Lifeboat Foundation

A small team of engineers at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, working with a colleague from the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, has found a way to create tiny artificial cilia that work at the microscale. Their study is reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Cilia are tiny appendages that microscopic organisms use to move through a fluid. Prior research has shown that they are efficient—some paramecia are able to move at a rate of 10 times their own length per second. Prior research has also shown that cilia also move fluid. In the human lung, they work to clear away mucus.

Because of their usefulness, scientists have been studying cilia looking for a way to replicate them for use in desired applications. Such efforts have until now been stymied by the problem of creating working cilia at the microscale. In this new effort, the researchers have overcome such problems and created the first artificial microscale working cilia.

Making AI models more “self-aware” and “conscious” of their biases and factual errors could potentially prevent them from producing more false information in the future, the Microsoft cofounder wrote on his blog, GatesNotes.

The science of human consciousness offers new ways of gauging machine minds – and suggests there’s no obvious reason computers can’t develop awareness.

Is time travel possible, and if it is, what sort of civilizations would result? We’ll explore the science that might permit it as well as the classic science fiction examples to see if they make sense.

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Strategic agreement calls for fleet of Boston Dynamics robots to be deployed across more than 20 facilities over the next two years, to position retailer for the future.

Hamburg, Germany / Waltham, MA, USA – September 11, 2023 – The Otto Group, one of the world’s largest e-commerce retailers, has signed a strategic agreement with Boston Dynamics, the global leader in mobile robotics, to continue automating its logistics operations. The plan is to deploy Boston Dynamics’ Spot^® robots in more than 10 and Stretch™ robots in more than 20 of the group’s facilities over the next two years, beginning with Hermes Fulfilment. The deployment supports Otto Group’s efforts to improve safety, increase operational efficiency and address labor shortages for specific types of warehouse work and the agreement marks the first time both of Boston Dynamics’ commercially available robots will be deployed together at enterprise scale.

Under the terms of the agreement, Spot, the four-legged mobile robot from Boston Dynamics, will support tunnel inspections and predictive maintenance activities for operations equipment, including thermal monitoring, analog gauge reading and acoustic detection of pressurized air and gas leaks. The Spot fleet will also run autonomous missions, collecting data for machine learning models to support tasks like fire exit egress monitoring and detecting slight changes in storage racks to keep Otto Group’s warehouses even safer. In addition, the Otto Group will be utilizing Stretch, Boston Dynamics’ box-moving robot designed for warehouse applications. Stretch will begin unloading containers at 10 facilities next year, with the goal of having all sites operational by the end of 2025. Stretch, which is particularly useful for unloading heavy packages in the container sector, will provide technological support for physically demanding activities.

Researchers turn to synchrotron imaging of historical and homemade prints to explore possible connections between early printing methods in Korea and Europe.

Observations of air-bubble mergers in water explain why dissolved salt slows this process and leads to foam.

Air bubbles churned up in pure water can easily merge. But bubbles merge far more slowly in seawater or in other liquids containing dissolved impurities, which is why such liquids often generate enduring foams. Now a team of engineers believes that it has identified the fundamental cause of the difference—subtle forces set up by electrolytes, mobile ions created when substances dissolve in liquids [1]. In a collision between two bubbles, these forces greatly reduce the rate at which the liquid separating the bubbles can flow away. This understanding, the researchers say, explains why foams arise so easily in salty seawater and could be useful in many industrial applications.

Solutions with high electrolyte concentrations often produce persisting foams, so researchers have suspected for decades that dissolved electrolytes somehow slow bubble mergers. The effect has remained mysterious, however, and many theories even suggest that electrolytes should speed up bubble mergers, says mechanical engineer Bo Liu of the University of Alberta in Canada.

An area known as Thacker Pass on the Nevada-Oregon border is home to clay that contain tens of millions of tons of lithium.