JEFF BEZOS AND BLUE ORIGIN GO ALL IN ON MOON SETTLEMENTS
Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin space venture will work with NASA as well as the European Space Agency to create a settlement on the moon. And even if Blue Origin can’t strike public-private partnerships, Bezos will do what needs to be done to make it so, he said here at the International Space Development Conference on Friday night. Bezos laid out his vision for lunar settlement during a fireside chat with yours truly, which took place just after he received the National Space Society’s Gerard K. O’Neill Memorial Award.
Read moreINGESTIBLE “BACTERIA ON A CHIP” COULD HELP DIAGNOSE DISEASE
This “bacteria-on-a-chip” approach combines sensors made from living cells with ultra-low-power electronics that convert the bacterial response into a wireless signal that can be read by a smartphone. In the new study, appearing in the May 24 online edition of Science, the researchers created sensors that respond to heme, a component of blood, and showed that they work in pigs. They also designed sensors that can respond to a molecule that is a marker of inflammation.
Read moreAMERICANS LESS TRUSTING OF SELF-DRIVING SAFETY FOLLOWING HIGH-PROFILE ACCIDENTS
Americans are less trusting of self-driving cars following two deadly accidents involving autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles, with half of U.S. adults considering those automobiles less safe than human drivers, according to a new poll. A Morning Consult survey conducted March 29-April 1 among a national sample of 2,202 adults found that 27 percent of respondents said self-driving cars are safer than human drivers, while 50 percent said autonomous vehicles are less safe. Eight percent said the automobiles are on par with human drivers when it comes to safety.
Read moreMAKING DRIVERLESS CARS CHANGE LANES MORE LIKE HUMAN DRIVERS DO
In the field of self-driving cars, algorithms for controlling lane changes are an important topic of study. But most existing lane-change algorithms have one of two drawbacks: Either they rely on detailed statistical models of the driving environment, which are difficult to assemble and too complex to analyze on the fly; or they’re so simple that they can lead to impractically conservative decisions, such as never changing lanes at all. At the International Conference on Robotics and Automation tomorrow, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a new lane-change algorithm that splits the difference.
Read moreTHE INTERNET OF TRASH: IOT HAS A LOOMING E-WASTE PROBLEM
In 2016, Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank Group Corp., predicted that in the next 20 years there will be a trillion connected devices in the world and orbiting the planet. This spurred his investment in Arm Holdings, the chip-design company, which is profiting from increased demand for battery-sipping chips meant for low-compute jobs. Arm’s microcontrollers are now inside rings, watches, and sensors on industrial equipment.
Read moreTHE US GOVERNMENT WANTS TO START CHARGING FOR THE BEST FREE SATELLITE DATA ON EARTH
The US government may begin charging users for access to five decades of satellite images of Earth, just as academic and corporate researchers are gaining the tools they need to harness them. Nature reports that the Department of Interior has asked an advisory board to consider the consequences of charging for the data generated by the Landsat program, which is the largest continuously collected set of Earth images taken in space and has been freely available to the public since 2008. Since 1972, Landsat has used seven different satellites to gather images of the Earth, with an eighth currently slated for a December 2020 launch.
Read moreWORLD’S BIGGEST PLANETARIUM ACHIEVES JAW-DROPPING 10K RESOLUTION
Planetarium No. 1, the world’s biggest planetarium, uses NVIDIA graphics to showcase the universe with a level of clarity, detail and interactivity like never before. Russian dome with half-acre of screen area powered by NVIDIA Quadro graphics. Housed in a 19th century natural gas storage building, the planetarium’s exterior is about the only thing that isn’t on the cutting edge of modernity. Inside is the world’s largest planetarium, with a half acre (2,000 square meters) of projection area within a 37-meter diameter dome. It’s the planet’s only large-size planetarium with a dome that partially touches the floor. This expansive viewing angle makes it possible for visitors to take photos of themselves with space in the background.
Read moreHOW BRAIN WAVES SURF SOUND WAVES TO PROCESS SPEECH
When people listen to speech, their ears translate the sound waves into neural signals that are then processed and interpreted by various parts of the brain, starting with the auditory cortex. Years of neurophysiological studies have observed that the waves of neural activity in the auditory cortex lock onto the audio signal’s “envelope”—essentially, the frequency with which the loudness changes. (As Poeppel put it, “The brain waves surf on the sound waves.”
Read moreENGINEERED BAND GAP PUSHES GRAPHENE CLOSER TO DISPLACING SILICON
A new method for engineering a band gap into graphene maintains its attractive electronic properties Graphene might bethe best conductor of electrons we know. However, as a pure conductor it can’t stop the flow of electrons like a semiconductor such as siliconcan. Silicon’s ability to create an on/off state for the flow of electrons makes it possible to create the “0” and “1” of binary digital logic for computing.
Read moreA CLASSICAL MATH PROBLEM GETS PULLED INTO THE MODERN WORLD
A century ago, the great mathematician David Hilbert posed a probing question in pure mathematics. A recent advance in optimization theory is bringing Hilbert’s work into a world of self-driving cars. A collision-free path can be guaranteed by a sum-of-squares algorithm. Long before robots could run or cars could drive themselves, mathematicians contemplated a simple mathematical question. They figured it out, then laid it to rest — with no way of knowing that the object of their mathematical curiosity would feature in machines of the far-off future. The future is now here.
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