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#439832 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

NEUROSCIENCE
How the World’s Biggest Brain Maps Could Transform Neuroscience
Alison Abbott | Nature
“To truly understand how the brain works, neuroscientists also need to know how each of the roughly 1,000 types of cell thought to exist in the brain speak to each other in their different electrical dialects. With that kind of complete, finely contoured map, they could really begin to explain the networks that drive how we think and behave.”

GENE THERAPY
A Gene-Editing Experiment Let These Patients With Vision Loss See Color Again
Rob Stein | NPR
“Carlene Knight’s vision was so bad that she couldn’t even maneuver around the call center where she works using her cane. …But that’s changed as a result of volunteering for a landmark medical experiment. …Knight is one of seven patients with a rare eye disease who volunteered to let doctors modify their DNA by injecting the revolutionary gene-editing tool CRISPR directly into cells that are still in their bodies.”

INTERFACES
Light Field Lab Shows off Solidlight High-Res Holographic Display
Dean Takahashi | VentureBeat
“…the company [says] it is the highest-resolution holographic display ever designed. And yes, the little chameleon that I saw floating in the air looked a lot better than the pseudo-hologram of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars movie. While it’s not hard to beat the vision of holograms in a movie from 1977, it has taken an extraordinarily long time to create real holograms that look good.”

TRANSPORTATION
Airless Tires Are Finally Coming in 2024: Here’s Why You’ll Want a Set
Brian Cooley | CNET
“Nails become minor annoyances and sidewall cuts that usually render a tire unrepairable are no longer possible. There would be no need to check tire inflation (you’ve probably ignored my admonitions to do that anyway) and we’d say goodbye to spare tires, jacks and inflation kits that most drivers view as mysterious objects anyway. Blowouts that cause thousands of crashes a year would be impossible.”

FUTURE
These 5 Recent Advances Are Changing Everything We Thought We Knew About Electronics
Ethan Siegel | Big Think
“As we race to miniaturize electronics, to monitor more and more aspects of our lives and our reality, to transmit greater amounts of data with smaller amounts of power, and to interconnect our devices to one another, we quickly run into the limits of these classical technologies. But five advances are all coming together in the early 21st century, and they’re already beginning to transform our modern world. Here’s how it’s all going down.”

TECH
The Facebook Whistleblower Says Its Algorithms Are Dangerous. Here’s Why.
Karen Hao | MIT Technology Review
“Frances Haugen’s testimony at the Senate hearing today raised serious questions about how Facebook’s algorithms work—and echoes many findings from our previous investigation. …We pulled together the most relevant parts of our investigation and other reporting to give more context to Haugen’s testimony.”

COMPUTING
D-Wave Plans to Build a Gate-Model Quantum Computer
Frederic Lardinois | TechCrunch
“For more than 20 years, D-Wave has been synonymous with quantum annealing. …But as the company announced at its Qubits conference today, a superconducting gate-model quantum computer—of the kind IBM and others currently offer—is now also on its roadmap. D-Wave believes the combination of annealing, gate-model quantum computing and classic machines is what its businesses’ users will need to get the most value from this technology.”

ENERGY
The Decreasing Cost of Renewables Unlikely to Plateau Any Time Soon
Doug Johnson | Ars Technica
“Past projections of energy costs have consistently underestimated just how cheap renewable energy would be in the future, as well as the benefits of rolling them out quickly, according to a new [University of Oxford] report. …if solar, wind, and the myriad other green energy tools followed the deployment trends they are projected to see in the next decade, in 25 years the world could potentially see a net-zero energy system.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
The Turbulent Past and Uncertain Future of Artificial Intelligence
Eliza Strickland | IEEE Spectrum
“Today, even as AI is revolutionizing industries and threatening to upend the global labor market, many experts are wondering if today’s AI is reaching its limits. …Yet there’s little sense of doom among researchers. Yes, it’s possible that we’re in for yet another AI winter in the not-so-distant future. But this might just be the time when inspired engineers finally usher us into an eternal summer of the machine mind.”

INTERNET
Facebook and Google’s New Plan? Own the Internet
James Ball | Wired UK
“The name ‘cloud’ is a linguistic trick—a way of hiding who controls the underlying technology of the internet—and the huge power they wield. Stop to think about it for a moment and the whole notion is bizarre. The cloud is, in fact, a network of cables and servers that cover the world: once the preserve of obscure telecoms firms, it is now, increasingly, owned and controlled by Big Tech—with Google and Facebook claiming a lion’s share.”

