Surgeons planning world's first HEAD transplant claim they repaired 'irreversible' spinal cord injuries in monkeys and dogs - which they say is proof they can start human trials

• Sergio Canavero, of Italy, and Xiaoping Ren, of China, published two studies on Wednesday 
• In the studies, they claim to cure 'irreversible' spinal cord injuries in monkeys and dogs 
• The papers were published in the peer-reviewed US journal Surgical Neurology International 
• Describing their findings as 'unprecedented', Canavero and Ren say this shows they are ready to conduct human trials 

By MIA DE GRAAF HEALTH EDITOR FOR DAILYMAIL.COM

The surgeons aspiring to perform the world's first human head transplant claim they have made indisputable progress towards their controversial goal.

Sergio Canavero, of Italy, and Xiaoping Ren, of China, published two studies on Wednesday in which they claim to cure 'irreversible' spinal cord injuries in monkeys and dogs.

According to the papers, published in the peer-reviewed US journal Surgical Neurology International, the animals were able to walk again after their spinal cords were severed then successfully repaired.

Describing their findings as 'unprecedented', Canavero and Ren say this shows they are ready to conduct human trials. 

Sergio Canavero, widely seen as a rogue in the West, claims China is giving him space to innovate

Canavero, based in Turin, told USA Today, his studies 'completely reject' the view that 'a severed spinal cord cannot be mended in any way, a mantra uncritically repeated over and over.' 

It's not clear where the trials would be conducted. 

Their recent animal studies were done in China, at Harbin Medical University, where researchers across the country have been pushing the envelope scientifically and ethically, sending pulses racing across the world.  

Until 2018, they had a candidate - 33-year-old Russian computer science student Valery Spiridonov, who has a fatal muscle-wasting disease. 

But Spiridonov dropped out because his new wife gave birth to their 'miracle son', which gave him pause. 

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

01-04-2019 om 17:09 geschreven door peter  

Welcoming our new overlords of any kind is becoming more than just a funny meme … it may be a warning that their arrival could be happening faster than we can perceive, comprehend … or stop. That seems to be the case if the overlords are artificially intelligent robots as the tech news media this week brings stories of AI robots reproducing, evolving and reciting bible verses to humans based on data collected to determine what their spiritual needs at the moment might be. Robots controlling what you pray for? Will they stop you from praying for less robots?

Wired reports this week on research in the field of evolutionary robotics being conducted at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam by computer scientist Gusz Eiben. Ebsen uses simple AI robots with simple “genomes” that define what their color will be. He then has them “mate” via connections and combine their genomes. Like in humans, he programmed the connection and combination to have flaws that can cause mutations in the “offspring.” The end result?

“One parent is fully green, and the other parent is fully blue. Then the child has some modules that are blue and some that are green, but the head is white. That’s not what we put in—it’s a mutation effect.”

Obviously, negative or flawed mutations would not be the goal. Programmers of evolutionary robots would design them to combine their strongest “genes” or characteristics to produce a baby bot with the best of both robot parents. With computers powering their intelligence and decision-making, this “evolution” could result in combinations not foreseen by human engineers. Additionally, what humans may see as genetic flaws may have uses that the AI determines to be valuable.

Everything will be OK as long as humans tightly control the algorithms … right? Research scientist David Howard, who recently published a framework for evolutionary robotics in Nature Machine Intelligence, proposes a scenario where scientists developing robots for exploring jungles do it by sending robots out into jungle to learn for themselves.

“What we’d do is get lots of small robots that are quite simple and cheap to make. We’d send them out, and some of them would do better than others.”

By “do better than others,” Howard means make it back to the lab in one piece. Those that do would be allowed to “mate” and create the next generation of bots to send out into the jungle again and repeat the process. What could possibly go wrong?

Where did every bot-ty go?

“From the Gospel according to Matthew. Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Sage advice, you say? Would you feel the same way if you knew it was an AI robot’s response to your concern? In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Gabriele Trovato, a roboticist and assistant professor at Waseda University in Japan, introduces SanTO, a 17-inch-tall robot equipped with a microphone, sensors and a facial recognition-enabled camera. Trovato developed SanTO with a specific purpose in mind (view photos of SanTO here):

Roboticist Gabriele Trovato designed SanTO, a robot shaped like a figurine of a Catholic saint, to provide comfort and assistance to the elderly.

GABRIELE TROVATO

THE FUTURE OF EVERYTHING

A woman interacts with SanTO at a nursing home in Siegen, Germany.

PHOTO: GABRIELE TROVATO

Built from the body of an automated-teller machine, the BlessU-2 robot can communicate in seven languages and offers several different types of prayers, such as those focused on tradition or renewal. 

PHOTO: DIANA LOEFFLER

“Religion has evolved through history, from oral tradition to written tradition to press and mass media. So it’s very reasonable to think that AI and robotics will help religion to spread out more.”

Although Trovato was warned by religious officials that SanTO should not offer biblical interpretations, it comes close by making decisions which text to recite by interpreting the needs of the person it is working for based on the questions asked and cues picked up by the facial recognition system. Isn’t that counseling and teaching using biblical quotations?

Robots are reproducing, evolving and “spreading the word” of religious texts. Perhaps when we worry about our eventual takeover by the robot overlords, we should less concerned about the “over” and fret more about the “lord” part.

Or are we too late?

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

31-03-2019 om 13:43 geschreven door peter  

The “Replicator”: New 3D Printer Uses Rays of Light to Shape Objects, Transform Product Design

A new 3D printer uses light to transform gooey liquids into complex solid objects in only a matter of minutes.

Nicknamed the “replicator” by the inventors — after the Star Trek device that can materialize any object on demand — the 3D printer can create objects that are smoother, more flexible and more complex than what is possible with traditional 3D printers. It can also encase an already existing object with new materials — for instance, adding a handle to a metal screwdriver shaft — which current printers struggle to do. 

Credit; UC Berkeley video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally

The technology has the potential to transform how products from prosthetics to eyeglass lenses are designed and manufactured, the researchers say.

“I think this is a route to being able to mass-customize objects even more, whether they are prosthetics or running shoes,” said Hayden Taylor, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper describing the printer, which appears online today (Jan. 31) in the journal Science.

“The fact that you could take a metallic component or something from another manufacturing process and add on customizable geometry, I think that may change the way products are designed,” Taylor said.

UC Berkeley researchers used a new light-based 3D printing technique to add a handle onto a screwdriver shaft

UC Berkeley photo by Stephen McNally

Most 3D printers, including other light-based techniques, build up 3D objects layer by layer. This leads to a “stair-step” effect along the edges. They also have difficulties creating flexible objects because bendable materials could deform during the printing process, and supports are required to print objects of certain shapes, like arches.

The new printer relies on a viscous liquid that reacts to form a solid when exposed to a certain threshold of light. Projecting carefully crafted patterns of light — essentially “movies” — onto a rotating cylinder of liquid solidifies the desired shape “all at once.”

“Basically, you’ve got an off-the-shelf video projector, which I literally brought in from home, and then you plug it into a laptop and use it to project a series of computed images, while a motor turns a cylinder that has a 3D printing resin in it,” Taylor said. “Obviously there are a lot of subtleties to it — how you formulate the resin, and, above all, how you compute the images that are going to be projected, but the barrier to creating a very simple version of this tool is not that high.”

Taylor and the team used the printer to create a series of objects, from a tiny model of Rodin’s “The Thinker” statue to a customized jawbone model. Currently, they can make objects up to four inches in diameter.

