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U.S distance runner Zach Bitter set a 100-mile run world record in 11 hours, 19 minutes and 13 seconds at the Six Days in the Dome event in Milwaukee on Saturday. He ran 363 laps around the 442-meter track at the Pettit National Ice Center.

He averaged a mile pace of 6:48, which is faster than running a sub-three hour marathon. He ran the first 50 miles in five hours, 40 minutes and 38 seconds before completing the next 50 two minutes faster in five hours, 38 minutes and 35 seconds.

The previous record was 11 hours, 28 minutes and three seconds by Oleg Kharitonov in 2002. The 40-year-old from Manitowoc, Wis. set the American record for 100 miles when he ran a 11:40:55 in 2013.

Bendable light beams have significant applications in optical manipulation, optical imaging, routing, micromachining and nonlinear optics. Researchers have long explored curved light beams in place of traditional Gaussian beams for line-of-sight light communications. In a recent study now published on Scientific Reports, Long Zhu and a team of researchers in Optical and Electronic information, in China, proposed and developed free-space, data-carrying bendable light communication systems between arbitrary targets for potential multifunctionality. The researchers employed a 32-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (32-QAM) based discrete multitone (DMT) signal to demonstrate free-space bendable light intensity modulated direct detection (IM-DD) communication in the presence of three curved light paths. They characterized (tested) multiple functions of free-space bendable light communication to reveal that they allowed optical communications to be more flexible, robust and multifunctional. The work will open a new direction to explore special light beams enabled, advanced free-space light communications.

Bendable light beams are a new class of electromagnetic waves associated with a localized intensity maximum that can propagate along a curved trajectory. Researchers have previously studied and reported generic classes of bendable light beams that travel along elliptical and parabolic trajectories. Airy beams (appear to curve as they travel) are a type of non-diffracting beams that maintain its wavefront during transmission, much like Bessel beams (which only exist in theory, ideally) for optical communication free of obstructions. Airy beams possess properties of self-acceleration, non-diffraction and self-healing to propagate along a parabolic trajectory. Aside from airy beams, bendable light beams can reconstruct their wavefront to propagate continuously along the preset trajectory. To explore advantages of bendable light beams for diverse applications, researchers must bend the light along arbitrary trajectories; which can be achieved using the caustic method.

When I created my reaction video to the SAFIRE video I based mostly of my analysis on their released video. I made some extrapolations and requested that they release the information as quickly as possible. The Safire team even viewed the video and liked my unbiased analysis and wanted to arrange a call to discuss this and help answer my questions and cover any misconceptions I may have had. This video is my analysis of that conversation as well as the unedited version of it. It has certainly answered a lot of my questions and yes there are still many questions to be answered but to be fair even they don’t know the answer to all of these questions.

Link to my REACTION video:

Could robots with feelings be the next step in AI? A research paper discusses an interesting approach to robot design. It is titled “Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines” in Nature Machine Intelligence.

No need to see the robot as an enemy just because it takes on a robotic version of human ; the train of thought that the authors take is a distance away from fear and trembling by some futurists who ponder robots turning against their masters in an upside-down switch of master-servant roles.

Rather, Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio, the authors, choose to focus on machines acquiring homeostasis. Man and Damasio are with the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.