Impact Lab – Page 527 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Automation, Healthcare, Medicine, Robotics, Science & Technology News

The pharmacy of the future will see robots come to the rescue of humans

November 14, 2019

High technology is changing the way pharmacies operate – and how customers get served

It looks like a normal pharmacy in a normal Johannesburg shopping mall. But behind the scenes at the Morningside Dispensary, a revolution is underway

It may not be getting the attention that politicians get when they talk of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but it is a real and practical example of what emerging technologies make possible in everyday life.

For the customers of this pharmacy are being served by a robot. Even when they don’t realise it, and are talking to a human pharmacist, the efficiency with which they are being served is made possible by a robot.

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Alternative Transportation, Aviation, Science & Technology News, Transportation

Inside the high-stakes race to build the world’s first flying taxi

November 13, 2019

The Lilium prototype in a hangar in Wessling, Germany.Credit…Felix Schmitt for The New York Times

Lilium, a German start-up, illustrates the potential and the risks of creating a new generation of electric aircraft for urban transportation.

MUNICH — Inside an airplane hangar about 20 miles from central Munich, Daniel Wiegand lifted the door of a prototype that he said would become one of the world’s first flying taxis. He’s coy about how much it cost to build — “several million,” he says — but promises that within five years a fleet of them could provide a 10-minute trip from Manhattan to Kennedy International Airport for $70.

A lot is riding on his plane. Mr. Wiegand, 34, is the chief executive and a founder of Lilium, one of the most promising and secretive start-ups in the global race to build an all-electric aircraft that will — regulators and public opinion willing — move passengers above cities.

“This is the perfect means of transportation, something that can take off and land everywhere,” Mr. Wiegand (pronounced VEE-gand) said. “It’s very fast, very efficient and low noise.”

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Amazon.com, Apple, Computer Security, Google, Home Technology, Science & Technology News

Researchers used a laser to hack Alexa and other voice assistants

November 13, 2019

San Francisco (CNN Business)Usually you have to talk to voice assistants to get them to do what you want. But a group of researchers determined they can also command them by shining a laser at smart speakers and other gadgets that house virtual helpers such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Japan’s University of Electro-Communications figured out they could do this silently and from hundreds of feet away, as long as they had a line of sight to the smart gadget. The finding could enable anyone (with motivation and a few hundred dollars’ worth of electronics) to attack a smart speaker from outside your house, making it do anything from playing music to opening a smart garage door to buying you stuff on Amazon.

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Automobiles, Breakthrough Thinking, Inventions, Science & Technology News

Teenager solves car blind spots using a webcam and projector

November 13, 2019

It’s a relatively cheap and remarkably effective fix.

As every cyclist knows, the blind spots caused by a car’s roof pillars can be extremely dangerous. Although companies are working on various high-tech solutions for this problem, a 14-year-old from Pennsylvania has taken a more low-tech approach to create an ingenious fix for the issue.

Alaina Gassler of West Grove came up with the idea for the project after seeing her mother struggle with blind spots while driving. Gassler decided to put a webcam on the outer roof pillar of a car which could record everything that was masked from the driver’s view. Then, she used a projector to display the live feed from the webcam onto the interior pillar, with 3D-printed parts aligning the image exactly between the window and the windshield.

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Blockchain, Education, Higher Education, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

How Blockchain could disrupt the education industry

November 12, 2019

Blockchain is undisputedly an ingenious invention. It’s a technology that began as underpinning for virtual currencies but it is quickly becoming obvious that blockchain is more than just bitcoin.

The encrypted ledger technology that powers bitcoin is primed to reshape the future of many industries. Be it healthcare, finance, media, or the government, the blockchain technology will bring about a revolutionary change across many industries.

The technology is sure to disrupt every industry, including education. There is no denying the fact that the education system is far from where it needs to be. Using this technology, a lot of improvements can be made in the education sector.

The edtech sector is huge. It is estimated that it will reach $93.76 billion by 2020. Technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality are already making their way into the education sector. It’s only a matter of time before the blockchain technology becomes mainstream too.

Let’s see how this disruptive technology can revolutionize the education sector.

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AI, Healthcare, Science & Technology News

How your poop can help train AI

November 12, 2019

San Francisco (CNN)The next time you go to the bathroom, a couple startups are hoping you’ll snap a photo before you flush. For scientific reasons, of course.

No, really. Two companies — Auggi, a gut-health startup that’s building an app for people to track gastrointestinal issues, and Seed Health, which works on applying microbes to human health and sells probiotics — are soliciting poop photos from anyone who wants to send them.

The companies began collecting the photos online on Monday via a campaign cheekily called “Give a S–t” (you can imagine what the dashes stand for) with the goal of creating one of the first known data sets of human poop images. These pictures — the companies hope to collect 100,000 photos in total — can then be used to build AI for research into gut-related diseases and to help people with such health conditions more easily track their own bowel movements.

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2019 Predictions, Entertainment, Movies, Science & Technology News

‘Blade Runner’ was set in November 2019. So how close have we come to that prediction of our future?

