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Boffins' beam forming kit opens the door to more realistic holograms
MIT's hardware speeds up light manipulation by a factor of 10
Brandon Vigliarolo
A research team led by MIT has developed a novel piece of kit that can drastically increase the speed and capability of optical beam forming technology and that's easy to produce at scale.
If commercialized, the team's new type of spatial light modulator (SLM) could open the way to super-fast LiDAR imaging for autonomous vehicles, improved medical scanners and even developing free-standing 3D holograms akin to those from Star Wars. Admittedly we'll be waiting on that last one for a while. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Hologram
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New lightweight material is stronger than steel
(Nanowerk News) Using a novel polymerization process, MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities.
The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets.
Such a material could be used as a lightweight, durable coating for car parts or cell phones, or as a building material for bridges or other structures, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.
“We don’t usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things,” he says. “It has very unusual properties and we’re very excited about that.” Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Research https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=MIT
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A new AI system can automatically decipher a lost language that’s no longer understood — without knowing its relationship to other languages.
Researchers at MIT CSAIL developed the algorithm in response to the rapid disappearance of human languages. Most of the languages that have existed are no longer spoken, and at least half of those remaining are predicted to vanish in the next 100 years.
The new system could help recover them. More importantly, it could preserve our understanding of the cultures and wisdom of their speakers. Learn more / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Research
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A deep learning algorithm developed at MIT has discovered new antibiotics that can treat drug-resistant diseases by killing 35 powerful bacteria.
The pathogens that the halicin antibiotic has targetted include Acinetobacter baumannii, which was nicknamed “Iraqibacter” after it infected thousands of US service personnel returning from the war in Iraq. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Antibiotics
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Bird boasts that its dockless electric scooters allow customers to “cruise past traffic and cut back on CO2 emissions—one ride at a time.”
Its rival Lime claims the vehicles “reduce dependence on personal automobiles for short distance transportation and leave future generations with a cleaner, healthier planet.”
But the mere fact that battery-powered scooters don’t belch pollution out of a tailpipe doesn’t mean they’re “emissions free,” or as “eco-friendly” as some have assumed. The actual climate impact of the vehicles depends heavily on how they’re made, what they’re replacing, and how long they last.
Researchers at North Carolina State University decided to conduct a “life-cycle assessment” that tallied up the emissions from making, shipping, charging, collecting, and disposing of scooters after one of them noticed that a Lime receipt stated, “Your ride was carbon free.”
The study concludes that dockless scooters generally produce more greenhouse-gas emissions per passenger mile than a standard diesel bus with high ridership, an electric moped, an electric bicycle, a bicycle—or, of course, a walk.
The paper found that scooters do produce about half the emissions of a standard automobile, at around 200 grams of carbon dioxide per mile compared with nearly 415. But, crucially, the researchers found in a survey of e-scooter riders in Raleigh, North Carolina, that only 34% would have otherwise used a personal car or ride-sharing service. Nearly half would have biked or walked, 11% would have taken the bus, and 7% would have simply skipped the trip.
The bottom line: roughly two-thirds of the time, scooter rides generate more greenhouse-gas emissions than the alternative. And those increased emissions were greater than the gains from the car rides not taken, says Jeremiah Johnson, an engineering professor and one of the authors of the paper. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=CARS https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=Mobilit%C3%A9 https://www.scoop.it/topic/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=eBike https://www.scoop.it/topic/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=Cyclisme https://www.scoop.it/topic/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=eScooters https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Mobility
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The first worldwide drone standards have been unveiled to keep aircraft safe The first ever set of global standards for drones has been launched today, designed to keep aircraft safe and to make sure operators are held accountable. What’s happened: The International Organization for Standardization (IOS) has released a draft set of standards for drone operations for public consultation, open until January 21, 2019. The standards are expected to be adopted worldwide later next year. What does the document say? There’s little to disagree with here. The standards call for “no-fly zones” to ensure sufficient distance from airports or sensitive locations. The document suggests geo-fencing technology to stop flights in restricted areas. It also says there should be flight logging, training, and maintenance requirements. There are rules to ensure that operators respect privacy and data protection. Crucially, it also says a fail-safe means of human intervention is mandatory for all drone flights, establishing accountability for drone operators. Why is it needed? Agreeing to a consistent set of industry regulations should encourage more organizations to adopt drone technology, thanks to stronger assurances on safety and security. In the Financial Times today, the head of the UK’s air safety board said that half of air traffic incidents now involve drones. Alastair Muir of NATS, the British air traffic control service, called for more technology to combat the threat. Better standards should help, too. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Drones
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A body-on-a-chip strings together 10 model human organs
The new device could help researchers see how different types of tissue respond to drugs without using lab animals.