“This is the first case where we don’t need to build up custom 3D parts layer by layer,” said Brett Kelly, co-first author on the paper who completed the work while a graduate student working jointly at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. “It makes 3D printing truly three-dimensional.”

The 3D printer works by shining changing patterns of light through a rotating vial of liquid. A computer algorithm calculates the exact patterns of light needed to shape a specific object.

UC Berkeley photo by Hayden Taylor

A CT scan — in reverse

The new printer was inspired by the computed tomography (CT) scans that can help doctors locate tumors and fractures within the body.

CT scans project X-rays or other types of electromagnetic radiation into the body from all different angles. Analyzing the patterns of transmitted energy reveals the geometry of the object.

“Essentially we reversed that principle,” Taylor said. “We are trying to create an object rather than measure an object, but actually a lot of the underlying theory that enables us to do this can be translated from the theory that underlies computed tomography.”

Besides patterning the light, which requires complex calculations to get the exact shapes and intensities right, the other major challenge faced by the researchers was how to formulate a material that stays liquid when exposed to a little bit of light, but reacts to form a solid when exposed to a lot of light.

“The liquid that you don’t want to cure is certainly having rays of light pass through it, so there needs to be a threshold of light exposure for this transition from liquid to solid,” Taylor said.

The researchers formulated a thick, syrupy liquid that hardens into a solid when exposed to a certain threshold of light.

UC Berkeley photo by Stephen McNally

The 3D printing resin is composed of liquid polymers mixed with photosensitive molecules and dissolved oxygen. Light activates the photosensitive compound which depletes the oxygen. Only in those 3D regions where all the oxygen has been used up do the polymers form the “cross-links” that transform the resin from a liquid to a solid. Unused resin can be recycled by heating it up in an oxygen atmosphere, Taylor said.

“Our technique generates almost no material waste and the uncured material is 100 percent reusable,” said Hossein Heidari, a graduate student in Taylor’s lab at UC Berkeley and co-first author of the work. “This is another advantage that comes with support-free 3D printing.”

The objects also don’t have to be transparent. The researchers printed objects that appear to be opaque using a dye that transmits light at the curing wavelength but absorbs most other wavelengths.

“This is particularly satisfying for me, because it creates a new framework of volumetric or ‘all-at-once’ 3D printing that we have begun to establish over the recent years,” said Maxim Shusteff, a staff engineer at the Livermore lab. “We hope this will open the way for many other researchers to explore this exciting technology area.”

Indrasen Bhattacharya of UC Berkeley is co-first author of the work. Other authors include Christopher M. Spadaccini of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

This work was supported by UC Berkeley faculty startup funds and by Laboratory-Directed Research and Development funds from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The team has filed a patent application on the technique.

• Contacts and sources:
   Kara Manke
  UC Berkeley

Source: 

• http://www.ineffableisland.com/2019/03/the-replicator-new-3d-printer-uses-rays.html

{ https://beforeitsnews.com/v3/ }

29-03-2019 om 22:59 geschreven door peter  

"A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity you put sunlight in and get heat out."

Professor Kasper Moth-Poulsen holding a tube containing the catalyst in front of the ultra-high-vacuum setup that was used to measure the heat release gradient in the molecular solar thermal energy storage system.

Johan Bodell

By Wayt Gibbs

What if we could bottle solar energy so it could be used to power our homes and factories even when the sun doesn't shine?

Scientists have spent decades looking for a way do just that, and now researchers in Sweden are reporting significant progress. They've developed a specialized fluid that absorbs a bit of sunlight's energy, holds it for months or even years and then releases it when needed. If this so-called solar thermal fuel can be perfected, it might drive another nail in the coffin of fossil fuels — and help solve our global-warming crisis.

Unlike oil, coal and natural gas, solar thermal fuels are reusable and environmentally friendly. They release energy without spewing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

"A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity, you put sunlight in and get heat out, triggered on demand," says Jeffrey Grossman, who leads a lab at MIT that works on such materials.

A MOLECULAR JEKYLL AND HYDE

On the roof of the physics building at Chalmers University of Technology in the Swedish city of Gothenburg, Kasper Moth-Poulsen has built a prototype system to test the new solar thermal fuels his research group has created.

As a pump cycles the fluid through transparent tubes, ultraviolet light from the sun excites its molecules into an energized state, a bit like Dr. Jekyll transforming into Mr. Hyde. The light rearranges bonds among the carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen atoms in the fuel, converting a compound known as norbornadiene into another called quadricyclane — the energetic Mr. Hyde version. Because the energy is trapped in strong chemical bonds, the quadricyclane retains the captured solar power even when it cools down.

To extract that stored energy, Moth-Poulsen passes the activated fuel over a cobalt-based catalyst. The Hyde-like quadricyclane molecules then shapeshift back into their Jekyll form, norbornadiene. The transformation releases copious amounts of heat — enough to raise the fuel's temperature by 63 degrees Celsius (113 degrees Fahrenheit).

If the fuel starts at room temperature (about 21 degrees C, or 70 degrees F), it quickly warms to around 84 degrees C (183 degrees F) — easily hot enough to heat a house or office.

"You could use that thermal energy for your water heater, your dishwasher or your clothes dryer," Grossman says. "There could be lots of industrial applications as well." Low-temperature heat used for cooking, sterilization, bleaching, distillation and other commercial operations accounts for 7 percent of all energy consumption in the European Union, Moth-Poulsen says.

Related

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A- solar thermal fuel could be stored in uninsulated tanks inside houses or factories — or perhaps piped or trucked between solar farms and cities. Very little of the fuel or the catalyst is damaged by the reactions, so the system can operate in a closed loop, picking up solar energy and dropping off heat again and again. "We've run it though 125 cycles without any significant degradation," Moth-Poulsen says.

HEAT WITHOUT FIRE

Moth-Poulsen has calculated that the best variant of his fuel can store up to 250 watt-hours of energy per kilogram. Pound for pound, that's roughly twice the energy capacity of the Tesla Powerwall batteries that some homeowners and utilities now use to store electricity generated by solar panels.

"I'm very excited by what Kasper is doing," Grossman says of the research. After a burst of work on norbornadiene fuels in the 1970s, he says, chemists were stymied. The fuels kept breaking down after a few cycles. They didn't hold their energy very long, and they had to be mixed with toxic solvents that diluted the energy-grabbing fuel. Moth-Poulsen "has gone back to that molecule and is using state-of-the-art tools to fix it," Grossman says.

The new results, published in a series of scientific papers over the past year, have caught the attention of investors. Moth-Poulsen says numerous companies have contacted him to discuss the potential for commercialization.

FROM PROTOTYPE TO PRODUCT

For all the promise of solar thermal fuels, years of development lie ahead. "We've made a lot of progress," Moth-Poulsen says, "but there is still a lot to figure out."

A crucial next step will be to develop a single fuel that combines the best characteristics of the many fuel variants the Chalmers team has developed — including long shelf life, high energy density and good recyclability.

Wei Feng, who leads a research group working on solar thermal fuels at China's Tianjin University, points to solvent-free operation as another "big challenge for future commercialization."

Moth-Poulsen's prototype fuels are made via common industrial processes and from widely available industrial agents, including derivatives of acetylene. But it's unclear how much a commercial version of the fuel would cost.

One important factor in the cost will be the fuel's efficiency, which currently is quite low. The prototype fuels respond only to the shortest wavelengths of sunlight, including ultraviolet and blue, which account for just 5 percent of the solar energy available. Moth-Poulsen says he's working to extend the fuel's sensitivity to include more of the spectrum.