November 12, 2019

Science-fiction movies are pretty goddamn awesome because it goes beyond the restrictions of realism and predicts what can or cannot happen in the future. Netflix’s Black Mirror is likely everyone’s hot favourite now because it’s showing us the deranged situation we’ll be in 15-20 years from now. But what if I say that we are already living in a future that was foreseen by a movie from the 80’s? What if I say that the predictions made in it were pretty accurate and that we need to pull our socks up and start making amends? Yes, I am talking about Blade Runner.

Blade Runner is a 1982 sci-fi film directed by Ridley Scott, written by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples, and starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. It is loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The movie is set in a dystopian (Well, not dystopian any more) future Los Angeles of 2019 in which synthetic humans (replicants) are revolting against the people who are building them and using them as slaves. That’s where Ford’s Rick Deckard comes in who’s tasked with hunting down replicants and it is through his eyes we get to see what Scott (And Dick) thinks November 2019 will look like.

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Automobiles, City Planning, Science & Technology News, Tom Frey

Cities declare war on cars as more auto bans stop traffic

November 11, 2019

New York City fired the latest salvo in the war against automobiles Wednesday.

The City Council passed a $1.7 billion plan that will fundamentally change how the citizens of the Big Apple bike, bus, and walk through Manhattan, Queen, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Staten Island. The five boroughs in the next five years will see the building of 250 miles of protected bike lanes, 150 miles of dedicated bus lanes and create additional pedestrian plazas.

Two weeks ago, San Francisco unveiled a $604 million project to ban cars from their busiest thoroughfare, Market Street, where a half-million pedestrians walk on what is one of the most dangerous streets for traffic accidents, executive director of Walk San Francisco Jodie Medeiros recently told Curbed San Francisco

“It’s a war on cars, number one, bottom line,” Car Coach and automotive industry expert Lauren Fix told FOX Business. “It’s what’s called a road diet, restricting roads to force people to use mass transit, which is horrible! It’s filthy, never not on time, not in the U.S. at least, and it’s not safe. The city allows pan handlers and drug addicts to sleep on the trains and beg for money. I’ll take an Uber or a cab before I take public transportation.”

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Award Winner, Higher Education, Intelligence, Law Enforcement, Science & Technology News

Harvard’s prestigious debate team loses to New York prison inmates

November 11, 2019

Prisoners participating in Bard College initiative to provide them a liberal arts education beat Ivy League students who won national title only months ago

Months after winning a national title, Harvard’s debate team has fallen to a group of New York prison inmates.

The showdown took place at the Eastern correctional facility in New York, a maximum-security prison where convicts can take courses taught by faculty from nearby Bard College, and where inmates have formed a popular debate club. Last month they invited the Ivy League undergraduates and this year’s national debate champions over for a friendly competition.

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2020 Predictions, Automation, Employment, Science & Technology News

2020 predictions about automation and the future of work from Forrester

November 11, 2019

Over 1 million knowledge-work jobs will be replaced in 2020 by software robotics, RPA, virtual agents and chatbots, and machine-learning-based decision management. So predicts research firm Forrester in a new report published today, “Predictions 2020: Automation.” It also estimates that 331,500 net jobs will be added to the US workforce next year, human-touch jobs that require intuition, empathy, and physical and mental agility.

Forrester highlights what it calls “the automation paradox,” predicting that after years of falling, MTTR or Mean-Time-To-Resolution (the time it takes to resolve an IT failure, for example) will increase. This is the result of automating the “low-hanging fruit,” the repetitive tasks and incidents, leaving the more complex and time-consuming problems for humans to fix.

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DNA, Healthcare, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News

CRISPR enzyme programmed to kill viruses in human cells

November 10, 2019

Researchers harness Cas13 as an antiviral and diagnostic for RNA-based viruses

Researchers have now turned a CRISPR RNA-cutting enzyme into an antiviral that can be programmed to detect and destroy RNA-based viruses in human cells.

Many of the world’s most common or deadly human pathogens are RNA-based viruses — Ebola, Zika and flu, for example — and most have no FDA-approved treatments. A team led by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has now turned a CRISPR RNA-cutting enzyme into an antiviral that can be programmed to detect and destroy RNA-based viruses in human cells.

Researchers have previously adapted the Cas13 enzyme as a tool to cut and edit human RNA and as a diagnostic to detect the presence of viruses, bacteria, or other targets. This study is one of the first to harness Cas13, or any CRISPR system, as an antiviral in cultured human cells.

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Architecture, Engineering, Green Friendly, Inventions, Science & Technology News

Porous polymer coatings dynamically control light and heat

November 10, 2019

The porous polymer coatings, which switch from white to transparent when wetted, can be put into plastic enclosures to make panels that control light and temperatures of buildings. Credit: Jyotirmoy Mandal/Columbia Engineering

Buildings devote more than 30% of their energy use to heating, cooling, and lighting systems. Passive designs such as cool roof paints have gone a long way toward reducing this usage, and its impact on the environment and climate, but they have one key limitation—they are usually static, and thus not responsive to daily or seasonal changes.

Columbia Engineering researchers have developed porous polymer coatings (PPCs) that enable inexpensive and scalable ways to control light and heat in buildings. They took advantage of the optical switchability of PPCs in the solar wavelengths to regulate solar heating and daylighting, and extended the concept to thermal infrared wavelengths to modulate heat radiated by objects. Their work is published on October 21, 2019 by Joule.

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