Lifeboat Foundation

IEEE Spectrum recently summarized a major breakthrough out of DARPA’s Photonically Optimized Embedded Microprocessors (POEM) program:

LED lighting systems could soon gain mainstream adoption with a new cost-effective hybrid LED and its solution-based process.

Shrinking transistors have powered 50 years of advances in computing—but now other ways must be found to make computers more capable.

How do we manage our complex, multi-cloud, hybrid infrastructures? Seth Vargo maps the operations tooling ecosystem you need to know in order to maintain your sanity, but he also looks into the future of infrastructure as code tools and what cool innovations we can expect.

A radical new innovation helping you to learn and excel in chess quickly with real time learning and progression.

Some people simply dream of having superhero powers – but one man made it a reality by inventing a real life Spider-Man web shooter.

I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there who have been envious of Spider-Man’s nifty web-shooting trick; people who eventually had to come to terms with the fact that the closest they were going to get to having those powers was through Spider-Man video games.

But one guy has given the world the opportunity to control webs without a PS4, and instead with a device that really shoots webs. The best part is, they’re willing to share it with the world and have made the invention available for purchase.

Continue reading “Guy Invents Real Life Spider-Man Web Shooter” »

(ECNS) — The Chinese team that constructed the world’s first ear in a lab and grafted it onto a patient last year has made new progress by developing injectable cartilage that can be used in human tissue repair and plastic surgery.

The regeneration technique involves taking a small part of cartilage tissue from behind the ear of a patient, culturing seed cells in the lab and reproducing cells in a sufficient amount to fill a biodegradable mould made by 3D-printing.

Professor Cao Yilin, director of National Tissue Engineering Research Center, said it marks a breakthrough from previous technology as the cultured cells can be injected into a patient’s body parts like the nose and chin where they continue to develop into normal tissue, a minimally invasive treatment similar to natural growth.

Continue reading “Chinese scientists make breakthrough in injectable cartilage” »

Soon after the invention of the laser in the late 1950s many dubbed the discovery as a solutYou’ve reached the limit of what you can view on Physics World without registering If you already have an account on Physics World, then please sign in to continue reading If you do not yet have an account, …

Recent attempts to move beyond narrow AI applications in industry have struggled to gain traction. ReThink Robotics, a leading startup founded by AI founding MIT researcher Dr. Rodney Brooks to create adaptive collaborative robots for industrial robotics, closed its doors in October 2018 and has since had its IP acquired by HAHN Group. In a retrospective published by The Robot Report, several contributing factors led to the shutdown. ReThink’s reliance on series elastic actuators compromised the precision and repeatability found in typical actuators in favor of safety, which likely led to efforts to compensate on hardware through software.

While the company utilized innovative machine control and machine vision technologies in iterating on their robots, the combination of mechanical motion of firmware at the heart of their products led to a narrow range of issues at varying quality. This made Baxter and Sawyer, ReThink’s flagship industrial robots, ill-suited for adaptive industrial use.

Other companies attempting to build adaptive robots, including Jibo, have met similar troubles. Touted as an interactive social robot with a personality, Jibo launched their eponymous robot in November 2017 with an emphasis on naturalistic human-computer interaction, but entered the market with more limited functionality than cheaper smart assistant speakers. The company has since closed down and transferred ownership of their IP to SQN Venture Partners in November 2018.

Continue reading “The Expectations And Possibility Of Adaptive AI Hardware” »