He's also aiming to break his own record of a 63-degree C temperature increase. When that heat is added to water that has been preheated to 40 degrees C or more by conventional solar collectors, he says, "That's just enough to boil water into steam." The steam could then drive turbines to make electricity. But with more tweaks to the chemical structure, he says, "I think we could push [the temperature increase] to 80 degrees C or higher." For electricity generation, hotter is better.

"When I started, there was really only one research group working on these kinds of systems," the 40-year-old Moth-Poulsen recalls. But progress has drawn others to the challenge. "Now there are teams in the U.S., in China, in Germany — about 15 around the world," he says.

WANT MORE STORIES ABOUT CLEAN ENERGY?

• Why energy-harvesting clothes will be such a huge deal
• Apple launches a clean energy fund in China
• Why wave power may be the next big thing in green energy

{ https://www.nbcnews.com/mach }

28-03-2019 om 00:41 geschreven door peter  

How 3-D Printing Could Break into the Building Industry

Imagine a single trained operator making a bridge, home or barracks

25-03-2019 om 23:04 geschreven door peter  

Why Nuclear Fusion Is Always 30 Years Away

By Nathaniel Scharping

Nuclear fusion has long been considered the “holy grail” of energy research. It represents a nearly limitless source of energy that is clean, safe and self-sustaining. Ever since its existence was first theorized in the 1920s by English physicist Arthur Eddington, nuclear fusion has captured the imaginations of scientists and science-fiction writers alike.

Fusion, at its core, is a simple concept. Take two hydrogen isotopes and smash them together with overwhelming force. The two atoms overcome their natural repulsion and fuse, yielding a reaction that produces an enormous amount of energy.

But a big payoff requires an equally large investment, and for decades we have wrestled with the problem of energizing and holding on to the hydrogen fuel as it reaches temperatures in excess of 150 million degrees Fahrenheit. To date, the most successful fusion experiments have succeeded in heating plasma to over 900 million degrees Fahrenheit, and held onto a plasma for three and a half minutes, although not at the same time, and with different reactors.

The most recent advancements have come from Germany, where the Wendelstein 7-X reactor recently came online with a successful test run reaching almost 180 million degrees, and China, where the EAST reactorsustained a fusion plasma for 102 seconds, although at lower temperatures.

Still, even with these steps forward, researchers have said for decades that we’re still 30 years away from a working fusion reactor. Even as scientists take steps toward their holy grail, it becomes ever more clear that we don’t even yet know what we don’t know.

The first plasma achieved with hydrogen at the Wendelstein 7-X reactor. Temperatures in the reactor were in excess of 170 million degrees Fahrenheit.

(Credit: IPP)

For Every Answer, More Questions

The Wendelstein 7-X and EAST reactor experiments were dubbed “breakthroughs,” which is an adjective commonly applied to fusion experiments. Exciting as these examples may be, when considered within the scale of the problem, they are only baby steps. It is clear that it will take more than one, or a dozen, such “breakthroughs” to achieve fusion.

“I don’t think we’re at that place where we know what we need to do in order to get over the threshold,” says Mark Herrmann, director of the National Ignition Facility in California. “We’re still learning what the science is. We may have eliminated some perturbations, but if we eliminate those, is there another thing hiding behind them? And there almost certainly is, and we don’t know how hard that will be to tackle.”

We will almost certainly get a better perspective on the unknown problems facing fusion sometime in the next decade when an internationally-backed reactor, intended to be the largest in the world, comes to fruition. Called ITER, the facility would combine all we have learned about fusion into one reactor.

It represents our current best hope for reliably reaching the break-even point, or the critical temperature and density where fusion reactions produce more power than is used to create them. At the break-even point, the energy given off when two atoms fuse is enough to cause other atoms to fuse together, creating a self-sustaining cycle, making a fusion power plant possible.

Perhaps inevitably, however, ITER has fallen prey to setbacks and design disputes that have slowed construction. The U.S. has even threatened to cut its funding for the project. It is these sorts of budgetary and policy hesitations that could ensure we continue saying fusion is 30 years away, for the next three decades.

In the face of more immediate challenges, from health epidemics to terrorism, securing funding for a scientific long bet is a hard sell. A decades-long series of “breakthroughs” that lead only to more challenges, compounded by pervasive setbacks, have diluted the fantastic promise of a working fusion reactor.

What Exactly Is Fusion?

Reliably reaching the break-even point is a twofold problem: getting the reaction started and keeping it going. In order to generate power from a fusion reaction, you must first inject it with sufficient energy to catalyze nuclear fusion at a meaningful rate. Once you have crossed this line, the burning plasma must then be contained securely lest it become unstable, causing the reaction to fizzle.

To solve the issue of containment, most devices use powerful magnetic fields to suspend the plasma in midair to prevent the scorching temperatures from melting the reactor walls. Looking something like a giant doughnut, these “magnetic containment devices” house a ring of plasma bound by magnetism where fusion will begin to occur if a high enough temperature is achieved. Russian physicists first proposed the design in the 1950s, although it would be decades before they actually achieved fusion with them.

A magnetic confinement fusion device, the Wendelstein 7-X, under construction.

(Credit: IPP)

To create a truly stable plasma with such a device, two magnetic fields are required: one that wraps around the plasma and one that follows it in the direction of the ring. There are currently two types of magnetic confinement devices in use: the tokamak and the stellarator.

The differences between the two are relatively small, but they could be instrumental in determining their future success. The main disparity in their design arises from how they generate the poloidal magnetic field — the one that wraps around the plasma. Tokamaks generate the field by running a current through the plasma itself, while stellarators use magnets on the outside of the device to create a helix-shaped field that wraps around the plasma.

According to Hutch Neilson of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, stellarators are considered more stable overall, but are more difficult to build and suffer from a lack of research. Tokamaks, on the other hand, are much better understood and easier to build, although they have some inherent instability issues.

At the moment, there is no clear winner in the race between the two, as neither appears to be close to the “holy grail.” So, due to lack of a victor, researchers are building both.

“There is a lack of a solution at this time, so looking at two very realistic and promising configurations for closing that gap is the responsible thing to do,” says Neilson.

One of five sections that comprise the outer vessel of Wendelstein 7-X, photographed during production. 

(Credit: Wolfgang Filser/IPP)

Currently, the largest fusion reactor in the world is the Joint European Torus (JET), a tokamak based in England and supported by the European Union. JET was commissioned in the 1970s and first came online in 1983 and successfully produced plasma, the first step in achieving fusion.

With a series of upgrades beginning in the late 1980s, JET became the world’s largest fusion generator, and currently holds the record for the most energy produced in a fusion reaction at 16 megawatts. Even so, it has not yet reached the break-even point.

ITER Offers a Way

To reach this all-important milestone, we will likely have to wait for ITER.Latin for “the way,” ITER will be the largest and most powerful fusion generator in the world, and is expected to to cross the break-even point. ITER is projected to produce 500 MW of power with an input of 50 MW, and be able to hold plasma for half an hour or more. That’s enough energy to power roughly 50,000 households.

Based on the tokamak design, the project is the result of a collaboration between the European Union and six other countries, including the U.S., that have pooled resources and expertise to build a reactor that is expected to be the gateway to useable fusion energy.

One of the cables used to create the toroidal magnetic field within ITER.

(Credit: ITER Organization)

One of the main issues facing current generators is one of size, says Duarte Borba, a researcher at EUROfusion, and ITER will attempt to overcome this shortfall. As reactors get larger, they become more stable and can achieve higher temperatures, the two key factors in creating fusion.

