Group items tagged

Researchers at LaserMotive have devised a way to beam lasers to power military bases and drones, possibly helping to save lives, since delivering fuel to battle zones can be a dangerous task in wartime. Although still largely in the R&D stage, laser power beaming has many other potential uses, which include powering vehicles, replacing electric power wiring and transmission lines in difficult places, and even launching rockets into orbit. The beam is about 8 inches wide as it leaves the transmitter - and then spreads wider as it travels. The beam emitter is located at a ground-based unit and operated by a person, who could control it from the same location or remotely from an entirely different place altogether. The operator uses the machine to fire the laser beam at a photovoltaic collector located on an unmanned autonomous vehicle (UAV), small plane, or helicopter. The current range of the system is about a kilometer. When the laser hits the photovoltaic device, the photons in the light beam are converted to electricity to fly the AUV. Topics: AI/Robotics | Energy | Physics/Cosmology | Survival/Defense

Source: New York Times - Apr 11, 2011 In their new book, Infinite Reality, Dr. Jim Blascovich and Dr. Jerry Bailenson insist that 3-D conferences with avatars are nigh because consumer technology has suddenly caught up with the work going on in virtual-reality laboratories in academia. These psychologists point to three developments in the past year: the Microsoft Kinect tracking system for the Xbox, the Nintendo 3DS gaming device, and the triumph on "Jeopardy!" of IBM's Watson computer.

This paper has two halves. First, I piece together what we know about Margaret Thatcher's training and employment as a scientist. She took science subjects at school; she studied chemistry at Oxford, arriving during World War II and coming under the influence (and comment) of two excellent women scientists, Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin. She did a fourth-year dissertation on X-ray crystallography of gramicidin just after the war. She then gathered four years' experience as a working industrial chemist, at British Xylonite Plastics and at Lyons. Second, my argument is that, having lived the life of a working research scientist, she had a quite different view of science from that of any other minister responsible for science. This is crucial in understanding her reaction to the proposals-associated with the Rothschild reforms of the early 1970s-to reinterpret aspects of science policy in market terms. Although she was strongly pressured by bodies such as the Royal Society to reaffirm the established place of science as a different kind of entity-one, at least at core, that was unsuitable to marketization-Thatcher took a different line.

The human hand is an amazing machine that can pick up, move and place objects easily, but for a robot, this "gripping" mechanism is a vexing challenge. Opting for simple elegance, researchers from Cornell University, University of Chicago, and iRobot have bypassed traditional designs based around the human hand and fingers, and created a versatile gripper using everyday ground coffee and a latex party balloon.

Apomediation is a new scholarly socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or "gatekeeper", e.g. health professionals giving "relevant" information to a patient, and disintermediation means to bypass them), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries, i.e. network/group/collaborative filtering processes [Eysenbach, 2008 [WebCite] and 2007b]. The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands "in between" (latin: inter- means "in between") the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which "stand by" (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place. The switch from an intermediation model to an apomediation model has broadimplications for example for the way people judge credibility, as hypothesized and elaborated in more detail elsewhere [

The "ink" in the bioprinting process employed by Organovo is composed of spheres packed with tens of thousands of human cells. These spheres are assembled or "printed" on sheets of organic biopaper. By precisely placing the cells with the bioprinter, and providing them with the proper natural developmental cues, they do exactly what they do in nature: they self assemble into fully formed, functional tissue.

An Arab country with neither secret police nor censorship is unprecedented in recent decades. Tunisia is inspiring similar demands in Egypt and Jordan. When skeptics wonder if the Revolutions of 2011 would really change anything essential in the region, they would be wise to keep an eye on these two developments in Tunisia, which, if consolidated, would represent an epochal transformation of culture and politics. Arguably, Tunisians are now freer than Americans. The US government thinks our private emails are actually public. The FBI and NSA routinely read our email and they and other branches of the US government issue security letters in the place of warrants allowing them to tap phones and monitor whom we call, and even to call up our library records and conduct searches of our homes without telling us about it. Millions of telephone records were turned over to George W. Bush by our weaselly telecom companies. Courts allow government agents to sneak onto our property and put GPS tracking devices under our automobiles without so much as a warrant or even probable cause. Mr. Obama thinks this way of proceeding is a dandy idea.

"Let me now express my position more clearly and systemically: philosophy of science can seek to generate scientific knowledge in places where science itself fails to do so; I call this the complementary function of philosophy of science, as opposed to its descriptive and prescriptive functions. I propose taking the philosophy of science as a field which investigates scientific questions that are not addressed in current specialist science - questions that could be addressed by scientists, but are excluded due to the necessities of specialization."

RepRap is a free desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects. Since many parts of RepRap are made from plastic and RepRap can print those parts, RepRap is a self-replicating machine - one that anyone can build given time and materials. It also means that - if you've got a RepRap - you can print lots of useful stuff, and you can print another RepRap for a friend...RepRap is about making self-replicating machines, and making them freely available for the benefit of everyone. We are using 3D printing to do this, but if you have other technologies that can copy themselves and that can be made freely available to all, then this is the place for you too.Reprap.org is a community project, which means you are welcome to edit most pages on this site, or better yet, create new pages of your own. Our community portal and New Development pages have more information on how to get involved. Use the links below and on the left to explore the site contents. You'll find some content translated into other languages.RepRap is described in the video on the right.

