Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 218

Guillermo del Toro, the mega director behind Hellboy and Pacific Rim, talked with The Hollywood Reporter not long ago and said that he experienced one of the most strangest, and supernatural experiences of his life.

Not only did del Toro say he has had two experiences with ghosts, but he had a close encounter with a UFO when he was younger. During the interview, del Toro explained: "You sound like a complete lunatic, but I saw a UFO. I didn't want to see a UFO. It was horribly designed".

During his experience, del Toro said he sat alone with his friend in the dark, and saw a light on the horizon that was moving "super-fast". They honked at it, and then flashed their lights, where they said the UFO "went from 1,000 meters away [to much closer] in less than a second".

Elon Musk is doing a world-first by launching a red Tesla Roadster into space, loading up the vehicle onto the first Falcon Heavy rocket that will leave our atmosphere and deliver the car to aliens, I guess.

Musk said that he would launch the Tesla Roadster into space with most thinking he was joking around, but SpaceX has confirmed that it is indeed true.

Musk took to Twitter, where he tweeted: "A Red Car for the Red Planet Test flights of new rockets usually contain mass simulators in the form of concrete or steel blocks. That seemed extremely boring. Of course, anything boring is terrible, especially companies, so we decided to send something unusual, something that made us feel. The payload will be an original Tesla Roadster, playing Space Oddity, on a billion year elliptic Mars orbit".

Tesla has stepped up to the plate by saving the Loy Yang Power Station that recently experienced a 560 MW drop on December 14th, this drop in MW has caused a dip in the frequency from 50Mz to 49.80Hz.

The Tesla Powerpack is currently connected to Neoen's Hornsdale Wind Farm near Jamestown about three hours drive out of Adelaide, South Australia. The Powerpack has a massive capacity of 100MW and to save the coal-powered mining station the Powerpack supplied 7.3MW from to Loy Yang which is a massive distance of 620 miles away located near the border of Victoria (1000 kms).

The best bit about this is the fact that a Wind Farm which naturally generates energy not only just saved a coal-powered power plant from a frequency drop, but it also beat the back-up unit which is contracted to provide power within a very short 6 seconds of a frequency drop. Tesla didn't even give them a chance, by the time they went to back up the power plant the problem was already fixed.

Virgin Group invested into Hyperloop One earlier this year, which saw Virgin boss Richard Branson being placed onto the board, and adding Virgin's name to Hyperloop One.

Axios is now reporting that Branson is the new Hyperloop One chairman, replacing Shervin Pishevar who took a leave of absence after he was swept into sexual harassment allegations and an arrest for rape (that didn't result in a charge) just last month.

Now that Branson is the chairman of Virgin Hyperloop One, the company is reportedly receiving a bunch of new funding to the tune of $50 million from current investors Caspian Venture Capital and DP World. These two companies are based in Russia and Dubai, respectively, with Virgin Hyperloop One starting off on its capital and running out, with 300 employees at risk of losing their jobs if more funding wasn't secured.

In the wonderful world of science, today we are happy to report that scientists have worked out a new way of a possible way to fight cancer: using sperm.

A team of researchers at the Leibniz Institute for Solid State and Material Research Dresden have recently completed a study where they turned sperm into an effective drug delivery tool. If you were like me, you wouldn't know that sperm has many different benefits when it comes to delivering drugs.

First, sperm is mobile - the drugs can be encased so that it doesn't get diluted by body fluids or leak out, and they protect the drug from enzymes that could break them down. They also don't cause immune responses like other cell types, and they also don't duplicate and form unwanted colonies.

It would be quite an honor to step foot on the International Space Station as only a very small amount of people get the opportunity, with this achievement though is a sacrifice and that is all the entertainment luxuries earth has to offer. Luckily, Disney and NASA are not allowing the Astronauts aboard the International Space to miss out on one of the luxuries and that is of course Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

Spaceflight reporter Robin Seemangal took to Twitter and posted this news "I received confirmation from Disney and NASA sources that the crew aboard the International Space Station will be screening Star Wars: The Last Jedi".

Inverse then followed up this report by asking NASA if this news was true or not, a NASA spokesperson said that the movie would be shown to Astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The ability to pass down knowledge from one to another through a repetitive teaching reward system has proven to be one of the pivotal aspects of human life. An example of this would be teaching a dog to sit or roll over, then to reward it with a treat after completion of the desired task.

This basic principle practice increases the likelihood of the dog performing the same task more efficiently once learned that their is a reward after.

The same principle practice can now be applied to AI robots, being named one of the 10 breakthrough technologies of 2017 by MIT Technology Review, this revolutionary kind of AI learning will mean that AI will be able to adapt and take in new information without human interaction, simply by experimenting.