ITER is meant to be the successor to JET, and will take the technology developed there and apply it on a much larger scale. This includes JET’s tungsten and beryllium divertors, which capture energy in the reactor, as well as the capability to fully control the system remotely. ITER will also use superconducting magnets to create its magnetic field, as opposed to ones made of copper, according to Borba.

Such magnets will reduce the amount of energy consumed by the device and will allow for longer, more sustained plasma production. JET can currently only produce plasma in bursts, as it cannot sustain the high levels of energy use for very long.

Collaboration Is Key

The most important development made by JET and implemented with ITER may not even be scientific, but rather bureaucratic in nature, says Borba. As a project supported by multiple nations, JET forged the path for organizing and implementing a large-scale, decades-long project.

With a projected price tag of $15 billion and a daunting shopping list of complex components, ITER could only exist today as a collaborative effort. Each of the member nations contributes researchers and components, with the hope that the potential benefits will be shared by all.

An illustration showing which countries are responsible for manufacturing various parts of the ITER reactor.

(Credit: ITER Organization)

However, the democratic nature of ITER has significantly slowed down its construction. The goal is to have all of the parts arrive at the same time, but allocating each part to a different country brings in political and economic variables that throw the timing off. When ITER first received formal approval in 2006, it was slated to first achieve fusion in 2016, a date which has since been pushed back at least 10 years. Issues with component construction and design disagreements have been blamed for the delays.

A Worldwide Effort

To achieve a fusion power plant capable of addressing our energy needs, ITER alone is still not enough, according to Neilson. Even though it represents a significant advancement in reactor design, ITER isn’t the end game for fusion research.

If everything goes to plan, ITER will pave the way for another reactor, called DEMO, which will expand the technologies perfected by ITER to an industrial scale, and hopefully prove that nuclear fusion is a viable source of energy.

In the meantime, the new crop of fusion reactors appearing around the world will continue to play crucial roles in the chase for fusion. Far from being redundant, their supplemental research will attack the problem from different angles.

While ITER addresses the issue of scale, fusion projects in Asia are attempting to hold on to plasmas for longer and longer as they probe the benefits of superconducting magnets, Neilson said. Meanwhile, in Germany, the Wendelstein 7-X is pushing the boundaries of the stellarator design, possibly sidestepping issues of stability entirely. Nuclear fusion research has been a mild success in terms of international cooperation, with a growing number of countries determined to contribute their own piece of the puzzle.

Today, there are nuclear fusion experiments operating in the U.S., Germany, United Kingdom, India, France, Japan and several other countries. More reactors are being planned or are currently under construction. Even with the surge of interest, it’s still not enough, says Neilson.

“For a problem as dense and challenging as fusion, you want to have many more experiments trying out different parts of the problem than we actually have,” says Neilson.

More Than a Scientific Problem

Ultimately, the question may be one of funding. Multiple sources said they were confident that their research could progress faster if they received more support. Funding challenges certainly aren’t new in scientific research, but nuclear fusion is particularly difficult due to its near-generational timescale. Although the potential benefits are apparent, and would indeed address issues of energy scarcity and environmental change that are relevant today, the day when we see a payoff from fusion research is still far in the future.

Our desire for an immediate return on our investments dampens our enthusiasm for fusion research, says Laban Coblentz, the head of Communication at ITER.

“We want our football coaches to perform in two years or they’re out, our politicians have two or four or six years and they’re out — there’s very little time to return on investment,” he said. “So when somebody says we’ll have this ready for you in 10 years, that’s a tough narrative to tell.”

In the U.S., fusion research receives less than $600 million in funding a year, including our contributions to ITER. This is a relatively small sum when compared to the $3 billion the Department of Energy requested for energy research in 2013. Overall, energy research represented 8 percent of the total funding the U.S. gave out for research that year.

“If you look at it in terms of energy budgets, or what’s spent on military development, it’s not really a lot of money that’s going to this,” says Thomas Pedersen, division head at the Max-Planck Institut für Plasmaphysik. “If you compare us to other research projects, it seems very expensive, but if you compare it to what goes into oil production or windmills or subsidies for renewables, its much, much less than that.”

The JET reactor, as seen from above.

(Credit: EUROfusion)

Pedersen looks at fusion research in terms of expected inputs and gains. Research into solar and wind power may be relatively cheap, but the payoff pales in comparison to a working nuclear fusion generator.

Always 30 Years Away

However, the finish line has been visible for some time now, a mountaintop that seems to recede with every step forward. It is the path that is obscured, blocked by obstacles that are not only technological, but also political and economic in nature. Coblentz, Neilson and Borba expressed no doubts that fusion is an achievable goal. When we reach it however, may be largely dependent on how much we want it.

Soviet physicist, Lev Artsimovich, the “Father of the Tokamak” may have summed it up best:

“Fusion will be ready when society needs it.”

{ http://discovermagazine.com/ }

24-03-2019 om 18:22 geschreven door peter  

Friday Futures: the sea as fuel, DNA as a computer

Welcome to Friday Futures, our weekly guide to the latest visions of The Future from around the web. This week: the sea could be the best source of fuel; levitation by light; AI and science; DNA as a computer; DNA regenerates limbs.

1. The oceans could be the real source of renewable fuel

The ocean may soon be a valuable source of renewable energy.

A team of scientists at Stanford have figured out a way to make hydrogen fuel out of saltwater. The discovery could open up the world’s oceans as a potential source of energy.

Source: Stanford University

2. Can we levitate objects using light alone?

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) say they’ve found a way to levitate and propel objects using only light — though, for the time being, the work remains theoretical. 

Light Levitation

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) say they’ve found a way to levitate and propel objects using only light — though, for the time being, the work remains theoretical.

They hope the technique could be used for “trajectory control of ultra-light spacecraft and even laser-propelled light sails for space exploration,” according to a paper published in the journal Nature Photonics Monday. That means no fuel needed — just a powerful laser fired at a spacecraft from back on Earth.

Optical Tweezers

The Caltech scientists devised the so-called “photonic levitation and propulsion” system by designing a complex pattern that could be etched into an object’s surface. The way the concentrated light beam reflected from the etching causes the object to “self-stabilize,” they say, as it attempts to stay inside the focused laser beam.

The first breakthrough that laid the groundwork for the new research were the development of “optical tweezers” — scientific instruments that use a powerful laser beam to attract or push away microscopic objects. The big downside: they can only manipulate tiny objects at only microscopic distances.

Ognjen Ilic, post-doctoral scholar and first author of the new study, puts the tweezer concept and its limitations in much simpler terms: “One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer,” he said in a statement. “But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on.”

From Micrometers To Meters

In the paper, the Caltech researchers argue that their light manipulation theoretically could work with an object of any size, from micrometers to spaceship size.

Though the theory is still untested in the real world, the researchers say that if it pans out, it could send a spacecraft to the nearest star outside our solar system in just 20 years.

“There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft,” said Harry Atwater, professor at the Caltech Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”

READ MORE: Levitating objects with light [Caltech]

More on light levitation: Japanese Researchers Unveil Tiny, Floating “Firefly” Light

3. What is the relationship between 5G and space?

4. AI is becoming really good at science

The Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope slated to switch on in the mid-2020s, will generate about as much data traffic each year as the entire internet. 

Read more…

5. DNA molecules can be programmed as computers

Computer scientists at Caltech have designed DNA molecules that can carry out reprogrammable computations, for the first time creating so-called algorithmic self-assembly in which the same “hardware” can be configured to run different “software.”

