Staff will now be augmented by exoskeletons in Ford factories across the world.
Following successful trials, Ford will now offer employees the use of exoskeletons to reduce the strain of factory work.
Despite the emergence of Industry 4.0, smart factories, sensors, and data analytics, much of the heavy-duty operations of today’s industrial and manufacturing still rely heavily on human input.
Over time, the physical demand of such work can cause injury, muscle stress, and accidents.
Currently Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly helped launch the magazine and was its executive editor for its first seven years. He has written for The New York Times, The Economist, Science, TIME, and more, and is the bestselling author of The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future. He recently sat down with Srinivas Rao on the Unmistakable Creative podcast to discuss the surprising changes that society can expect in the next 20 years.
Continue reading… “A world-leading technologist on what the year 2038 will look like”
Wind and solar farms are glutting networks more frequently, prompting a market signal for coal plants to shut off.
Bright and breezy days are becoming a deeper nightmare for utilities struggling to earn a return on traditional power plants.
With wind and solar farms sprouting up in more areas — and their power getting priority to feed into the grid in many places — the amount of electricity being generated is outstripping demand during certain hours of the day.
The result: power prices are slipping to zero or even below more often in more jurisdictions. That’s adding to headaches for generators from NRG Energy Inc. in California to RWE AG in Germany and Origin Energy Ltd. in Australia. Once confined to a curiosity for a few hours over windy Christmas holidays, sub-zero cost of electricity is becoming a reality for hundreds of hours in many markets, upending the economics of the business in the process.
Continue reading… “Power worth less than zero spreads as green energy floods the grid”
This dexterous robot could put stunt doubles out of a job. Disney’s Imagineering Research and Development lab built a robotic stuntman that can perform daring flips 60 feet in the air. The robot uses a combination of lasers, accelerometers and gyroscopes to track and adjust its position in midair to mimic the actions of a real stuntman. Disney calls the technology “Stuntronics.”
Continue reading… “Disney invented a robotic stuntman that could put humans out of a job”
Have you ever wondered where all the money goes that you donate to the American Cancer Society ?With the advancement of medicine, you’d think scientists would have unlocked the cure by now with the ACS’s help. Right?.
Is there more to this story than meets the eye?Apparently, the American Cancer Society seems to like the status quo. People with cancer are unnecessarily dying, when a cure is probably within reach of American scientists.
There’s a lot of money to be made by chemotherapy and other primitive treatments especially for the board members and their companies that sit on the ACS board.
“The American Cancer Society is fixated on damage control— diagnosis and treatment— and basic molecular biology, with indifference or even hostility to cancer prevention.
This myopic mindset is compounded by interlocking conflicts of interest with the cancer drug, mammography, and other industries.
She’s not your ordinary jewelry dealer. Going by the online moniker “Xiaotian,” she commands a big fan base, jokes with her customers, and models for her own business.
“Hi bao bao,” she greets her potential buyers during a livestream session one afternoon in Hong Kong, using a common, endearing nickname for online shoppers. “This is a new design that came out this week. You want me to try it on? Alright!”
Comments piled on. Some complimented the good looks of the designer who stood beside her. Others wanted to see the necklace up close. Still, others asked about the price.
That the Chinese are shopping on the internet in droves is not news. But a new trend is emerging among sellers on ecommerce platforms: they’re ditching old marketing playbooks and are turning to more personal interactions instead.
Taobao is at the forefront of that effort. Already, the Chinese equivalent of Amazon has legions of daigou agents: Chinese expats who buy foreign brands for their compatriots back home.
Continue reading… “Taobao leads the charge in a new ecommerce trend: livestreamed shopping”
Digital properties such as photos and videos get stolen frequently, which is why many creators of such forms of content employ watermarking methodologies so that ownership is easier to claim in case of theft. Another less-known digital property that can get stolen are artificial intelligence (AI) models, that have been developed by researchers after months, and sometimes years of effort.
IBM is now developing a technique to allow AI researchers to “watermark” these models. The technology is currently “patent-pending”.
Continue reading… “IBM patenting watermark technology to protect ownership of AI models”
It’s Instagram’s fault.
Around 10 years ago, Baker was raising chickens with her daughter on their small farm in Claremont, New Hampshire when she first saw a YouTube video of a chicken wearing what looked to be an upside-down apron that stretched across its backside. The diaper, so to speak, was used to catch chicken poop so the birds wouldn’t leave droppings everywhere (chickens do not urinate separately from defecation. Their urine is technically in their excrement). “I’m like, ‘Oh my goodness, I so need to do that,’” Baker said. Baker’s daughter liked to bring her favorite chicken, an Old English hen named Abigail, inside their house, and because chickens poop close to a dozen times per day, Baker needed a better system for managing Abigail’s excrement.
Continue reading… “The booming business of luxury chicken diapers”
New technologies are opening the door to near-everlasting life as well as a myriad of ethical and philosophical questions.
Technologists are working on a variety of ways to avoid death — including uploading your brain to a computer.
Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and beyond are attempting to disrupt what has long been seen as one of the only inevitabilities of life: death.
Computer scientists and artificial intelligence specialists are developing programs that allow people to theoretically avoid death, opening the door to near-everlasting life as well as a myriad of ethical and philosophical questions.
Continue reading… “Disrupting death: Technologists explore ways to digitize life”
A HORRIFYING EXPERIENCE. On July 13, game developer Red Meat Games released its fifth virtual reality (VR) project, Bring to Light. It was particularly appropriate to release it on Friday the 13th, since the developers designed the VR horror game to quite literally push players to their terror limits with the help of a biometric sensor.
Continue reading… “This VR horror game is exactly as scary as your body can handle”
Made of electronic circuits coupled to minute particles, the devices could flow through intestines or pipelines to detect problems.
Researchers at MIT have created what may be the smallest robots yet that can sense their environment, store data, and even carry out computational tasks. These devices, which are about the size of a human egg cell, consist of tiny electronic circuits made of two-dimensional materials, piggybacking on minuscule particles called colloids.
Continue reading… “Cell-sized robots can sense their environment”
They’ve awarded cash prizes as part of an ongoing competition.
NASA has selected five winners in an ongoing contest it has been running to get smart ideas about how to build a 3d-printed habitat on Mars.
The winners have passed level one of the 3D-Printed Habitat Centennial Challenge, which required developing about 60 percent of the design. Level Two will require greater complexity with 100 percent completion and an understanding of the hydraulics of each build. The teams will then create virtual structures and, on April 29, build them for real on the campus of Bradley University in Peoria, Ill.
The teams have different approaches and their video entries reflect that. First-place Team Zopherus, for example, highlights the autonomous robots that build out their modular structures. Using the Martian soil, their robots would build structures from the ground up.
Continue reading… “Here’s what NASA thinks Mars houses could look like”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.