Subscriber nudge+ Posted October 17, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted October 17, 2021 This is cool. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azeem Posted October 17, 2021 Share Posted October 17, 2021 I would like to see time travel in past or genetic memory like in Assassins Creed becoming real. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted October 18, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted October 18, 2021 On 17/10/2021 at 16:04, Khan of TF365 said: I would like to see time travel in past or genetic memory like in Assassins Creed becoming real. Genetic memory is a good one. While seeing actual memories Assassin's Creed style is probably very unlikely, it would be very interesting (and cool) to be able to decode what kind of life experiences are passed from ancestors to offspring. You might be interested in epigenetics; it's still a relatively new field related to the above; it basically demonstrates how behavioural and physical traits in multiple generations can be induced by certain life experiences of the ancestors without structural changes to the DNA. Fascinating stuff... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted October 28, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted October 28, 2021 Quote Library in a glass chip: laser-writing trick can store vast amounts of data New data-storage method can pack 500 terabytes onto a CD-sized piece of glass. Credit: Yuhao Lei and Peter G. Kazansky, University of Southampton An international team of researchers has figured out a laser-writing technique that can store vast amounts of data in glass. So-called five-dimensional (5D) data storage uses molecule-sized nanostructures created in silica glass to store information, and is 10,000 times denser in storage than a Blu-Ray disc. “Individuals and organisations are generating ever-larger datasets, creating the desperate need for more efficient forms of data storage with a high capacity, low energy consumption and long lifetime,” says Dr Yuhao Lei, a researcher at the University of Southampton in the UK, and lead author on a paper in Optica describing the technique. The technique can write at speeds of roughly a million voxels per second, equivalent to recording 230 kilobytes of data per second. This isn’t particularly fast compared to conventional data storage – a test disc created by the researchers took months to write and read five gigabytes. But the silica is more stable, and much denser, than other methods, making it useful for information that has to last. “While cloud-based systems are designed more for temporary data, we believe that 5D data storage in glass could be useful for longer-term data storage for national archives, museums, libraries or private organisations,” says Lei. Five-dimensional optical storage is not a new concept, but it’s previously not been fast or dense enough to be a feasible storage method. Lei and colleagues have improved the technique by using a laser that sends out pulses of light at ultrashort intervals – every femtosecond (10-15 seconds) or so. This laser was able to create tiny pits in glass, called nanostructures, ranging between 50 and 500 nanometres in size (or less than half the width of a bacterium). “This new approach improves the data writing speed to a practical level, so we can write tens of gigabytes of data in a reasonable time,” says Lei. “The highly localised, precision nanostructures enable a higher data capacity because more voxels can be written in a unit volume. In addition, using pulsed light reduces the energy needed for writing.” The researchers are now determining ways to increase the speed of the writing, and planning to bring the technology outside the lab. https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/materials/long-term-data-storage-in-glass/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bluewolf Posted November 15, 2021 Share Posted November 15, 2021 IBM claims it has made a quantum chip that cannot be simulated by classical computers in major breakthrough (msn.com) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted November 18, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted November 18, 2021 This is pretty cool! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted November 18, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted November 18, 2021 Quote Iodine-powered spacecraft tested in orbit for the first time Could an iodine-fuelled electric propulsion system be the future of space travel? French aerospace company ThrustMe has successfully tested an iodine-powered spacecraft for the first time, showing that this fuel is a viable alternative to the more expensive and difficult-to-store xenon. The satellite industry is booming: over the next decade, experts predict that up to 24,000 satellites will be launched into orbit, with most of them requiring a propulsion system to manoeuvre. Electric propulsion systems are a good choice because of their high fuel efficiency. These generate thrust by using electrical energy to accelerate the ions of a propellant gas. Currently, most systems are powered by the noble gas xenon. Bur xenon is rare, expensive (at approximately $3,000 per kg), and must be packed into high-pressure tanks to fit on a satellite. It’s also in demand for other industries such as medicine, lighting and semiconductors. Ground-based tests have shown that iodine could be a good alternative. Now, as reported in a paper in Nature, researchers have made a successful test of iodine in orbit for the first time. “Iodine is significantly more abundant and cheaper than xenon, and has the added advantage that it can be stored unpressurised as a solid,” says Dmytro Rafalskyi, lead author of the paper and co-founder of ThrustMe, the company that developed the system. Iodine also transforms directly from a solid into a gas when heated (ie, it sublimates), so iodine crystals can be placed straight into the thruster without the need for bulky high-pressure tanks to store them. Solar energy can then provide the one watt of power needed to heat the crystals to become gas. Plus, the propulsion system is tiny, fitting within a package of roughly 10 cubic centimetres. ThrustMe’s system was integrated into a 20kg CubeSat satellite, Beihangkongshi-1, operated by China’s Spacety. It was launched by a Long March 6 rocket on the 6 November 2020, and the results show that the system performed successfully. “We anticipate that these results will accelerate the adoption of alternative propellants