Back story: Current organ-on-a chip systems place different kinds of human cells into a device andthen push fluid through them to mimic blood flow. That lets researchers see how, say, lung cells respond to different conditions.
What’s new: MIT engineers have now built a more complex version, which combines cells from 10 different organs—liver, lung, gut, endometrium, brain, heart, pancreas, kidney, skin, and skeletal muscle. That allows tests to see how different model organs react and interact with each other when exposed to different chemicals in the fluid.
Why it matters: The cells can live for up to four weeks of testing, and the team has already used the setup to see how the different model organs respond to painkillers. It’s still a crude approximation of our body, but it could be used to test how organs react to early-stage drugs. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Research
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This AI software dreams up new designs for 3-D-printed parts before your eyes
Desktop Metal’s new software lets regular people design objects optimized for 3-D printing, no experience required.
The news: Desktop Metal’s new LiveParts is a piece of software that automatically generates designs of objects ready for 3-D printing. Users just tell it the structural constraints of the object they’re building, and it uses biology-inspired AI models to quickly generate a design suited to additive manufacturing.
Better components: The software ensures that parts take advantage of 3-D printing’s capabilities. “This would enable weight reductions between 25 and 60 percent of many kinds of general-purpose parts,” says Desktop Metal CEO Ric Fulop, “while spreading loads more evenly and improving fatigue resistance.”
3-D printing for the masses? Desktop Metal says the software is easy to use even if you have no experience designing parts for additive manufacturing. That could help move 3-D printing closer to being able to create whatever you need, whenever you need it—no engineering degree required.
Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=3D-Printing
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Volvos Mutterkonzern Geely gab bekannt, die Verhandlungen zur Übernahme des Flugauto-Entwicklers Terrafugia abgeschlossen zu haben. Das ehemalige Startup arbeitet derzeit an mehreren Protoypen - ein Modell kann man sogar jetzt schon vorbestellen. Terrafugia gehört jetzt Geely
Bereits im Juli gab der chinesische Konzern Geely, Volvos-Mutterkonzern, bekannt, den Flugauto-Hersteller Terrafugia zu übernehmen. Jetzt veröffentlichte das Unternehmen in einer Pressemitteilung, dass die Verhandlungen um die Übernahme nun abgeschlossen seien. Was nach Science Fiction klingt, ist bei Terrafugia schon lange Realität. Das ehemalige Startup-Unternehmen, welches 2006 von fünf Ingenieuren des MIT gegründet wurde, stellte sein erstes Flugauto schon vor einigen Jahren vor. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Cars
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Lamborghini is working with engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on a new all-electric supercar that won't have batteries.
Instead, the body of the Lamborghini Terzo Millennio concept car, made from exotic carbon nanotubes, would be used as a supercapacitor. Supercapacitors store and release energy in a manner different from that employed by batteries. They have certain advantages, but also serious disadvantages.
It could be years, if ever, before scientists from MIT and Lamborghini, which is part of the Volkswagen Group (VLKAF), can overcome the downsides. But the effort would be worth it, said Mauricio Reggiani, Lamborghini's head of research and development.
Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Cars
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Spritzen – keiner mag sie. Besonders Kinder fürchten sich davor. Und doch müssen wir sie jedes Mals aufs Neue zum Arzt schleppen, vor allem für die verschiedenen Impfungen. Aber womöglich, reicht in Zukunft ein einziger. Eine Injektion für alle notwendigen Impfungen.
