The purpose of this blog is the creation of an open, international, independent and free forum, where every UFO-researcher can publish the results of his/her research. The languagues, used for this blog, are Dutch, English and French.You can find the articles of a collegue by selecting his category. Each author stays resposable for the continue of his articles. As blogmaster I have the right to refuse an addition or an article, when it attacks other collegues or UFO-groupes.
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Deze blog is opgedragen aan mijn overleden echtgenote Lucienne.
In 2012 verloor ze haar moedige strijd tegen kanker!
In 2011 startte ik deze blog, omdat ik niet mocht stoppen met mijn UFO-onderzoek.
BEDANKT!!!
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UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN - DE ALLERLAATSTE NIEUWTJES
UFO's of UAP'S in België en de rest van de wereld Ontdek de Fascinerende Wereld van UFO's en UAP's: Jouw Bron voor Onthullende Informatie!
Ben jij ook gefascineerd door het onbekende? Wil je meer weten over UFO's en UAP's, niet alleen in België, maar over de hele wereld? Dan ben je op de juiste plek!
België: Het Kloppend Hart van UFO-onderzoek
In België is BUFON (Belgisch UFO-Netwerk) dé autoriteit op het gebied van UFO-onderzoek. Voor betrouwbare en objectieve informatie over deze intrigerende fenomenen, bezoek je zeker onze Facebook-pagina en deze blog. Maar dat is nog niet alles! Ontdek ook het Belgisch UFO-meldpunt en Caelestia, twee organisaties die diepgaand onderzoek verrichten, al zijn ze soms kritisch of sceptisch.
Nederland: Een Schat aan Informatie
Voor onze Nederlandse buren is er de schitterende website www.ufowijzer.nl, beheerd door Paul Harmans. Deze site biedt een schat aan informatie en artikelen die je niet wilt missen!
Internationaal: MUFON - De Wereldwijde Autoriteit
Neem ook een kijkje bij MUFON (Mutual UFO Network Inc.), een gerenommeerde Amerikaanse UFO-vereniging met afdelingen in de VS en wereldwijd. MUFON is toegewijd aan de wetenschappelijke en analytische studie van het UFO-fenomeen, en hun maandelijkse tijdschrift, The MUFON UFO-Journal, is een must-read voor elke UFO-enthousiasteling. Bezoek hun website op www.mufon.com voor meer informatie.
Samenwerking en Toekomstvisie
Sinds 1 februari 2020 is Pieter niet alleen ex-president van BUFON, maar ook de voormalige nationale directeur van MUFON in Vlaanderen en Nederland. Dit creëert een sterke samenwerking met de Franse MUFON Reseau MUFON/EUROP, wat ons in staat stelt om nog meer waardevolle inzichten te delen.
Let op: Nepprofielen en Nieuwe Groeperingen
Pas op voor een nieuwe groepering die zich ook BUFON noemt, maar geen enkele connectie heeft met onze gevestigde organisatie. Hoewel zij de naam geregistreerd hebben, kunnen ze het rijke verleden en de expertise van onze groep niet evenaren. We wensen hen veel succes, maar we blijven de autoriteit in UFO-onderzoek!
Blijf Op De Hoogte!
Wil jij de laatste nieuwtjes over UFO's, ruimtevaart, archeologie, en meer? Volg ons dan en duik samen met ons in de fascinerende wereld van het onbekende! Sluit je aan bij de gemeenschap van nieuwsgierige geesten die net als jij verlangen naar antwoorden en avonturen in de sterren!
Heb je vragen of wil je meer weten? Aarzel dan niet om contact met ons op te nemen! Samen ontrafelen we het mysterie van de lucht en daarbuiten.
28-01-2023
AI'll be back! Shape-shifting Terminator style robot can melt and reform to pass through metal bars
AI'll be back! Shape-shifting Terminator style robot can melt and reform to pass through metal bars
Scientists designed a robot that can change between liquid and solid stages
A video shows a solid robot in a cage that liquifies to escape and then reforms
In the 1991 film 'Terminator 2: Judgement Day' T-1000 liquifies himself to walk through metal bars, and this sci-fi scene is recreated in a real-world robot.
A video of a shape-shifting robot shows it trapped in a cage, melting and then sliding through the bars where it reforms on the outside.
Researchers led by The Chinese University of Hong Kong created the new phase-shifting material by embedding magnetic particles in gallium, a metal with a very low melting point of 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
While the team does not see the innovation threatening humanity like in the Terminator movie, they foresee it removing foreign objects from the body or delivering drugs on demand.
Scientists tested the robot through a series of 'obstacles.' One saw a person-shaped robot inside of a cage
As well as being able to shape-shift, the engineers say their robots are magnetic and can also conduct electricity.
The robots were tested in obstacle courses of mobility and shape-morphing.
The terrifying dystopia of shapeshifting metal assassins seen in Terminator 2 may not have been as far-fetched as once thought.
Researchers from China created droplets of liquid metal that move through obstacle courses and Petri dishes by 'eating' flakes of aluminum
Team leader Doctor Chengfeng Pan explained that where traditional robots are hard-bodied and stiff, 'soft' robots have the opposite problem; they are flexible but weak, and their movements are difficult to control.
'Giving robots the ability to switch between liquid and solid states endows them with more functionality,' said Pan.
Senior author Professor Carmel Majidi, a mechanical engineer at Carnegie Mellon University, in Canada said: 'The magnetic particles here have two roles.
'One is that they make the material responsive to an alternating magnetic field, so you can, through induction, heat up the material and cause the phase change.
'But the magnetic particles also give the robots mobility and the ability to move in response to the magnetic field.'
He explained that the process is in contrast to existing phase-shifting materials that rely on heat guns, electrical currents, or other external heat sources to induce solid-to-liquid transformation.
Prof Majidi says the new material also boasts an 'extremely fluid' liquid phase compared to other phase-changing materials, whose 'liquid' phases are considerably more viscous.
Before exploring potential applications, the team tested the material's mobility and strength in various scenarios.
The robot seems to pull inspiration from Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In the 1991 film T-1000 liquifies himself to walk through metal bars
The robot liquifies and slides through the bars. This is because of magnetic particles embedded in gallium, a metal with a very low melting point of 85 degrees Fahrenheit.
With the aid of a magnetic field, the robots jumped over moats, climbed walls, and even split in half to cooperatively move other objects around before coalescing back together.
'Now, we're pushing this material system in more practical ways to solve some very specific medical and engineering problems,' Pan said.
The team also used the robots to remove a foreign object from a model stomach and to deliver drugs on-demand into the same stomach.
The robot can be heated and an external magnet pulls it in a specific direction
Once on the outside of the cage, the robot reforms back into its solid shape
The innovation may also work as smart soldering robots for wireless circuit assembly and repair and as a universal mechanical 'screw' for assembling parts in hard-to-reach spaces.
Prof Majidi added: 'Future work should further explore how these robots could be used within a biomedical context.
'What we're showing are just one-off demonstrations, proofs of concept, but much more study will be required to delve into how this could actually be used for drug delivery or for removing foreign objects.'
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- Gemiddelde waardering: 0/5 - (0 Stemmen) Categorie:SF-snufjes }, Robotics and A.I. Artificiel Intelligence ( E, F en NL )
21-01-2023
A ROBOT CHOREOGRAPHER REVEALS WHY M3GAN — AND ALL ROBOTS — SHOULD DANCE
MOLLY GLICK JAN 19 2023
A ROBOT CHOREOGRAPHER REVEALS WHY M3GAN — AND ALL ROBOTS — SHOULD DANCE
Something about dancing robots seems to tickle people’s fancies. After all, millions of people watched a 2020 video from the robotics company Boston Dynamics of its fancy humanoid and quadrupedal devices getting down to ‘60s soul.
More recently, the murderous (yet campy) villain in the movie M3GAN has captivated the internet with her moves — and even earned recognition as a gay icon. Whether we’re obsessing over grooving robots or moving like robots ourselves, automaton choreography clearly holds a place in our hearts.
So it’s no surprise that a niche research field dubbed choreorobotics has gained traction in recent years. Brown University even has an entire course dedicated to the subject. Not only are labs programming robots to gyrate and hop, but dance experts are also helping scientists give their devices more fluid, human-like movements. Ultimately, this kind of work could help us feel closer to robots in an increasingly automated world.
Kate Sicchio, a choreographer and digital artist at Virginia Commonwealth University, combines her dance and tech knowledge to devise robot performances.Last year, Sicchio worked with Patrick Martin from the university’s engineering department to produce a (surprisingly touching) human-automaton duet. Offstage, she also helps design machines with more realistic motions.
Inverse talked to Sicchio to learn more about choreorobotics — and whether increasingly limber robots could actually become blood-thirsty killers like M3GAN.
WHY DO YOU THINK ROBOT DANCING VIDEOS GET SO POPULAR?
It's really interesting to have this unfamiliar device do this uncanny human thing. It’s similar to why we love putting googly eyes on everything. This makes it human even though it's not supposed to be. And that becomes funny or endearing somehow. It's very popular to make the robot do this very human, expressive thing when it's not human or expressive on its own
WHAT MAKES A ROBOT PERFORMANCE POWERFUL?
One of the things we found is that a robot on its own feels very isolated and cold. We have this piece called “Amelia and the Machine.”In the opening, this dancer is actually moving the robot arm around.
People are really moved by this intimacy with the robot and the fact that she's touching it.
It's a small manipulator robot, so it's probably the size of a toddler. The fact that she’s sitting next to it — that small connection really changes how people see the robot because it's no longer this isolated thing. All of a sudden it has a companion.
WHAT STYLE OF DANCE DO ROBOTS DO BEST?
My home is contemporary dance, so that's where I go first. That tends to work well because, with the robot we’re using, it's not a one-to-one mapping of the human body onto the robot. Sometimes it's hard to do traditional ballet, where there are really specific positions to hit. It’s really hard to map an arabesque onto a robot that doesn't have a leg.
I think contemporary dance, where there's a lot of freedom and creativity in how you develop movement, works well. I would be interested in doing things with dance forms with more rhythm or more structure and timing — that would be a really interesting study to follow up with at some point. More tutting or street dance forms could be really interesting to play with.
