A long-awaited tool the chip industry needs to keep driving progress is finally working.
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A common drug could hold the key to long life, in flies at least, according to research.
At low doses, lithium prolonged the life of fruit flies in lab experiments.
Scientists say the finding is “encouraging” and could eventually lead to new drugs to help people live longer and healthier lives.
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As our cars become increasingly connected to the internet, and eventually drive themselves, we’re going to want them to be rock-solid secure. The recent Chrysler exploit and FBI warning both highlighted just how vulnerable our vehicles can be to malicious hackers.
The idea of anti-virus software for cars has been around for several years, and this year there’s even an entire conference about in-car cybersecurity. Karamba Security is a new company in the space that is offering what amounts to a firewall for your ride.
Don’t miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! Join us May 26 & 27 in Amsterdam.
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One week after Elon Musk unveiled the Tesla Model 3, the company’s first mass-market car, hundreds of thousands of people have paid $1,000 to reserve the car despite its expected late-2017 launch.
That reservation figure totals to $14 billion (theoretical dollars) in sales, or 325,000 cars, with one big caveat: With only $1,000 down, some — perhaps many — of these orders will inevitably be adjusted or canceled over the next few years. In any event, that’s $325 million paid in preorders to date for a car that basically doesn’t exist yet.
Over 325k cars or ~$14B in preorders in first week. Only 5% ordered max of two, suggesting low levels of speculation.
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A new kind of nanoscale rectenna (half antenna and half rectifier) can convert solar and infrared into electricity, plus be tuned to nearly any other frequency as a detector.Right now efficiency is only one percent, but professor Baratunde Cola and colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech, Atlanta) convincingly argue that they can achieve 40 percent broad spectrum efficiency (double that of silicon and more even than multi-junction gallium arsenide) at a one-tenth of the cost of conventional solar cells (and with an upper limit of 90 percent efficiency for single wavelength conversion).
It is well suited for mass production, according to Cola. It works by growing fields of carbon nanotubes vertically, the length of which roughly matches the wavelength of the energy source (one micron for solar), capping the carbon nanotubes with an insulating dielectric (aluminum oxide on the tethered end of the nanotube bundles), then growing a low-work function metal (calcium/aluminum) on the dielectric and voila–a rectenna with a two electron-volt potential that collects sunlight and converts it to direct current (DC).
“Our process uses three simple steps: grow a large array of nanotube bundles vertically; coat one end with dielectric; then deposit another layer of metal,” Cola told EE Times. “In effect we are using one end of the nanotube as a part of a super-fast metal-insulator-metal tunnel diode, making mass production potentially very inexpensive up to 10-times cheaper than crystalline silicon cells.”
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Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new 3D printing process that creates fully functional robots from the moment they come out of the printer.
MIT process of robot making is quite streamlined, as the robot’s solid and hydraulic parts are created in one step. CSAIL Director Daniela Rus, who oversaw the project, said that their approach of printable hydraulics is a step ahead in the rapid fabrication of functional machines.
The single-step process involves printing a small six-legged robot that crawls with the help of 12-hydraulic pumps embedded in its body. Working of the printer includes inkjet printer deposits drops of material quite small in size. The object is printed layer wise from bottom to the top. High-intensity UV light solidifies the materials that were used to create the object.
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To the Robots of this restaurant “You’re Fired!”.
Employing robots and artificial intelligence in Chinese restaurants has turned out to be not such a smart idea after all, with restaurants in Guangzhou either closing down or firing their mechanical staff.
According to Workers’ Daily, two restaurants which made use of robotic waiters have closed down and a third which remains open has given all but one of the robots the sack.
Their human counterparts at the restaurant were full of complaints about their former colleagues. “The robots weren’t able to carry soup or other food steady and they would frequently break down. The boss has decided never to use them again,” said one employee.