 Read more…

6. And can regenerate limbs, maybe

Harvard researchers say they’ve identified a “DNA switch” enabling animals to regrow entire portions of their bodies — a finding that, with a few important caveats, could pave the way to helping human lost limb regeneration. 

Read more…

7. An explanation of CRISPR that makes sense!

8. And of course, the dating app based on the contents of your fridge

The first time John Stonehill was invited back to his girlfriend’s house, he headed straight for the refrigerator. It was stainless steel with a water and ice dispenser.

 Read more…

(Compiled by Alex Leslie, edited by John C. Tanner)

{ https://disruptive.asia/ }

24-03-2019 om 16:55 geschreven door peter  

We take light for granted and often forget just how weird and powerful the sometimes-wave, sometimes-particle is. Never mind that our entire existence is dependent on light, there’s a whole host of other wacky applications that science is only beginning to get get a grasp on. For example, new research from the California Institute of Technology has apparently found a way to levitate macro-scale objects using noting but light. Scientists at Caltech say that, once implemented, this technology would allow a spacecraft to surf its way on a beam of light to the nearest planet outside our solar system in as little as 20 years.

The new research is only theoretical at this point, but it builds off decades of previous work using light to manipulate very small objects. The first so-called “optical tweezers,” which use the radiative pressure of focused light beams to manipulate nano-scale objects, led to the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. The principle is more or less the same, but but there’s a big difference between moving microscopic objects microscopic distances, and launching interstellar spacecraft. Ognjen Ilic, postdoctoral scholar at Caltech and author of the new paper, says:

“One can levitate a ping pong ball using a steady stream of air from a hair dryer. But it wouldn’t work if the ping pong ball were too big, or if it were too far away from the hair dryer, and so on.”

The key to the new research is in creating nano-scale reflection patterns on the surface of the objects to be levitated. By giving the surface of the object the right pattern it will interact with the light beam in such a way that it will continually spin itself back into the beam of light, creating a feedback loop of sorts with the radiative pressure of light all the way to another star system. While previous theoretical concepts for light sails relied on incredibly powerful lasers to do the heavy lifting, this method would encode the objects surface with what it needs to stay stable, and would work with a light source even millions of miles away.

Of course, this is still theoretical. They haven’t started building light sails yet, and actual real world demonstrations will be needed. Still, it’s pretty exciting. Harry Atwater, Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science at Caltech says:

“We have come up with a method that could levitate macroscopic objects. There is an audaciously interesting application to use this technique as a means for propulsion of a new generation of spacecraft. We’re a long way from actually doing that, but we are in the process of testing out the principles.”

It probably won’t look like this.

If it works, this technology would allow starships to travel at close to the speed of light and would open up a whole new realm of possibilities for the future of sustained interstellar travel. Just think, we’ve spent so much time lighting stuff on fire, trying to squeeze out the little bit of propulsion we could from it, when all we really needed was a big flashlight.

{ https://mysteriousuniverse.org/ }

24-03-2019 om 16:35 geschreven door peter  

This Car Is Powered By Salt Water: 920HP, Top Speed 217.5 MPH, 373 Miles/Tank

By Arjun Walia

It works just like a hydrogen fuel cell except that the liquid used for storing energy is saltwater. This isn’t far from the water powered car, an idea labelled as a conspiracy by many despite the massive amount of evidence behind it. You can read more about that here.

In this case (saltwater) the liquid passes through a membrane in between the two tanks, creating an electric charge. This electricity is then stored and distributed by super capacitors. The four electric motors in the car are fed electricity which makes it run. The car carries the water in two 200-litre tanks, which in one sitting will allow drivers to travel up to 373 miles (600km). Overall, the four-seater is 5.25 metres (0.4ft) long, 2.2 metres wide (7.2ft), the 1.35 metre (4.4ft).

“After making its debut at the 2014 Geneva Motor Show (pictured) in March, the saltwater technology has now been certified for use on European roads.”

(source)

Nanoflowcell AG is the company behind the design, and they are currently preparing the technology for mass production.

‘We’ve got major plans, and not just within the automobile industry. The potential of the NanoFlowcell is much greater, especially in terms of domestic energy supplies as well as in maritime, rail and aviation technology”  

– NanoFlowcell AG Chairman of the Board Professor Jens-Peter Ellermann.

This is huge news, and is another example out of so many that clearly show how we have so many ways to do better here. Although money remains an issue, it doesn’t have to be.

All cars should be required to be made from this type, or other similar types of clean green energy. A few years ago, if you told somebody it’s possible to fuel a car by pouring saltwater into it, they would have called you a conspiracy theorist.

Last Year The U.S Navy Developed a Technology To Create Fuel From Seawater

Scientists at the U.S Naval Research Laboratory have developed a technology to recover carbon dioxide and hydrogen from seawater and convert it into a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. This could be a tremendous breakthrough and eliminate the need for old ways of generating fuel.

It’s just another example of the many ways of generating energy that are now available that could end our dependence on fossil fuels. These new, clean green ways of generating energy have been around for decades, so why are we always talking about them without ever implementing them?

“Refueling U.S. Navy Vessels, at sea, is a costly endeavor in terms of logistics, time, fiscal constraints and threats to national security sailors at sea. In Fiscal year 2011, the U.S. Navy Military Sea Lift Command, the primary supplier of fuel and oil to the U.S. Navy fleet, delivered nearly 600 million gallons of fuel to Navy vessels underway, operating 15 fleet replenishment oilers around the globe.”

(source)

The Navy successfully used the new fuel-from seawater process to power a radio-controlled scale-model replica of a World War II aircraft with an internal combustion engine. Below is the footage from the test flight.

“In close collaboration with the Office of Navel Research p38 Naval Reserve program, NRL has developed a game changing technology for extracting, simultaneously, CO2 and H2 from seawater. This is the first time technology of this nature has been demonstrated with the potential for transition, from the laboratory, to full-scale commercial implementation.”

– Dr. Heather Willauer (source)

Researchers say that this approach could be commercially viable within the next seven to ten years. They state interest in pursuing land-based options that could provide a solution to our current problems.

Again, another option, and example showing the power of human potential, so what’s stopping us from the implementation of cleaner and greener technologies?

Not long ago, Department of Defence adviser Dr. Harold Puthoff made some noteworthy comments while discussing the reality of free energy. This is what he said:

“I’ve been taken out on aircraft carriers by the Navy and shown what it is we have to replace if we have new energy sources to provide new fuel methods.”

You can watch that full interview HERE.

Whether it be Solar, Free Energy (zero-point), or converting seawater, it’s clear we can do better than we are doing now. It’s remarkable how Barack Obama has constantly pointed out that we will be using oil, gas and coal for the next twenty years, and that we don’t have the technology to lift our dependence off of these resources. Those who are looking into it can clearly see that this simply isn’t true. We have the means to live in ways that are more harmonious with the planet and all beings on it.

http://www.gizmag.com/quant-e-sportlimousine-approved-europe-roads/33020/

{ https://www.collective-evolution.com/ }

23-03-2019 om 22:15 geschreven door peter  

Scientists create liquid metal that stretches like Terminator

Credit: American Chemical Society

Come with me if you want to stretch.

In good news, scientists have not created a remorseless Terminator-style killing machine for real. In other good news, they've figured out how to make a liquid metal that can stretch in all sorts of directions. It looks like a sci-fi visual effect made real.

The American Chemical Society released a video on Wednesday of the metal in action to go along with a paper titled Magnetic Liquid Metals Manipulated in the Three-Dimensional Free Space from the Applied Materials & Interfaces journal. 