within the space industry and demonstrate the potential of iodine for a wide range of space missions,” Rafalskyi and colleagues write in their paper. In an accompanying News & Views article, independent aerospace engineering experts Igor Levchenko and Kateryna Bazaka call the system “not only remarkably simple, light and inexpensive, but also efficient”. They say it could be a “gamechanger” for small satellites, including those that need propulsion systems to form flexible networks, known as constellations. “For large satellite constellations, such as the 42,000-satellite Starlink system planned by aerospace-manufacturer SpaceX in Hawthorne, California, changing the propellant from xenon or krypton to iodine would lead to multi-million-dollar savings,” they write. “Further savings could come from simplifying the propellant’s storage and supply technology, which would also save money by decreasing the mass of the thruster.” Levchenko and Bazaka also note that cheap iodine-powered propulsion systems could also be used to reduce the cost of in-orbit manufacturing. “For example, the research company Varda Space Industries in Torrance, California, is building the world’s first commercial zero-gravity industrial park in space. The facility will manufacture products that are difficult to build on the surface of Earth owing to the effects of gravity, such as 3D-printed arteries and hearts, and certain pharmacological drugs.” But there are still a few hurdles to overcome before iodine-based propulsion systems become the norm, including the fact that iodine is highly corrosive, so the metal and electronics components of a satellite must be protected. Solid iodine also requires around 10 minutes to be heated to a high enough temperature to sublimate into a gas, which means a satellite might be less responsive in orbit. But nevertheless, Levchenko and Bazaka say that this “is an impressive contribution to the rapidly changing landscape of electric propulsion technologies”. https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/iodine-powered-spacecraft-tested-in-orbit/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator Tommy Posted November 18, 2021 Moderator Share Posted November 18, 2021 5 hours ago, nudge said: This is pretty cool! Haven't seen one of those since Endor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted November 21, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted November 21, 2021 Quote AI: is it starting to speak our language? Code is my copilot: Mark Pesce test drives AI-assisted coding with GitHub Copilot. Credit: Sorbetto / Getty. Two new advances – Copilot and MT-NLG – show signs that the promise of AI is upon us: taking care of the boring bits of our lives, so we can do the interesting stuff. When someone once commented on the obvious African influences in his paintings, Pablo Picasso famously said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Programmers practise a similar kind of predation – like magpies, a good programmer will feather their nests with the shiniest bits that they can spy. And with a good search engine, well, there’s a lot there to spy. Nearly every problem in programming has been solved before by someone, somewhere, at some point – and if a programmer can find that solution, they can save themselves a fair bit of effort, or at least study the handiwork of others in pursuit of their own answers. It’s this promiscuity of resources that separates the young and inexperienced programmers from those (such as myself) who have been slinging code most of their lives. A few years ago, a study showed that the most productive programmers were those who consulted Google (and Stack Overflow, which is a kind of Wikipedia of great code examples) most frequently. These days, I code with a whole set of browser tabs open – into Google, Stack Overflow, documentation pages, and so forth. It’s like having an extra brain – well, millions of extra brains. It definitely makes programming less tiring than it might have been 20 years ago, when programmers spent a lot of their time solving problems others had already solved, but had no idea others had solved them. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Pablo Picasso These practices that programmers learn over a lifetime’s experience with their tools have been dramatically short-circuited by one of the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. At the end of June, programming website GitHub – a “repository” used by millions of programmers to store and share their code with their teams, or, in the case of open source, with the world – announced a new tool: Copilot. Developed from a very rich artificial intelligence model known as OpenAI Codex, it purports to do what good programmers have always done for themselves – find the best bit of code to solve the problem at hand. That sounds like quite a big ask, because code can be difficult for any programmer who didn’t write it to read and understand, and because the entire act of coding – laying out a structure, then filling in that structure with the necessary details – seems like a very human, cognitive task. It’s never been something a programmer could ask Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant to do for them. In AI terms, it’s next level. I wrote a single line of comment that stated my requirements and – abracadabra! – the computer provided a complete solution. When I recently got access to GitHub Copilot (it’s still in limited release) I had very low expectations. I reckoned it would do little more than make a few hints while I sat and typed out my code. What I got, though, was rather more than that. From the examples provided by GitHub, I could see that I could frame what I needed as a “comment” – a bit of code designed to be read by a human and ignored by the computer. So I wrote a single line of comment that stated my requirements and – abracadabra! – the computer provided a complete solution. I inspected the code burped up by Copilot, and realised the computer had given me exactly the result I was looking for. Just what I would have done – if not in exactly the same way. Coding styles differ among programmers, and Copilot has its own, very straightforward style. That makes it easy to read – always a good thing. Yet after some time playing with it, I could see that Copilot is far from perfect. I asked it for code to do something quite straightforward, and while it came up with suggestions that would have done the job, none of them made sense in the context of the programming language I was using. It may be that I’ll need to learn to “speak” to Copilot in a language that it can understand – just as we’ve all learned how to shape our requests to Siri and Google and Alexa. And there’s no question that it feels uncanny to have the computer quickly and silently come up with just the bit of code that you’re looking for. Copilot will make bad programmers better, and good programmers more productive. That’s a good thing. