Science, Space, & Robotics - Page 227

Fusion power is seen as the holy grail for renewable and clean energy sources. Harnessing the power of the stars would propel mankind to extraordinary heights, and instantly resolve our growing energy crises to boot. Now thanks to the nuclear fusion experiments conducted by the Max Planck Institute of Physics in Germany, we're one step closer to unlocking the secrets of fusion power.

The world's largest nuclear fusion stellarator, the Wendelstein 7-X, has just made history by being the first stellarator-type fusion device to produce hydrogen plasma. Hydrogen plasma is vital to re-creating and molding the specific conditions of our Sun, thus facilitating fusion reactions.

"It's a very clean source of power, the cleanest you could possibly wish for. We're not doing this for us, but for our children and grandchildren," Karlsruhe Institute of Technology physicist John Jelonnek said.

Normal silicon circuits that use electricity aren't fast enough for NASA and the future of laser communication. So now NASA is looking to test a true photonic based modem to ensure the fastest, and most reliable, form of communication between space and the ground.

Photonic based computers and chips can provide an incredible amount of bandwidth, which can be crucial when communicating data, like how a modem just needs to pass data through as fast as possible. And they'll be applying this to their new laser communication system, the Laser Communication Relay Demonstration (LCRD).

This is a huge step in researching realistic and usable fast communication methods that can be used in space to travel long distances. This is almost an evolution of NASA's own OPALs, which is another laser communications experiment that's on the ISS. Essentially, the shot a high-powered laser beam at a tiny target on Earth to transmit packets of data. This new solution should be far faster and show that photonics can be an actual viable solution.

One of Google's DeepMind AI software programs AlphaGo has beaten the European champion of the board game Go. More than that, it beat him -- Fan Hui -- soundly: 5-0. The fear marks a major AI breakthrough pros predicted wouldn't happen for another decade.

"The technical idea that underlies it is the idea of reinforcement learning - getting computers to learn to improve their behaviour to achieve goals," said Prof Zoubin Ghahramani, of the University of Cambridge. "That could be used for decision-making problems - to help doctors make treatment plans, for example, in businesses or anywhere where you'd like to have computers assist humans in decision making."

For the uninitiated, Go is essentially a more complex version of chess invented in ancient China, and possibly the most intricate board game in the world. While the rules are simpler, there are about 200 moves per player per game as opposed to the 20 in chess. The DeepMind division at Google says there are more possible positions in Go than atoms in the universe; it makes sense then when its chief executive Demis Hassabis says, "For us, Go is the pinnacle of board game challenges."

The future holds a lot of technological marvels, but what happens when perfect robots make humans redundant in the workforce? It's actually already happening, says Neil deGrasse Tyson, and as long as we're more "intellectually nimble" going forward, we don't have to worry about it.

"Yes, robots have already taken over our jobs. So what it means is...If all you think about is the jobs today, and you project forward, there might be a day when robots take over every job we have today," Dr. deGrasse Tyson said. "Is that the future that will come? No, because we have innovative people in society, and we invent new things all the time. These require new jobs to manage them, to invent them, to conceive them, to engineer them."

Wireless Power Transfer, of Tesla fame, is about to become a reality. His vision of actually transmitting power to charge devices is almost here.

Tesla's original design

Wireless charging is currently limited to simply not having to plug something physically into your phone. You still need to make contact with something, like a pad, to charge that battery. But soon, we'll have true wireless charging, where that precious power is beamed through the air to your device. From a distance.

Strong evidence suggests a new planet 10 times the size of Earth has been hiding out at the edge of our solar system for...quite some time now. Tentatively named "Planet Nine", it would found in the outer darkness 30.5 billion kilometers from the sun, or about five times farther than Pluto.

Evidence for this possible planet surfaced in 2014 but wasn't strong enough to be taken too seriously. Recently, scientists Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology uncovered "anomalies in the orbits of a handful of smaller bodies they can see", indicating they were being "shepherded" by the gravity of a planet. As a result, the likelihood Planet Nine does indeed exist has majorly increased, and the scientific community at large is taking note.