Robert Patrick as the liquid metal T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

Video screenshot by CNET

The shiny liquid metal can be manipulated with magnets. It stretches like the fictional T-1000 robot from Terminator 2, and can also be used to complete a circuit. 

Scientists at Beihang University in China led the research project.

"They added iron particles to a droplet of a gallium, indium and tin alloy immersed in hydrochloric acid," the ACS reports. "A gallium oxide layer formed on the droplet surface, which lowered the surface tension of the liquid metal." This allows it to stretch out and move without breaking apart.

We're a long way off from morphing androids, but the researchers believe this sort of liquid metal could one day be incorporated into soft robotics. You can almost hear it whispering, "I'll be back."

{ https://www.cnet.com/ }

21-03-2019 om 18:06 geschreven door peter  

LIGHT LEVITATION

{ https://futurism.com/ }

19-03-2019 om 23:58 geschreven door peter  

The robotics community likes to say that we’re at an inflection point, something akin to software’s position in the 1980s. In 1984, around eight percent of households had a computer, according to US Census data, a percentage that grew to more than 23 percent by the early 1990s. That’s roughly two million households buying a new computer each year.

Similar projections exist for the adoption of household and workplace robotics. About 4 million robots were sold in 2015, according to data from Loup Ventures, the vast majority of which were vacuum cleaners. That number is expected to soar to 23 million by 2025. By then, either robots or some other form of automation will be completing roughly 52 percent of tasks worldwide, according to a recent projection from the World Economic Forum.

There are a few factors at play in this acceleration. Each week, the field overcomes new hurdles, and as 5G networks drastically expand network capacity over the next two years, that pace of progress will get even faster. If you don’t have robot colleagues already, it’s only a matter of time.

It should come as some relief to hear that research is already underway to see how robot growth is going to affect your workday.

Robots Don’t Need to Take Jobs to Take a Toll on Workers

It’s obviously awful to be automated out of a job. But what if the robots you work with are simply colleagues? That’s the question underlying a study from a fascinating group of researchers at Cornell whose expertise spreads across engineering, robotics, and behavioral economics. In the study, published last month, the researchers tried to tease out the emotional impact of working alongside a robot with an identical job. The workplace, after all, is a competitive place — what happens when you make workers compete with robots who, obviously, don’t mess up or get tired? It turns out, they don’t like it.

“People thought they were worse at the job when the robot was there,” Guy Hoffman, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who specializes in robot-human interaction, tells Inverse. “To me, this raises the question of whether there’s this downside to highly productive robots working alongside people.”

To test for this effect, Hoffman, along with lead author Alap Kshirsagar, co-author Ori Heffetz, and two graduate students, pitted humans and robots against one another in a pretty tedious task, identifying G’s out of a string of letters. The better the human or the robot did, the greater their odds of winning a prize.

Throughout the challenge, the players were able to see their odds of winning, which allowed the researchers to assess whether working with a fast or slow robot had a different effect on the human participants. What they found leaves room for concern: The better the robot was doing, the less the human participants tried.

How Loss Aversion Comes Into Play

Ori Heffetz, an economics professor at Cornell and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, explains that this is likely due to loss aversion, a common theory in behavioral economics which holds that people tend to prioritize avoiding losses over pursuing gains. Loss aversion, he said in an email, explains why people tend to slack off more when competing against a robot they thought would win anyway.

“People evaluate their outcomes not only in absolute terms, but also relative to a reference point,” Heffetz explained in an email. “Our task-competitors seemed to evaluate winning the prize relative to how much they expected to win it; when the robot was slower, they expected to win the prize more and worked harder to avoid disappointment. When the robot was faster, they knew their overall chances to win the prize are lower, and they tried less hard.”

Loss aversion is powerful. It explains why we’re too hesitant to bet our chips in poker, and why we’ll sometimes slack off when a goal seems unrealistic to us. In terms of financial behavior, it also explains why most people who invest tend to do the opposite of what they’re supposed to do, and buy assets when they’re high and sell them when they’re low. This effect is said to be about twice as psychologically powerful as the effect of equivalent gains, according to a famous 1992 paper by the Nobel-winning economist Daniel Kahneman.

As to how we can triumph over loss aversion when robots are in the picture? More research needs to be done. And after all, spotting the “G” in a long strings of letters isn’t the same as doing a job where you can (at least hopefully) gain some satisfaction from seeing tasks being accomplished.

Heffetz says the next step is to continue studying how and where humans form reference points for when they feel like they’re winning and losing. A robot, after all, is obviously not a fair reference point to assess human ability. If we can crack the code to that particular question, then we might be able to crack the code for how to make robot-human collaboration a win-win for everyone.

• Media via World Economic Forum , Last Week Tonight/YouTube, Boston Dynamics

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

18-03-2019 om 17:11 geschreven door peter  

A replica of the appendage creates bubbles that produce high pressures and temperatures

BY EMILY CONOVER 

OH SNAP!  Snapping shrimp slam their claws shut, producing bubbles that generate plasma and unleash shock waves at prey. Scientists have now reproduced this phenomenon using a 3-D printed claw replica.

CHRISTIAN GLOOR/FLICKR (CC BY 2.0)

{ https://www.sciencenews.org/ }

18-03-2019 om 00:42 geschreven door peter  

A Real World 'Star Trek' Replicator Is Now Possible Thanks To New Breakthrough

Eric Mack

Contributor

I cover science and innovation and products and policies they create.

A startup with alumni from MIT and Yale says it's made a breakthrough in creating a next-generation material that should make it possible to 3-d print literally anything out of thin air.

New York-based Mattershift has managed to create large-scale carbon nanotube (CNT) membranes that are able to combine and separate individual molecules.

"This technology gives us a level of control over the material world that we've never had before," said Mattershift Founder and CEO Dr. Rob McGinnis in a release. "For example, right now we're working to remove CO₂ from the air and turn it into fuels. This has already been done using conventional technology, but it's been too expensive to be practical. Using our tech, I think we'll be able to produce carbon-zero gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels that are cheaper than fossil fuels."

{ https://www.forbes.com/ }

16-03-2019 om 21:41 geschreven door peter  

New research plans to keep drones in the air longer by giving them the ability to land

 BY ALEXANDRU MICU

An international team wants to make drones fly for longer — by teaching them how to land.

Examples of various perching and resting actions.
Image credits Hang et al., (2019), Sci. Robot.

Drones today are really awesome gadgets, but they’re still severely limited by their short flight time. Despite a lot of effort being expended into improving their batteries or energy efficiency, drones can still only last minutes in the air.

Now, a new study reports that we don’t need bigger, better batteries to keep drones aloft for longer; it’s as simple as sticking landing gears on them.

Take a breather

The team says they’ve taken inspiration from birds, bats, and their impressive biological landing gears.

Many birds fly in short bursts and perch on elevated positions between bouts, they explain. By taking these elevated positions, they are able to conserve energy while keeping tabs on their surroundings for food or threats. Bats fly in a similar manner, but instead of perching, they simply hang upside down.

So the researchers set to work on incorporating similar abilities into our drones. The design they came up is reminiscent of a hawk’s talons. Drones equipped with this landing gear can land on flat or semi-flat surfaces like a bird, or perform a leaning landing on objects such as window sills.

An Xbox One Kinect sensor built into the design allows drones to automatically find and navigate perches, the team adds. After landing, the drone can turn down its rotors, thus saving battery power and prolonging its ability to fly. Other onboard devices such as cameras can be kept operational, allowing landed drones to keep performing their intended tasks.