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. It may be that I’ll need to learn to “speak” to Copilot in a language that it can understand. Copilot sits atop OpenAI Codex, which in turn sits upon something known as GPT-3 – the third iteration of a “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”, an artificial intelligence program that has been “taught” 175 billion “parameters” (think of them as rules) about human language. All of that data came from a huge vacuuming of the Web – GPT-3 sucked in much of what we’ve been publishing online over the past 30 years. With so much fed into it, and so many rules inferred from all of that hoovering, GPT-3 could do things that no computer program had done before, such as craft a summary of a technical article, find the salient points in a press release – even “read between the lines” of CEOs public reports to discern the real health of the business. There’s no magic here, no “thought”, but those billions of rules make it appear as though GPT-3 can do things only humans can do. Mo rules, mo smarts. But GPT-3 is over 18 months old – dog years in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Microsoft and Nvidia (who make the pricey display cards hardcore gamers prefer) unveiled the latest, greatest and biggest program, MT-NLG. MT-NLG has over half a trillion parameters within its model of human language – three times the number on offer from the suddenly shabby GPT-3. What does that get you? Expanded powers of inference. In one example, Microsoft fed MT-NLG a statement, then asked it a question: Famous professors supported the secretary. Question: Professors supported the secretary. True or False? MT-NLG replied: True. The secretary was supported by famous professors. That’s all the more significant because MT-NLG showed its work, explaining why it answered as it had. In the same way the steam engine relieved human beings of the mechanical drudgeries of work, artificial intelligence looks to be fulfilling its promise to relieve the drudgeries of desk work. Much of what we read consists of factual statements. MT-NLG, like GPT-3 before it, can digest these factual statements, draw inferences, then make decisions based on those inferences. Is it “understanding”? The question we need to ask at this point isn’t the unanswerable, “Does MT-NLG understand what it’s reading?” But rather, “Does MT-NLG have enough rules to give the correct answer?” The answer there is (mostly) yes. Microsoft recently bought GitHub; Copilot and MT-NLG look to be on a collision course. This means the kinds of suggestions Copilot provides programmers will soon get even better. Will this put programmers out of work? That seems unlikely. Instead, programmers will be able to focus on the interesting bits, using Copilot to provide workable solutions to all of the necessary “boilerplate” within every computer program. In the same way that the steam engine relieved human beings of the mechanical drudgeries of work, artificial intelligence looks to be fulfilling its promise to relieve the drudgeries of desk work. It won’t be long until we have tools analogous to Copilot employed for basic business communication – drafting simple press releases, answering customer emails, and so forth. Automation is coming to the boring bits of our white-collar lives, leaving us with the interesting bits – the weird and unexpected, those things no computer has ever learned, nor any human has ever seen. Humans are good at dealing with exceptional circumstances – and with some help from AI, we’ll have more time to get better. https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/ai/github-copilot-ai-coding/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Code is my copilot: Mark Pesce test drives AI-assisted coding with GitHub Copilot. Credit: Sorbetto / Getty. Two new advances – Copilot and MT-NLG – show signs that the promise of AI is upon us: taking care of the boring bits of our lives, so we can do the interesting stuff. When someone once commented on the obvious African influences in his paintings, Pablo Picasso famously said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Programmers practise a similar kind of predation – like magpies, a good programmer will feather their nests with the shiniest bits that they can spy. And with a good search engine, well, there’s a lot there to spy. Nearly every problem in programming has been solved before by someone, somewhere, at some point – and if a programmer can find that solution, they can save themselves a fair bit of effort, or at least study the handiwork of others in pursuit of their own answers. It’s this promiscuity of resources that separates the young and inexperienced programmers from those (such as myself) who have been slinging code most of their lives. A few years ago, a study showed that the most productive programmers were those who consulted Google (and Stack Overflow, which is a kind of Wikipedia of great code examples) most frequently. These days, I code with a whole set of browser tabs open – into Google, Stack Overflow, documentation pages, and so forth. It’s like having an extra brain – well, millions of extra brains. It definitely makes programming less tiring than it might have been 20 years ago, when programmers spent a lot of their time solving problems others had already solved, but had no idea others had solved them. “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Pablo Picasso These practices that programmers learn over a lifetime’s experience with their tools have been dramatically short-circuited by one of the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. At the end of June, programming website GitHub – a “repository” used by millions of programmers to store and share their code with their teams, or, in the case of open source, with the world – announced a new tool: Copilot. Developed from a very rich artificial intelligence model known as OpenAI Codex, it purports to do what good programmers have always done for themselves – find the best bit of code to solve the problem at hand. That sounds like quite a big ask, because code can