THE M3GAN DANCE SEEMS TO FRIGHTEN, OR AT LEAST CONFUSE, VIEWERS. CAN DANCING DEVICES BACKFIRE AND ACTUALLY ALIENATE US FROM ROBOTS?
That’s something that we're also studying. There's this weird space where it totally can go wrong and could be like, “They're trying too much to make it human,” and it just falls short and becomes scary. I think what's interesting about M3GAN is that it's a very humanoid robot. The robots I work with do not look human at all, and I'm not interested in trying to make them look human. I get a lot of recommendations to put costumes on them. But I don't know that it needs a hand or a hat, or a tiara. It’s this weird moment where it can become scary instead of endearing or friendly.
One thing that's interesting about M3GAN is how it quickly becomes a killer robot. That is an ethical concern in this field — where might this go wrong? Could this become weaponized somehow if it becomes so good at moving? That's something I think about, too: How do we keep them ethical? I've never taken DARPA funding, but I know people who have gotten military funding for projects like this.
DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE HOLLYWOOD DANCING ROBOT SCENE?
The scene from Ex Machina. What I like about that dancing robot scene is it’s kind of the reveal that, guess what, this is all training for this AI robot, and all these women you keep seeing in the house aren't really women — and I'm going to show you because we can do this crazy dance routine together.
What stands out and makes it so interesting is that they do all these disco moves, but their eyes are locked on the guy watching. They never move their heads, which is what makes it so weird and un-human: They never unlock their focus. They're not having fun.
WHAT TYPES OF ROBOTS HAVE THE BEST MOVES?
With simpler robots, you can better appreciate the movement they can do and see how that can be made into something more expressive or more collaborative with the human. I think that’s less scary because it's not trying to be human and then failing.
Most researchers use more simple devices — a lot do big industrial arms. It's almost become a trope, the pretty ballerina with the big industrial arm. And then Boston Dynamics has the bipedal, more human sort of robots. The company’s dance spectacles look seamless, but they are actually really hard to program. So they never do them live, you only see the edited videos. They’re a huge production that takes several days to film to get you three minutes of a Bruno Mars song or whatever.
The humanoid ones are just tricky, that center of gravity thing is really hard — it’s easier when the robot is low to the ground. With our small robots, if you make a movement too fast or wild, it will fall over. So you can imagine a big humanoid robot trying to get it to jump, and land is very difficult.
WHY IS CHOREOROBOTICS IMPORTANT BEYOND PERFORMANCE?
I make stage pieces with Patrick Martin, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering. But we're also doing scientific studies during that process. We found that, because dancers are interested in doing extreme or different movements, they're very good at finding the boundaries of what a robot can do very quickly. A friend of mine calls dancers “extreme user testers.”
We’ve been doing a lot with machine learning and creating new algorithms for robots to move and we’ve been doing that by studying dancers. We do things like motion capture of dancers doing certain gestures, and then see how we can map those to the robot and see if we can get it to move with new qualities or in ways that normal programming hasn't thought of.
I also think it’s interesting when roboticists engage with choreography themselves. We did a workshop with Patrick Martin and his graduate students and some of my dance students — getting them to move. We explored a variety of prompts around moving the body in space, ways to repeat lines of the body with other body parts, and other approaches of responding to the geometry of the body.
When roboticists think about movement, they're always thinking of it outside of their own body. I think about it like getting the robot to follow my arm. Getting roboticists to actually do the dance and be in their bodies is a really interesting place for us to go next. That will start to develop this kind of kinesthetic empathy that perhaps we're searching for with dancing robots. I think roboticists should become dancers.
Scientists and publishing specialists are concerned that the increasing sophistication of chatbots could undermine research integrity and accuracy.
Credit: Ted Hsu/Alamy
An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December1. Researchers are divided over the implications for science.
“I am very worried,” says Sandra Wachter, who studies technology and regulation at the University of Oxford, UK, and was not involved in the research. “If we’re now in a situation where the experts are not able to determine what’s true or not, we lose the middleman that we desperately need to guide us through complicated topics,” she adds.
The chatbot, ChatGPT, creates realistic and intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts. It is a ‘large language model’, a system based on neural networks that learn to perform a task by digesting huge amounts of existing human-generated text. Software company OpenAI, based in San Francisco, California, released the tool on 30 November, and it is free to use.
Since its release, researchers have been grappling with the ethical issues surrounding its use, because much of its output can be difficult to distinguish from human-written text. Scientists have published a preprint2 and an editorial3 written by ChatGPT. Now, a group led by Catherine Gao at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, has used ChatGPT to generate artificial research-paper abstracts to test whether scientists can spot them.
The researchers asked the chatbot to write 50 medical-research abstracts based on a selection published in JAMA, The New England Journal of Medicine, The BMJ, The Lancet and Nature Medicine. They then compared these with the original abstracts by running them through a plagiarism detector and an AI-output detector, and they asked a group of medical researchers to spot the fabricated abstracts.
Under the radar
The ChatGPT-generated abstracts sailed through the plagiarism checker: the median originality score was 100%, which indicates that no plagiarism was detected. The AI-output detector spotted 66% the generated abstracts. But the human reviewers didn't do much better: they correctly identified only 68% of the generated abstracts and 86% of the genuine abstracts. They incorrectly identified 32% of the generated abstracts as being real and 14% of the genuine abstracts as being generated.
“ChatGPT writes believable scientific abstracts,” say Gao and colleagues in the preprint. “The boundaries of ethical and acceptable use of large language models to help scientific writing remain to be determined.”
Wachter says that, if scientists can’t determine whether research is true, there could be “dire consequences”. As well as being problematic for researchers, who could be pulled down flawed routes of investigation, because the research they are reading has been fabricated, there are “implications for society at large because scientific research plays such a huge role in our society”. For example, it could mean that research-informed policy decisions are incorrect, she adds.
But Arvind Narayanan, a computer scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey, says: “It is unlikely that any serious scientist will use ChatGPT to generate abstracts.” He adds that whether generated abstracts can be detected is “irrelevant”. “The question is whether the tool can generate an abstract that is accurate and compelling. It can’t, and so the upside of using ChatGPT is minuscule, and the downside is significant,” he says.
Irene Solaiman, who researches the social impact of AI at Hugging Face, an AI company with headquarters in New York and Paris, has fears about any reliance on large language models for scientific thinking. “These models are trained on past information and social and scientific progress can often come from thinking, or being open to thinking, differently from the past,” she adds.
The authors suggest that those evaluating scientific communications, such as research papers and conference proceedings, should put policies in place to stamp out the use of AI-generated texts. If institutions choose to allow use of the technology in certain cases, they should establish clear rules around disclosure. Earlier this month, the Fortieth International Conference on Machine Learning, a large AI conference that will be held in Honolulu, Hawaii, in July, announced that it has banned papers written by ChatGPT and other AI language tools.
Solaiman adds that in fields where fake information can endanger people’s safety, such as medicine, journals may have to take a more rigorous approach to verifying information as accurate.
Narayanan says that the solutions to these issues should not focus on the chatbot itself, “but rather the perverse incentives that lead to this behaviour, such as universities conducting hiring and promotion reviews by counting papers with no regard to their quality or impact”.
Nature613, 423 (2023)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00056-7
References
Gao, C. A. et al. Preprint at bioRxiv https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.12.23.521610 (2022).
A laser beam (green) shoots into the sky alongside the 124-metre-high telecommunications tower on Säntis mountain in the Swiss Alps.
Credit: TRUMPF/Martin Stollberg
A rapidly firing laser can divert lightning strikes, scientists have shown for the first time in real-world experiments1. The work suggests that laser beams could be used as lightning rods to protect infrastructure, although perhaps not any time soon.
“The achievement is impressive given that the scientific community has been working hard along this objective for more than 20 years,” says Stelios Tzortzakis, a laser physicist at the University of Crete, Greece, who was not involved in the research. “If it’s useful or not, only time can say.”
Metal lightning rods are commonly used to divert lightning strikes and safely dissipate their charge. But the rods’ size is limited, meaning that so, too, is the area they protect.
Physicists have wondered whether lasers could enhance protection, because they can reach higher into the sky than a physical structure and can point in any direction. But despite successful laboratory demonstrations, researchers have never before succeeded in field campaigns, says Tzortzakis.
Bolt from the blue
To change that, a group of roughly 25 researchers set up the Laser Lightning Rod project, which trialled a specially created €2 million (US$2 million) high-power laser in the Swiss Alps. The scientists placed the laser next to the Säntis telecommunications tower, which is hit frequently by lightning. “This is one of those projects that everyone was waiting for the results of,” says Valentina Shumakova, a laser physicist at the University of Vienna.
A sufficiently intense laser beam can create a conductive path for lightning to travel down, just as a metal wire can. Physicists think that it does this by shifting the properties of air so that the beam focuses into a thin, intense filament. This rapidly heats the air, reducing its density and creating a favourable path for lightning. “It’s like drilling a hole through the air with the laser,” says Aurélien Houard, a physicist at the Laboratory of Applied Optics in Paris, who led the project.
Rather than try to divert lightning from the tower, the Säntis experiments were designed to show that the laser could guide a strike’s path through the structure’s lightning rod. In future use, similar beams would guide strikes away from sensitive installations and onto a distant lightning rod, says Houard.
Guided lightning
Over 10 weeks of observation, the team spotted the laser channelling 4 lightning events during 6 hours of thunderstorms. A high-speed camera clearly showed one strike following the straight line of the laser beam, rather than taking a branching path.
“For 100% of the strikes where the laser was present, we measured an effect of the laser,” says Houard. But Tzortzakis notes that the laser was also active for many hours without channelling strikes. This suggests that although the laser diverted lightning, it did not force thunderclouds to discharge, which would be a better protection strategy, he says.
The latest effort succeeded where others had failed, says Tzortzakis, because previous attempt had used a laser that fired just a few pulses per second. This team used a specialist laser that fires 1,000 high-energy pulses per second, which would have boosted its chance of intercepting the lightning.