Wissenschaftler des Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) haben eine neue Technologie entwickelt, die es erlaubt, alle notwendigen Impfstoffe zu kombinieren. Die neue Impfung besteht aus mehreren Mikro-Kapseln, die mit einem speziellen 3D-Druckverfahren hergestellt wurden. Die Kapseln enthalten jeweils einen Impfstoff. Sie wurden so entwickelt, dass sie sich zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt öffnen und den Inhalt in den Körper freisetzen.
Diese Methode wurde bereits erfolgreich an Mäusen getestet. Die Kapseln haben den Impfstoff exakt zu den festgelegten Zeitpunkten freigesetzt. Nämlich nach 9, 20 und 41 Tagen nach dem Tag der Impfung. Das Material, aus denen die Kapseln bestehen, ist für Menschen nicht schädlich. Daher wäre es möglich, diese Methode auch bald an Menschen zu testen. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=vaccins
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What goes up, may come down in pieces—and cause some trouble in the process.
As hardware prices and launch costs fall, there’s an increasing trend to launch swarms of satellites into space to monitor our planet and transmit data. But some academics are concerned that the rising numbers may make an existing space junk problem far worse.
At the end of 2016, it was estimated that 1,459 operating satellites were in orbit around Earth. But that number looks set to rise quickly, as companies continue to launch swarms of smaller spacecraft. Earlier this year, for instance, Planet Labs popped 88 of its tiny satellites into space to photograph the planet below.
Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: http://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Space+Junk
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Now a team of Google researchers has published a proposal for a radical redesign that throws out the ranking approach and replaces it with a single large AI language model—a future version of BERT or GPT-3. The idea is that instead of searching for information in a vast list of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained on those pages answer them directly. The approach could change not only how search engines work, but how we interact with them. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=AI
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MIT’s deep learning found an antibiotic for a germ nothing else could kill
Scientists at MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute and MIT’s CSAIL built a deep learning network that can acquire a broad representation of molecular structure and thereby discover novel antibiotics. The resulting compound, halicin, can destroy a pathogen for which no cure has existed, and it could even help in the fight against coronavirus.
Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Research
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(Nanowerk News) After years of tackling numerous design and manufacturing challenges, MIT researchers have built a modern microprocessor from carbon nanotube transistors, which are widely seen as a faster, greener alternative to their traditional silicon counterparts.
The microprocessor, described in the journal Nature ("Modern microprocessor built from complementary carbon nanotube transistors"), can be built using traditional silicon-chip fabrication processes, representing a major step toward making carbon nanotube microprocessors more practical.
Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Nano
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Watch a harpoon successfully spear a piece of space junk
This is the third in a series of successful space-trash cleanup tests by the RemoveDEBRIS spacecraft.
Gotcha: The RemoveDEBRIS satellite, created by a team at the University of Surrey, has pulled off its most demanding experiment yet. It fired a harpoon at 20 meters a second at a separate satellite panel that it was holding at the end of a boom. As you can see in the video above, the harpoon succeeded in stabbing and capturing the item. Last year the team also accurately fired a giant net at a satellite to capture it, and tested out a lidar- and camera-based system for identifying space junk.
The space landfill: Earth’s orbit is full of trash. Right now there are more than 7,600 tons of space junk floating around our planet. And that’s a problem, because the more things we send up there, the greater the chances they crash into each other. That creates many more, smaller bits of junk, which would pose serious danger to future space missions (while overly dramatized, see the movie Gravity).
Cleaning up the mess: The final test by RemoveDEBRIS in March will be an act of self-sacrifice. The satellite will inflate a sail designed to carry itself into Earth’s atmosphere, where it will burn up. If more satellites clean up after themselves when their job is done, we can prevent more junk piling up in orbit. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Space https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Space+Junk
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Blockchain smart contracts can finally have a real world impact
A startup says it has tackled a long-standing problem that has kept smart contracts from responding to events in the outside world.
You have probably heard that blockchain technology and "smart contracts" are going to revolutionize our lives.
But there’s a problem: before smart contracts can do anything really useful, they need a reliable way to connect with events in the real world—and that has proved impossible so far. This is the so-called "oracle problem," a technological challenge that is still hampering any chance that blockchain will break out and become a part of our everyday lives.
Until now, perhaps. A startup called Chainlink is combining its software with a trusted hardware system called Town Crier, developed by a leading academic cryptocurrency research group. Together, they might be closer than ever to solving the problem.