The landing gear has only been tested under laboratory conditions so far. Although the results are encouraging, the team says they still need to tweak their design further to get the drones to land and take off autonomously. With some more work, however, they’re confident we’ll soon see drones perching atop buildings and other high surfaces.

The paper “Perching and resting—A paradigm for UAV maneuvering with modularized landing gears” has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

15-03-2019 om 21:25 geschreven door peter  

• Media via Hang et al., Sci. Robot. 4, eaau6637 (2019), Credit: Hang et al., Sci. Robot. 4, eaau6637 (2019), Yale University

{ https://www.inverse.com/ }

15-03-2019 om 00:58 geschreven door peter  

Move over Doctor Who: 'Time machine' created in Russia moves tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past

• Russian physicists have effectively achieved the same principle of time travel 
• They loosely described it as moving in the opposite direction of 'time's arrow' 
• The researchers worked with electrons in the realm of quantum mechanics
• Broken pool balls were able to re-order themselves into their original formation

By VICTORIA BELL FOR MAILONLINE

A 'time machine' that moves tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past was built in Russia, scientists have claimed.

It may not rival Dr Who's Tardis but researchers have described it as being able to move the smaller-than-atom sized objects in the opposite direction of 'time's arrow'. 

The experiments involved electrons - negatively charged particles that make up an atom - found in the realm of quantum mechanics, the study of sub-atomic particles. 

They gave the analogy of a break for a game of pool, in which the balls are substitutes for the electrons.

After the break the 'balls' are scattered in what should be a haphazard way, according to the laws of physics. 

But researchers managed to make them reform in their original triangle 'break' order - appearing as if they were turning back time - using a special quantum computer.

Scroll down for video 

A 'time machine' that moves tiny particles a fraction of a second into the past has built in Russia, scientists have claimed. The team gave the analogy of a break for a game of pool. The 'balls' scattered and should have appeared to split in a haphazard way. But researchers managed to make them reform in their original order in the snooker triangle (pictured)

Researchers, from the Laboratory of the Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics & Technology (MIPT), say that they have effectively defied the second law of thermodynamics with the experiment.

This is a rule within physics that governs the direction of events from the past to the future, stating that everything in our universe tends towards decay.

The 'time machine' is built from a basic quantum computer, which is made up of 'qubits'. 

These are units of information described by a 'one', a 'zero', or a mixed 'superposition' of both, that can be stored on an electron.

In the experiment an 'evolution program' was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones. 

During this process, order was lost - just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue. Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved 'backwards', from chaos to order.

The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point. 

To an outside observer, it looks as if time is running backwards, said lead researcher Dr Gordey Lesovik, who heads the laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information.

'We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.' 

The 'time machine', described in the journal Scientific Reports consists of a rudimentary quantum computer made up of electron 'qubits'.  

In the experiment an 'evolution program' was launched which caused the qubits to become an increasingly complex changing pattern of zeros and ones. 

During this process, order was lost - just as it is when the pool balls are struck and scattered with a cue. 

Another program then modified the state of the quantum computer in such a way that it evolved 'backwards', from chaos to order. 

It may not be the Tardis, a fictional time machine that appears in Doctor Who, pictured here, but physicists have loosely described as moving in the direction of 'time's arrow'. The team worked with electrons in the realm of quantum mechanics

The state of the qubits was rewound back to its original starting point. 

The scientists found that, working with just two qubits, 'time reversal' was achieved with a success rate of 85 per cent. 

When three qubits were involved more errors occurred, resulting in a 50 per cent success rate. 

The experiment could have a practical application in the development of quantum computers, the scientists said. 

'Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors,' said Dr Lesovik. 

WHAT IS A QUANTUM COMPUTER AND HOW DOES IT WORK?

The key to a quantum computer is its ability to operate on the basis of a circuit not only being 'on' or 'off', but occupying a state that is both 'on' and 'off' at the same time.

While this may seem strange, it's down to the laws of quantum mechanics, which govern the behaviour of the particles which make up an atom.

At this micro scale, matter acts in ways that would be impossible at the macro scale of the universe we live in.

Quantum mechanics allows these extremely small particles to exist in multiple states, known as 'superposition', until they are either seen or interfered with.

A scanning tunneling microscope shows a quantum bit from a phosphorus atom precisely positioned in silicon. Scientists have discovered how to make the qubits 'talk to one another

A good analogy is that of a coin spinning in the air. It cannot be said to be either a 'heads' or 'tails' until it lands.

The heart of modern computing is binary code, which has served computers for decades.

While a classical computer has 'bits' made up of zeros and ones, a quantum computer has 'qubits' which can take on the value of zero or one, or even both simultaneously.   

One of the major stumbling blocks for the development of quantum computers has been demonstrating they can beat classical computers.

Google, IBM, and Intel are among companies competing to achieve this.

{ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ }

14-03-2019 om 23:59 geschreven door peter  

THIS NEW 3D PRINTER STRAIGHT OUT OF STAR TREK USES LIGHT TO MATERIALIZE OBJECTS

University of California, Berkeley has developed a new type of 3D printer that uses rays of light to turn liquids into solids in a matter of minutes. Dubbed the ‘The Replicator’ by its creators referencing the famous Star Trek technology; the new device can form objects, smoother, faster and with more complex than traditional 3D printers.

https://i.makeagif.com/media/5-28-2016/UabBmB.gif

It also has the ability to add new materials to existing objects, for example adding a handle to a cup.

The UC Berkeley researchers say the printer could completely change the way products are imagined and prototyped.

“I think this is a route to being able to mass-customize objects even more, whether they are prosthetics or running shoes,” said Hayden Taylor, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley and senior author of a paper describing the printer, which appears online today (Jan. 31) in the journal Science.

Printer opens possibilities for new types of design ideation

“The fact that you could take a metallic component or something from another manufacturing process and add on customizable geometry, I think that may change the way products are designed,” Taylor said.

Traditional 3D printers build up objects layer by layer in either plastic or metal.

The Replicator uses a gooey liquid that turns to a solid when exposed to different thresholds of light. It works when carefully calibrated light waves are projected onto a rotating cylinder of liquid which transforms the object ‘all at once’.

“Basically, you’ve got an off-the-shelf video projector, which I literally brought in from home, and then you plug it into a laptop and use it to project a series of computed images, while a motor turns a cylinder that has a 3D printing resin in it,” Taylor explained.

“Obviously there are a lot of subtleties to it — how you formulate the resin, and, above all, how you compute the images that are going to be projected, but the barrier to creating a very simple version of this tool is not that high.”

3D printing becomes truly 3D

In a series of test prints, Taylor and his team made several small objects including a tiny replica of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’. The printer can currently make objects up to four inches in diameter.

“This is the first case where we don’t need to build up custom 3D parts layer by layer,” said Brett Kelly, co-first author on the paper who completed the work while a graduate student working jointly at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“It makes 3D printing truly three-dimensional.”

The printer’s design was inspired by CT scans used by doctors to locate tumors, CT scans work by projecting X-rays into the body from all different angles. By analyzing the patterns of transmitted energy exposes the geometry of the object.

Taylor said they took this idea and basically reversed it.

“We are trying to create an object rather than measure an object, but actually a lot of the underlying theory that enables us to do this can be translated from the theory that underlies computed tomography.”

The Replicators inventors have filed a patent but hope to share their knowledge with other researchers who will continue to develop the technology.

{ https://thetruthrevolution.net/ }

09-03-2019 om 22:58 geschreven door peter  

MIT’s newest, diminutive robot can do backflips and outrun you in every single way

BY ALEXANDRU MICU

MIT’s newest robot is cute, tiny, modular, and could run rings around you.