However, the fact that the project’s laser is one of a kind is also its biggest limitation, because it will take time to shrink the system and make it cheaper and more practical, says Houard.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00080-7
References
Houard, A. et al. Nature Photon. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-022-01139-z (2023).
Somitogenesis is the process by which segmented body structures like vertebrae form in embryos. While the process is well understood in animals like mice or zebrafish it is difficult to study in humans.
But now, researchers have created a model embryo capable of undergoing somitogenesis, using pluripotent stem cells, called an axioloid.
The researchers hope that this new platform will allow them to better study human development and the diseases that can arise when it is disrupted.
As we enter into 2023, what can we expect? At Inverse, we aren't in the business of fortune-telling, but the innovations we saw in the last 12 months can help us predict what might be in store for the next — from driver-free transportation to commercial space exploration to (finally) clean energy for all
5. CHEAPER EVS AND DRIVER-FREE SHIPPING
Cheaper options like the 2024 Chevrolet Equinox EV could make electric cars available to broader swaths of the population.
Chevrolet
This year will usher in more affordable EVs, allowing a bigger chunk of the population to drive sustainably. For example, GM is rolling out cheaper models that run for around $30,000, expanding the choices for drivers on a budget. Tesla’s least expensive offering, the Model 3, starts at around $46,990 — while it’s currently the best-selling electric car in the United States, some of these new models could knock the Model 3 off its throne.
If you don’t feel like driving, it may soon get easier to hail an autonomous car. In 2023, Uber plans to launch a fully driverless service, and GM’s robotaxi division (which now operates in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Austin) aims to enter a “large number of markets.”
Cars aren’t the only mode of transportation to ditch drivers. Autonomous semi-trucks could surge ahead in 2023 and, soon enough, forever change the way we get our goods.
In the coming months, self-driving trucks are planned to hit Texas highways. Companies like Aurora Innovation and TuSimple will start to test their wheels without any human backup drivers — which has concerned some safety advocates, Reutersreported. Driverless semis have already been tested out in Arizona and Arkansas, but Texas is particularly attractive for autonomous truck companies to set up hubs because it sits in the middle of one of the country’s busiest freight routes.
4. COMMERCIAL SPACE FIRSTS
If all goes well, SpaceX’s Starship could finally take off for an orbital test.
SpaceX
Just as in 2022, space magnates are still shooting for the Moon. But before SpaceX can take on lunar landings, it needs to send Starship on its first orbital test flight. Chris Impey, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, thinks that this is the year. SpaceX “will have its first successful orbital flight of the Starship, a game-changing rocket in the effort to get astronauts to the Moon and Mars within a decade,” he tells Inverse.
While it may be a few years before people step foot on the Moon again, uncrewed commercial landers could touch down within a few months. In December, the Japanese firm ispace launched a lunar lander that’s scheduled to touch down in March. If things work out, ispace will become the first private company to land on the Moon — that is, if it isn’t beaten by landers from the U.S.-based companies Astrobotic and Intuitive Machines, which are slated to arrive around the same time.
In another victory for private space, SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission could accomplish the first-ever commercial spacewalk. It’s scheduled to take off no earlier than March 2023 at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Four passengers, including billionaire mission funder Jared Isaacman, will travel to a maximum orbit of around 745 miles above Earth — the highest of any crewed vehicle since the Apollo missions.
Polaris Dawn will also offer crucial data to scientists on the ground: For example, the astronauts will wear smart contact lenses with tiny sensors that measure eye pressure while in microgravity (past NASA missions haverevealed that space travel affects people’s vision). They’ll also receive a brain scan just hours after splashing down to Earth to examine how microgravity impacts the brain.
Another potential breakthrough: The first methane-powered rocket could reach space this year if United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket aces its first orbital test (which was originally planned for 2020). Methane is more stable than the liquid hydrogen powering most rockets today. It can also be stored at more moderate temperatures than the super-cold ones required for liquid hydrogen. In fact, astronauts could even make methane fuel while on Mars for the journey back home.
3. U.S. WIND FARMS TAKE OFF
The Vineyard Wind 1 project off of Massachusetts is planned to go online this year.
GE Renewable Energy
Bringing offshore wind to the U.S. hasn’t exactly been a breeze, but this year wind energy could finally have its moment: The energy company Avangrid Renewables plans to take the country’s first commercial-scale offshore wind project online in 2023. Its Vineyard Wind 1 project, which sits over 15 miles off the coast of Massachusetts, will offer a capacity of 800 megawatts. Plenty of other wind farms are in the works, including potential projects off the coasts of California, New Jersey, North Carolina, Connecticut, Maryland, and Virginia.
We can also expect a huge win for nuclear energy. The nuclear waste company Posiva will begin operating the world’s first storage facility for nuclear fuel in Olkiluoto, an island off of Finland. The facility will hold up to around 7,000 tons of radioactive uranium, which will be put into copper canisters and buried over 1,300 feet underground. Fortunately for the people living above, the waste will sit guarded for millennia.
2. A DIFFERENT LOOK AT VIRTUAL REALITY
Companies will likely start to market VR and AR headsets for uses beyond gaming, like working from home and exercising.
Meta
If 2022 was the year of Metaverse fails, 2023 could herald its comeback — and improvements in VR and AR tech as a whole.
“I believe we will see virtual reality technology's continued refinement,” Christopher Ball, an assistant professor of augmented and virtual reality at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, tells Inverse.
The Meta Quest 3 headset will be announced later this year, and it will likely be more affordable than the Meta Quest Pro. But the new Quest could pack some advanced features now found exclusively in the Meta Quest Pro, according to Ball.
He also predicts that virtual reality companies may focus less on gaming and ramp up promotion of other uses to consumers, like working from home, exercising, and socializing. For example, the recent partnership between Meta and Microsoft will bring Office 365 apps to VR. And Meta is currently trying to buy Within, a VR company with a popular exercise app called Supernatural — against the wishes of the FTC.
“Hopefully, we will also learn more about Apple’s long-gestating mixed-reality headset. Apple has a strong record of refining consumer technologies with improved software integration,” Ball says. “Therefore, many observers are eagerly anticipating Apple’s entrance into the mixed-reality space, as they may become the trendsetters for extended reality technology and software over the next decade.”
1. A BIOTECH BREAKTHROUGH COULD GO MAINSTREAM
This year, CRISPR gene-editing therapy could finally be delivered to patients.
Shutterstock
After the miraculous success of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccines from BioNTech and other pharmaceutical giants, scientists have doubled down on developing more mRNA jabs to protect against a range of potentially deadly diseases. In 2023, BioNTech plans to begin human trials for shots against tuberculosis, malaria, and genital herpes, as reported by Nature.
Another buzzy technology could make inroads this year. The Swiss-American biotechnology company CRISPR Therapeutics could make history by receiving the first-ever regulatory approval for a CRISPR gene-editing therapy in the U.S. and Europe. CRISPR Therapeutics is seeking FDA approval for a treatment for two genetic blood diseases — sickle cell disease and beta thalassaemia. If all goes well, it could even hit the market in the coming months.
THE INVERSE ANALYSIS
Of course, there's no telling how exactly 2023 will play out. But if recent years are any indication, developments that have been decades in the making could finally start to take off. After all, scientists did just manage to bombard hydrogen with lasers long enough to create some mysticalfusion energy.
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16-11-2022
BREAKING: Large Hadron Collider Just Discovered Three New Exotic Particles
BREAKING: Large Hadron Collider Just Discovered Three New Exotic Particles
On Tuesday, the European nuclear research center CERN said that scientists using the upgraded Large Hadron Collider (LHC) had found three particles that had never been seen before.
The world’s biggest and most powerful particle collider started up again after a three-year break for improvements. Researchers can look at twenty times more collisions now that the LHC has been updated.
Researchers at CERN found a “pentaquark” and the first pair of “tetraquarks” with the help of the improved collider.
What does it mean that particles have been found?
Chris Parkes, a spokesman for the LHCb experiment, which was designed to find out what happened after the Big Bang, says that this discovery will help theorists make a unified model of exotic hadrons, the nature of which is mostly unknown.
“We are in a time of discovery that is similar to the 1950s, when a “particle zoo” of hadrons started to be found, which led to the quark model of normal hadrons in the 1960s. “We’re making ‘particle zoo 2.0,'” said Niels Tuning, who is in charge of physics at the LHCb.
A quark is an electron that can’t be broken up into smaller pieces. Hadrons, like the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei, which are an important part of the universe, are made when two or three quarks come together. Before the LHC got better, it was hard to find these particles because they often broke apart quickly.
The upgraded Large Hadron Collider will run for about four years at 13.6 trillion electronvolts.
Tuning said, “The more analyses we do, the more kinds of strange hadrons we find.”
Researchers want to learn more about “dark matter,” which has never been seen or touched. CERN also wants to find out more about how the subatomic particles that make matter and antimatter are made and how they break down.
Researchers developed a new type of solar energy harvesting system that breaks the efficiency record of all existing technologies.
(CREDIT: Creative Commons)
Photovoltaic cells which convert sunlight directly into energy have made much progress. Yet with all the research, history and science behind it, there are limits to how much solar power can be harvested and used – as its generation is restricted only to the daylight.
Bo Zhao, Kalsi Assistant Professor of mechanical engineering, and his doctoral student, Sina Jafari Ghalekohneh, have created new architecture that improves the efficiency of solar energy harvesting to the thermodynamic limit.
(CREDIT: University of Houston)
University of Houston professor Bo Zhao is continuing the historic quest, reporting on a new type of solar energy harvesting system that breaks the efficiency record of all existing technologies. And no less important, it clears the way to use solar power 24/7.
(a) Illustration of traditional STPV and (b) nonreciprocal STPV. The absorber of traditional STPV has back radiation towards the sun. In nonreciprocal STPV, the back emission from the intermediate layer is suppressed, and more incoming energy is directed towards the cell. The nonreciprocal behavior of the intermediate layer can be made wavelength selective.
Traditional solar thermophotovoltaics rely on an intermediate layer to tailor sunlight for better efficiency. The front side of the intermediate layer (the side facing the sun) is designed to absorb all photons coming from the sun. In this way, solar energy is converted to thermal energy of the intermediate layer and elevates the temperature of the intermediate layer.
