Lifeboat Foundation

In a bid to help those with limited mobility get to the gate, Tokyo Narita International Airport is set to welcome a number of self-driving wheelchairs to its floors. With the ability to navigate the airport all on their own, the new wheelchairs are hoped to streamline foot traffic in one of Japan’s busiest airports and form part of a wider plan to boost mobility options at such facilities.

Although many people throw milk away once it reaches its “best before” date, the fact is that the milk will still likely be good for several more days. In order to eliminate such waste, scientists at Cornell University are designing a “smart” carton.

Researchers trained a neural network to map audio “voiceprints” from one language to another.

The display on a smartphone is a modern marvel, cramming millions of pixels into the space of a few inches – but soon this may look decidedly retro. Researchers at Cambridge University have managed to create the smallest pixels in the world, about a million times tinier than those in a phone. These new pixels could be used in huge, flexible displays that are relatively easy to manufacture and cheaper to run.

Visitors to The Dali Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, will now be greeted by a digitally resurrected simulation of Salvador Dali. Created using machine learning and deepfake technologies, the digital Dali is programmed to communicate in novel ways, from commenting on the day’s weather to taking a selfie with museum patrons.

With the power to turn themselves into any other cell in the body, stem cells have a future as a key treatment for a range of diseases and injuries. The problem is, they lack some of the self-defense mechanisms that other cells have, leaving them open to attack from viruses and other threats. Now, researchers from the University of Edinburgh may have found a way to switch this mechanism back on, making stem cell treatments more effective.

The Boy Who Died Wolf, an album by Highly Suspect on Spotify.

Serotonin levels have been linked to the regulation of mood and sexual function. Emerging research now reveals more about its role in learning processes.

A recent French study indicates that the ancient Romans may have figured out how to deal with earthquakes by simply deflecting the energy of the waves using structures that resemble metamaterials. These are materials which can manipulate waves (electromagnetic or otherwise) in ways which are normally deemed impossible, such as guiding light around an object using a special pattern.

In a 2012 study, the same researchers found that a pattern of 5 meter deep bore holes in the ground was effective at deflecting a significant part of artificially generated acoustic waves. One of the researchers, [Stéphane Brûlé], noticed on an aerial photograph of a Gallo-Roman theater near the town of Autun in central France that its pattern of pillars bore an uncanny resemblance to this earlier experiment: a series of concentric (semi) circles with the distance between the pillars (or holes) decreasing nearer the center.

Further research using archaeological data of this theater site confirmed that it did appear to match up the expected pattern if one would have aimed to design a structure that could successfully deflect the acoustic energy from an earthquake. This raises the interesting question of whether this was a deliberate design choice, or just coincidence.

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