the cone than the smaller one, creating enough thrust—without the need for propellant—to push a spacecraft through the vacuum of space. And, the drive could theoretically increase momentum once it starts moving.

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Future autonomous machines may build trust through emotion

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Future autonomous machines may build trust through emotion

Army researchers found that the effect of emotion expressions is moderated by strategy. People will only process and be influenced by emotion expressions if the counterpart’s actions are insufficient to reveal the counterpart’s intentions.

Army research has extended the state-of-the-art in autonomy by providing a more complete picture of how actions and nonverbal signals contribute to promoting cooperation. Researchers suggested guidelines for designing autonomous machines such as robots, self-driving cars, drones and personal assistants that will effectively collaborate with soldiers.

Dr. Celso de Melo, computer scientist with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Army Research Laboratory at CCDC ARL West in Playa Vista, California, in collaboration with Dr. Kazunori Teradafrom Gifu University in Japan, recently published a paper in Scientific Reports where they show that emotion expressions can shape cooperation.

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First operational boring tunnel under vegas almost done, Elon Musk announces

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The company is as quick as a flash given the excavation was completed last February.

Elon Musk announced via Twitter that the first operational tunnel under Las Vegas was almost done on Tuesday. “Tunnels under cities with self-driving electric cars will feel like warp drive,” wrote the founder of The Boring Company.

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Scientists claim to have created an algorithm that makes self-driving cars ‘accident-proof’ – as long as human drivers drive legally

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  • New research presents algorithm that ensures a fail-safe trajectory for vehicles
  • It works on the principle that other human drivers act responsibly on the roads
  • Getting self-driving cars to react to unique situations is an obstacle in a roll out

An algorithm makes self-driving cars ‘accident-proof’ as long as other human drivers on the road act responsibly, scientists claim.

German researchers developed the algorithm with data collected from vehicles in the real-world and tested it in computer simulations.

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Researchers create bioink that delivers oxygen to 3D printed tissue cells

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Tissue engineering or regeneration is the process of improving upon or replacing biological tissues by combining cells and other materials with the optimal chemical and physiological conditions in order to build scaffolds upon which new viable tissue can form. We’ve seen many examples of 3D printing being used to accomplish this task. The potential to engineer new tissues this way provides an answer to organ transplant shortages and applications in drug discovery.

However, to become viable tissues, these cells need oxygen delivered to them via blood vessels, which, in transplanted tissue, can take several days to grow. But a collaborative group of researchers is working on a solution: an oxygen-releasing bioink that can deliver this all-important element to the cells in 3D bioprinted tissues. This allows the cells to survive while they’re waiting for blood vessels to finish growing.

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Self-learning robot autonomously moves molecules, setting stage for molecular 3D printing

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If you know even just a little bit about science, you probably already know that molecules are often referred to as “the building blocks of life.” Made of a group of atoms that have bonded together, molecules make up all kinds of materials, but behave totally differently in regards to macroscopic objects than atoms do. Picture how a LEGO model is made of many teeny tiny bricks—it’s easy for us to move these bricks around, but if you think of molecules as these bricks, it’s much more difficult to do so, as each one basically requires its own separate set of instructions.

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IBM publishes its quantum roadmap, says it will have a 1,000-qubit machine in 2023

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IBM Quantum Hummingbird

IBM today, for the first time, published its road map for the future of its quantum computing hardware. There is a lot to digest here, but the most important news in the short term is that the company believes it is on its way to building a quantum processor with more than 1,000 qubits — and somewhere between 10 and 50 logical qubits — by the end of 2023.

Currently, the company’s quantum processors top out at 65 qubits. It plans to launch a 127-qubit processor next year and a 433-qubit machine in 2022. To get to this point, IBM is also building a completely new dilution refrigerator to house these larger chips, as well as the technology to connect multiple of these units to build a system akin to today’s multi-core architectures in classical chips.

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COVID-19 pandemic could usher in a ‘New Digital Age,’ study claims

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The study suggests that COVID-19 can be used as a chance to rebuild the nation, by making Israel the starting point for solutions its own society needs, and then for the planet.

Israel should focus on its unique strengths in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Autonomous Technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT) to be ahead of the new digital age being ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic, a study by Start-Up Nation Central claimed on Monday.

Since the novel coronavirus has disrupted existing supply chains and industries, the report argues that Israeli talents could promote innovative solutions. AR means could be used to take over some aspects of customer service and manufacturing. As more and more people are expected to work and purchase goods and services from home, cyber security demands are expected to grow.

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Tech companies are starting to let their employees work from anywhere — as long as they take a lower salary

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Software firm VMware will start cutting pay for employees who leave Silicon Valley, according to a recent Bloomberg report.

While employees can work remotely on a permanent basis, they could face an 18% pay cut for moving to a city like Denver, Bloomberg reports.

VMware isn’t the only company reconsidering employee pay. Facebook will start adjusting salaries in January based on where employees live, according to The New York Times.

Twitter has had a pay localization policy in place for years as part of a broader push to decentralize its workforce.

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Microsoft’s underwater server experiment resurfaces after two years

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Turns out, dunking data centers is a great idea

Back in 2018, Microsoft sunk an entire data center to the bottom of the Scottish sea, plunging 864 servers and 27.6 petabytes of storage 117 feet deep in the ocean. Today, the company has reported that its latest experiment was a success, revealing findings that show that the idea of an underwater data center is actually a pretty good one.

On the surface, throwing an entire data center to the bottom of the ocean may seem strange, but Microsoft’s Project Natick team hypothesized that placing would result in more reliable and energy-efficient data centers.

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The 5 biggest technology trends in 2021 everyone must get ready for now

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It might seem strange to be making predictions about 2021, when it’s far from certain how the remainder of 2020 is going to play out. No-one foresaw the world-changing events of this year, but one thing is clear: tech has been affected just as much as every other part of our lives.

Another thing that is clear is that today’s most important tech trends will play a big part in helping us cope with and adapt to the many challenges facing us. From the shift to working from home to new rules about how we meet and interact in public spaces, tech trends will be the driving force in managing the change.

In many ways, Covid-19 will act as a catalyst for a whole host of changes that were already on the cards anyway, thanks to our increasingly online and digital lives. Things will just happen more quickly now, with necessity (long acknowledged as the mother of invention) as the driving force. And should it be the case that – as certain US presidents have predicted – Covid-19 “magically disappears” – the changes it has brought about will not, as we will have learned to do a lot of things more efficiently and safely.

Here’s my overview of how the major tech trend that I identified in my most recent book Tech Trends in Practice, are likely to play out during the next year. Some will play their part in helping us to recover “normality” (whatever that means), while some of them will make it easier for us to understand and navigate a changed reality.

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How CRISPR is tackling the troubling immune response that’s plagued gene therapy until now

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One of the major challenges facing gene therapy — a way to treat disease by replacing a patient’s defective genes with healthy ones — is that it is difficult to safely deliver therapeutic genes to patients without the immune system destroying the gene, and the vehicle carrying it, which can trigger life-threatening widespread inflammation.

Three decades ago researchers thought that gene therapy would be the ultimate treatment for genetically inherited diseases like hemophilia, sickle cell anemia, and genetic diseases of metabolism. But the technology couldn’t dodge the immune response.

Since then, researchers have been looking for ways to perfect the technology and control immune responses to the gene or the vehicle. However, many of the strategies tested so far have not been completely successful in overcoming this hurdle.

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