But the thermodynamic efficiency limit of STPVs, which has long been understood to be the blackbody limit (85.4%), is still far lower than the Landsberg limit (93.3%), the ultimate efficiency limit for solar energy harvesting.
Zhao explained, “In this work, we show that the efficiency deficit is caused by the inevitable back emission of the intermediate layer towards the sun resulting from the reciprocity of the system. We propose nonreciprocal STPV systems that utilize an intermediate layer with nonreciprocal radiative properties. Such a nonreciprocal intermediate layer can substantially suppress its back emission to the sun and funnel more photon flux towards the cell.”
“We show that, with such improvement, the nonreciprocal STPV system can reach the Landsberg limit, and practical STPV systems with single-junction photovoltaic cells can also experience a significant efficiency boost,” he added.
Besides improved efficiency, STPVs promise compactness and dispatchability (electricity that can be programmed on demand based on market needs).
In one important application scenario, STPVs can be coupled with an economical thermal energy storage unit to generate electricity 24/7.
“Our work highlights the great potential of nonreciprocal thermal photonic components in energy applications. The proposed system offers a new pathway to improve the performance of STPV systems significantly. It may pave the way for nonreciprocal systems to be implemented in practical STPV systems currently used in power plants,” said Zhao.
***
As an intellectual exercise this is an elegant work showing where to look for more efficiency. This is a strong case for nonreciprocal solar theromophotovoltaics. But they haven’t been designed and engineered yet.
Perhaps this work will trigger some progress. 93.+% is definitely something to keep looking for. And that “economical thermal energy storage unit” will be needing some work as well.
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14-11-2022
Most Useful Machines That Do Incredible Things
Most Useful Machines That Do Incredible Things
In today’s world, technology is evolving faster than ever before and humans are powering it. Brilliant minds all around the world innovate day and night to produce the most advanced machines and equipment that can make our lives easier and our work more efficient. Sure, technology can get terrifying, if you think of it can do, such as tear down entire forests. But it’s also pretty amazing – we use machines to create bridges where humans just can’t on their own. Stick around to learn more about the top 12 most useful machines that help humans do incredible things!
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ROBOTICS COMPANIES DON'T WANT YOU TO USE THEIR GIZMOS FOR EVIL
ROBOTICS COMPANIES DON'T WANT YOU TO USE THEIR GIZMOS FOR EVIL
Plus: Worm spit could annihilate plastic.
Scientists are betting that the wax worm’s saliva can help cut down on plastic pollution by breaking down PE plastic.
Simona Gaddi
Plastic pollution is a huge problem worldwide: We produce around 350 to 400 million tons of non-degradable plastic annually, and 5 to 13 million tons end up in the ocean. But we don’t yet have many sustainable, cost-effective recycling methods yet.
A promising technique called biodegradation could add a crucial tool to our recycling toolbox: Scientists have deployed organisms like bacteria and fungi to break down plastic, but it can take months and require pre-treatment that demands loads of energy.
Now, findings suggest that the saliva from the beeswax-eating wax worm, or Galleria mellonella, could be harnessed to break down the world's most widely used plastic (polyethylene or PE), according to a new study published in the journal Nature Communications. The method doesn’t require any treatment beforehand, saving time and money.
Researchers from Spain studied wax worm larvae saliva and found that it can degrade PE by breaking it down into smaller molecules. The process only takes a few hours. To the best of the researchers’ knowledge, this is the quickest biodegradation technique yet for PE.
Study author Federica Bertocchini, a molecular biologist at the Spanish National Research Council, hopes the new study can inspire other labs to go after similar research.
“We also hope that the study might increase the study of insects as the wonderful resourceful animals they are, both as a biotechnological tool, but, even more, at the basic research level,” she adds.
YOU MAY HAVE seen clips of the creepy, dog-like robot from Boston Dynamics called Spot that can traverse rough terrains, map its environment, and grab you a drink, among other skills. The company has even programmed Spot to dance to K-pop.
Spot and other roving autonomous bots developed in recent years have received lots of criticism as they’ve been increasingly embraced by law enforcement officials. Some experts worry that the AI programmed into these robots could target people of color or use excessive violence. Last year, public concern forced the NYPD to retire a Spot model that they called Digidog.
It’s also possible for ordinary people to use commercially available robots for evil: This summer, a Russian man terrified the internet when he slapped a gun onto a Unitree dogbot.
Now, Boston Dynamics and other robotics companies seem eager to clean up their image.
WHAT’S NEW — In an open letter published last week, six major robotics companies have promised not to weaponize their publicly available devices and software — and not to support anyone doing so — as originally reported by Axios. These include Agility Robotics, which is working on a hyped-up humanoid called Digit (that will come with a face and hands).
While the letter notes that “advanced mobile robots will provide great benefit to society as co-workers in industry and companions in our homes,” the automation giants do point out the potential for mistreatment.
“We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues,” they add.
The Spot robot from Boston Dynamics has appealed to law enforcement officials in recent years.
Sam Barnes/Sportsfile/Getty Images
THERE’S A CATCH
This oath doesn’t seem to apply to the devices used by military and police officials. That’s not a huge surprise, since Boston Dynamics largely got its start with funding from the military, along with the controversial Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In fact, U.S. Marine Corps officials have already looked into using Boston Dynamics’ AlphaDog robot in combat, but they shelved it in 2015 because it proved too loud for the battlefield. They have also tried to prep the company’s human-like Atlas model for battle.
Governments around the world also want to automate their armies. For instance, the French army has tested Spot for surveillance purposes, according to The Verge.
So while it may get more difficult for a regular Joe to go haywire with a humanoid, this option doesn’t appear to be off the table for law enforcement agencies.
This hyped-up tool was created by a machine learning engineer named Boris Dayma in July 2021 for a competition held by Google and Hugging Face, a startup that hosts open-source machine learning tools on its website. Suddenly, DALL-E Mini became the Internet’s beloved toy — largely thanks to its ease of access.
The concept was inspired by an art-making model called DALL-E 1, which was unveiled in 2021 by a machine learning research organization called OpenAI. While OpenAI kept DALL-E 1 under wraps, Dayma’s DALL-E Mini was open to anyone with an Internet connection.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 with an idealistic name and a promise to offer its work to AI researchers for free. The organization since reneged on that promise, turning for-profit and inking a $1 billion partnership with Microsoft. This year, it released its more powerful, higher-budget DALL-E 2. It costs money to use, unlike Dayma’s Craiyon — in fact, he switched the name to avoid confusion with OpenAI’s models.
Just as OpenAI did with its controversial language model, GPT-3, the company plans to license DALL-E 2 out for use by corporate clients.
But the future of AI art does not necessarily resemble walled gardens with quotas and entrance fees. Shortly after the birth of DALL-E 2, a fledgling startup named Stability AI released an open-source model called Stable Diffusion, which is free to use. Anyone could download and run Stable Diffusion themself; the only (admittedly steep) barrier was a powerful enough computer. Along with Craiyon, Internet users now have a few free options to make the bizarre images of their dreams a reality.
To dive into the origins of this AI meme-making frenzy, we spoke with Boris Dayma, the machine learning engineer who spearheaded DALL-E Mini.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Where did you get the idea?
At the beginning of last year, OpenAI published a blog about DALL-E 1, which was that cool AI model that could draw images from any text prompt. There had already been some other projects around that. But that was the first one that looked impressive.
The only problem was that the code was not released. Nobody could play with it.
So, a bunch of people decided that they want to try to reproduce it, and I got very interested, and I was like, “I want to try, too. This is one of the coolest AI applications. I want to learn how that works and I want to try to do it myself.” So, when I saw that, I immediately tweeted, “OK, I’m going to build that.”
I didn’t do anything for six months.
What finally changed?
In July of last year, HuggingFace and Google … organized a community event, like a competition to develop AI models.
You could choose whatever subject you wanted, and in exchange, you would have access to their computers, which are much better than what people typically have at home. And you would have access to support from HuggingFace engineers and Google engineers. I thought it was a great opportunity to learn and to play with it.
I proposed the project: DALL-E Mini. Let’s try to reproduce DALL-E — or, not necessarily reproduce, but try to get the same results, even if we build it a bit differently. Let’s see how it works, and learn, and experiment on that.
What was that first version like?
It was not what we have now. Now, the [current] model is much, much more powerful. But it was already impressive.
When it started, after one or two days, you would put “view of the beach by night,” and you would have something kind of dark. “View of the beach during the day” — you would have something clear. You couldn’t necessarily recognize the beach yet, but we were like, “Oh, my God, it’s actually learning something.”
At the end of like days of training the model, it was actually able to do landscapes quite nicely, which was very impressive. We put “snowy mountain,” and it worked. That was really exciting. Yeah, actually, we were even surprised that it worked!
But, you know, we did a lot of things very fast [during the competition], and there was still so much to optimize.
Only many months later did it become popular. What do you think caused it to explode in popularity?
I was surprised how it became very popular. But I think it’s because, as we made the model public, some people realized it could do things that were, for example, funny images and memes and things like that. They realized that certain famous personalities were actually recognizable, even though they’re not necessarily drawn perfectly. You can recognize them and put them in funny situations, and the model is able to do that.
It reached a moment where it suddenly was able to compose more complex prompts, and also able to recognize more people. I think that turned it viral.
What did you think of the funny pictures?
It was something I didn’t expect. All along the way, when I was developing the model, my test prompts were very basic. My most creative prompt was “the Eiffel Tower on the moon.” Maybe I wouldn’t have noticed that it could do such creative things without the use of the broader audience, I would say.
People have been doing the model in all kind of situations. ... Sometimes, I’m surprised what it can draw. Recently, people for example have been using “octopus assembling Ikea furniture.” Or, like, “a store being robbe by teddy bears, view from CCTV camera.” This is crazy that it works at all.
Does Craiyon still have a place in a world with DALL-E 2?
I think there are a lot of advantages.