SpaceX has added a newly updated funding round to this year's summer collection. Adding $100 million on to it's already $351 million funding round bringing the total to around $450 million, putting Space X's total post-money valuation to $21.5 billion.

James Gleeson, the spokesperson for SpaceX has replied to the amended filing by saying: "This filing simply discloses that SpaceX received an additional $100 million of investment as part of the last funding round which was disclosed earlier this summer."

SpaceX has massive ambitions, outlining plans for a trip to Mars in 2022 and launching satellites for the U.S military using its Falcon 9 rocket. It's clear why investors see SpaceX as a trustworthy investment, the track record for Elon provides its benefits of reassurance.

Quantum encryption is the wish of most in the security industry as you can't even look at the data without making changes to it, but using quantum encryption - until now - was always slower than traditional methods.

Not for long, as researchers have made a new quantum encryption key distribution system that is between 5-10x faster than previous methods, and can keep up with conventional encryption when run side-by-side. How did they do it? By getting more data into each photon.

Engadget reports "Normally, you can only encode one bit per photon by using a weak laser. The team discovered that it could encode two bits by tweaking the release time of photons and using high-speed photon detectors to track these changes. Effectively, they're giving photons properties they couldn't have before". Crazy stuff, isn't it?

Elon Musk, or the real life Tony Stark, has taken the first step into solving the standstill traffic problem that LA is known for. Musk has begun the process with his firm 'The Boring Company' by filing a permit to start digging within city limits.

Keeping the momentum going forward Musk has already acquired a verbal approval and has also posted a photo from the first stage of the project near his office in Hawthorne, in southwestern Los Angeles County near LAX. Musk hopes the route of tunnel will stretch from the entirety of the "whole 405" from LAX to Interstate 101 in "a year or so."

In April, The Boring Company released a video showing a car being lowered into the tunnel from a platform in the city streets. Users of the tunnel will be able to take "express" trips through the main tunnel with "no intermediate stopping", side tunnels will also be connected to the main tunnel for entry and exit.

Earlier this year the state-funded Russian Foundation for Advanced Research Projects unveiled the Final Experimental Demonstration Object Research - or better known as FEDOR. The robot demonstrated the ability to fire pistols correctly at targets, crawl and even drive a car.

In a tweet from Russian Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Head of the Military-Industrial Commission Dmitry Rogozin said "Robot FEDOR showed the ability to shoot from both hands. Fine motor skills and decision-making algorithms are still being improved."

FEDOR is now having its decision making algorithms upgraded as the robot is destined to orbit the Federatsiya in 2021. Cosmonauts plan to use this very same spacecraft to hopefully carry astronauts to the moon one day, and also aspire to travel to Mars it the FEDOR as well.

The cable that is providing millions of people with internet access, and even the cable you have running to your router - heck, the same fiber optic cable that is going into my router here as I type this, could soon be an early earthquake detector.

Researchers have developed a new technology that detects seismic activity through the "jiggling" in fiber optic cables, with 'laser interrogators' looking for disturbances in the fiber, and then sending that information about the magnitude and direction of the tremors. Using fiber-based detections isn't something that's completely new, but it has previously been used for acoustic sensing that needed them wrapped in cement,or sticking them to a surface so that you ensured contact was made to the ground.

But this new system is capable of detecting different types of seismic waves, so it would know if the impending earthquake was something worth alerting someone, or a system somewhere about it. The new system is also capable of detecting very small, or localized quakes that would otherwise not be noticed.

TSMC is ramping into 3nm as soon as possible, with the Taiwanese semiconductor giant spending $20 billion on a next-gen 3nm manufacturing plant, so that it can keep customers like Apple happy in the future.

Samsung and Intel have been in the fab game for a while now, but TSMC has been spending around $10 billion per year in order to keep up to, or exceed what their two main competitors are doing. TSMC has announced its building a next-gen 3nm technology plant in Southern Taiwan, but to put it into perspective... 1nm is one billionth of a meter, and measures the width of each transistor in the chip. It's an incredibly intricate process, with TSMC leading the world in many ways.

Morris Chang, founder of TSMC and 86-year-old ultimate boss of the company said: "By the time we're through, by the time we've built all the necessary capacity, I think we would have spent upwards of $15 billion. That's a conservative estimate. Maybe it's safer to say upwards of $20 billion". Don't worry, TSMC won't be going out of business any time soon, as his company is worth a whopping $190 billion.

OMRON has been making a table tennis robot for a while now, with the AI-powered future table tennis champion dubbed FORPHEUS in its fourth-generation state now able to use its new companion robot arm that throws the ball up in the air so that it can serve.

This means that FORPHEUS is a great trainer and/or opponent for would-be table tennis players, with the fourth-gen robot featuring a display on both sides of the "net" that display players' status.