be difficult for any programmer who didn’t write it to read and understand, and because the entire act of coding – laying out a structure, then filling in that structure with the necessary details – seems like a very human, cognitive task. It’s never been something a programmer could ask Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant to do for them. In AI terms, it’s next level. I wrote a single line of comment that stated my requirements and – abracadabra! – the computer provided a complete solution. When I recently got access to GitHub Copilot (it’s still in limited release) I had very low expectations. I reckoned it would do little more than make a few hints while I sat and typed out my code. What I got, though, was rather more than that. From the examples provided by GitHub, I could see that I could frame what I needed as a “comment” – a bit of code designed to be read by a human and ignored by the computer. So I wrote a single line of comment that stated my requirements and – abracadabra! – the computer provided a complete solution. I inspected the code burped up by Copilot, and realised the computer had given me exactly the result I was looking for. Just what I would have done – if not in exactly the same way. Coding styles differ among programmers, and Copilot has its own, very straightforward style. That makes it easy to read – always a good thing. Yet after some time playing with it, I could see that Copilot is far from perfect. I asked it for code to do something quite straightforward, and while it came up with suggestions that would have done the job, none of them made sense in the context of the programming language I was using. It may be that I’ll need to learn to “speak” to Copilot in a language that it can understand – just as we’ve all learned how to shape our requests to Siri and Google and Alexa. And there’s no question that it feels uncanny to have the computer quickly and silently come up with just the bit of code that you’re looking for. Copilot will make bad programmers better, and good programmers more productive. That’s a good thing. But it’s just the tip of the iceberg. It may be that I’ll need to learn to “speak” to Copilot in a language that it can understand. Copilot sits atop OpenAI Codex, which in turn sits upon something known as GPT-3 – the third iteration of a “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”, an artificial intelligence program that has been “taught” 175 billion “parameters” (think of them as rules) about human language. All of that data came from a huge vacuuming of the Web – GPT-3 sucked in much of what we’ve been publishing online over the past 30 years. With so much fed into it, and so many rules inferred from all of that hoovering, GPT-3 could do things that no computer program had done before, such as craft a summary of a technical article, find the salient points in a press release – even “read between the lines” of CEOs public reports to discern the real health of the business. There’s no magic here, no “thought”, but those billions of rules make it appear as though GPT-3 can do things only humans can do. Mo rules, mo smarts. But GPT-3 is over 18 months old – dog years in the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, Microsoft and Nvidia (who make the pricey display cards hardcore gamers prefer) unveiled the latest, greatest and biggest program, MT-NLG. MT-NLG has over half a trillion parameters within its model of human language – three times the number on offer from the suddenly shabby GPT-3. What does that get you? Expanded powers of inference. In one example, Microsoft fed MT-NLG a statement, then asked it a question: Famous professors supported the secretary. Question: Professors supported the secretary. True or False? MT-NLG replied: True. The secretary was supported by famous professors. That’s all the more significant because MT-NLG showed its work, explaining why it answered as it had. In the same way the steam engine relieved human beings of the mechanical drudgeries of work, artificial intelligence looks to be fulfilling its promise to relieve the drudgeries of desk work. Much of what we read consists of factual statements. MT-NLG, like GPT-3 before it, can digest these factual statements, draw inferences, then make decisions based on those inferences. Is it “understanding”? The question we need to ask at this point isn’t the unanswerable, “Does MT-NLG understand what it’s reading?” But rather, “Does MT-NLG have enough rules to give the correct answer?” The answer there is (mostly) yes. Microsoft recently bought GitHub; Copilot and MT-NLG look to be on a collision course. This means the kinds of suggestions Copilot provides programmers will soon get even better. Will this put programmers out of work? That seems unlikely. Instead, programmers will be able to focus on the interesting bits, using Copilot to provide workable solutions to all of the necessary “boilerplate” within every computer program. In the same way that the steam engine relieved human beings of the mechanical drudgeries of work, artificial intelligence looks to be fulfilling its promise to relieve the drudgeries of desk work. It won’t be long until we have tools analogous to Copilot employed for basic business communication – drafting simple press releases, answering customer emails, and so forth. Automation is coming to the boring bits of our white-collar lives, leaving us with the interesting bits – the weird and unexpected, those things no computer has ever learned, nor any human has ever seen. Humans are good at dealing with exceptional circumstances – and with some help from AI, we’ll have more time to get better. https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/ai/github-copilot-ai-coding/
