Lifeboat Foundation

Artificial intelligence has the power to eradicate poverty and disease or hasten the end of human civilisation as we know it – according to a speech delivered by Professor Stephen Hawking this evening.

“AT&T and Time Warner are reportedly in talks about a potential merger.”

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Group metals, a lil history on aluminum, technology needed, space law and more. The one great idea presented here is that many folks think stuff will be brought back to Earth. Though there would be some of that the resources out there will be used out there.

As Humans venture out far away from the Earth into the solar system, they will need material resources to keep us going. Where do we get those from? One for-profit company, Planetary Resources, wants to be the one to make it happen.

Continue reading “Mining Asteroids? An Interview with the CEO of Planetary Resources” »

For the first time, a team including scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used neutron beams to create holograms of large solid objects, revealing details about their interiors in ways that ordinary laser light-based visual holograms cannot.

Holograms—flat images that change depending on the viewer’s perspective, giving the sense that they are three-dimensional objects—owe their striking capability to what’s called an interference pattern. All matter, such as neutrons and photons of light, has the ability to act like rippling waves with peaks and valleys. Like a water wave hitting a gap between the two rocks, a wave can split up and then re-combine to create information-rich interference patterns (link is external).

An optical hologram is made by shining a laser at an object. Instead of merely photographing the light reflected from the object, a hologram is formed by recording how the reflected laser light waves interfere with each other. The resulting patterns, based on the waves’ phase differences (link is external), or relative positions of their peaks and valleys, contain far more information about an object’s appearance than a simple photo does, though they don’t generally tell us much about its hidden interior.

I know, it doesn’t seem like there’s any possible way that a transmission system could be interesting enough that we’d dedicate an entire article (and video!) to it. But here we are: As soon as SRI explained how their new Abacus transmission worked, we were absolutely sure that it was cool enough to share. In a nutshell, here’s why: It’s the first new rotary transmission design since Harmonic Drive introduced its revolutionary gear system in the 1960s*, and it might give harmonic gears a literal run for their money.

The physics of most electric motors generally dictates that the motors are happiest when they’re spinning very fast. Unless you want to use them to simply spin a thing very fast, you’ll need to add a rotary transmission that can convert low torque, high speed rotation into higher torque, lower speed rotation. If you’ve got the budget, the way to do this is with a high-performance harmonic gear like the ones offered by Harmonic Drive. Roboticists like harmonic gears because they are compact, have high gear ratios, and, perhaps most important, don’t have backlash, which is essentially the amount of wiggle room that you get with conventional gear-based transmissions. In robotic applications, wiggling means that you don’t know exactly where everything is all the time, making precision tasks something between irritating and impossible.

Harmonic gears are great, but they’re also superduper expensive, because they require all kinds of precision machining. Alexander Kernbaum, a senior research engineer at SRI International, has come up with an entirely new rotary transmission called the Abacus drive, and it’s a beautiful piece of clever engineering that offers all kinds of substantial advantages:

Continue reading “SRI Demonstrates Abacus, the First New Rotary Transmission Design in 50 Years” »

Given that the battery life of most multicopter drones typically doesn’t exceed 30 minutes of flight time per charge, there are many tasks that they simply can’t perform. Feeding them power through a hard-wired tether is one option, although that only works for applications where they’re hovering in place. Scientists at Imperial College London, however, are developing an alternative – they’re wirelessly transferring power to a drone as it’s flying.

For their study, the scientists started with an off-the-shelf mini quadcopter. They proceeded to remove its battery, add a copper coil to its body, and alter its electronics.

The researchers also built a separate transmitting platform that uses a circuit board, power source and copper coil of its own to produce a magnetic field. When placed near that platform, the drone’s coil acts as a receiving antenna for that magnetic field, inducing an alternating electrical current. The quadcopter’s rejigged electronics then convert that alternating current to direct current, which is used to power its flight.

Earlier this year, a team from Queen’s University in Canada demonstrated a smartphone prototype called ReFlex that had a flexible display capable of flipping virtual book pages in response to what were dubbed bend gestures. Researchers from the same Human Media Lab have now developed a similar device called the WhammyPhone that’s claimed to be the world’s first virtual musical instrument for flexible phones.

The WhammyPhone prototype sports a 1920 × 1080 pixel full high-definition Flexible Organic Light Emitting Diode (FOLED) touchscreen display and, like the ReFlex device, includes a bend sensor. This means that a user can manipulate the sound of electronically-generated instruments such as a guitar or violin by bending, squeezing or twisting the “smartphone.”

Continue reading “Bendable WhammyPhone offers flexible music control” »

In a great example of a low-cost research solution that could deliver big results, University of Michigan scientists have created a window for lithium-based batteries in order to film them as they charge and discharge.

The future of lithium-ion batteries is limited, says University of Michigan researcher Neil Dasgupta, because the chemistry cannot be pushed much further than it already has. Next-generation lithium cells will likely use lithium air and lithium sulfur chemistries. One of the big hurdles to be overcome in making these batteries practical is dendrites — tiny branch-like structures of lithium that form on the electrodes.

Continue reading “A peek into the future of lithium batteries” »

Traditional lithium-ion batteries may be on the way out, as scientists continue to overcome the obstacles holding back the longer-lasting lithium-oxygen batteries. The main issue is lack of efficiency and the build-up of lithium peroxide, which reduces the electrodes’ effectiveness. But now a team at Yale has used a molecule found in blood as a catalyst that not only improved the lithium-oxygen function, but may help reduce biowaste.

Lithium-oxygen, or lithium-air batteries, have the potential to hold a charge for much longer than traditional lithium-ion batteries and extend the life of devices like phones to several weeks before they’d need to be recharged. But before those dreams can become a reality, the problems of efficiency and lithium peroxide build-up need to be solved.

Previous studies have tried to fight lithium peroxide by keeping the oxygen in the cell as a solid, and by modifying the electrode to produce lithium superoxide instead. In this case, the Yale researchers were looking for a new catalyst that allowed lithium oxide in the cell to decompose back into lithium ions and gaseous oxygen, and they found one in an unexpected place: animal blood.