One of the first is it democratizes, in a way, access to AI technology. The application of creating images, I think, is a really cool application, whether you do it for work, because it’s useful for you, or even just for entertainment. Having people just having fun, creating funny memes — I think it has a big value.
Giving access to everybody versus only the people who can afford [DALL-E 2] or the select group of users who have access, I think it lets people benefit equally from the same technology. Having it free is something that’s very important to us as well.
Also, one of the issues you have when few people can access a big model is there’s a higher danger for deepfakes, et cetera, because only a few people are able to create it and control it.
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09-11-2022
These futuristic "energy weapons" could finally bring sci-fi to the battlefield
These futuristic "energy weapons" could finally bring sci-fi to the battlefield
Sarah Scoles
Weapons usually get their power from the explosion of one object near other objects, one object hitting another object (hard), or both. But some devices don’t need to shoot bullets or blow up: They blast out photons — mysterious, massless particle waves of electromagnetic energy.
These futuristic "energy weapons" could finally bring sci-fi to the battlefield
Photons come in plenty of varieties: They can be X-rays or gamma rays or UV rays or optical light waves or infrared radiation or microwaves or radio waves. And some photon “ammo,” particularly microwaves and lasers, can act like electromagnetic bullets, damaging or disabling the high-tech targets in their sights — whether those be drones, satellites, small ships, or, hypothetically, Roombas.
Tools that shoot this unusual ammo are called directed energy weapons. And their various forms can, at least in theory, jam electronics, blind sensors, fry circuits, sear holes, and generally trigger non-kinetic chaos.
The U.S. military has long been interested in harnessing those destructive capabilities, to varying degrees of success. Today, the Air Force leads the charge, and the Directed Energy Directorate at Albuquerque’s Air Force Research Lab (AFRL) spends its time, in part, developing weapons that use beams of photons to punch things they don’t like.
These futuristic "energy weapons" could finally bring sci-fi to the battlefield
In its quest to create these destructors, the AFRL has joined forces with local researchers at the University of New Mexico to create the Directed Energy Center. There, students and professors conduct Air Force-relevant research and feed the pipeline of scientists who can work on the aforementioned drone-disabling and satellite-pew-pewing. These teams could also benefit the scholarly and commercial worlds in fields ranging from medicine to mining.
Through their hard work, these students could make elusive DE weapons a more viable military option: Despite more than five decades of research, these gizmos haven’t seen as much progress as some labs had hoped. Now, they might finally be coming into their own.
It’s not hard to see why scientists keep trying. Laser weapons could shoot down enemy drones, rockets, and mortars, or “dazzle” satellites — a flighty way of saying “make them confused and unable to see straight.” And microwave weapons could mess with electronics and communications over a larger area, making them ideal for disabling swarms of drones.
That latter threat is of particular concern to the Air Force these days. Drones can provide enemies with low-cost surveillance, or serve as a weapon system capable of great harm at long ranges. “As they become more proficient and technically mature, it’s important that there’s a safe way to protect the air bases,” says AFRL’s Adrian Lucero. DE weapons are on their way to accomplishing that — and amping up the energy off of the battlefield, too.
Failure to launch
These futuristic "energy weapons" could finally bring sci-fi to the battlefield
Directed energy weapons didn’t always feel so close to fruition. The federal government has looked into DE since the 1960s, but there hasn’t historically been that much to show for it.
While the Department of Defense has recently made progress on photonic weapons, in the past it has invested billions in directed energy programs that stalled and were ultimately axed, as noted in a September report by the Congressional Research Service.
You may be familiar with one of the most infamous DE boondoggles: Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which the Clinton administration shuttered in 1993. Known mockingly on the street as Star Wars, the program aimed to create, among other infrastructure, DE weapons that could shoot down missiles … from space.
Yeah, you’re not the only one who finds it unrealistic. In 1987, several years into the program, an American Physical Society study group concluded that such DE programs were decades from being operationally viable.
Many scientists wanted nothing to do with the program.
Many scientists wanted nothing to do with the program.
Nevertheless, the government poured millions of dollars into SDI. Much of that work consisted of basic research conducted at universities. In fact, for some physics and engineering researchers, the Star Wars checkbook offered “one of the few available sources for new funds,” noted a 1988 United Nations University publication.
But many scientists wanted nothing to do with the program or its bucks, in part decrying the military secrecy around some of the work. Some 6,500 researchers signed a pledge promising not to work on Star Wars, calling it “ill-conceived and dangerous.”
Edl Schamiloglu, head of the collaborative Directed Energy Center at the University of New Mexico, was doing his Ph.D. research at the time. Back then, he and his colleagues aimed to harness energy from atomic fusion using “pulsed-power technology.”
Here’s how it worked: Devices like capacitors accumulate a bunch of low-power electrical energy over time and then discharge it all at once in a rapid burst to coax atoms to combine. In 1987, though, Reagan canceled the program that funded Schamiloglu’s research.
Schamiloglu needed to pivot, and he had already heard of DE through his pulsed-power work. He previously used pulsed power to make protons; to work on DE, he just needed to apply the same sort of instrumentation to produce electrons, whose energy could be converted to microwaves. “The technology is the same,” Schamiloglu says.
These futuristic "energy weapons" could finally bring sci-fi to the battlefield
Later, with equipment donated from the Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories, Schamiloglu put his own microwave factory together. Then he took that information to the AFRL director, who provided Schamiloglu with some seed funding.
He’s been working on DE ever since at UNM — one of the few universities with this electromagnetic specialization. But this field is picking up in part because associated weapons technology has recently moved in a more mature direction.
Five years later, Air Force microwave and laser weapons took down some drones in New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range. And this past spring, a Navy laser shooter knocked out a fake cruise missile, in that same desert, where scientists also tested the first nuclear weapon.
Do I look to be in a gaming mood?
These futuristic "energy weapons" could finally bring sci-fi to the battlefield
AFRL is now developing a weapon called THOR: the Tactical High-Power Operational Responder. THOR uses high-power microwaves to mess up electronics, a concept you essentially understand if you’ve ever (for some reason) tried to nuke your cellphone.
After THOR — which lives inside a 20-foot shipping container and can hitch rides around the world on C-130 aircraft — sets a target, an operator pulls the trigger and releases a burst of microwaves that last merely a nanosecond. Its ideal “enemy”: a swarm of small drones.
Last year, a test revealed that THOR’s microwaves could indeed knock things out of the sky. It worked very well, “neutralizing” objects 100 percent of the time.
Now, AFRL wants to amp up DE research for the next generation of scientists.
That goal also appealed to Schamiloglu at the University of New Mexico. He wanted the school to take a closer look at laser DE, since it had long focused on microwaves.
After the Air Force and UNM teamed up, legislators designated money in the AFRL budget to back UNM’s Directed Energy Center, which aims to train future pew-pew gurus. “They will work not only at the Air Force Research Lab, but at the numerous contractors that support the research that’s ongoing,” says Matthew Fetrow, technology outreach lead at AFRL.
It’s not all light
These futuristic "energy weapons" could finally bring sci-fi to the battlefield
These scientists have plenty to improve on: While DE weapons are faring better than they have in the past, they’re not perfect. They can be stymied by natural forces like rain and fog — the water in the air can mess with their beams, kind of like it does with your headlights. These systems can also be big and cumbersome. Sometimes, they’re super power-hungry.
Outside of all that tech trouble, the weapons raise some ethical concerns. International law doesn’t deal much with DE, and regulations may be important to help ensure it’s used responsibly and humanely. There is a UN document, “Article 1 of the Protocol on Blinding Lasers,” which states that no one can use “laser weapons specifically designed, as their sole combat function or as one of their combat functions, to cause permanent blindness to unenhanced vision.”
Research into DE technology isn’t just useful on the battlefield. For example, industrial giant Honeywell has a whole division dedicated to directed energy’s commercial applications.
These span everything from fusion energy to laser welding and cutting. The company is also interested in the same cooling systems that keep DE weapons chill: Those can ice down batteries and radars anywhere.
Research into DE technology isn’t just useful on the battlefield.
Research into DE technology isn’t just useful on the battlefield.
On the academic side, particle accelerators also need highly focused, extremely energetic beams of particles, which can improve with advances in beams of pure energy. At Purdue University, a researcher named Allen Garner invented a microwave device in 2021 that has equal utility for quirking enemy electronics, sterilizing medical equipment, and performing noninvasive medical procedures (snip-pew snip-pew).
Then, there are the less obvious applications. “We’ve actually been seeing some interesting concepts come forward from companies — in particular, small companies — looking at using microwaves, high-power sources, to help in mining,” says Fetrow of AFRL, “which surprised the daylights out of me.”
These futuristic "energy weapons" could finally bring sci-fi to the battlefield
Right now, AFRL and UNM’s joint focus is on increasing the power you can get out of both microwave and laser systems. With microwaves, that involves building better amplifiers, which are essentially volume knobs. As for lasers, they’re trying to improve the fiber-optic cables that whip up the light beams. “The holy grail right now is to really push the power, how much power can you generate from these fiber lasers,” says Schamiloglu.
But researchers are in a bind: As power increases, so does heat, and the glass in the system gets too warm. UNM has been working on novel ways to cool those fibers, so the laser can pump out even more power.
AFRL is also working on the next generation of THOR technology that’s meant to be lighter and more energy-efficient. It goes by the name Mjölnir, THOR’s mighty hammer — “THOR’s Massless Hammer” apparently wasn’t catchy enough.
It may take a while before such a hammer can be hurled on the battlefield, but in the coming decades, the battlefield could start to resemble a sci-fi flick.
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THESE TINY MAGNETIC ROBOTS CAN INFILTRATE TUMORS — AND MAYBE DESTROY CANCER
THESE TINY MAGNETIC ROBOTS CAN INFILTRATE TUMORS — AND MAYBE DESTROY CANCER
Bacterial cancer treatments are coming back into fashion (with some futuristic upgrades).
DOCTORS AREN’T ALWAYS able to remove hard-to-reach cancerous tumors with surgery, so some patients must receive aggressive chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy — a combination that can prove ineffective.
But a new cancer treatment may offer a way to take down inoperable tumors with pinpoint accuracy, no radiation required.