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted November 25, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted November 25, 2021 Quote Rolls-Royce claims its all-electric plane is the fastest ever made The new aircraft, Spirit Of Innovation, clocked a top speed of 623km/h (387.4mph). Could it help us reach 'jet zero'? As if that wasn’t enough, Spirit Of Innovation, which is part of the Accelerating the Electrification of Flight (ACCEL) project, additionally achieved 555.9km/h (345.4mph) over a three-kilometre course, smashing the previously held record for an electric plane by 213.04km/h (132mph). In further runs at the Boscombe Down test site, the craft broke even more records by clocking a speed of 532.1km/h (330mph) over 15 kilometres and climbing to an altitude of 3,000 metres in 202 seconds. Rolls-Royce has submitted the data to the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) – the World Air Sports Federation that controls and certifies world aeronautical and astronautical records – to confirm that it has broken world records. “The advanced battery and propulsion technology developed for this programme has exciting applications for the advanced air mobility market,” said Rolls-Royce CEO Warren East. “Following the world’s focus on the need for action at COP26, this is another milestone that will help make ‘jet zero’ a reality and supports our ambitions to deliver the technology breakthroughs society needs to decarbonise transport across air, land and sea.” Spirit Of Innovation achieved these feats thanks to a 400kW electric powertrain and a 6,480-cell 750V battery. To put that into perspective, that battery has enough energy to juice up 7,500 smartphones. These drive three propellers that complete 2,200 revolutions per minute. “Spirit Of Innovation is a bit different from other existing electric-powered aircraft in that it has been optimised for speed, which means that the batteries are used up very quickly – the aircraft can only fly for around seven to eight minutes with enough power remaining to land with reserves,” explained Bill Read, deputy editor of Aerospace, the magazine of The Royal Aeronautical Society. “Future designs for electric commercial aircraft will be concentrating more on endurance to keep the batteries running for as long as possible to increase range.” The aim of ACCEL is to research battery technology for future electric aeroplanes, including commercial craft. Some of the main challenges have been finding ways to reduce the weight of the batteries. To overcome this, Rolls-Royce designed the battery containment system to act as a structural part of the plane. Read more about air travel X-59 QueSST: the quiet supersonic aeroplane that could revolutionise air travel The new age of the airship: could blimps be the future of air travel? “According to Rolls-Royce, while electric cars typically have an equal weight proportion of cells and packaging, the battery box in the aircraft weighs 450kg, of which the cells account for 300kg,” said Read. “Rolls-Royce says that the resulting system is very energy efficient with 90 per cent of the battery power being used to power the aircraft with only 10 per cent being lost through heat and sound.” The batteries getting hot is another problem in electric planes. Spirit Of Innovation’s battery cells are in fire-proof containers lined with Portuguese cork (yes, the same stuff that’s in the top of your wine bottle) to provide a thermal barrier. A bunch of sensors on the plane can monitor 20,000 points of data per second, and measure the charge, temperature and voltage of the battery cells. This is relayed back to the pilot during the flight to provide information and warnings about the state of the batteries. With rising concerns about the effect of aviation emissions on the environment, there has been an increasing focus on the development of electric planes. While scientists have been experimenting with electric flight since the end of the 19th Century, when French aviator Gaston Tissandier flew an electric airship, electric flight is currently impractical for your annual holiday to the Med as any plane with sufficient battery power for long flights would be too heavy to take to the skies. Instead, many manufacturers are working on planes that could be used for short-haul flights or as air taxis. For example, easyJet is developing a fully electric 186-seater plane that could fly for about an hour, which would be sufficient to take you from London to Amsterdam. Meanwhile, Urban Air Port plans to build a skyport in Coventry, which will be the world’s first operational hub for air taxis and cargo drones. Indeed, according to Read, Rolls-Royce plans to use the experience gained from the ACCEL project in the development of a complete electric propulsion system for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) air taxis and larger electric-powered commuter aircraft. One problem with batteries is that the cells will degrade with use. According to a member of the ACCEL team, batteries can only be recharged from 500 to 1,500 cycles before they degrade too much to be of use to power aircraft. This could be a problem for eVTOL operators which will need to use full power for take-offs and landings, and will require frequent recharges which could wear out their batteries quite quickly https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/rolls-royce-claims-its-all-electric-plane-is-the-fastest-ever-made/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted November 25, 2021 Author Subscriber Share Posted November 25, 2021 5 hours ago, CaaC (John) said: It looks so cool! Great speed as wel. Due to low energy density of current batteries, it can only do a 30 minute flight max, but it's a nice demonstration of experimental technology nonetheless. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted November 26, 2021 Subscriber Share Posted November 26, 2021 As soft as jelly, as hard as glass Researchers create a hydrogel as strong as shatterproof glass Researchers from the University of Cambridge have invented a ‘super jelly’ so strong it can hold its shape even with the equivalent of an elephant treading on it, despite being 80% water. Jelly-like materials, or hydrogels, have many applications in soft robotics, tissue engineering and wearable tech, but it is difficult to make strong jellies that don’t break apart when under pressure. According to this study, published in Nature Materials, the new hydrogel material is soft like a jelly, but acts like an ultra-hard, shatterproof glass when compressed. The way a material behaves depends on its molecular structure. Some molecules bond rigidly so they can’t move at all, leading to tough, solid materials such as glass. Others can slide around each other and keep the material – such as rubber – flexible. Most hydrogels have networks of polymers linked together in a shape that keeps them flexible. “In order to make materials with the mechanical properties we want, we use crosslinkers, where two molecules are joined through a chemical bond,” says Dr Zehuan Huang, the study’s first author. “We use reversible crosslinkers to make soft and stretchy hydrogels, but making a hard and compressible hydrogel is difficult, and designing a material with these properties is completely counterintuitive.” The new hydrogel follows the