SPACE
The Moon Didn’t Die as Soon as We Thought
Tatyana Woodall | MIT Technology Review
“The moon may have been more volcanically active than we realized. Lunar samples that China’s Chang’e 5 spacecraft brought to Earth are revealing new clues about volcanoes and lava plains on the moon’s surface. In a study published [Thursday] in Science, researchers describe the youngest lava samples ever collected on the moon.”

Image Credit: 光曦 刘 / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439816 This Bipedal Drone Robot Can Walk, Fly, ...

Most animals are limited to either walking, flying, or swimming, with a handful of lucky species whose physiology allows them to cross over. A new robot took inspiration from them, and can fly like a bird just as well as it can walk like a (weirdly awkward, metallic, tiny) person. It also happens to be able to skateboard and slackline, two skills most humans will never pick up.

Described in a paper published this week in Science Robotics, the robot’s name is Leo, which is short for Leonardo, which is short for LEgs ONboARD drOne. The name makes it sound like a drone with legs, but it has a somewhat humanoid shape, with multi-joint legs, propeller thrusters that look like arms, a “body” that contains its motors and electronics, and a dome-shaped protection helmet.

Leo was built by a team at Caltech, and they were particularly interested in how the robot would transition between walking and flying. The team notes that they studied the way birds use their legs to generate thrust when they take off, and applied similar principles to the robot. In a video that shows Leo approaching a staircase, taking off, and gliding over the stairs to land near the bottom, the robot’s motions are seamlessly graceful.

“There is a similarity between how a human wearing a jet suit controls their legs and feet when landing or taking off and how LEO uses synchronized control of distributed propeller-based thrusters and leg joints,” said Soon-Jo Chung, one of the paper’s authors a professor at Caltech. “We wanted to study the interface of walking and flying from the dynamics and control standpoint.”

Leo walks at a speed of 20 centimeters (7.87 inches) per second, but can move faster by mixing in some flying with the walking. How wide our steps are, where we place our feet, and where our torsos are in relation to our legs all help us balance when we walk. The robot uses its propellers to help it balance, while its leg actuators move it forward.

To teach the robot to slackline—which is much harder than walking on a balance beam—the team overrode its feet contact sensors with a fixed virtual foot contact centered just underneath it, because the sensors weren’t able to detect the line. The propellers played a big part as well, helping keep Leo upright and balanced.

For the robot to ride a skateboard, the team broke the process down into two distinct components: controlling the steering angle and controlling the skateboard’s acceleration and deceleration. Placing Leo’s legs in specific spots on the board made it tilt to enable steering, and forward acceleration was achieved by moving the bot’s center of mass backward while pitching the body forward at the same time.

So besides being cool (and a little creepy), what’s the goal of developing a robot like Leo? The paper authors see robots like Leo enabling a range of robotic missions that couldn’t be carried out by ground or aerial robots.

“Perhaps the most well-suited applications for Leo would be the ones that involve physical interactions with structures at a high altitude, which are usually dangerous for human workers and call for a substitution by robotic workers,” the paper’s authors said. Examples could include high-voltage line inspection, painting tall bridges or other high-up surfaces, inspecting building roofs or oil refinery pipes, or landing sensitive equipment on an extraterrestrial object.

Next up for Leo is an upgrade to its performance via a more rigid leg design, which will help support the robot’s weight and increase the thrust force of its propellers. The team also wants to make Leo more autonomous, and plans to add a drone landing control algorithm to its software, ultimately aiming for the robot to be able to decide where and when to walk versus fly.

Leo hasn’t quite achieved the wow factor of Boston Dynamics’ dancing robots (or its Atlas that can do parkour), but it’s on its way.

Image Credit: Caltech Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies/Science Robotics Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439798 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

ROBOTICS
How DeepMind Is Reinventing the Robot
Tom Chivers | IEEE Spectrum
“Having conquered Go and protein folding, the company turns to a really hard problem. …To get to the next level, researchers are trying to fuse AI and robotics to create an intelligence that can make decisions and control a physical body in the messy, unpredictable, and unforgiving real world.”