While there's no detection as of yet, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii says it's "pretty convincing", while David Nesvorny, a solar system theorist at the Southwest Research Institute remarks, "These guys are really good. They make a good case."

Neurosurgeons and engineers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have just created an exciting new medical device. An tiny sensor that can send life-saving information wirelessly, then dissolve completely, not requiring surgery to take out.

Their device is made of a polylactic-co-glycolic acid and silicon mixture, making it very safe for humans. It's a huge breakthrough because cranial surgery can be dangerous and risky. Now this tiny little device, which is smaller than the tip of a pencil, can be implanted into key areas in your head to monitor intracranial pressure and temperature, and then just be completely absorbed by the body.

Since these new devices dissolve over time, they avoid a lot of the common complications that can occur. There's very little worry of infection, inflammation or any other kind of triggered immune response that can occur with implants of this kind. That means it can help more people more readily. A lot of lives could potentially be saved by using this device. There's a quoted 50,000 people that die of traumatic brain injuries that go undetected or aren't properly monitored.

Robots are slowly taking over the human population, in factories, retail and service industries - slowly, but surely. But, how much worse can it get? The World Economic Forum has now weighed in, with some estimates.

The WEF says that over 5 million jobs will be lost to robots, with the white-collar workers (admin/office jobs) being the ones most at risk. The WEF surveyed 15 countries that have over 1.9 billion workers - including China, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, the UK and the US. These 1.9 billion workers make up 65% of the global workforce, with hope that robots won't take over all of our jobs - as people will need to adapt to technology as it arrives.

WEF founder Klaus Schwab and board member Richard Samans explained: "To prevent a worst-case scenario -- technological change accompanied by talent shortages, mass unemployment and growing inequality -- reskilling and upskilling of today's workers will be critical". You can read their full report "The Future of Jobs" here.

The $32 million collaboration between the Google-owned Boston Dynamics team and DARPA has been put on the backburner indefinitely, as the US Marines Corps has decided not to go forward with the LS3 "robotic mule" produced by the project. The main reason: it's too damn loud. Repairs and squad integration were also concerns.

The purpose of the creatures was to carry up to 400lbs worth of equipment, though judging from the look of them, enemy intimidation was part of the appeal as well.

It's not all for naught, though: Boston Dynamics and DARPA explain this was a research opportunity from the start more than anything else.

Tim Peake, the first British ESA astronaut on the ISS, seems to have accidentally called the wrong number on Christmas. From space.

Presumably he was trying to reach his family on Christmas day when he accidentally phoned an unknown lady and said "Hello, is this planet Earth?", which he was likely promptly hung-up on. I can't imagine that that wouldn't sound like a prank call to someone on Earth, even if it's an endearing message from anyone who knows who the message was.

But these types of wrong numbers aren't unusual, either. Astronaut Sam Christoforetti has also accidentally called the wrong number while orbiting the Earth, to 911. Though I'm not sure that the police ever responded to let them know the dangers of calling if it's not an emergency.

Columbia University Engineers have successfully created the world's first biologically powered computer chip, which could ultimately usher in a new harmonious union of nature and technology.

Thanks to a new advancement in the field of bioelectronics, the union of man and machine may not be that far away. Researchers at New York's Columbia University have tapped the energy created by a natural biological process to power an integrated CMOS circuit, which is found in common electronics such as cell phones.

"In combining a biological, electronic device with CMOS, we will be able to create new systems not possible with either technology alone," says Ken Shepard, Lau Family Professor of Electrical Engineering who led the study. "We are excited at the prospect of expanding the palette of active devices that will have new functions, such as harvesting energy from ATP, as was done here, or recognizing specific molecules, giving chips the potential to taste and smell. This was quite a unique new direction for us, and it has great potential to give solid state systems new capabilities with biological components."