principle of cross-linked polymers, but has special barrel-shaped molecules called cucurbiturils that hold the polymers together – almost like handcuffs. Cucurbiturils clutch the polymers tightly together like glass when the hydrogel is under pressure, but still allows for flexible movement at other times. The glass-like state was so strong it could be run over by a car. “At 80% water content, you’d think it would burst apart like a water balloon, but it doesn’t: it stays intact and withstands huge compressive forces,” says Oren Scherman, director of the university’s Melville Laboratory for Polymer Synthesis. “The properties of the hydrogel are seemingly at odds with each other.” Co-author Dr Jade McCune says that the way the hydrogel can withstand compression is surprising. “It wasn’t like anything we’ve seen in hydrogels,” she says. “We also found that the compressive strength could be easily controlled through simply changing the chemical structure of the guest molecule inside the handcuff.” The researchers used the material to make a hydrogel pressure sensor for real-time monitoring of human movement, and they hope to investigate uses in other biomedical or bioelectric technology. “To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that glass-like hydrogels have been made,” says Huang. “We’re not just writing something new into the textbooks, which is really exciting, but we’re opening a new chapter in the area of high-performance soft materials.” https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/materials/as-soft-as-jelly-as-hard-as-glass/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted January 11, 2022 Author Subscriber Share Posted January 11, 2022 https://www.livescience.com/chinas-1-trillion-artificial-sun-fusion-reactor-just-got-five-times-hotter-than-the-sun China's tokamak dubbed "artificial sun" has set a new world record for longest sustained nuclear fusion by reaching and holding plasma temperatures five times hotter than the core of the sun for more than 17 minutes 120 million degrees C, unimaginable. Nuclear fusion is THE technology that would solve a lot of problems... Unlimited clean energy would be one of humanity's biggest achievements. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bluebird Hewitt Posted January 12, 2022 Share Posted January 12, 2022 21 hours ago, nudge said: https://www.livescience.com/chinas-1-trillion-artificial-sun-fusion-reactor-just-got-five-times-hotter-than-the-sun China's tokamak dubbed "artificial sun" has set a new world record for longest sustained nuclear fusion by reaching and holding plasma temperatures five times hotter than the core of the sun for more than 17 minutes 120 million degrees C, unimaginable. Nuclear fusion is THE technology that would solve a lot of problems... Unlimited clean energy would be one of humanity's biggest achievements. Don't tell that to the general environmental activist. They'll jump up and down saying how bad nuclear is. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted January 12, 2022 Author Subscriber Share Posted January 12, 2022 2 minutes ago, Bluebird Hewitt said: Don't tell that to the general environmental activist. They'll jump up and down saying how bad nuclear is. Could be worse. Like tens thousands of dumbasses who took the name "artificial sun" literally and panickly shared doctored videos of some old Chinese rocket launch on the social media, claiming that China launched an actual artificial sun into Earth's orbit... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azeem Posted January 13, 2022 Share Posted January 13, 2022 Corona was a distraction so they could create their artificial sun Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bluebird Hewitt Posted January 13, 2022 Share Posted January 13, 2022 22 hours ago, nudge said: Could be worse. Like tens thousands of dumbasses who took the name "artificial sun" literally and panickly shared doctored videos of some old Chinese rocket launch on the social media, claiming that China launched an actual artificial sun into Earth's orbit... Fuck sake. Also, on a bit of a random note, I have been watching a couple videos on YouTube from 'Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell'. They seem informative but not sure how reliable they are as such. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted January 13, 2022 Author Subscriber Share Posted January 13, 2022 6 minutes ago, Bluebird Hewitt said: Fuck sake. Also, on a bit of a random note, I have been watching a couple videos on YouTube from 'Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell'. They seem informative but not sure how reliable they are as such. They are generally reliable, especially as a starting point to learn about new topics. Their information is usually well-researched and while there might be some mistakes or poorly chosen sources (it's unavoidable), Kurzgesagt appear to be willing to admit their mistakes. I think they actually removed a few videos after new evidence showed it wasn't very accurate anymore. I personally don't like the format, but I've recommended it several times to others. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted January 21, 2022 Subscriber Share Posted January 21, 2022 Quote Cracking open the code AI that struggles to recognise darker skin; databases that don’t accept name changes – both are the result of the assumptions written into the code. Getting a different viewpoint’s not just a worthy idea; it’s critical to our software-driven future. One Australian software company is trying to switch things up to achieve just that. The phrase “diversity in coding” is almost a cliché at this point. It’s an inherent good, something schools have been enthusiastic about for years. Any software engineering company worth its website will tell you it’s keen to improve the gender and cultural balance of its staff. But while this cause has spurred hundreds of scholarships, programmes, and initiatives, there’s scant public evaluation data – and thus, not much evidence on how effective each one is. Meanwhile, women’s actual participation in the engineering workforce continues to rise at a snail’s pace. So it’s unsurprising that some software companies are trying other methods to diversify their staff. One company – Stile, based in Melbourne and making education software – has just begun its second year of an unusual internship program. “Our strategy was kind of the same as everybody’s,” says Shaun O’Keefe, head of Platform Engineering at Stile, when explaining how he helped