Lifeboat Foundation

No Robots Please says Mercedes; at least for their manufacturing teams that does specialized/ custom work.

Our dystopian all-robot future just got hit with a minor setback: Mercedes-Benz is ditching some of its robot workers in favor of humans, citing the human ability to move faster and perform a wider array of tasks. The reason largely revolves around Mercedes’ increased array of customization options — there are so many different individualization options at the moment that robots aren’t able to deal with them all. Humans, the auto maker says, are saving the company money.

Mercedes’ individualization options include things like various tire valve caps, trim, and cupholders, small but significant aspects of the vehicles that robots aren’t easily able to switch between. According to Daimler AG’s Markus Schaefer, “The variety is too much to take on for the machines. They can’t work with all the different options and keep pace with changes.”

Continue reading “Mercedes is ditching some robots in favor of human staff” »

Congress held a meeting today on what NASA’s overall purpose should look like under the next few presidents. But agreement on just what that purpose might be—as witnesses discussed everything from the planned Mars trip to a proposal for a space station hotel—seemed far away.

“If we treated the Air Force like we do NASA, we’d have no flying aircraft. We cannot decide every few years what we want the purpose of the space program to be,” said former NASA administrator Mike Griffin to the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology this morning.

The Mars mission was a topic of heavy discussion. At one point, Congressman Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) waved a MARS 2033 bumpersticker over his head (whether he brought it with him to the meeting for that specific purpose, or simply has it on him at all times was unclear)—only to have his colleague Congressman Jim Bridenstine (R-OK) snap that perhaps Republicans should print their own Mars 2032 bumper stickers.

Continue reading “Congress Considers Moon Camps and a Space Station Hotel for NASA’s Future” »

Recent advances in lasers suggest that we may see rockets propelled by light earlier than we had imagined. NASA scientist Philip Lubin and his team are working on a system that would use Earth-based lasers to allow space travel to far-away places in just a fraction of the time needed with current technology.

Using earth based lasers to push along a spacecraft instead of on board hydrocarbon-based fuel could dramatically reduce travel time to Mars, within our lifetime. Currently, it takes five months for a space craft to reach Mars. But, with photonic propulsion, it is likely that small crafts filled with experiments will reach Mars in just 3 days. Large spaceships with astronauts and life support systems will take only one month, which is about 20% of the duration of a current trip.

What’s next? Lubin believes that we may be able to send small crafts with scientific experiments to exoplanets as fast as 5% light speed in, perhaps, 30 years. Eventually, he claims that the technology will carry humans at speeds up to 20% light speed.

Read about it here.

The head of Google’s self-driving car division made headlines recently for asking federal regulators to permit a vehicle without human-facing features like a steering wheel. Now he’s made a very good case for why no autonomous vehicle should have these things at all.

In an interview with NPR that aired today, Google’s Chris Urmson hit home the point that it’s simply not a good idea to any to have any kind of human-oriented controls in self-driving cars:

You wouldn’t imagine that in the back of a taxi, we put an extra steering wheel or brake pedal there for the passenger to grab ahold of anytime. It would just be crazy to think about doing that. But at the same time, I could imagine that there are vehicles where most of the days you don’t really want to drive it, so let it take you to and from work in the morning, for example, but on the weekend when you get a chance to get out onto some open road, that you might enjoy driving in that location. But I think the idea that you want the person to jump in who hasn’t been paying attention or maybe had a couple of drinks with dinner and then jump in to override is probably not the right idea.

Continue reading “Why Self-Driving Cars Really Shouldn’t Ever Have Steering Wheels” »

“Suppose you want to travel from Helsinki to New York and you have to change your flight in London,” explains Sorin Paraoanu. “Normally you would first fly on a plane from Helsinki to London, then wait for some time in the airport in London, then board the flight London-New York. But in the quantum world, you would be better off boarding a plane from Helsinki to London sometime after the flight London-New York took off. You will not spend any time in London and you will arrive in New York right at the time when the plane from Hesinki lands in London.” This is mind-boggling but the experiment shows that it is indeed happening.

Besides the relevance for quantum computing, the result also has deep conceptual implications. Much of our understanding of the reality is based on the so-called continuity principle: the idea that influences propagate from here to there by going through all the places in-between. Real objects don’t just appear somewhere from nothing. But the experiment seems to defy this. Like in a great show of magic, quantum physics allows things to materialize here and there, apparently out of nowhere.

The team would like to acknowledge the excellent scientific environment created in the Low Temperature Laboratory (part of OtaNano) at the Department of Applied Physics.

Continue reading “Quantum physicists turn to the dark state” »

Aftermarket wireless EV charger maker Plugless is taking preorders for its inductive charger for the Tesla Model S.

Our next step is to develop a photo-catalyst better matched to the solar spectrum,” MacDonnell said. “Then we could more effectively use the entire spectrum of incident light to work towards the overall goal of a sustainable solar liquid fuel.

A team of University of Texas at Arlington chemists and engineers have proven that concentrated light, heat and high pressures can drive the one-step conversion of carbon dioxide and water directly into useable liquid hydrocarbon fuels.

This simple and inexpensive new sustainable fuels technology could potentially help limit global warming by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make fuel. The process also reverts oxygen back into the system as a byproduct of the reaction, with a clear positive environmental impact, researchers said.

Continue reading “Proven one-step process to convert CO2 and water directly into liquid hydrocarbon fuel” »

On Monday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Mark Zuckerberg partook in what he thought would be a “fireside chat” with Wired’s Jessi Hempel but which was verifiably not fireside, and was, actually, a keynote.

Inverse picked out the best nine moments of this interview.

1.) Zuck doesn’t know that Aquila will meet regulations but is just confident that it’ll work out

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg Offers These Predictions for the Future of the Internet” »

Membrane wings show promise for highly efficient micro air vehicles.