Impact Lab – Page 558 – A Laboratory of the Future Human Experience

Breakthrough Thinking, cutting edge, Engineering, quantum computing, Science & Technology News

Physicists use light waves to accelerate supercurrents, enable ultrafast quantum computing

July 18, 2019

Scientists have discovered that terahertz light — light at trillions of cycles per second — can act as a control knob to accelerate supercurrents. That can help open up the quantum world of matter and energy at atomic and subatomic scales to practical applications such as ultrafast computing.

Jigang Wang patiently explained his latest discovery in quantum control that could lead to superfast computing based on quantum mechanics: He mentioned light-induced superconductivity without energy gap. He brought up forbidden supercurrent quantum beats. And he mentioned terahertz-speed symmetry breaking.

Then he backed up and clarified all that. After all, the quantum world of matter and energy at terahertz and nanometer scales — trillions of cycles per second and billionths of meters — is still a mystery to most of us.

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AI, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, Crazy Stuff, Science & Technology News

Worlds’s first AI universe simulator knows things it shouldn’t

July 18, 2019

Great Mystery

“It’s like teaching image recognition software with lots of pictures of cats and dogs, but then it’s able to recognize elephants.”

Since we can’t travel billions of years back in time — not yet, anyways — one of the best ways to understand how our universe evolved is to create computer simulations of the process using what we do know about it.

Most of those simulations fall into one of two categories: slow and more accurate, or fast and less accurate. But now, an international team of researchers has built an AI that can quickly generate highly-accurate, three-dimensional simulations of the universe — even when they tweak parameters the system wasn’t trained on.

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3D Printer, Medical Breakthrough, Science & Technology News, Space, Space Flight

A BFF in Space! Bioprinter Will 3D-Print Human Tissue on the Space Station

July 18, 2019

A new 3D printer will launch to the space station in July with the goal of manufacturing human tissue in space.A new 3D printer will launch to the space station in July with the goal of manufacturing human tissue in space.(Image: © Techshot Inc.)

The futuristic gizmo will launch this month.

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AI, Breakthrough Thinking, Business, Science & Technology News

AI and machine learning dominate World Economic Forum’s list of 2019 Technology Pioneers

July 18, 2019

The World Economic Forum today announced its list of 56 companies selected as Technology Pioneers, and this year’s class demonstrates the growing embrace of artificial intelligence and machine learning across a broad range of sectors.

Of those selected, at least 20 companies say they are using AI or machine learning in some fashion to tackle challenges in fields such as advertising technology, smart cities, cleantech, supply chain, manufacturing, cybersecurity, autonomous vehicles, and drones.

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Analysis, Environment, New Discoveries, Science & Technology News

New analysis techniques unearth a trove of unusual minerals

July 17, 2019

Nataliyamalikite was discovered in Kamchatka’s Avacha Volcano, which emits sulfurous vapor that’s high in thallium.YURI SMITYUK/GETTY IMAGES

THE LANDSCAPE OF Kamchatka Peninsula steams with sulfurous vapor, its 29 active volcanoes forming a hazy backdrop for the region’s herds of reindeer and rivers of salmon. One of the most geologically active places in the world, Kamchatka juts out from the eastern coast of Russia to resemble a larger version of Florida. A process almost like alchemy occurs here: Like a set of roiling cauldrons, Kamchatka’s volcanoes mix unusual combinations of atomic elements to forge minerals that are unlike anything anywhere else in the world.

And in the past few years, researchers have discovered several new minerals on Kamchatka. “They pop up by accident,” says Joël Brugger, a geologist at Monash University in Australia, who helped discover a new mineral on the peninsula called nataliyamalikite in 2017. “You just have to keep your eyes open.” Researchers don’t set out to make these discoveries, usually. Instead, they stumble upon new minerals during their studies of broader geologic processes that might, for example, cause rare metals to collect in unusually large concentrations in a specific volcano.

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AI, Machine Learning, Science & Technology News

Machine learning has been used to automatically translate long-lost languages

July 17, 2019

Some languages that have never been deciphered could be the next ones to get the machine translation treatment.

In 1886, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans came across an ancient stone bearing a curious set of inscriptions in an unknown language. The stone came from the Mediterranean island of Crete, and Evans immediately traveled there to hunt for more evidence. He quickly found numerous stones and tablets bearing similar scripts and dated them from around 1400 BCE.

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Drone, drones, Engineering, Science & Technology News

We’re going to mistake the drones of the future for annoying flying insects

July 17, 2019

Harvard’s robotic flying bee has been in development for well over a decade now. And despite its incredibly simple design, over the past few years, its creators have improved Robobee’s capabilities, adding abilities such as the ability to hover and even steer itself down a pre-determined flight path. It’s too tiny to carry its own batteries and has been long reliant on a connected power cable. But last August, for the first time ever, Robobee made its first flight without a wire tether.