There's also a three-camera system that faces the human player that is built into the main body, and a bat that is driven by three arms and a 5-axis motor.

TSMC is running directly into the arms of 3nm fabrication, with the Taiwanese semiconductor company announcing the locaiton of their first 3nm fab, which will be build in Tainan Science Park, in southern Taiwan.

The decision to build it in Taiwan versus the rumors of a US production plant is so that TSMC can use their assets and supply chain for the production and support of many customers like AMD, NVIDIA, who will want 3nm designs made. The Taiwanese government also provided a lending hand, with land, water, electricity and environmental protection offered to TSMC for their latest manufacturing plant. Some of the new 3nm manufacturing machines will be supplied by ASML, a Netherlands-based company.

As for when we can expect 3nm production to kick off... 2022 at the earliest. TSMC has teased that the 7nm yields are currently ahead of schedule, so we should expect 7nm-based products released in 2018. The 5nm roadmap is still on track, expected to launch in Q1 2019.

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk visited my state last week, where here in South Australia his company along with the state government are erecting the largest utility-grade battery bank in the world.

The 100mW Hornsdale Wind Farm is around an hour drive from where I live here in SA, which will be the largest grid-tied system in the world when it's turned on. The largest grid-tied system to date is a 30mW/120mWh system built by AES Energy Storage in Southern California, but the Hornsdale Wind Farm rocks a huge 100mW of power.

Musk was in town recently, and didn't respond to my tweets unfortunately, where he took the stage with South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill. Weatherill was at Tesla's party on Friday night, telling the crowd: "There were lots of people that were making jokes about South Australia and making fun of our leadership in renewable energy. Well today they're laughing out of the other side of their face". Musk added: "To have that [construction] done in two months ... you can't remodel your kitchen in that period of time".

NVIDIA has just announced that it is going all-in with AI, pushing into the world of deep neural networks (DNNs) and artificial intelligence, with a bunch of new tools and huge partnerships with some of the largest technology companies in China.

NVIDIA founder and CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang took the stage as usual, saying: "At no time in the history of computing have such exciting developments been happening, and such incredible forces in computing been affecting our future. What technology increases in complexity by a factor of 350 in five years? We don't know any. What algorithm increases in complexity by a factor of 10? We don't know any. We are moving faster than Moore's Law".

Huang unveiled NVIDIA's new TensorRT 3, which is a new inferencing platform that the company claims allowed a previously-trained DNN to run in a production environment capable of going through 45,000 images per second. This is all powered by the HGX server that has 8 x Tesla V100 accelerators.

Brushing your teeth every morning hasn't changed much, and while the introduction of electric toothbrushes made it more convenient... we live in a 'smart' world now, right?!

This is where Oclean One steps into the foray, with the team hitting Indiegogo trying to secure $20,000 - but quickly reaching $103,647 from 999 backers at the time of writing. What is Oclean One? It's the fastest electric toothbrush in the world, with a 60-day battery life, ultra-fast charging, "best-in-class bristles", a bunch of presets, and even a freakin' AI-enabled application, and a speaker.

The best part about the Oclean One is the personalization that you get, with the Oclean app recommending brushing plans that are based on your age, gender, eating habits, and more. There are 12 preset brushing plans that will help you reach your pearly white goals, such as whitening your teeth, strengthening your sensitive teeth, and protecting your gums.

We've all seen movies like The Terminator and The Matrix, where AI wipes out the human race, because reasons. But AI can be a force for good as well, with some researchers using AI to detect Alzheimer's earlier than ever before.

Some researchers have looked at blood and cerebrospinal fluid test, while others are developing tools to find early signs of Alzheimer's. But a team of researchers from the University of Bari in Italy might have found the answer, where they've developed an algorithm that can spot tiny structural changes in the brain that are caused by Alzheimer's... up to 10 years before symptoms appear.

The trained AI has received 67 MRI scans, with 38 of them from Alzheimer's patients, and 29 from healthy patients. The researchers divided the scans into small regions, with the AI system analyzing the neuronal connectivity between.

Astronauts on-board the International Space Station should be frightened and/or excited that they've found a new "shape-shifting" bacteria on-board the floating technology fortress.

The "clever shape-shifting" was detected in bacteria that was being experimented on in the near-weightlessness of space, something that scientists believe the bacteria was doing to survive. In what feels like as a scenario ripped right out of a movie 'Life' with Ryan Reynolds (trailer below), the space bacteria showed a 13x increase in cell numbers, and a 73% reduction in cell column size.

The study's lead author, Dr Luis Zea, explains: "We knew bacteria behave differently in space and that it takes higher concentrations of antibiotics to kill them. What's new is that we conducted a systematic analysis of the changing physical appearance of the bacteria during the experiments".