Researchers have figured out how to deliver cancer-killing compounds (called enterotoxins) to tumors using bionic bacteria that are steered by a magnetic field. These “micro-robots” can hunt down and converge on a specific tumor, then shrink it by releasing the bacteria's own naturally produced anti-cancer chemicals. The results were recently published in the journal Science.
This high-tech cancer treatment could allow magnetic bacteria (grey) to squeeze through narrow spaces between cells and attack tumors.
Yimo Yan / ETH Zurich
“Cancer is such a complex disease, it’s hard to combat it with one weapon,” says Simone Schürle-Finke, a micro-roboticist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland and the first author of the new study.
She and her lab hope that these magnetic, bacteria-riding little robots will offer a precise and powerful addition to the cancer treatment toolbox.
HERE’S THE BACKGROUND
The idea of curing cancerous tumors with bacteria is surprisingly old. American oncologist William Coley first started injecting his patients with a mixture of dead bacteria and bacterial proteins in the 1890s. After he reported successfully treating people with otherwise inoperable tumors, his work garnered equal parts enthusiasm and skepticism from the medical community.
Despite Coley’s vocal critics (including members of the American Medical Association), his formula, dubbed “Coley’s toxins,” would go on to be sold as a cancer treatment for the next seventy years. By the 1960s, though, Coley’s toxins had all but fallen by the wayside in favor of promising new treatments, like radiation and chemotherapy.
William Coley used bacteria like Streptococcus pyogenes to treat cancer.
Shutterstock
Significant interest in bacteria as a cancer treatment didn’t re-emerge until the dawn of CRISPR, a revolutionary bioengineering technology, in the early 2010s. And today, labs are realizing the limits of today’s standard cancer interventions, such as their imprecise nature and harmful side effects.
Today, researchers like Schürle-Finke and her team are putting micro-robots inside genetically engineered bacteria to target cancerous growths like never before. Once these microbes reach a tumor, “you basically have a little nano-factory that continues to release molecules that can be toxic to cancer cells,” she says. The only issue? Figuring out how to get the bacteria bots in place.
WHAT’S NEW
Many inoperable tumors can’t be addressed by surgery simply because of their location — they may be too hard to reach with a knife, let alone inject with a syringe full of bacterial cyborgs. This means that researchers have had to brainstorm some creative ways to navigate therapeutic bacteria toward cancer cells.
Schürle-Finke was pondering this conundrum when inspiration struck. “Maybe I could help with magnetic guidance,” she recalled thinking. Most bacteria can’t be pushed around with magnets, but as luck would have it, one special group of aquatic bacteria does: magnetotactic bacteria, which use the tiny iron crystals produced in their bodies like an internal compass.
Scientists were able to direct the bacteria with a magnetic field.Boris SV/Moment/Getty Images
So she took the next logical step — ordering some magnetotactic bacteria online. “I was surprised,” Schürle-Finke says, “You can just buy them.”
Back in the lab, her team got to work equipping the bacteria with fluorescent tags and microcontrollers. In these genetically engineered bacteria, the microcontrollers propel them to release cancer-fighting compounds on demand.
Then, they injected the bacteria bots into tumor-ridden mice. Using an externally generated magnetic field, scientists were able to successfully direct the bacteria and park them on the mice’s tumors with more than three times the precision of the control group (which wasn’t subjected to a magnetic field.)
WHAT’S NEXT
Though this study offers a solid proof-of-concept, micro-robotic bacteria technology still needs to be refined before it becomes a mainstream cancer treatment.
For one thing, “these bacteria that we tested, they’re quite foreign to the human body,” Schürle-Finke says, and they don’t naturally produce cancer-fighting compounds.
In the future, bioengineers may try to identify the cluster of genes responsible for producing magnetotactic bacteria's magnetic iron pellets and transfer it to a more familiar model organism, like a harmless strain of E. coli, Salmonella, or Clostridium.
They’ll also have to address the physical limits to generating a magnetic field. While the field they generated was able to penetrate a tiny mouse’s tissue, it may weaken and become useless as it passes through a thicker and more complex human body.
Still, Schürle-Finke is excited about the possibility that bacterial therapy holds. And she’s ready to continue bridging the gap across scientific disciplines, from oncology to microbiology to robotics. “I think it’s beautiful that we’re experiencing this convergence of sciences,” she says.
These shape-shifting robot fish swim through the body to attack cancer
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FIRST-EVER LAB-GROWN BLOOD COULD CHANGE MEDICINE FOREVER
FIRST-EVER LAB-GROWN BLOOD COULD CHANGE MEDICINE FOREVER
For the first time ever, scientists have given patients red bloodcells that were grown in a lab. This feat is part of a clinical trial in England looking into the safety of the cutting-edge technique, which could help tackle the ongoing blood supply shortage that was worsened by the pandemic.
The trial is a collaboration between institutions including the University of Bristol, the University of Cambridge, and the National Health Service.
Regular transfusions can be life-saving for people with conditions like sickle cell disease, which affects the shape of red blood cells and can block blood flow, and thalassemia, which causes the body to produce too little of a protein called hemoglobin.
Now, these lab-grown red blood cells could stretch sparse donations into larger volumes. The procedure could also help address the need for more blood from Black donors — sickle cell disease is prevalent among Black people, and blood is most compatible when donated from people of the same race or similar ethnicity.
And unlike donor blood, which can contain relatively old cells, these lab-grown cells are guaranteed to be fresh. This means they can last longer and perform better, reducing the need for frequent transfusions. When people receive lots of transfusions, they also run the risk of developing too much iron in their bodies.
HOW TO GROW BLOOD CELLS
A white blood cell surrounded by red blood cells, which scientists have figured out how to grow in the lab.
Ed Reschke/Photodisc/Getty Images
The scientists started with a regular blood donation and used magnetic beads to pinpoint the flexible stem cells that can morph into red blood cells, CNBC reported.
Then, they put the stem cells in a nutrient solution for 18 to 21 days, which nudges the cells to proliferate and grow into more mature cells, according to The Guardian. Then, they tagged the cells with a radioactive substance to track them in blood samples from trial participants over the six months following the first injection of cells.
So far, two healthy volunteers have received the lab-grown red blood cells, and they haven’t reported any negative side effects. Next up, the team will give a minimum of 10 participants two “mini” transfusions at least four months apart — one consisting of standard donated red blood cells and another composed of lab-grown ones.
The researchers will analyze patient blood samples to determine whether the lab-grown red blood cells will last longer than the ones made in the body. While further research is needed, this marks a major step forward in treating blood disorders.
“The need for normal blood donations to provide the vast majority of blood will remain,” says Farrukh Shah, the medical director of tranfusion at NHS Blood and Transplant. “But the potential for this work to benefit hard-to-transfuse patients is very significant.”
A NEW LASER-POWERED CHIP CAN TRANSMIT THE ENTIRE INTERNET (TWICE) EACH SECOND
MOLLY GLICK
Well, consumer devices can’t run on lasers just yet. But in recent years, researchers have been working hard to make this dream a reality.
In the most recent breakthrough, a new chip can bend laser light to transmit 1.8 petabits, or over 1 million gigabits, per second. To put things in perspective, that’s nearly twice the world’s internet traffic per second.
This breaks the May 2022 record of 1.02 petabits per second, as reported by New Atlas.
What’s new — Most computer chips rely on electricity to transmit information, but this new gizmo uses light to do its thing.
Once a laser delivers information to the chip, it uses a comb to split data into hundreds of frequencies (or colors), according to a new paper by scientists in Denmark, Sweden, and Japan that was published in Nature Photonics.
A new laser-powered chip can transmit the entire internet (twice) each second
Ooh, pretty colors — More specifically, the chip splits the info into 223 chunks, each of which corresponds to a different section of the light spectrum. This means that the information can travel quickly and efficiently without getting mixed up in the process. After it’s processed, the data recombines into a single beam and travels through a cable.
The team put their system into a matchbox-sized device and fed it multiple channels of data. They used a fiber cable, which measured nearly 5 miles long, to hook it up to another device to confirm it could send quality information.
Eventually, the scientists predict it could even reach 100 Pbit/s — a nearly unimaginable speed compared to today’s possibilities.
“Our findings could mark a shift in the design of future communication systems, targeting device-efficient transmitters and receivers,” the team wrote in their paper.
While the U.S. electric vehicle market is finally revving up, sluggish charging times can pose a major headache for drivers. After all, nobody wants to sit at a roadside station for upwards of 20 minutes to an hour while their ride juices up. But that dilemma could soon change.
A new battery could charge up in about 11 minutes, according to a new Nature study.
Researchers from Penn State University took advantage of a technique called asymmetric temperature modulation, which rapidly preheats and then cools the cell to help move charge faster. They also worked with a very porous anode, or a positively charged electrode that’s able to take in lots of charged ions at once.
The new battery has an estimated lifespan comparable to current EV batteries, lasting around 2,000 charge cycles, or about 500,000 miles.
Study author Chao-Yang Wang, a mechanical engineer at Penn State University, founded a startup called EC Power to bring speedy charging to the masses. The company’s Pennsylvania-based factory is already churning quick-charging out EV batteries, including ones that powered buses at the 2022 Winter Olympics.
This latest breakthrough should enable them to produce even more efficient batteries, Wang says.
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20-10-2022
SCIENTISTS SUGGEST OUR BRAINS WORK LIKE QUANTUM COMPUTERS
SCIENTISTS SUGGEST OUR BRAINS WORK LIKE QUANTUM COMPUTERS
"AS A RESULT, WE CAN DEDUCE THAT THOSE BRAIN FUNCTIONS MUST BE QUANTUM."
GETTY IMAGES/FUTURISM
Brain Power
As physicists endeavor to build bigger and better quantum computers, a powerful one may have already been lurking inside our heads all along.
In a new study published this month in the Journal of Physics Communications, a team of scientists from Trinity College Dublin suggest that our brains could actually be using quantum computation.
If confirmed — something that will require extensive investigation — the finding could help explain why, in certain respects, our brains still outdo supercomputers.
Quantum Cerebrum
Their conclusion relies on the idea of quantum entanglement, a phenomenon describing particles changing each other's quantum state, even when they are separated by a large distance.