design the internship. “It was that you are very positive about getting more women into engineering […], but you were basically counting on people coming to you.” FULL REPORT Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted January 29, 2022 Subscriber Share Posted January 29, 2022 Quote Is this the world’s weirdest telescope? Three undersea neutrino detector observatories are in the works. What seems like a very difficult and risky project comes with great galactic rewards. Traditionally, astronomy has used light to study distant celestial objects. But photons are not the only particles that reach us. Neutrinos are also powerful tools for studying the universe, especially at its extremes, because they don’t get deflected or hindered. They’re tiny, nearly massless, and absolutely everywhere – they’re constantly being created by the Sun’s nuclear fusion processes, for example. If you hold up your hand, about 60 billion neutrinos will pass through your thumbnail every second, like miniscule ghosts. But these are not the most interesting kinds of neutrinos, according to astrophysicists. Instead, they want to study super-fast, super-energetic neutrinos that have come from far, far away. And these turn out to be incredibly difficult to spot. That’s why scientists want to build a neutrino telescope more than two kilometres beneath the surface of the Pacific Oce If you hold up your hand, about 60 billion neutrinos will pass through your thumbnail every second. “Neutrino telescopes are a technological marvel,” says project leader Elisa Resconi, an astrophysicist at the Technical University of Munich, Germany. “In a neutrino telescope we measure the dimmest light possible, with the shortest time synchronisations imaginable, using the lowest power consumption and producing the highest data. All of this from the most remote place on Earth.” She says that a prototype of the telescope – called the Pacific Ocean Neutrino Experiment, or P-ONE – will be built by end of next year. So here’s the plan: Just off the coast of British Columbia in the north-east Pacific Ocean, seventy one-kilometre-long strings will be sunk deep into the darkness. The strings – each studded with sensitive light detectors – will be attached to floats so they stand upright like kelp. Then, they’ll wait and watch for flashes of radiation that occur when the nearly massless subatomic particles interact in the water. Specifically, the telescope will look for high-energy neutrinos that have come from far across the universe, produced in exotic events like supernovae, gamma ray bursts or colliding stars. “With neutrinos,” Resconi says, “we can study mechanisms and regions which are obscured in photons – we can study beyond any dense cloud or accretion disk.” Using these messengers from the stars, astrophysicists can investigate places like the centre of our Milky Way Galaxy, which is shrouded in dust, or search for hints of cosmic ray production or even dark matter. “And of course, we could also discover something we can’t imagine today,” Resconi adds. “We understand only a very small fraction of the universe.” FULL REPORT Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted March 1, 2022 Subscriber Share Posted March 1, 2022 Quote Venus flytraps doing the neuron dance Medical applications possible as artificial neurons are used to control the movement of the carnivorous plants. A team of Swedish researchers has successfully used a printed artificial neuron to control the movement of a Venus flytrap plant, forecasting that it could aid the development of futuristic medical devices and brain-machine interfaces. Existing silicon-based circuits and devices, such as those used in current computers, are difficult to integrate with biological systems due to their complexity, poor biocompatibility and low energy efficiency. By contrast, the artificial neuron is based on organic electrochemical transistors, which more closely resemble electrical signalling systems found in biology. “The human brain is one of the most advanced computers ever made,” says Simone Fabiano, an associate professor at Linköping University in Sweden and senior author on the study. “It has a massive amount of memory and is excellent at processing information and making decisions while consuming very little energy. On the contrary, man-made supercomputers are bulky and consume a lot of energy.” The team tackled the challenge of creating an artificial neuron that approaches nature’s elegance and efficiency. Ordinary neurons, or nerve cells, operate using electric currents, which are linked to tight control of certain charged molecules (ions) inside and outside the cell. The artificial neuron uses an organic electrochemical transistor that is controlled by ion concentration spikes, similar to biological neurons. Compared to a silicon-based artificial neuron, Fabiano says, the new mechanism is easier and less expensive to produce. It can also operate at a lower voltage, thereby saving energy, and can interface directly with biological neurons. Next, the researchers worked on integrating the artificial neuron with the cells of Venus flytraps. These carnivorous plants snap shut to trap their insect prey when sensitive hairs on the plant surface are stimulated twice within a short amount of time (approximately 30 seconds), leading to the release of ions within cells and a movement response. The researchers mimicked this biological mechanism by stimulating the artificial neuron with a high-input electrical current, creating a high “firing frequency” and triggering the plant to snap shut. When stimulated with a low-input current, firing frequency does not reach the threshold and the plant remains open. The artificial neuron has potential applications ranging from implantable medical devices to prosthetics, brain-machine interfaces and intelligent soft robotics. “The ability to link an artificial device with a biological system is crucial to the success of these domains,” the authors write in the study. “Neurons, together with synapses, are the building blocks of our brain,” Fabiano explains. “Being able to mimic the functioning of biological neurons with electronic devices could enable the development of artificial intelligence technologies.” “It will take many years of research to achieve the efficiency of our brain, but I believe we are on the right track to demonstrate printed, small-scale artificial neural networks,” she adds. The team hopes to continue work on communication between artificial and biological neurons, Fabiano