It wasn’t necessarily the most spectacular flight, however. Instead of soaring across the laboratory, buzzing past researcher’s ears, Robobee lifted off for a mere second under its own power before falling out of the sky—saved from a crash landing by an emergency kevlar safety wire. To achieve this feat, RoboBee received a couple of key hardware upgrades last year, including the addition of two extra wings, bringing the total to four, which contributed to a 38 percent boost in lifting power. It also got the smallest set of solar cells you can buy, weighing in at just 10 milligrams.

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Bitcoin, facebook, Legal Issues, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

Consumer groups call for a moratorium on Libra until ‘profound questions’ are answered

July 16, 2019

Some 33 consumer and public-policy groups sent a letter Tuesday to five Congressional committees and federal regulators asking for a moratorium on the Facebook Inc.-backed Libra cryptocurrency.

“We call on Congress and regulators to impose a moratorium on Facebook’s Libra and related plans until the profound questions raised by the proposal are addressed,” says the letter. “We also urge Facebook to put its implementation of its plans for the new cryptocurrency, Libra, on hold until the Congress and regulators have an opportunity to assess and react to a far more detailed presentation than has yet been made public.”

Among the signatories are the Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Reports, the Economic Policy Institute, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Public Citizen, U.S. PIRG, and the Woodstock Institute.

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Human Behavior, new technology, Robots, Science & Technology News

The second coming of the robot pet

July 16, 2019

MITA YUN DIDN’T get into robotics to save the world. The lunar rovers she built as a student at Carnegie Mellon, and the software she developed as an engineer for Google—that stuff was just practice. The things Yun really wanted to make were friends.

Yun had hungered for companionship since she was a little girl in China. She’d begged her parents for a pet, but no dice. These were the days of China’s one-child policy, so no sibling either. Instead, Yun’s parents filled her room with a menagerie of stuffed animals, which she liked to imagine springing to life, their little paws dancing on her bedspread, their little bodies stuffed with possibilities.

In 2017, Yun quit her job at Google to start building the friend she’d always wanted. She started a company, called Zoetic, and recruited a few other roboticists to take her imaginary sidekick and turn it into a commercial product. Two years later, she’s ready to introduce her creation: a small, interactive robot called Kiki, which goes on pre-sale later this month.

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Engineering, Inventions, New Inventions, Science & Technology News

Materials science may be the most important technology of the next decade. Here’s why:

July 16, 2019

Think of just about any major challenge we will face over the next decade and materials are at the center of it. To build a new clean energy future, we need more efficient solar panels, wind turbines and batteries. Manufacturers need new materials to create more advanced products. We also need to replace materials subject to supply disruptions, like rare earth elements.

Traditionally, developing new materials has been a slow, painstaking process. To find the properties they’re looking for, researchers would often have to test hundreds — or even thousands — of materials one by one. That made materials research prohibitively expensive for most industries.

Yet today, we’re in the midst of a materials revolution. Scientists are using powerful simulation techniques, as well as machine learning algorithms, to propel innovation forward at blazing speed and even point them toward possibilities they had never considered. Over the next decade, the rapid advancement in materials science will have a massive impact.

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brain hacking, Ideas, Science & Technology News

The future of brain-computer interfaces and the human machine

July 15, 2019

The melding of humanity with the technology we have created has begun…

We are well on our way as Homo sapiens to becoming a species that fully merges technology with our organic bodies. In some ways, we’ve been getting at this for centuries already, beginning with the first use of eyeglasses, at the end of the thirteenth century in Italy, to improve vision by making it easy for someone to wear two magnifying lenses on the bridge of their nose.

But ever since the invention of the computer and the first human-machine interfaces were born (HMIs), a dream of many technologists has been to create direct connections between computers and the human brain. These brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) — also known as Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMIs) — would eliminate the lag inherent in the translation between thought → physical action → computer response. BCIs also allow people who cannot perform physical actions required for HMIs to bypass that real-world step and directly control powerful computer tools with the electrical impulses in their brains.

One of the dreams is that BCIs will eventually place the entire canon of human knowledge within the realm of immediate recall: No more searching the internet via typing or voice commands needed. In a near future, we will be able to think about what we need and pull whatever relevant information is available directly from a cloud and into the forefront of our minds.

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government, Latest Trend, Money Talk, Science & Technology News

India going cashless could be a model for the world

July 15, 2019

India aims to curb cash – but this time it wants to do it properly.

A cashless society wasn’t the original goal of the country’s draconian currency ban in November 2016. But when an acute shortage of banknotes gave a fillip to digital wallets, that purpose was added as an afterthought to justify an act of farcical state overreach.

The real innovation in mobile payments in India began a few months prior to the cash ban. It’s called a unified payment interface, or UPI. The name is clunky, but the idea is simple. One smartphone owner who’s a customer of Bank A can request a payment from, or initiate a payment to, another owner who has an account with Bank B. Neither party needs to know anything more than each other’s mobile number or a virtual ID. They don’t even need to use the same mobile app to transact.

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