"We adapted an idea, developed for experiments to prove the existence of quantum gravity, whereby you take known quantum systems, which interact with an unknown system," said Christian Kerskens, study co-author and lead physicist at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, in a statement.
"If the known systems entangle, then the unknown must be a quantum system, too," he explained. "It circumvents the difficulties to find measuring devices for something we know nothing about."
In the case of this experiment, the proton spins of the water in our brains served as the "known system." Kerskens and his team then used a special form of MRI imaging to detect if any of the proton spins were quantum entangled.
Curiously, the scientists ended up detecting a specific kind of electrical brain signal known as heartbeat evoked potentials, which they say is normally not detectable with MRIs.
What allowed them to detect those potentials, the scientists suggest, is quantum entanglement in proton spins in the brain.
"If entanglement is the only possible explanation here then that would mean that brain processes must have interacted with the nuclear spins, mediating the entanglement between the nuclear spins," Kerskens concluded. "As a result, we can deduce that those brain functions must be quantum."
Entangled Thoughts
All in all, it's an intriguing suggestion, but there's a lot more that needs to be proven. For one, the study rides on relatively recent proposals in the field of quantum gravity.
And, as the scientists in the study admit, their efforts were largely undertaken through the perspective of quantum physics.
In short, to prove their theory, it'd require a substantial multidisciplinary effort, especially considering the complexity of the human brain — but it's a tantalizing possibility, nonetheless.
Researchers have transplanted a human brain organoid (bright green) into the brain of a newborn rat pup, creating a hybrid brain in which the neurons interface.
Credit: Stanford University
Miniature human-brain-like structures transplanted into rats can send signals and respond to environmental cues picked up by the rats’ whiskers, according to a study1. This demonstration that neurons grown from human stem cells can interface with nerve cells in live rodents could lead to a way to test therapies for human brain disorders.
Scientists would like to use brain organoids — tiny brain-like structures grown from human stem cells — to study neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders that humans develop. But the organoids mimic human brains only so far. They don’t develop blood vessels and so can’t receive nutrients, meaning that they don’t thrive for long. And they don’t get the stimulation they need to grow fully: in a human infant’s brain, neurons’ growth and how they develop connections with other neurons are based in part on input from the senses.
To give brain organoids this stimulation and support, neuroscientist Sergiu Pasca at Stanford University in California and his colleagues grew the structures from human stem cells and then injected them into the brains of newborn rat pups, with the expectation that the human cells would grow along with the rats’ own cells. The team placed the organoids in a brain region called the somatosensory cortex, which receives signals from the rats’ whiskers and other sensory organs and then passes them along to other brain regions that interpret the signals.
Human brain cells mature much more slowly than rat cells, so the researchers had to wait for more than six months for the organoids to become fully integrated into the rat brains. But when they examined the animals’ brains at the end of that time, they saw that the integration had been so successful that it was almost like adding “another transistor to a circuit”, Pasca said at a 10 October press conference.
Paola Arlotta, a molecular biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is excited about the results. “It’s an important step in allowing organoids to tell us more complex properties of the brain,” she says, although she thinks that the transplantation procedure is probably still too expensive and complex to become a standard research tool. The next step, Arlotta adds, will be to work out how individual human neurons — not just fully developed organoids — are integrated into the rat brain.
Behaviour trigger
In their report, published in Nature on 12 October1, the researchers describe how they genetically engineered the neurons in the organoids to fire when stimulated with light from a fibre-optic cable embedded in the rats’ brains. The team trained the rats to lick a spout to receive water while the light was switched on. Afterwards, when the researchers shone the light on the hybrid brains, the rats were prompted to lick the spout, meaning that the human cells had become integrated well enough to help drive the animals’ behaviour. Furthermore, when the researchers prodded the rats’ whiskers, they found that the human cells in the sensory cortex fired in response, suggesting that the cells were able to pick up sensory information.
Human neurons created from stem cells and transplanted into a rat brain (right) grow more fully than those cultivated in a dish (left).
Credit: Stanford University
To demonstrate the promise of their work for studying brain disorders, Pasca and his colleagues also created brain organoids from the stem cells of three people with a genetic condition called Timothy syndrome, which can cause symptoms similar to some seen in autism. The tiny structures looked the same as any other brain organoids grown in a dish, but when the researchers transplanted them into rats, they did not grow as large as others and their neurons didn’t fire in the same way.
Rusty Gage, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, is glad to see these results. In 2018, he and a team of researchers found that transplanted human brain organoids could be integrated into the brains of adult mice2. Mice don’t live as long as rats, and Pasca and his colleagues hoped that because newborn rat pups’ brains are more plastic than those of adult animals, they would be better able to receive the new cells.
“We’ve got challenges out there for us,” Gage says. “But I do believe the transplantation procedure will be a valuable tool.”
Some of the challenges are ethical. People are concerned that creating rodent–human hybrids could harm the animals, or create animals with human-like brains. Last year, a panel organized by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report concluding that human brain organoids are still too primitive to become conscious, attain human-like intelligence or acquire other abilities that might require legal regulation. Pasca says that his team’s organoid transplants didn’t cause problems such as seizures or memory deficits in the rats, and didn’t seem to change the animals’ behaviour significantly.
But Arlotta, a member of the National Academies panel, says that problems could arise as science advances. “We can’t just discuss it once and let it be,” she says. She adds that concerns about human organoids need to be weighed against the needs of people with neurological and psychiatric disorders. Brain organoids and human–animal hybrid brains could reveal the mechanisms underlying these illnesses, and allow researchers to test therapies for conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. “I think we have a responsibility as a society to do everything we can,” Arlotta says.
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Human brain cells grown in a lab learn to play Pong: Incredible footage shows mini-brains mastering the classic video game after just five MINUTES of training
Human brain cells grown in a lab learn to play Pong: Incredible footage shows mini-brains mastering the classic video game after just five MINUTES of training
Pong is a classic table tennis-themed video game, first released in 1972
Researchers took human brain cells and grew 800,000 neurons in a dish
They demonstrated that the brains cells could master Pong in just five minutes
In the future, the researchers hope the findings could pave the way for treatments for neurodegenerative conditions like dementia
It's the classic table tennis-themed video game that tasks players with moving a paddle vertically across a screen to hit a ball.
And now even human brain cells grown in a lab have mastered Pong.
Researchers from Melbourne-based start-up, Cortical Labs, have shown for the first time that 800,000 brain cells can perform goal-directed tasks – in this case, Pong.
The findings suggest that even brain cells in a petri dish can exhibit inherent intelligence, modifying their behaviour over time.
'This new capacity to teach cell cultures to perform a task in which they exhibit sentience – by controlling the paddle to return the ball via sensing – opens up new discovery possibilities which will have far-reaching consequences for technology, health, and society,' said Dr Adeel Razi, an author of the study.
'We know our brains have the evolutionary advantage of being tuned over hundreds of millions of years for survival.
'Now, it seems we have in our grasp where we can harness this incredibly powerful and cheap biological intelligence.'
Researchers from Melbourne-based start-up, Cortical Labs, have shown for the first time that 800,000 brain cells living in a dish can perform goal-directed tasks – in this case, Pong
How will the results be used?
The team will now try to see what happens when DishBrain is affected by medicines and alcohol.
'We're trying to create a dose response curve with ethanol – basically get them 'drunk' and see if they play the game more poorly, just as when people drink,' said Dr Kagan.
In the future, the researchers hope the findings could pave the way for treatments for neurodegenerative conditions.
'DishBrain offers a simpler approach to test how the brain works and gain insights into debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and dementia,' says Dr Hon Weng Chong, Chief Executive Officer of Cortical Labs.
Scientists have previously been able to grow brain cells in the lab and read their activity.
However, until now, it's not been possible to stimulate the cells in a structured and meaningful way.
Dr Brett Kagan, who led the study, explained: 'In the past, models of the brain have been developed according to how computer scientists think the brain might work.
'That is usually based on our current understanding of information technology, such as silicon computing.
'But in truth we don't really understand how the brain works.'
In the new study, the team took mouse cells from embryonic brains as well as some human brain cells, and grew 800,000 neurons in a dish, in what they're calling 'DishBrain'.
The neurons were connected to a computer in such a way where they received feedback on whether their paddle was hitting the ball.
Electrodes on the left or right of one array were fired to tell DishBrain which side the ball was on, while distance from the paddle was indicated by the frequency of signals.
Using electric probes that recorded 'spikes', the researchers monitored the neuron's activity and responses to this feedback.
In the new study, the team took mouse cells from embryonic brains as well as some human brain cells, and grew 800,000 neurons in a dish, in what they're calling 'DishBrain'
(pictured)
Pong is a classic table tennis-themed video game that tasks players with moving a paddle vertically across a screen to hit a ball
What is Pong?
Pong was officially released on November 29, 1972.
The two-dimensional table tennis simulator, the first release by Atari, is credited with being one of the progenitors of the video games industry, which is now worth a phenomenal $65billion a year.
The simple two-dimensional simulation of ping pong, consists merely of two paddles which moved up and down to pass a moving spot between each player.
Yet its addictive gameplay captured the imagination of thousands of players around the world, building Atari's status as a video games giant.
Spikes became stronger the more a neuron moved its paddle and hit the ball.
And when neurons missed the ball, their playstyle was critiqued by a software programme.
This shows that neurons can adapt their activity to a changing environment in a goal-oriented way, in real time.
Professor Karl Friston, a theoretical neuroscientist at UCL, and co-author of the study, said: 'Remarkably, the cultures learned how to make their world more predictable by acting upon it.
'This is remarkable because you cannot teach this kind of self-organisation; simply because — unlike a pet — these mini brains have no sense of reward and punishment.'
Pong wasn't the only game the team tested.
'You know when the Google Chrome browser crashes and you get that dinosaur that you can make jump over obstacles (Project Bolan),' said Dr Kagan.
'We've done that and we've seen some nice preliminary results, but we still have more work to do building new environments for custom purposes.'
The team will now try to see what happens when DishBrain is affected by medicines and alcohol.