Stuart Grey has created a great animation that shows a time-lapse of all of the wonderful things we've shot into space. It's gorgeous and downright terrifying if you understand the implications.

Space debris flying around our beautiful blue and green planet is a real threat to us and our future ventures in space. We've put a tremendous amount of stuff into space, and a lot of it is still there. In fact, almost 20,000 pieces of debris, or inactive and non-used space objects are still out there today.

Just imagine what happened in Gravity actually happening in real-life. We track a lot of the stuff up there, but there's just so much that one day it's possible that something will slip through and actually hit a communications satellite or GPS satellite that you're using. Whoops! Thankfully there are some efforts underway to clean some of it up, before it falls into peoples homes.

Microsoft has developed software, called predictive policing, that's able to predict whether inmates will end back up into jail within six months from release with a 91% accuracy rate. Check out the video presentation here.

It might sound like the program that was depicted in 2002's silver-screen adaptation of Philip K. Dicks 1956 Minority Report, and it mostly is. Just without all the special powers. Instead of having gifted humans predict the future through the Force, or similar powers, the piece of software actually under development is instead a complex algorithm that uses historical data and trends to predict future trends.

It's not magic, but it's based on science and statistics in order predict the probability that someone will repeat their behavior. Past behavior, as they say, is the greatest predictor of future behavior, as much as we'd like to believe that we can change drastically, sometimes it isn't necessarily so for everyone. And we are ultimately a predictable lot, prone to patterns.

LG has just unveiled its new robotic vacuum, the Hom-Bot Turbo+, which has some nifty features.

First off, it's a normal robotic vacuum, so you can schedule your cleaning duties to be done while you're out of the house, or asleep. The Turbo+ has three cameras that, with the assistance of the Robonavi software, allow the robotic vacuum to navigate your house, apartment or wherever you call home, and keep it clean.

LG has used these cameras in a unique way, as you can view the Turbo+ in real-time, and remotely control it through the Home-View function. The Home-View function has the cameras working as a mobile security system, which lets owners of the Turbo+ receive still images to their devices if it detects movement in a home that should be empty.

Sony is working on a new battery technology that will see batteries lasting 40% longer on a single charge, and they'll also be up to 30% smaller than current batteries found inside of our devices.

Japanese newspaper Nikkei is behind the latest report, reporting that Sony is creating a power cell made from a sulfur compound, instead of lithium, used in today's batteries. The first commercial Li-on battery was created by Sony, so if the Japanese electronics giant does get its new sulfur-based battery to the market, it would make another first for Sony. But there are problems with sulfur-based batteries, as their capacity decreases with every charge cycle, because of the electrode dissolving into the electrolyte. Nikkei reports that Sony has found a way around these problems by reforming the electrolyte solution to make longer-lasting batteries, hold even more power.

Sony is reportedly verifying the safety of this new battery technology before it kicks off mass production. The company is going to be making sure the new sulfur-based batteries won't explode, or make your new smartphone worthless after a few charges. We shouldn't see Sony's new battery technology inside of devices until 2020.

Solar power is a great alternative to countless other energies, but cloud can get in the way sometimes - and it's unavoidable, until now.

An international consortium is working on taking solar farms to the skies, above the clouds using stratospheric balloons. These balloons would be much closer to the sun, taking in as much power as possible into its solar cells - without much interference and space used on the ground. Under the direction of French-Japanese scientific research lab, NEXTPV, the main tenet of their concept is that there aren't many clouds floating at an altitude of 3.7 miles (6km). But higher, at 12.4 miles (or 20km) there are not many clouds at all.

Taking away cloud coverage and light diffusions that "occurs in the many close layers of the Earth's atmosphere leads to a higher concentration of sunlight. In turn, this concentrated solar power leads to higher energy yields from photovoltaic solar cells", reports Yahoo. How would these massive solar farms float above the clouds? They would use the excess electricity generated during the day to recombine hydrogen and oxygen in a fuel cell. This fuel cell would then release power regularly, as required, overnight. The same source of hydrogen isolated through water electrolysis for the fuel cell would keep the entire solar farm balloon in the air.