Smart contracts are computer programs stored in a blockchain. They can be used to automate the unstoppable transfer of crypto-tokens between users, according to agreed-upon conditions. “Oracles” are real-time data feeds that deliver things like weather data, currency exchange rates, airline flight information, and sports statistics to smart contracts.
The idea is that by working together, the two systems can allow blockchain-based services to interact with real-world events with a greater degree of trust than is possible from today’s oracle services. For example, if your flight is canceled but you bought flight insurance, a smart contract might instantaneously pay you after getting an update from a trusted source of flight times.
Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=blockchain https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Blockchain https://www.scoop.it/t/luxembourg-europe/?&tag=Blockchain https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-learning-and-teaching/?&tag=Smart+Contracts
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AI-controlled brain implants help improve people’s memoryMachine-learning software is being used to prod an individual’s brain into remembering things. Backstory: Electrical stimulation to improve brain performance isn’t a new idea—but knowing how to deliver the pulses is tough. First, learn: Researchers from University of Pennsylvania gathered data from 25 epilepsy patients, each with up to 200 electrodes already implanted in their brains for monitoring purposes, while they performed memory tasks. That formed a training set for AI to learn personalized models about how brain activity relates to remembering something. Then, do: The same electrodes were then used for stimulation. The researchers had patients perform memory tasks while using the AI to plan stimulation when it thought they might forget something. It worked: patients with AI stimulation performed 15 percent better than controls on word-recall tasks. Why it matters: Human understanding of the brain remains limited. The approach may help build systems to improve brain function, even if precise understanding of how memory works eludes us. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=AI https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Brain...
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Storing data in DNA is a lot easier than getting it back out
But a method bacteria use to swap genetic information could offer a way.
by Emerging Technology from the arXiv January 26, 2018
Humanity is creating information at an unprecedented rate—some 16 zettabytes every year (a zettabyte is one billion terabytes). And this rate is increasing. Last year, the research group IDC calculated that we’ll be producing over 160 zettabytes every year by 2025.
All this data has to be stored, and as a result we need much denser memory than we have today. One intriguing solution is to exploit the molecular structure of DNA. Researchers have long known that DNA can be used for data storage—after all, it stores the blueprint for making individual humans and transmits it from one generation to the next.
What’s impressive for computer scientists is the density of the data that DNA stores: a single gram can hold roughly a zettabyte. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=DNA
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Why This New Quantum Computing Startup Has a Real Shot at Beating Its Competition
A startup called Quantum Circuits plans to compete with the likes of IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Intel to bring quantum computing out of the lab and into the wider world. There’s one good reason to think it might be able to beat them all.
That’s because Quantum Circuits was founded by Robert Schoelkopf, a professor at Yale, whose work in many ways has helped kick-start this exciting new era of quantum advances.
Quantum computers exploit two strange features of quantum physics, entanglement and superposition, to process information in a fundamentally different way from traditional computers. The approach allows the power of such machines to scale dramatically with even just a few quantum bits, or qubits. Those racing to build practical quantum computers are nearing the point where quantum machines will be capable of doing things that no conventional machine could—an inflection point known as quantum supremacy.
The promise of reaching such a milestone has transformed the field from a mostly academic endeavor into a high-stakes competition between the research arms of several big companies and a few startups. And everyone is using the superconducting circuits Schoelkopf pioneered. Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren: https://www.scoop.it/t/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Quantum-Computing
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Boffins' beam forming kit opens the door to more realistic holograms
MIT's hardware speeds up light manipulation by a factor of 10
Brandon Vigliarolo
A research team led by MIT has developed a novel piece of kit that can drastically increase the speed and capability of optical beam forming technology and that's easy to produce at scale.
If commercialized, the team's new type of spatial light modulator (SLM) could open the way to super-fast LiDAR imaging for autonomous vehicles, improved medical scanners and even developing free-standing 3D holograms akin to those from Star Wars. Admittedly we'll be waiting on that last one for a while.
Learn more / En savoir plus / Mehr erfahren:
https://www.scoop.it/topic/21st-century-innovative-technologies-and-developments/?&tag=Hologram