*robotic cheetah noises*.
Image credits Bryce Vickmark.

Researchers at MIT have developed a ‘mini cheetah’ robot whose range of motion, they boast, would rival those of a champion gymnast. This four-legged robot (hardly more than a powerpack on legs) can move, bend, and swing its legs in a wide range of motions, which allows it to handle uneven terrain about twice as fast as a human, and even walk upside-down. The robot, its developers add, is also “virtually indestructible” at least as falling or slamming into stuff is concerned.

Skynet’s newest pet

The robot weighs in at a paltry 20 pounds, but don’t let its diminutive stature fool you. The mini cheetah can perform some really impressive tricks, even being able to perform a 360-degree backflip from a standing position. If kicked to the ground, or if it falls flat, the robot can quickly recover with what MIT’s press release describes as a “swift, kung-fu-like swing of its elbows.” Apparently, nobody at MIT has ever seen Terminator.

But, the mini cheetah isn’t just about daredevil moves — it’s also designed to be highly modular and dirt cheap (for a robot). Each of its four limbs is powered by three identical electric motors (one for each axis) that the team developed solely from off-the-shelf parts. Each motor (as well as most other parts) can be easily replaced in case of damage.

“You could put these parts together, almost like Legos,” says lead developer Benjamin Katz, a technical associate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

“A big part of why we built this robot is that it makes it so easy to experiment and just try crazy things, because the robot is super robust and doesn’t break easily, and if it does break, it’s easy and not very expensive to fix.”

The mini cheetah draws heavily from its much larger predecessor, Cheetah 3. The team specifically aimed to make it smaller, easier to repair, more dynamic, and cheaper so thatthey would create a platform on which more researchers can test movement algorithms. The modular layout also makes it highly customizable. In Cheetah 3, Katz explains, you had to “do a ton of redesign” to change or install any parts since “everything is super integrated”. In the mini cheetah, installing a new arm is as simple as adding some more motors.

“Eventually, I’m hoping we could have a robotic dog race through an obstacle course, where each team controls a mini cheetah with different algorithms, and we can see which strategy is more effective. That’s how you accelerate research.”

Each of the robot’s 12 motors is about the size of a Mason jar lid and comes with a gearbox that provides a 6:1 gear reduction, enabling the rotor to provide six times the torque that it normally would. A sensor permanently measures the angle and orientation of the motor and its associated limb, allowing the robot to keep tabs on its shape.

It’s also freaking adorable:

This lightweight, high-torque, low-inertia design allows the robot to execute fast, dynamic maneuvers and make high-force impacts on the ground without breaking any gears or limbs. The team tested their cheetah through the hallways of MIT’s Pappalardo Lab and along the slightly uneven ground of Killian Court. In both cases, it managed to move at around 5 miles (8 km) per hour. Your average human, for context, walks at about 3 miles per hour.

“The rate at which it can change forces on the ground is really fast,” Katz says. “When it’s running, its feet are only on the ground for something like 150 milliseconds at a time, during which a computer tells it to increase the force on the foot, then change it to balance, and then decrease that force really fast to lift up. So it can do really dynamic stuff, like jump in the air with every step, or run with two feet on the ground at a time. Most robots aren’t capable of doing this, so move much slower.”

They also wrote special code to direct the robot to twist and stretch, showcasing its range of motion and ability to rotate its limbs and joints while maintaining balance. The robot can also recover from unexpected impacts, and the team programmed it to automatically shut down when kicked to the ground. “It assumes something terrible has gone wrong,” Katz explains, “so it just turns off, and all the legs fly wherever they go.” When given a command to restart, the bot determines its orientation and performs a preprogrammed maneuver to pop itself back on all fours.

The team, funnily enough, also put a lot of effort into programming the bot to perform backflips.

“The first time we tried it, it miraculously worked,” Katz says.

“This is super exciting,” Kim adds. “Imagine Cheetah 3 doing a backflip — it would crash and probably destroy the treadmill. We could do this with the mini cheetah on a desktop.”

The team is building about 10 more mini cheetahs, which they plan to loan to other research groups. They’re also looking into instilling a (fittingly) very cat-like ability in their mini cheetahs, as well:

“We’re working now on a landing controller, the idea being that I want to be able to pick up the robot and toss it, and just have it land on its feet,” Katz says. “Say you wanted to throw the robot into the window of a building and have it go explore inside the building. You could do that.”

I have to admit, the idea of casually launching a robot out the window (there’s a word for that, by the way: defenestration) with complete disregard, and having it come back a few minutes later with its task complete, is hilarious to me. And probably why they will, eventually, learn to hate us.

Still, doom at the hands of our own creations is still a ways away, and not completely certain. Until then, the team will be presenting the mini cheetah’s design at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, in May. No word on whether they’ll be giving these robots out at the conference, but if they are, I’m calling major dibs.

{ https://www.zmescience.com/ }

06-03-2019 om 01:21 geschreven door peter  

One sign that robots are increasingly capable of human tasks? Companies are buying a lot more them: Some 35,880 robots were shipped to North American companies last year, according to new data from the Association of Advancing Automation, seven percent more than 2017, setting a new record. In particular, non-automotive companies picked up the pace of automation, with shipments growing 41 percent.

Robot purchases picked up in a variety of industries except for, notably, the auto industry, which has traditionally been at the forefront of automated assembly (car companies still account for a little more than half of robotics purchases, according to the AAA’s data). Food and consumer good companies picked up their pace of automation the most, with shipments up 48 percent. Plastics, life sciences, and electronics companies all put more robots to work in 2018 as well.

“While the automotive industry has always led the way in implementing robotics here in North America, we are quite pleased to see other industries continuing to realize the benefits of automation,” said Jeff Burnstein, President of the Association for Advancing Automation, in a statement released with the report.

Robots are simply getting better: The World Economic Forum estimates that robots or automation will be capable of replicating more than half of workplace tasks by 2025, including 28 percent of tasks that involve decision-making, up from about 19 percent today. As 5G networks begin to roll out over the next two years, robots will also benefit from significantly from the extra bandwidth and latency improvements, making them much more dextrous and quick-to-react to their surroundings.

The job market is particularly strong, with unemployment hitting the lowest level it’s been at in nearly half a century, as the Wall Street Journal reported Friday. That’s finally starting to translate into stiff competition to find even relatively “low-skill” workers to fill jobs, which can drive up the economic incentive to automate, because the savings-per-worker is greater.

Check out the latest video from the Inverse YouTube channel 🔥📺🔥:

As always, the debate about how worried we need to be about this trend rages. As these trends — better, smarter, robots and machines capable of doing more — continue, some have argued that it could create a “barbell” economy, i.e. an economy where jobs are concentrated on low-paying and high-paying extremes instead of there being a large middle class.

The Brookings Institute published this month an alarming paper suggesting that automation’s job displacement will be regionally concentrated. In the future, life will be particularly difficult for people in cities with fewer than 100,000 people and in rural areas. In some regions, almost half of the jobs people have may be susceptible to automation.

Then again, people have always feared that the robots are coming for our jobs. And just because the tech is there, doesn’t mean replacing a person with a cheaper robot is always going to be preferable. As the economist Oren Cass recently pointed out to the New Yorker’s Jill Lepore, just because parents can put their kids on an autonomously driven school buses doesn’t mean they will.

Cultural resistance to robots may provide some measure of comfort in the short term, but, unfortunately, it may only be a matter of time before robots get pretty good at babysitting, too.

04-03-2019 om 18:05 geschreven door peter