says. https://cosmosmagazine.com/technology/ai/artificial-neuron-venus-flytrap/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber CaaC (John)+ Posted October 15, 2022 Subscriber Share Posted October 15, 2022 Quote NASA Poised to Break Sound Barrier in New Way Seventy-five years ago, a sonic boom thundered for the first time over the high desert of California. On the ground below, it has been written, a small group of researchers from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) – NASA’s predecessor organization – were the first to hear the thunder crack coming from the Bell X-1 rocket plane flying faster than the speed of sound. It was Oct. 14, 1947, and the joint X-1 team of NACA, Air Force (newly formed that year), and Bell engineers and pilots had broken the sound barrier – an imaginary wall in the sky some said was impossible to penetrate. Now, aeronautical innovators with NASA’s Quesst mission are poised to break the sound barrier again, only this time in a very different way that could make it possible for all of us to one day travel by air just as fast as any of the X-1 pilots who flew supersonic. “That first supersonic flight was such a tremendous achievement, and now you look at how far we’ve come since then. What we’re doing now is the culmination of so much of their work,” said Catherine Bahm, an aeronautical engineer at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in California. Bahm is manager of the Low Boom Flight Demonstrator project. Her team is responsible for designing and building the X-59, NASA’s experimental airplane that is the centerpiece of Quesst. Through Quesst, NASA plans to demonstrate the X-59 can fly faster than sound without generating the typically loud sonic booms that led to supersonic flight over land being banned in 1973. The plan includes flying the X-59 over several communities to survey how people react to the quieter sonic “thump” it produces – if they hear anything at all. Their responses will be shared with regulators who will then consider writing new rules to lift the ban. And when that happens it will mark another historic milestone in flight, potentially opening a new era in air travel, where airline passengers might hop on a supersonic jet at breakfast time in Los Angeles to make a lunchtime reservation in New York City. Then to Now The dream of commercial supersonic travel wasn’t top of mind for Air Force Capt. Chuck Yeager when he piloted the X-1 “Glamorous Glennis” in 1947 on the history-making flight past Mach 1 – a measurement of how fast you’re flying relative to the speed of sound. It was years before a U.S. supersonic transport – widely known as the SST – was proposed by President John F. Kennedy in June 1963, shortly after Europe announced its plans for the Concorde, the faster-than-sound airliner that eventually operated from 1976 to 2003. The U.S. later halted the SST project in 1971 and banned supersonic flight over land in 1973. Research continued into supersonic flight for both military and purely scientific reasons. The X-planes that followed the X-1 pushed the boundaries of flight higher and faster, and NASA’s aeronautical innovators were there at every step. The ever-more-advanced computer and wind tunnel research tools they used added to their knowledge. Quieting the Boom Along the way, researchers gained a greater understanding of how aircraft create sonic booms and turned their attention the idea of lowering the intensity of the sonic booms by manipulating the shape of the airplane. That idea was tested in flight by NASA’s Shaped Sonic Boom Demonstration program during 2003-2004. It used a Northrop F-5E jet whose fuselage was modified to give it a shape designed to produce quieter sonic booms. It worked. With the X-59 and its quiet supersonic technology building on all that has been learned since the X-1 first proved it was possible to go beyond Mach 1, NASA hopes to enable industry to make faster-than-sound flight available to everyone. “We’ve kind of been stuck with our airliners at about Mach .8 for the past almost 50 years, so being able to get there – wherever there is – much faster is still kind of an unfulfilled dream,” said Peter Coen, NASA’s mission integration manager for Quesst. There’s an old joke about how the X-1 broke the sound barrier and NASA has been trying to fix it ever since. Coen doesn’t see it that way. Instead, the new obstacle to supersonic flight is the speed limit due to the negative effect of sonic boom noise, he said. “With the X-59 flying on the Quesst mission, I think we’re ready to break the sound barrier once again,” Coen said. First flight of the X-59 is targeted for early 2023. https://www.nasa.gov/aeroresearch/nasa-poised-to-break-sound-barrier-in-new-way Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bluewolf Posted December 11, 2022 Share Posted December 11, 2022 EctoLife: Concept Unveiled for the World’s First Artificial Womb (bizsiziz.com) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Subscriber nudge+ Posted December 11, 2022 Author Subscriber Share Posted December 11, 2022 39 minutes ago, Bluewolf said: EctoLife: Concept Unveiled for the World’s First Artificial Womb (bizsiziz.com) This is probably the most dystopian thing I've ever seen in my life. In fact, all throughout the video, I was wondering if it was a genuine concept, or if it's just some sort of a sci-fi short movie or satire. In fact, I am still not sure Fucking hell, a baby factory where you can make genetically engineered babies (if you buy the Elite package, of course...) and it comes with an app, of course. The whole facility just reminds me of Matrix... Or Clone Wars. Or Brave New World. Or Gattaca. Nah there's no way it's real Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderator Tommy Posted December 11, 2022 Moderator Share Posted December 11, 2022 2 minutes ago, nudge said: This is probably the most dystopian thing I've ever seen in my life. In fact, all throughout the video, I was wondering if it was a genuine concept, or if it's just some sort of a sci-fi short movie or satire. In fact, I am still not sure Fucking hell, a baby factory where you can make genetically engineered babies (if you buy the Elite package, of course...) and it comes with an app, of course. The whole facility just reminds me of Matrix... Or Clone Wars. Or Brave New World. Or Gattaca. Nah there's no way it's real "What do you do for a living?" - "I work in the baby factory." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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