Researchers in EPFL's Computer Vision Laboratory developed a computer-based modeling service that generates a 3D image from up to thousands of 2D shots, with all the processing done in the cloud. Since April, the EPFL startup Pix4D has been offering the modeling service with a fourth dimension: time. Now, individuals and small businesses looking for fast, cheap, large-scale 3D models can get them without investing in heavy processing, the company states. With Pix4D, users upload a series of photos of an object, and within 30 minutes they have a 3D image. The software defines "points of interest" from among the photos, or common points of high-contrast pixels. Next, the program pastes the images together seamlessly by matching up the points of interest. Much in the same way our two eyes work together to calculate depth, the software computes the distance and angle between two or more photos and lays the image over the model appropriately, creating a highly accurate 3D model that avoids the time intensive, "point by point" wireframe method. With Pix4D's 3D models, you can navigate in all directions as well as change the date on a timeline to see what a place looked like at different times of the year. The company is collaborating with several drone makers (including another EPFL startup,senseFly) to market their software as a package with senseFly's micro aerial vehicles, or autonomous drones. Pix4D's time element avoids waiting for Google to update its satellite data or for an expensive plane to fly by and take high-resolution photos. Farmers, for example, can now send relatively inexpensive flying drones into the air to take pictures as often as they like, allowing them to survey the evolution of their crops over large distances and long periods of time. And since the calculations are done on a cloud server, the client doesn't need a powerful computer of his or her own.

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2009/05/23/Marcus_Chown_in_Conversation_with_Fred_Watson Marcus Chown, author of Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You: A Guide to the Universe, discusses the mechanics behind quantum computers, explaining that they function by having atoms exist in multiple places at once. He predicts that quantum computers will be produced within 20 years. ----- The two towering achievements of modern physics are quantum theory and Einsteins general theory of relativity. Together, they explain virtually everything about the world in which we live. But almost a century after their advent, most people havent the slightest clue what either is about. Radio astronomer, award-winning writer and broadcaster Marcus Chown talks to fellow stargazer Fred Watson about his book Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You. - Australian Broadcasting Corporation Marcus Chown is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. Formerly a radio astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, he is now cosmology consultant of the weekly science magazine New Scientist. The Magic Furnace, Marcus' second book, was chosen in Japan as one of the Books of the Year by Asahi Shimbun. In the UK, the Daily Mail called it "a dizzy page-turner with all the narrative devices you'd expect to find in Harry Potter". His latest book is called Quantum Theory Cannot Hurt You.

Foxconn, an electronics manufacturer from Taiwan with huge factories in China, generates about 40 percent of the global consumer electronics revenue by creating things like iPhones and computer components on giant assembly lines staffed by humans. Until recently, you'd probably never heard of Foxconn, but a series of worker suicides made us all take a hard look at where our electronics were coming from. Foxconn has made some improvements (including nets around tall buildings), but by all accounts, the core of the problem (the work) remains "repetitive, exhausting, and alienating." Yesterday, Foxconn announced (at an employee dance party of all places) that they're planning on buying some robots to replace their human workforce. And by some robots, they mean one million robots over the next three years. So for every one robot Foxconn currently has working at their manufacturing plants, they're going to buy a hundred more.

The supply of secure, clean, sustainable energy is arguably the most important scientific and technical challenge facing humanity in the 21st century. Rising living standards of a growing world population will cause global energy consumption to double by mid-century and triple by the end of the century. Even in light of unprecedented conservation, the additional energy needed is simply not attainable from long discussed sources these include nuclear, biomass, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric. The global appetite for energy is simply too much. Petroleum-based fuel sources (i.e., coal, oil and gas) could be increased. However, deleterious consequences resulting from external drivers of economy, the environment, and global security dictate that this energy need be met by renewable and sustainable sources. The dramatic increase in global energy need is driven by 3 billion low-energy users in the non-legacy world and by 3 billion people yet to inhabit the planet over the next half century. The capture and storage of solar energy at the individual level personalized solar energy drives inextricably towards the heart of this energy challenge by addressing the triumvirate of secure, carbon neutral and plentiful energy. This talk will place the scale of the global energy issue in perspective and then discuss how personalized energy (especially for the non-legacy world) can provide a path to a solution to the global energy challenge. Daniel G. Nocera is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Director of the Solar Revolutions Project and Director of the Eni Solar Frontiers Center at MIT. His group pioneered studies of the basic mechanisms of energy conversion in biology and chemistry. He has recently accomplished a solar fuels process that captures many of the elements of photosynthesis outside of the leaf. This discovery sets the stage for a storage mechanism for the large scale, distributed, deployment of solar energy. He has b

Barclays, the U.K. banking behemoth, is challenging Barclays To Host Blockchains Hackathon developers to assist refurbish the worldwide derivatives market next month at a hackathon. Disclosed to the media this week, DerivHack will take place at Barclays' Rise accelerator spaces at the same time in New York and London on September 20 and 21, 2018. The ISDA (International Swaps and Derivatives Association), Thomson Reuters, and Deloitte are co-sponsoring the hackathon.

Great link. Thanks