Lifeboat Foundation

After 15 years of development, an Israeli tech firm is optimistic it will finally get its 1,500 kilogramme (1.5 tonne) passenger carrying drone off the ground and into the market by 2020.

The Cormorant, billed as a flying car, is capable of transporting 500 kilogrammes (around half a tonne) of weight and travelling at 185 kilometres per hour. It completed its first automated solo flight over terrain in November. Its total price is estimated at $14 million.

Developers Urban Aeronautics believe the dark green drone, which uses internal rotors rather than helicopter propellers, could evacuate people from hostile environments and/or allow military forces safe access.

Continue reading “Israel’s ‘flying car’ passenger drone moves closer to delivery” »

Scientists are close to bringing back a huge ancient cattle species called an auroch.

Aurochs roamed Europe for thousands of years until the last of their kind died in the Jaktorow Forest in Poland in 1627.

They were 7 ft (2.13 m) tall and weighed around 1,000kg.

Continue reading “Scientists Are Attempting to Bring Back an Enormous Ancient Cow” »

The experimental 1,000-component optical processor is made for challenges like the “traveling salesman problem”.

Increasingly the vegetarian diet seems promising in terms of longevity strategy. Here is a short article exploring this idea.

Our ability to live a long life is influenced by a combination of our genes and our environment. In studies that involve identical twins, scientists have estimated that no more than 30 percent of this influence comes from our genes, meaning that the largest group of factors that control how long a person lives is their environment.

Of the many possible environmental factors, few have been as thoroughly studied or debated as our diet. Calorie restriction, for example, is one area that is being investigated.

Continue reading “Who’ll Live Longer: Meat Eaters or Vegetarians?” »

Axiom Space, a recently formed company headed by former ISS program manager Mike Suffredini, plans to send an astronaut to the ISS in 2019 and connect a large multipurpose habitat there in 2020.

N” A boom in consumer drone sales has spawned a counter-industry of start-ups aiming to stop drones flying where they shouldn’t, by disabling them or knocking them out of the sky.

Dozens of start-up firms are developing techniques — from deploying birds of prey to firing gas through a bazooka — to take on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that are being used to smuggle drugs, drop bombs, spy on enemy lines or buzz public spaces.

The arms race is fed in part by the slow pace of government regulation for drones.

Continue reading “Dog fight: Start-ups take aim at errant drones” »

Convinced by the awesome performance of electric motor technology Kreisel Electric is developing various projects for aerospace, marine, road and terrain.

In Brief

• Princeton University researchers have developed the world’s first integrated silicon photonic neuromorphic chip, which contains 49 circular nodes etched into semiconductive silicon.
• The chip could complete a math equation 1,960 times more quickly than a typical central processing unit, a speed that would make it ideal for use in future neural networks.

As developments are made in neural computing, we can continue to push artificial intelligence further. A fairly recent technology, neural networks have been taking over the world of data processing, giving machines advanced capabilities such as object recognition, face recognition, natural language processing, and machine translation.

These sound like simple things, but they were way out of reach for processors until scientists began to find way to make machines behave more like human brains in the way they learned and handled data. To do this, scientists have been focusing on building neuromorphic chips, circuits that operate in a similar fashion to neurons.

Continue reading “Computing at Light Speed: The World’s First Photonic Neural Network Has Arrived” »

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