Science, Space, Health & Robotics News - Page 384

SpaceX has confirmed it has sent its next-generation rocket engine, codenamed Raptor, in for testing at a facility in Texas.

The new Raptor engine could be up to 3x as powerful as the current Merlin engines that power SpaceX's Falcon 9 and upcoming Falcon Heavy rockets, but details on the next-gen Raptor engine are thin right now. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell made the announcement of the testing of Raptor at the Small Satellite Conference in Utah.

SpaceX founder and real life Tony Stark, Elon Musk, has said that Raptor could have a thrust of around 500,000 pounds, which puts it in the same category as the main engine on a space shuttle. But unlike the shuttle, which uses three main engines and two booster rockets, the future Mars Colonial Transporter would be powered by nine Raptor engines, giving it plenty of power.

Google has applied for a patent on bathroom devices that monitor your health. Among them: a pressure and electrical-sensing mat, a color-sensing bathroom mirror, an ultrasonic bathtub, a pressure-sensing toilet seat, and a radar-field device.

Some monitor your body by sending out sound waves, electromagnetic waves, electrical signals, and various forms of radiation, among other techniques, the data from which could be sent to health professionals. The devices can monitor your blood pressure and various parts of your body to determine specific health issues, like an impaired knee or overworked heart.

This isn't Google's first foray into the medical technology field: previously it explored Google Lens, a device that monitored sugar levels via an electronic eye lens.

Google is getting all six degrees of separation with parent company Alphabet, and its life sciences company Verily - yeah, see - has announced it entered a new joint venture with GSK, one of the pharmaceutical powerhouses, called Galvani Bioelectronics.

Galvani Bioelectronics will be working on experimental medicine that uses will use electric signals and much smaller devices, in comparison to the current system of chemical drugs in order to treat chronic diseases. Verily, owned by Google along with GSK said they would invest over $700 million across 7 years, with GSK owning a 55% equity in the newly formed Galvani Bioelectronics. GSK is already familiar with bioelectronics, as it began work in the exciting new field back in 2012.

Verily has been working with much smaller medical devices, such as smart contact lens right after Google's X research labs formed. Verily has worked with another large part of big pharma, with a joint venture into medical robots with Johnson and Johnson. There have been reports from biotech insiders and former staff that have not agreed with Verily for working on too many 'far-fetched health care projects without focus", reports Recode.

In the future, all of our houses might be 3D printed - especially if it takes just 45 days, like the world's first 3D printed house that was recently build in China.

According to the reports, the entire house was 3D printed in one go, rather than being built with multiple pieces. Experts over at Huashang Tengda in China oversaw the project, which took 45 days to complete in Beijing's Tongzhou District.

After 45 days, what we have is a large 400-square-meter home, with the two-story villa featuring walls that are up to 8.2 feet thick. Each flooor has a height of 10 feet, so you can be super tall and not have to worry about getting around the house. The 3D printing side of things was completed by the company, with specialists overlooking the project, but there wasn't much physical work to be done as it did most of it on its own.

SpaceX has been on a roll lately with three consecutive successful rocket launches and landings. It all came to an end yesterday though when its Falcon 9 rocket failed to land on a floating drone ship at sea and promptly exploded (or suffered a "rapid unscheduled disassembly" as founder Elon Musk puts it), but not before it successfully launched two satellites into orbit.

Musk says the explosion was caused by low thrust in one of the rocket's three primary engines, and that the company is now working on upgrades to the rocket in order to handle the same situation in the future.

SpaceX has a carg resupply mission for the International Space Station next month, followed closely by a Falcon 9 ground landing in Cape Canaveral, Florida and a satellite launch in August.

China's current five-year economic plan came to light in March, and in it saw mention of the country's intent to build a manned deep-sea platform nearly 10,000 feet underwater. Now authorities have examined the particulars and decided to accelerate the project.

The purpose of the lab is multi-fold: to help hunt for treasure, evaluate mineral deposits (particularly oil), and to put it to military use (likely within the field of sensor and communication systems).

"Having this kind of long-term inhabited station has not been attempted this deep, but it is certainly possible," said Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "Manned submersibles have gone to those depths for almost 50 years. The challenge is operating it for months at a time."

Our robot overlords are well and truly on their way, with former McDonald's USA CEO Ed Rensi, saying that it's better to buy $35,000 robots than it is to hire teenagers for $15 an hour.

During an interview with FOX Business Network's Mornings with Maria, Rensi said: "I was at the National Restaurant Show yesterday and if you look at the robotic devices that are coming into the restaurant industry -- it's cheaper to buy a $35,000 robotic arm than it is to hire an employee who's inefficient making $15 an hour bagging French fries -- it's nonsense and it's very destructive and it's inflationary and it's going to cause a job loss across this country like you're not going to believe".

He added: "It's not just going to be in the fast food business. Franchising is the best business model in the United States. It's dependent on people that have low job skills that have to grow. Well if you can't get people a reasonable wage, you're going to get machines to do the work. It's just common sense. It's going to happen whether you like it or not. And the more you push this it's going to happen faster".

China seems to have beat us to the punch when it comes to enlisting robots and AI to help fight crime. It's not quite on the level of Robo Cop, but the autonomous machine is still slightly deadly.

The Chinese National University of Defense has created a low-cost slightly intelligent robot that can patrol streets all on it's own. the 1.49-meter tall and 78kg robot can patrol the mean streets of China for about a maximum of 8 hours on battery at a speed of 18km/hour. It has a suite of sensors that can detect dangers so that it can even make actual arrests.

The researchers at CERN have just released an insane 300TB of data from the Large Hadron Collider, with the data itself from 2011.

A physicist who works on the Compact Muon Solenoid detector, Kati Lassila-Perini explains: "Once we've exhausted our exploration of the data, we see no reason not to make them available publicly. The benefits are numerous, from inspiring high school students to the training of the particle physicists of tomorrow. And personally, as CMS's data preservation coordinator, this is a crucial part of ensuring the long-term availability of our research data".

The raw data from the detectors, as well as the "derived" data sets can be used with tools released by CERN. There's even an entire CERN Linux environment, where you can boot up a virtual machine and start playing with scripts and apps.

DJI has been making some seriously good professional drones over the years, with its impressive Phantom series, but has just unveiled its latest is the Matrice 600, a hexacopter that is capable of adjusting how it flies automatically, depending on what camera is attached.

The M600 costs $4599, and is the latest drone in DJI's huge professional lineup that is a successor to its current "Spreading Wings" series, which are higher-end craft that include retractable landing gear, and a foldable design. The new M600 features dust-proof propellers, as well as self-cooling motors.

DJI's new M600 launches with an improved, robust A3 flight controller that will change flight parameters depending on what it's carrying, and the amazing Lightbridge 2 camera link. Lightbridge 2 delivers higher frame rates over 1080p live-streamed video back to the pilot, at up to 3 miles away. This video is pumped to the pilot at 1080p 60FPS, which is impressive given the 3-mile distance allowance.