Federal researchers have created a new tool to clean up oil spills by tinkering with the kind of foam found in seat cushions.
The modified foam can soak up oil floating on water and lurking below the surface, and then can be repeatedly wrung out and reused, the researchers say.
It “just bounces back like a kitchen sponge,” said co-inventor Seth Darling, a scientist at the Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago.
Continue reading… “Scientists tweak seat cushion material to clean oil spills”
The AImotive office is in a small converted house at the end of a quiet residential street in sunny Mountain View, spitting distance from Google’s headquarters. Outside is a branded Toyota Prius covered in cameras, one of three autonomous cars the Hungarian company is testing in the sleepy neighborhood. It’s a popular testing ground: one of Google’s driverless cars, now operating under spin-out company Waymo, zips past the office each lunchtime.
Continue reading… “AImotive aims to convert regular cars into driverless ones inexpensively”
DNA contains information about a living organism. It codes everything in an living being. That’s why it makes sense for corporations like Microsoft to invest in research that studies how DNA can be used to store data. Unlike most of the existing data storage devices out there, DNA doesn’t degrade over time, plus it’s very compact. For example, just four grams of DNA can contain a year’s worth of information produced by all of humanity combined.
Continue reading… “New Study Confirms That the Future of Data Storage Is in DNA”
Should robots pay taxes?
It may sound strange, but a number of prominent people have been asking this question lately. As fears about the impact of automation grow, calls for a “robot tax” are gaining momentum. Earlier this month, the European parliament considered one for the EU. Benoît Hamon, the French Socialist party presidential candidate who is often described as his country’s Bernie Sanders, has put a robot tax in his platform. Even Bill Gates recently endorsed the idea.
Continue reading… “Robots won’t just take our jobs – they’ll make the rich even richer”
A new technique using liquid metals to create integrated circuits that are just atoms thick could lead to the next big advance for electronics.
The process opens the way for the production of large wafers around 1.5 nanometres in depth (a sheet of paper, by comparison, is 100,000nm thick).
Continue reading… “Liquid metal nano printing set to revolutionize electronics”
While researchers continue working hard to make readily available 3D printed organs a reality, we know that it likely won’t happen, at least not on a massively available and low-cost scale, for quite some time. However, 3D printing technology is often used in surgery these days, from surgical guides to implants to patient-specific medical models. Recently, a team developed patient-specific, cost-effective 3D printed liver models, to help doctors with their preoperative plans before performing difficult laparoscopic resections.
If you’ve ever watched someone wear and use a VR headset, you know how odd they look with a high-tech blindfold on. That’s not good for demonstrating the emerging technology, especially while it still has a lot to prove before it enters the mainstream.
Continue reading… “Google’s new tech turns VR headsets invisible”
Advancements in the robotics field are helping to transform a number of industries, construction being one of them. Companies that build things can expect to see a host of new machines that perform a variety of tasks — adding efficiency to construction projects as well as reducing injuries to human workers.
Continue reading… “Robots and drones: Coming soon to a construction site near you”
The alleged lack of available talent for blockchain industry jobs was high on the agenda at the DTCC’s Fintech Symposium, held at the Grand Hyatt in New York City yesterday.
There, executives from a wide range of companies took turns addressing an audience of several hundred financial industry executives to express their concern about what they believe is a problem preventing wider growth and use of the technology.
Continue reading… “The Lack of Blockchain Talent is Becoming An Industry Concern”
Two University of Oxford biomedical researchers are calling for robots to be built with real human tissue, and they say the technology is there if we only choose to develop it. Writing in Science Robotics, Pierre-Alexis Mouthuy and Andrew Carr argue that humanoid robots could be the exact tool we need to create muscle and tendon grafts that actually work.
Right now, tissue engineering relies on bioreactors to grow sheets of cells. These machines often look like large fish tanks, filled with a rich soup of nutrients and chemicals that cells need to grow on a specialized trellis. The problem, explain Mouthuy and Carr, is that bioreactors currently “fail to mimic the real mechanical environment for cells.” In other words, human cells in muscles and tendons grow while being stretched and moved around on our skeletons. Without experiencing these natural stresses, the tissue grafts produced by researchers often have a broad range of structural problems and low cell counts.
Continue reading… “Get ready for robots made with human flesh”
Last year, Lauren Bowker was halfway through a nostalgic re-watching of the cult ’90s teen film The Craft when the idea struck. More specifically, it was during the “glamor spells” scene, when Robin Tunney’s character goes from brunette to platinum blond just by combing her fingers through her hair. “It was in that moment that the penny kind of dropped,” says Bowker, “I was like, ‘We could do that.'”
That wasn’t posturing: As a chemist, fashion designer, and the founder of the London-based material design studio, The Unseen, Bowker is something of a high-fashion alchemist. Her color-changing leather purses and otherworldly wearable Air sculptures are a measured mix of stunning aesthetics and seriously complex science.
Continue reading… “Modern-Day Witchcraft: This Hair Dye Changes Color”
Every week comes a new warning that robots are taking over our jobs. People have become troubled by the question of how robots will learn ethics, if they do take over our work and our planet.
As early on as the 1960s Isaac Asimov came up with the ‘Three Laws of Robotics’ outlining moral rules they should abide by. More recently there has been official guidance from the British Standards Institute advising designers how to create ethical robots, which is meant to avoid them taking over the world.
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.