'We're trying to create a dose response curve with ethanol – basically get them "drunk" and see if they play the game more poorly, just as when people drink,' said Dr Kagan.
In the future, the researchers hope the findings could pave the way for treatments for neurodegenerative conditions.
'DishBrain offers a simpler approach to test how the brain works and gain insights into debilitating conditions such as epilepsy and dementia,' said Dr Hon Weng Chong, Chief Executive Officer of Cortical Labs.
WHAT IS A NEURON AND HOW DOES IT WORK?
A neuron, also known as nerve cell, is an electrically excitable cell that takes up, processes and transmits information through electrical and chemical signals. It is one of the basic elements of the nervous system.
In order that a human being can react to his environment, neurons transport stimuli.
The stimulation, for example the burning of the finger at a candle flame, is transported by the ascending neurons to the central nervous system and in return, the descending neurons stimulate the arm in order to remove the finger from the candle.
A typical neuron is divided into three parts: the cell body, the dendrites and the axon. The cell body, the centre of the neuron, extends its processes called the axon and the dendrites to other cells.Dendrites typically branch profusely, getting thinner with each branching. The axon is thin but can reach enormous distances.
To make a comparable scale, the diameter of a neuron is about the tenth size of the diameter of a human hair.
All neurons are electrically excitable. The electrical impulse mostly arrives on the dendrites, gets processed into the cell body to then move along the axon.
On its all length an axon functions merely as an electric cable, simply transmitting the signal.
Once the electrical reaches the end of the axon, at the synapses, things get a little more complex.
The key to neural function is the synaptic signalling process, which is partly electrical and partly chemical.
Once the electrical signal reaches the synapse, a special molecule called neurotransmitter is released by the neuron.
This neurotransmitter will then stimulate the second neuron, triggering a new wave of electrical impulse, repeating the mechanism described above.
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12-10-2022
Electric vehicles can fully charge in just FIVE MINUTES using NASA technology designed to improve heat transfer for systems set to for missions to the moon and Mars
Electric vehicles can fully charge in just FIVE MINUTES using NASA technology designed to improve heat transfer for systems set to for missions to the moon and Mars
Researchers at Purdue University modeled a system after NASA technology to charge electric vehicles in just five minutes
The new system uses a liquid coolant to capture heat passing from the charge and through the cable to the vehicle
This allows them to release an intense current that can quickly power the car
The NASA technology was tested on the International Space Station and is set to be used to efficiently transfer heat in systems set to got to the moon and Mars
A NASA technique developed for missions to the moon, Mars and beyond can also charge an electric vehicle on Earth in just five minutes by ‘cooling’ heat generated by the current-carrying conductor.
Using NASA’s Flow Boiling Module as a blueprint, researchers at Purdue University dramatically reduced the amount of heat traveling through wires to push 1,400 amperes, the unit of electric current through cables. This is compared to the 520 amperes delivered by the most advanced chargers.
Because it can take at least 20 minute to power a vehicle at a station, many people have opted to stick with their gas guzzlers because of the convenience. But this new system charges a car faster than it takes to fuel up at the pump.
This technology would be welcomed by states like California and New York that are banning the sales of new gasoline-powered cars by 2035.
Using NASA’s Flow Boiling Module as a blueprint, researchers at Purdue University dramatically reduced the amount of heat in traveling through wires to push 1,400 amperes, the unit of electric current through cables
The NASA-made system was initially built for the International Space Station, where it has been tested in microgravity to ensure its success on future space missions.
The idea is that the orbiting laboratory, and other craft, will need technology that can efficiently transfer heat throughout systems - otherwise the mechanics could burn up.
This sparked the interest of Issam Mudawar, a professor of mechanical engineering at Purdue, who constructed a prototype in 2021 that was announced on Tuesday to be successful in powering electric vehicles.
This allowed them to create a charging system that powers vehicles in just five minutes
Using an alternative cooling method, Purdue researchers designed a charging cable that can deliver a current 4.6 times that of the fastest available EV chargers on the market today by removing up to 24.22 kilowatts of heat.
The module also resembles a real-world charging station, as it includes a pump, a tube with the same diameter as an actual charging cable, the same controls and instrumentation, along with the same flow rates and temperatures.
‘Application of this new technology resulted in unprecedented reduction of the time required to charge a vehicle and may remove one of the key barriers to worldwide adoption of electric vehicles,’ NASA shared in a statement.
As US states beat the drum to ban new gas cars, many are weary about how the plan will be carried out with the uncertainty of the number of charging stations needed to provide tens of thousands of new electric vehicles with enough power to ensure they get from Point A to Point B.
California was the first to implement the mandate last month that requires 35 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the state by 2026 produce zero emissions, then 68 percent by 2030 and ultimately 100 percent five years after.
However, more than 17 million vehicles registered in the state are those after 2010, 3.2 million are hybrids and at least 700,000 are all-electric.
New York, which joined the west coast state last week, is following the same quota to reach a total ban in 2035.
But how it plans to charge thousands of electric vehicles in a city that lacks private driveways still remains a mystery.
There are just 677 charging stations spread across the five boroughs and although the city is set to add 10,000 curbside chargers by 2030, it may not be enough to power the thousands that will be cruising around by 2030 - 68 percent of all new cars sold this year will be electric.
AlphaTensor was designed to perform matrix multiplications, but the same approach could be used to tackle other mathematical challenges.
Credit: DeepMind
Researchers at DeepMind in London have shown that artificial intelligence (AI) can find shortcuts in a fundamental type of mathematical calculation, by turning the problem into a game and then leveraging the machine-learning techniques that another of the company’s AIs used to beat human players in games such as Go and chess.
The AI discovered algorithms that break decades-old records for computational efficiency, and the team’s findings, published on 5 October in Nature1, could open up new paths to faster computing in some fields.
“It is very impressive,” says Martina Seidl, a computer scientist at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. “This work demonstrates the potential of using machine learning for solving hard mathematical problems.”
Algorithms chasing algorithms
Advances in machine learning have allowed researchers to develop AIs that generate language, predict the shapes of proteins2 or detect hackers. Increasingly, scientists are turning the technology back on itself, using machine learning to improve its own underlying algorithms.
The AI that DeepMind developed — called AlphaTensor — was designed to perform a type of calculation called matrix multiplication. This involves multiplying numbers arranged in grids — or matrices — that might represent sets of pixels in images, air conditions in a weather model or the internal workings of an artificial neural network. To multiply two matrices together, the mathematician must multiply individual numbers and add them in specific ways to produce a new matrix. In 1969, mathematician Volker Strassen found a way to multiply a pair of 2 × 2 matrices using only seven multiplications3, rather than eight, prompting other researchers to search for more such tricks.
DeepMind’s approach uses a form of machine learning called reinforcement learning, in which an AI ‘agent’ (often a neural network) learns to interact with its environment to achieve a multistep goal, such as winning a board game. If it does well, the agent is reinforced — its internal parameters are updated to make future success more likely.
AlphaTensor also incorporates a game-playing method called tree search, in which the AI explores the outcomes of branching possibilities while planning its next action. In choosing which paths to prioritize during tree search, it asks a neural network to predict the most promising actions at each step. While the agent is still learning, it uses the outcomes of its games as feedback to hone the neural network, which further improves the tree search, providing more successes to learn from.
Each game is a one-player puzzle that starts with a 3D tensor — a grid of numbers — filled in correctly. AlphaTensor aims to get all the numbers to zero in the fewest steps, selecting from a collection of allowable moves. Each move represents a calculation that, when inverted, combines entries from the first two matrices to create an entry in the output matrix. The game is difficult, because at each step the agent might need to select from trillions of moves. “Formulating the space of algorithmic discovery is very intricate,” co-author Hussein Fawzi, a computer scientist at DeepMind, said at a press briefing, but “even harder is, how can we navigate in this space”.
To give AlphaTensor a leg up during training, the researchers showed it some examples of successful games, so that it wouldn’t be starting from scratch. And because the order of actions doesn’t matter, when it found a successful series of moves, they also presented a reordering of those moves as an example for it to learn from.
Efficient calculations
The researchers tested the system on input matrices up to 5 × 5. In many cases, AlphaTensor rediscovered shortcuts that had been devised by Strassen and other mathematicians, but in others it broke new ground. When multiplying a 4 × 5 matrix by a 5 × 5 matrix, for example, the previous best algorithm required 80 individual multiplications. AlphaTensor uncovered an algorithm that needed only 76.
“It has got this amazing intuition by playing these games,” said Pushmeet Kohli, a computer scientist at DeepMind, during the press briefing. Fawzi tells Nature that “AlphaTensor embeds no human intuition about matrix multiplication”, so “the agent in some sense needs to build its own knowledge about the problem from scratch”.
The researchers tackled larger matrix multiplications by creating a meta-algorithm that first breaks problems down into smaller ones. When crossing an 11 × 12 and a 12 × 12 matrix, their method reduced the number of required multiplications from 1,022 to 990.
AlphaTensor can also optimize matrix multiplication for specific hardware. The team trained the agent on two different processors, reinforcing it not only when it took fewer actions but also when it reduced runtime. In many cases, the AI sped up matrix multiplications by several per cent compared with previous algorithms. And sometimes the fastest algorithms on one processor were not the fastest on the other.
The same general approach could have applications in other kinds of mathematical operation, the researchers say, such as decomposing complex waves or other mathematical objects into simpler ones. “This development would be very exciting if it can be used in practice,” says Virginia Vassilevska Williams, a computer scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “A boost in performance would improve a lot of applications.”
Grey Ballard, a computer scientist at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, sees potential for future human–computer collaborations. “While we may be able to push the boundaries a little further with this computational approach,” he says, “I’m excited for theoretical researchers to start analysing the new algorithms they’ve found to find clues for where to search for the next breakthrough.”
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Over mijzelf
Ik ben Pieter, en gebruik soms ook wel de schuilnaam Peter2011.
Ik ben een man en woon in Linter (België) en mijn beroep is Ik ben op rust..
Ik ben geboren op 18/10/1950 en ben nu dus 74 jaar jong.
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Veel leesplezier en geef je mening over deze blog.
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