NANOTECH
Microscopic Metavehicles Are Pushed and Steered by Light
Ben Coxworth | New Atlas
“Although solar-powered devices are now fairly common, Swedish scientists have created something a little different. They’ve built tiny ‘metavehicles’ that are mechanically propelled and guided via waves of light. …[It’s] hoped that the technology may someday be utilized in applications such as moving micro-particles through solutions inside of or adjacent to cells.”

3D PRINTING
How an 11-Foot-Tall 3D Printer Is Helping to Create a Community
Debra Kamin | The New York Times
“When New Story broke ground on the village in 2019, it was called the world’s first community of 3D printed homes. Two years and a pandemic later, 200 homes are either under construction or have been completed, 10 of which were printed on site by Icon’s Vulcan II printer. Plans for roads, a soccer field, a school, a market and a library are in the works.”

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Why OpenAI’s Codex Won’t Replace Coders
Thomas Smith | IEEE Spectrum
“If you’re a software developer yourself—or your company has spent tons of money hiring them—you can breathe easy. Codex won’t replace human developers any time soon, though it may make them far more powerful, efficient, and focused.”

FUTURE
Humans Can’t Be the Sole Keepers of Scientific Knowledge
Iulia Georgescu | Wired
“It’s clear that we do not really know what we know, because nobody can read the entire literature even in their own narrow field (which includes, in addition to journal articles, PhD theses, lab notes, slides, white papers, technical notes, and reports). …To solve this problem we need to make science papers not only machine-readable but machine-understandable, by (re)writing them in a special type of programming language. In other words: Teach science to machines in the language they understand.”

SCIENCE FICTION
Dune Foresaw—and Influenced—Half a Century of Global Conflict
Andy Greenberg | Source
“…reading Dune a half century later, when many of Herbert’s environmental and psychological ideas have either blended into the mainstream or gone out of style—and in the wake of the disastrous fall of the US-backed government in Afghanistan after a 20-year war—it’s hard not to be struck, instead, by the book’s focus on human conflict: an intricate, deeply detailed world of factions relentlessly vying for power and advantage by exploiting every tool available to them.”

SPACE
Space Policy Is Finally Moving Into the 21st Century
Tatyana Woodall | MIT Technology Review
“This week, the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research held its annual Outer Space Security Conference in Geneva, Switzerland (participants had the option to attend virtually or in person). For two days, diplomats, researchers, and military officials from around the world met to discuss threats and challenges, arms control, and space security. Their conversations provided a window into what new space policies might look like.”

Image Credit: 光曦 刘 / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439783 This Google-Funded Project Is Tracking ...

It’s crunch time on climate change. The IPCC’s latest report told the world just how bad it is, and…it’s bad. Companies, NGOs, and governments are scrambling for fixes, both short-term and long-term, from banning sale of combustion-engine vehicles to pouring money into hydrogen to building direct air capture plants. And one initiative, launched last week, is taking an “if you can name it, you can tame it” approach by creating an independent database that measures and tracks emissions all over the world.

Climate TRACE, which stands for tracking real-time atmospheric carbon emissions, is a collaboration between nonprofits, tech companies, and universities, including CarbonPlan, Earthrise Alliance, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, former US Vice President Al Gore, and others. The organization started thanks to a grant from Google, which funded an effort to measure power plant emissions using satellites. A team of fellows from Google helped build algorithms to monitor the power plants (the Google.org Fellowship was created in 2019 to let Google employees do pro bono technical work for grant recipients).

Climate TRACE uses data from satellites and other remote sensing technologies to “see” emissions. Artificial intelligence algorithms combine this data with verifiable emissions measurements to produce estimates of the total emissions coming from various sources.

These sources are divided into ten sectors—like power, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture—each with multiple subsectors (i.e., two subsectors of agriculture are rice cultivation and manure management). The total carbon emitted January 2015 to December 2020, by the project’s estimation, was 303.96 billion tons. The biggest offender? Electricity generation. It’s no wonder, then, that states, companies, and countries are rushing to make (occasionally unrealistic) carbon-neutral pledges, and that the renewable energy industry is booming.

The founders of the initiative hope that, by increasing transparency, the database will increase accountability, thereby spurring action. Younger consumers care about climate change, and are likely to push companies and brands to do something about it.

The BBC reported that in a recent survey led by the UK’s Bath University, almost 60 percent of respondents said they were “very worried” or “extremely worried” about climate change, while more than 45 percent said feelings about the climate affected their daily lives. The survey received responses from 10,000 people aged 16 to 25, finding that young people are the most concerned with climate change in the global south, while in the northern hemisphere those most worried are in Portugal, which has grappled with severe wildfires. Many of the survey respondents, independent of location, reportedly feel that “humanity is doomed.”