We all know the benefits of solar power, but it looks like the town council of Woodland, North Carolina doesn't. They rejected a rezoning proposal that would've seen the installation of a new solar farm. But the reason is going to kick you in the teeth.

The council has previously approved three other solar farms which are all currently under construction, but this proposal was rejected after down residents "expressed distruct and fear of the solar panels", reports The Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald. One of the residents, who just so happens to be a retired science teacher, Jane Mann, complained that many of the plants directly undernearth the panels were not receiving enough sunlight. Mann continued that the panels also cause cancer... adding that "I want to know what's going to happen. I want information. Enough is enough. I don't see the profit for the town. People come with hidden agendas. Until we can find if anything is going to damage this community, we shouldn't sign any paper".

But it gets better. Mann's husband, Bobby, warned the council that the solar farms "would suck up all the energy from the sun". A representative of the Strata Solar Company, which wants to build the farm just off Highway 258, said: "the panels don't draw additional sunlight. There are no toxic materials on site. This is a tried and true technology". But, even with mountains of evidence and countless other cities and countries adopting solar power, the town council stamped down a moratorium on solar panel installations. Officials want to wait until they "get a handle on how to do background checks" on the technology.

If you were wondering exactly how some Star Wars technologies may become feasible things in the real-world, Michigan State University has published another episode of its 'Chillin' with Chewie' series, aiming to explain Star Wars technological advancements to the public with the help of real life scientists.

While some technology in Star Wars may never come to light (pun intended), this series aims to cover many technologies ranging from real to fictional and from Carbonite to light sabers. With this educational tool further explaining a possible time frame for some of these cool technologies to become reality, it's a must watch for any Star Wars fan.

An article by Gizmodo pointed out that that this series explains that "TIE fighters' thrusters are a million times more powerful than anything we've ever developed," giving you an insight into some things you may learn by watching this series for yourself.

Google and NASA revealed on Wednesday that they've found a critical piece to the enigmatic puzzle of quantum computing that could usher in a new generation of ultra-efficient computers.

For the past two years, Google and NASA have combined their scientific might via the Quantum AI team to study the mechanics and possible advantages of quantum computing. It's taken quite a while, but the team has finally tapped the power of its D-Wave X2 system to demonstrate just how powerful quantum computing really is.

Using a processing called quantum annealing, the Quantum AI team was able to prove that the quantum computer not only works but represents tremendous gains over traditional problem-solving systems. The scientists discovered a new quantum annealing algorithm that processed and solved complex binary workloads over 100 million times faster (10^8) than methods simulated on single-core non-quantum computers. Essentially this means that Google's D-Wave X2 system can serve as a major tool to understand, define and experiment with the realm of nanoscale quantum computing.

We all know that Elon Musk has some doubts about artificial intelligence, with the SpaceX and Tesla founder saying that AI could be "more dangerous than nukes" back in April 2014. In October 2014, Musk warned the world about AI once again, saying that it's like "summoning the demon". It was only earlier this year that Musk said that AI would treat us "pet Labradors", a future that I don't want to live in.

These are some strong warnings from Musk, who has joined forces with some of the world's brightest minds, creating OpenAI. OpenAI, as explained on Medium, is a nonprofit that was funded by people like Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel and Amazon Web Services - just to name a few. These people are collectively pledging more than $1 billion to counteract large companies, or even governments that might gain too much power in the world of artificial intelligence.

As it stands, companies like Google are pretty open with their research into AI, but Y Combinator CEO and OpenAI founder Sam Altman says that as we get closer to the level where AI surpasses human intelligence, there's a large concern over how much these companies will share. OpenAI promises to make its results public, offering its patents royalty-free.