Researchers at EPFL developed a system that combines virtual reality with artificial tactile sensations to help amputees feel their prosthetics as if they are a part of their body.
Via Mashable
Research team develops the world’s first-ever 4-D printing for ceramics
A research team at City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has achieved a groundbreaking advancement in materials research by successfully developing the world’s first 4-D printing for ceramics, which are mechanically robust and can have complex shapes. This could turn a new page in the structural application of ceramics.
Ceramic has a high melting point, so it is difficult to use conventional laser printing to make ceramics. The existing 3-D-printed ceramic precursors, which are usually difficult to deform, also hinder the production of ceramics with complex shapes. To overcome these challenges, the CityU team has developed a novel “ceramic ink,” which is a mixture of polymers and ceramic nanoparticles. The 3-D-printed ceramic precursors printed with this novel ink are soft and can be stretched three times beyond their initial length. These flexible and stretchable ceramic precursors allow complex shapes, such as origami folding. With proper heat treatment, ceramics with complex shapes can be made.
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Music made by AI composers can help you improve concentration
Through purposefully designed sound and endless playlists, music made by AI composers will trick your brain into improving your focus and productivity.
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CDC uses HP bioprinters to speed up testing for new antibiotics
The pilot will help test effectiveness against superbugs.
The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is turning to some bleeding edge tech in its bid to stamp out drug-resistant ‘superbug’ bacteria. It’s buying a slew of HP bioprinters (the D300e you see above) as part of a pilot program that could speed up the testing of more effective antibiotics. The machines will give regional labs in New York, Minnesota, Tennessee and Wisconsin their first shot at printing drug samples used for developing and running antimicrobial susceptibility tests. Hospitals won’t have to wait for testing or else risk mistakes like overusing drugs.
The testing will start at CDC’s regional labs in the first quarter of HP’s fiscal 2019 (between November and January). Its initial focus is on widely resistant bacteria. And HP won’t be done once th e bioprinters are in the Center’s hands. HP will help the CDC study the success of the pilot, tweak it if needed, and explore the possibility of wider-scale printer uses if the test proves successful. This may become an instrumental part of fighting superbugs if all goes smoothly.
Via Engadget
IBM’s Holodeck-style classroom tech makes language-learning apps look primitive
Whether it’s apps like Duolingo or the ease of travel, there are plenty of ways technology has made it more straightforward to learn a second (or third or fourth …) language. Now, IBM Research and New York’s Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have come up with an entirely new high-tech approach — and it totally reminds us of the Vulcan school from 2009’s Star Trek movie.
Called the Cognitive Immersive Room (CIR), it pairs an A.I.-powered chatbot smart assistant with a 360-degree panoramic display system to place users into a variety of immersive locations to try out their language skills. Currently, it’s being used for Mandarin, which is widely considered to be among the more difficult languages for Westerners to learn. The CIR setup drops students into scenarios like a restaurant in China and a tai chi class, where they can put their Mandarin to the test.
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New “Super Wood” is as strong as steel
Wood is great. It looks nice as a building material. It grows right out of the ground. But compared to things like concrete, marble, and steel, it’s not all that strong. Well, it didn’t used to be, anyway. Scientists have now created a “super wood” that’s strong enough to stop a bullet.
The Marines 3D printed a concrete barracks
Letting robots do construction jobs on the battlefield frees Marines to fight.
Forging ahead with plans to have robots do “dull, dangerous and dirty” jobs, the U.S. Marine Corps used a 3D printer to create a barracks building out of concrete. The process, which took less than two days, created a hardened living space capable of resisting enemy fire, a real improvement over canvas and nylon tents.
The U.S. Marine Corps moves around a lot, deploying worldwide, often to dusty, remote locations for months at a time. As a consequence, they tend to build a lot of housing for themselves, and it takes a team of ten Marines five days to build a barracks from wood. Not only is construction dangerous, it also prevents those ten Marines from doing other things during those five days.
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The world’s first digital teacher just debuted in New Zealand
Here’s a new kind of teacher. It’s back to school, and you know what that means — time to fire up the computer that teaches you!
That’s what primary school students in New Zealand have to look forward to, anyways. They’ll soon be the first students in the world to learn from an artificially intelligent (AI) digital avatar.
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The numbers of hours Americans watch TV every day is incredibly different depending on your age
Television is still the media medium of choice amongst adults in the US, with Americans aged 18 or older watching an average of almost five hours a day, according to a Total Audience Report.
But as this chart from Statista, based on Nielsen data, shows, younger adults watch significantly less television than do older adults — Americans ages 18 through 34 watch a third of what adults aged 50 to 64 do.
China is building an innovation ecosystem ripe for start-ups. Here’s how
The government is pumping funds into research, education and innovative projects, as Chinese tech firms flourish and investors and venture capitalists flock.
With rising production costs, an ageing population and shrinking return on investments it is clear why China’s economy has shifted from labour-intensive manufacturing to an innovation-driven paradigm in just a few years.
Today, Huawei is the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world and JD.com, Tencent, Alibaba and Baidu are among the world’s top 10 internet companies in terms of revenue. These companies, and the new tech-based businesses seeking to emulate their success, have all benefited from the “innovation ecosystem” China is developing.
So what are the key elements that make up this ecosystem and have enabled China’s economy to rapidly climb the value chain?
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It’s the year 2038–here’s how we’ll eat 20 years in the future
A science-fiction look at the next two decades of food developments, from robot farmers to 3D-printed meals to government monitoring of your daily calorie intake.
It’s the year 2038. The word “flavor” has fallen into disuse. Sugar is the new cigarettes, and we have managed to replace salt with healthy plants. We live in a society in which we eat fruit grown using genetics. We drink synthetic wine, scramble eggs that do not come from chickens, grill meat that was not taken from animals, and roast fish that never saw the sea.
Was this what we had in mind when we started seeking transparency, traceability, and sustainability of our food system many years ago in the early aughts? About a decade ago, we lived through an agricultural bottleneck caused by warm temperatures that caused plagues and diseases, which severely compromised the food sources we were cultivating and consuming. By the end, three quarters of the world’s food was derived from just 12 plant and five animal species. We learned from this mistake and started to embrace true biodiversity, grew meat in labs, and put robotics into farms. But the technological advances that have made clean, sustainable food possible have also created some horrifying scenarios.
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Software predicts landslides in weeks, not hours, in advance
Researchers have developed a new software tool that predicts the boundaries of where landslides will occur two weeks before they happen.
Landslides—masses of rock, earth, or debris moving down a slope—happen everywhere. The effect on communities, the economy, and most importantly, lives, can be devastating. A recent landslide at a jade mine in Myanmar, for example, claimed at least 27 lives.
In open pit mines, landslides are particularly common. In 2013 a 20 meter towering wall of dirt and rocks, deep enough to bury New York City’s Central Park, came crashing down when Bingham Canyon, one of the largest copper producing mines in the United States, gave way. Astonishingly no one was hurt, thanks to advance warnings.
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