Once this demographic reaches working age, they’ll be able to throw their weight around, and it seems likely they’ll do so in a way that puts the planet and its future at center stage. For all its sanctimoniousness, “naming and shaming” of emitters not doing their part may end up being both necessary and helpful.

Until now, Climate TRACE’s website points out, emissions inventories have been largely self-reported (I mean, what’s even the point?), and they’ve used outdated information and opaque measurement methods. Besides being independent, which is huge in itself, TRACE is using 59 trillion bytes of data from more than 300 satellites, more than 11,100 sensors, and other sources of emissions information.

“We’ve established a shared, open monitoring system capable of detecting essentially all forms of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions,” said Gavin McCormick, executive director of coalition convening member WattTime. “This is a transformative step forward that puts timely information at the fingertips of all those who seek to drive significant emissions reductions on our path to net zero.”

Given the scale of the project, the parties involved, and how quickly it has all come together—the grant from Google was in May 2019—it seems Climate TRACE is well-positioned to make a difference.

Image Credit: NASA Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#439748 This Week’s Awesome Tech Stories From ...

BIOTECH
A New Company With a Wild Mission: Bring Back the Woolly Mammoth
Carl Zimmer | The New York Times
“A team of scientists and entrepreneurs announced on Monday that they have started a new company to genetically resurrect the woolly mammoth. The company, named Colossal, aims to place thousands of these magnificent beasts back on the Siberian tundra, thousands of years after they went extinct.”

TECH
Alphabet’s Project Taara Laser Tech Beamed 700TB of Data Across Nearly 5km
Richard Lawler | The Verge
“Sort of like fiber optic cables without the cable, FSOC can create a 20Gbps+ broadband link from two points that have a clear line of sight, and Alphabet’s moonshot lab X has built up Project Taara to give it a shot. They started by setting up links in India a few years ago as well as a few pilots in Kenya, and today X revealed what it has achieved by using its wireless optical link to connect service across the Congo River from Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

TRANSPORTATION
EV Startup Lucid’s First Car Can Travel 520 Miles on a Full Battery—Beating Tesla by 115 Miles
Tim Levin | Business Insider
“When Lucid Motors’ hotly anticipated first cars reach customers later this year, they’ll become the longest-range electric vehicles on the road. …The startup’s debut sedan, the Air Dream Edition R, has earned a range rating of 520 miles from the Environmental Protection Agency. It’s the longest range rating the agency has ever awarded.”

ENERGY
Self-Sustaining Solar House on Wheels Wants To Soak up the Sun
Doug Johnson | Ars Technica
“The vehicle has the aerodynamic tear-drop shape of other solar-powered vehicles and sports a series of solar panels on its roof. However, it also has additional roofing that slides up when stationary, making it easier to stand inside to cook or sleep. …To showcase its creation, Solar Team Eindhoven will begin to drive the vehicle 3,000 kilometers from Eindhoven to the southern tip of Spain this Sunday.”

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY
Biology Starts to Get a Technological Makeover
Steve Lohr | The New York Times
“Proponents of synthetic biology say the field could reprogram biology to increase food production, fight disease, generate energy and purify water. The realization of that potential lies decades in the future, if at all. But it is no longer the stuff of pure science fiction because of advances in recent years in biology, computing, automation and artificial intelligence.”

TRANSPORTATION
Michelin’s Airless Passenger Car Tires Get Their First Public Outing
Loz Blain | New Atlas
“GM will begin offering [Michelin’s airless] Uptis [tires] as an option on certain models ‘as early as 2024,’ and the partnership is working with US state governments on regulatory approvals for street use, as well as with the federal government. At IAA Munich recently, the Uptis airless tire got its first public outing, in which ‘certain lucky members of the public’ had a chance to ride in a Mini Electric kitted out with a set.”

SCIENCE
Biologist Rethink the Logic Behind Cells’ Molecular Signals
Phillip Ball | Quanta
“Biologists often try to understand how life works by making analogies to electronic circuits, but that comparison misses the unique qualities of cellular signaling systems. …[The] signaling systems of complex cells are nothing like simple electronic circuits. The logic governing their operation is riotously complex—but it has advantages.”

Image Credit: SpaceX / Unsplash Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots