We may be on the verge of creating a new life form, one that could mark not only an evolutionary breakthrough, but a potential threat to our survival as a species.
Category: innovation – Page 266
NASA Venus Landsail Rover Could Launch In 2023
NASA’s study of a Venus landsail rover for possible launch as early as 2023 continues via its Innovative Advanced Concepts office. Geoffrey Landis, the rover’s study scientist fills me in on the latest. Ironically, the optimal landing site is near that of the Soviet Venera 10 lander.
NASA continues working towards a Venus landsail surface rover that could see launch as early as 2023 and mark the first time in a generation that any probe has landed on the planet’s hot, rocky surface. After a five month journey from Earth, the lander-rover — about the size of a windsurfing board — would begin a nominal 50-day surface mission.
If funded, NASA would launch this landsail “Zephyr” rover as a $400 million Discovery class mission with a coupled orbiter and lander. Once safely in Venus orbit, the rover-lander would detach for its journey through the planet’s thick atmosphere. Following an upright wheels-down landing, pyrotechnics would then cut the rover loose to explore the surface.
Loaded with some 50 pounds of science equipment, the landsail rover would move about courtesy of a 26-foot airfoil sail.
Scientists make significant anti-aging breakthrough
A breakthrough in understanding human skin cells offers a pathway for new anti-ageing treatments.
For the first time, scientists at Newcastle University, UK, have identified that the activity of a key metabolic enzyme found in the batteries of human skin cells declines with age.
A study, published online in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, has found that the activity of mitochondrial complex II significantly decreases in older skin.
CNNMoney: A Tricopter
Is this the ultimate flying bike? A Hungarian company hopes to sell this flying device as soon as sometime this year.
More of our innovation stories: http://cnnmon.ie/1KQJYCZ
Levi Strauss Leads the Future of Design with Google’s Conductive Textiles Technology
We talked to Paul Dillinger, Levi’s VP of Global Product Innovation, on how the company is using the future of textile tech with Google’s Project Jacquard.
Upcoming Technology to Pump Air in the Tyres
If you ride a bike, motorbike, or drive an automobile, you know that from time to time you need to pump air into those tires, at least if you need to ensure an optimum ride, you do. It’s a known fact that we do get lazy and at times ignore. But there is a good news, especially for a cyclist, there could be a solution out there for you personally.
Benjamin Krempel has come up with an invention called Dubbed the PumpTube, the idea here is that the inner tube on your motorcycle’s tires will be able to self-pump, meaning that as you cycle, it’ll continuously pump air in your tires to ensure that it really never deflates and that it’ll be at the pressure that you have set.
Water Nanofilter
Necessity is the mother of invention. Tanzanian researcher creates a water filter that turns polluted water into drinking water.
The Good News From Google: A Conversation With Ruth Porat | Foreign Affairs
“Ruth Porat has taken an unusual path to the tech world. Before becoming the chief financial officer at Google in May 2015 (and then at Alphabet, Google’s new parent company, a few months later), she held the same post at Morgan Stanley, where among other roles she worked closely with the U.S. government to sort out the troubles at the insurance corporation AIG and the mortgage-financing agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the 2008 financial crisis.”
The Many Uses of Multi-Agent Intelligent Systems
In professional cycling, it’s well known that a pack of 40 or 50 riders can ride faster and more efficiently than a single rider or small group. As such, you’ll often see cycling teams with different goals in a race work together to chase down a breakaway before the finish line.
This analogy is one way to think about collaborative multi-agent intelligent systems, which are poised to change the technology landscape for individuals, businesses, and governments, says Dr. Mehdi Dastani, a computer scientist at Utrecht University. The proliferation of these multi-agent systems could lead to significant systemic changes across society in the next decade.
Image credit: ResearchGate“Multi-agent systems are basically a kind of distributed system with sets of software. A set can be very large. They are autonomous, they make their own decisions, they can perceive their environment, “Dastani said. “They can perceive other agents and they can communicate, collaborate or compete to get certain resources. A multi-agent system can be conceived as a set of individual softwares that interact.”
As a simple example of multi-agent systems, Dastani cited Internet mail servers, which connect with each other and exchange messages and packets of information. On a larger scale, he noted eBay’s online auctions, which use multi-agent systems to allow one to find an item they want to buy, enter their maximum price and then, if needed, up the bid on the buyer’s behalf as the auction closes. Driverless cars are another great example of a multi-agent system, where many softwares must communicate to make complicated decisions.
Dastani noted that multi-agent systems dovetail nicely with today’s artificial intelligence. In the early days of AI, intelligence was a property of one single entity of software that could, for example, understand human language or perceive visual inputs to make its decisions, interact, or perform an action. As multi-agent systems have been developed, those single agents interact and receive information from other agents that they may lack, which allows them to collectively create greater functionality and more intelligent behavior.
“When we consider (global) trade, we basically define a kind of interaction in terms of action. This way of interacting among individuals might make their market more efficient. Their products might get to market for a better price, as the amount of time (to produce them) might be reduced,” Dastani said. “When we get into multi-agent systems, we consider intelligence as sort of an emergent phenomena that can be very functional and have properties like optimal global decision or situations of state.”
Other potential applications of multi-agent systems include designs for energy-efficient appliances, such as a washing machine that can contact an energy provider so that it operates during off-peak hours or a factory that wants to flatten out its peak energy use, he said. Municipal entities can also use multi-agent systems for planning, such as simulating traffic patterns to improve traffic efficiency.
Looking to the future, Dastani notes the parallels between multi-agent systems and Software as a Service (SaaS) computing, which could shed light on how multi-agent systems might evolve. Just as SaaS combines various applications for on-demand use, multi-agent systems can combine functionalities of various software to provide more complex solutions. The key to those more complex interactions, he added, is to develop a system that will govern the interactions of multi-agent systems and overcome the inefficiencies that can be created on the path toward functionality.
“The idea is the optimal interaction that we can design or we can have. Nevertheless, that doesn’t mean that multi-agent systems are by definition, efficient,” Dastani said. “We can have many processes that communicate, make an enormous number of messages and use a huge amount of resources and they still can not have a sort of interesting functionality. The whole idea is, how can we understand and analyze the interactions? How can we decide which interaction is better than the other interactions or more efficient or more productive?”
Now you can learn to fly a plane from expert-pilot brainwave patterns | KurzweilAI
“You can learn how to improve your novice pilot skills by having your brain zapped with recorded brain patterns of experienced pilots via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), according to researchers at HRL Laboratories.”