Lifeboat Foundation

But a carbon nanotube coating (shown in clear jacket) replaces the tin-coated copper braid that serves as the outer conductor, ordinarily the heaviest component. Created by researchers at Rice University, the coating was tested by a collaborative group including NIST, which has more than 10 years of expertise in characterizing and measuring nanotu…bes. The coating, only up to 90 microns (millionths of a meter) in thickness, resulted in a total cable mass reduction of 50 percent (useful for lowering the weight of electronics in aerospace vehicles) and handled 10,000 bending cycles without affecting performance. And even though the coating is microscopically thin, the cable transmitted data with a comparable ability to ordinary cables, due to the nanotubes’ favorable electrical properties.

Credit: J. Fitlow/Rice University See More

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We hardly need superheroes anymore: engt.co/1JLE7im

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Researchers at Harvard are working to identify the brain processes that make humans so good at recognising patterns. Their ultimate goals is to develop biologically-inspired computer systems for smarter AI. Computers inspired by the human brain could be used to detect network invasions, read MRI images, and even drive cars.

Their ultimate goals is to develop biologically-inspired computer systems for smarter AI.

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Scalpers offered contact lenses guaranteed to fool any ocular-based biometric ticketing technology.

He was right, of course, which explains all those people arriving at the stadium in all the usual ways. Some came by autonomous cars that dropped them off a mile or more from the stadium, their fitness wearables synced to their car software, both programmed to make their owner walk whenever the day’s calories consumed exceeded the day’s calories burned. Others turned up on the transcontinental Hyperloop, gliding at 760 miles per hour on a cushion of air through a low-pressure pipeline, as if each passenger was an enormous bank slip tucked into a pneumatic tube at a drive-through teller window in 1967. That was the year the first Super Bowl was played, midway through the first season of Star Trek, set in a space-age future that now looks insufficiently imagined.

And so hours before Super Bowl 100 kicked off—we persist in using that phrase, long after the NFL abandoned the actual practice—the pregame scene offered all the Rockwellian tableaux of the timeless tailgate: children running pass patterns on their hoverboards—they still don’t quite hover, dammit—dads printing out the family’s pregame snacks, grandfathers relaxing in lawn chairs with their marijuana pipes.

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Self driving cars to reach a $4bil revenue target within 10 yrs.

The White House wants to spend nearly $4 billion on self-driving cars, a move some experts say could help put extra horsepower behind autonomous vehicles and have them cruising America’s streets within the next 10 years.

“That is a serious amount of money,” Wendy Ju, executive director of Stanford’s Center for Design Research, told NBC News.

Continue reading “Self-Driving Cars in 10 Years? How $4B Could Make it a Reality” »

Space Tourism … and Much More.

Copyright ©2016 Parabolic Arc.

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The Antipode is the second hypersonic jet by Canadian inventor and engineer, Charles Bombardier. The Antipode design is a 10-seat private jet that uses rocket boosters to take off, detaches the rockets at altitude of 12km, fires its hypersonic engines to hit speeds of Mach 24 (20,000 km/h), and gets you from New York to London in 11 minutes.

To cool the jet from the heat of hypersonic travel.

It would channel some of the air, flowing at supersonic speed, through a nozzle located on the nose of the aircraft, producing a counterflowing jet of air that would induce LPM (a novel aerodynamic phenomenon called ‘long penetration mode), which would in turn lead to a drop in surface temperature due to aeroheating and a reduction of the shockwave and noise caused by breaking the sound barrier.

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Wise Autoresponse for your Customer Support Call Center needs — I do know that one of the large financial institutions in NYC announced in Dec. that they were replacing their tier 1 & tier 2 support with AI this summer.

BERKELEY, CA — (Marketwired) — 01/27/16 — Wise.io, which delivers machine learning applications to help enterprises provide a better customer experience, today announced the availability of Wise Auto Response, the first intelligent auto reply functionality for customer support organizations. Using machine learning to understand the intent of an incoming ticket and determine the best available response, Wise Auto Response automatically selects and applies the appropriate reply to address the customer issue without ever involving an agent. By helping customer service teams answer common questions faster, Wise Auto Response removes a high percentage of tickets from the queue, freeing up agents’ time to focus on more complex tickets and drive higher levels of customer satisfaction.

“Wise Auto Response has dramatically eased the burden on our support agents, allowing us to reply to half of all tickets automatically,” said Francesca Noli, VP of Marketing at Product Madness. “Now we are able to focus agent attention on more complex, customer-facing issues like payment problems, which have a direct impact on our bottom line. Wise gives us the best of both worlds: it has the power of an artificial intelligence system like Watson, along with the lightweight integration we need to successfully apply machine learning to our service operations quickly, easily and cost effectively.”

Wise Auto Response identifies common customer inquiries that can be responded to with a high level of confidence — such as password resets and basic product functionality, or standard “thank you” email templates that don’t require hands-on follow up — and automatically responds without the need for any manually written business rules. The new functionality complements the current suite of predictive applications offered by Wise.io, including Wise Routing, which automates the support ticket triage process, and Wise Recommended Response, which provides a ranked shortlist of appropriate macros and templates for each new customer inquiry.

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Our economy will be severely impacted as millions of lorry drivers, cabbies and delivery people are put out of work. In this era of endless innovation, humanity’s century-long relationship with the automobile is about to be permanently disrupted. The reason has nothing to do with millennials, Uber or improvements in mass transport. Driving should and will be made illegal because we now have the technology to prevent deadly traffic accidents, one of the greatest causes of premature deaths.

More than 1.2 million people are killed in car accidents each year. Last year, more than 275,000 Chinese, 238,000 Indians and 36,000 Americans died in preventable traffic accidents. Since Ralph Nader first took on the car industry by publishing Unsafe at Any Speed in 1965, auto-mobile manufacturers have radically improved the safety and reliability of their vehicles. Seatbelts, airbags, anti-lock brakes, as well as tyre-pressure-monitoring, have all reduced traffic deaths. But, until now, makers were unable to deal with the single biggest cause of fatalities: human error. We now have the technology to save millions of lives, but does society have the willpower to mandate its use?

Google’s autonomous vehicles have logged 1.5 million kilometres on roads dominated by human-driven cars. Subjected to the same real-world conditions as us mere mortals, self-driving cars have been through rain, sleet and snow. These vehicles have driven the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe 40 times, without incident. In July, Google reported 14 minor road accidents in total — but in all of the cases blamed human error. According to the data, human-driver error is responsible for 94 per cent of all crashes.

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