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Category: innovation – Page 7

#bed Year 2006

July 5, 2006 Given that we spend roughly a third of our life asleep, the humble bed has had remarkably little innovation pointed in its direction over the ages. So a new floating bed which hovers 40 cm above the floor represents a significant development in the design of sleeping apparatus. Debuting at the recent Millionaire Fair in Kortrijk, Belgium, the floating bed is the result of six years of development by Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars working with Bakker Magnetics. Using the power of permanent opposing industrial-strength magnets to enable it to float, the full scale bed can hold 900 kilograms of weight, while a smaller one fifth scale platform can safely hold 80 kilogams. Already people are beginning to see many applications for the simple yet visually arresting platforms ranging from the basis for a sofa, Coffee table, Japanese dining table and particularly in the display areas where museums and high-end visual merchandisers are beginning to conceptualise numerous creative uses.

Four thin cables assure its motionless position and form the only contact with the ground and the only other aspect which concerned us about what is essentially a stunningly simple device was the issue of sleeping in such close proximity to magnetic fields.

Janjaap assures us that should you feel inclined to slip your bankcard into your pyjamas, the magnetic field atop the unit is not enough to degauss the magnetic strip. The field below the unit is a different matter however, and given that the magnetic field is strong enough to suspend 900 kilograms, it’s not recommended that people with pacemakers go under the bed – so if you’re wearing a pacemaker and drop the strawberry lube while using the floating bed, it’d be advisable to ask your partner to retrieve it.

Continue reading “The Floating Bed” | >

Medical breakthroughs often change lives, but some redefine what’s possible for the future of healthcare. This historic achievement brings hope to millions around the world.

Discover the story of how one doctor’s groundbreaking work is reshaping what we know about hearing loss and recovery.

Imagine living in a world of perpetual silence—where the laughter of loved ones and the melody of a favorite song are mere concepts, never experienced. For millions across the globe, this silence is a daily reality caused by hearing loss. Yet, a breakthrough in medical science has rewritten the possibilities, turning silence into sound. At the center of this transformation stands Dr. Mashudu Tshifularo, a South African surgeon whose revolutionary use of 3D-printed implants has achieved what was once deemed impossible: curing deafness.

Continue reading “South African Doctor Makes History by Curing Deafness” | >

A global team has made a significant advance in understanding how bacterial plasmids contribute to antibiotic resistance.

Their findings reveal a complex mechanism involving the proteins KorB and KorA, which could lead to innovative treatments to weaken drug-resistant bacteria.

Breakthrough in Bacterial Resistance Research.

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A team of chemists and agriculture specialists has developed a way to transform urea in wastewater, into percarbamide, which can be used as a fertilizer. In their paper published in the journal Nature Catalysis, the group describes their process and how well the resulting product worked in growing edible crops.

Urine is seen as a source of because it is high in nitrogen and other rich compounds that are good for . Many home gardeners know that urine can be used as a fertilizer both for flower and vegetable gardens—the key is to mix it with a lot of water to prevent burning the plants.

Prior efforts to use urine as a source of fertilizer on a larger scale, however, have proven to be unfeasible due to industrial inefficiencies; it is much easier to use standard methods that involve extracting nitrogen from the air. In this new effort, the researchers have developed a way to use human and animal as a fertilizer for growing edible crops.

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On a broader level, by pushing AI toward more human-like processing, Titans could mean AI that thinks more deeply than humans — challenging our understanding of human uniqueness and our role in an AI-augmented world.

At the heart of Titans’ design is a concerted effort to more closely emulate the functioning of the human brain. While previous models like Transformers introduced the concept of attention—allowing AI to focus on specific, relevant information—Titans takes this several steps further. The new architecture incorporates analogs to human cognitive processes, including short-term memory, long-term memory, and even the ability to “forget” less relevant information. Perhaps most intriguingly, Titans introduces a concept that’s surprisingly human: the ability to prioritize surprising or unexpected information. This mimics the human tendency to more easily remember events that violate our expectations, a feature that could lead to more nuanced and context-aware AI systems.

The key technical innovation in Titans is the introduction of a neural long-term memory module. This component learns to memorize historical context and works in tandem with the attention mechanisms that have become standard in modern AI models. The result is a system that can effectively utilize both immediate context (akin to short-term memory) and broader historical information (long-term memory) when processing data or generating responses.

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For over 20 years, the Ihara research group at Ehime University has specialized in developing innovative methods for polymer synthesis using diazocarbonyl compounds as monomers.

They discovered that diazoacetate can be polymerized using a palladium (Pd)-based initiator to produce carbon–carbon (C–C) main-chain polymers, with each carbon atom in the backbone bonded to an alkoxycarbonyl (ester) group. Unlike traditional vinyl polymerization—where the polymer backbone is built from two-carbon units of vinyl monomers like ethylene and styrene—diazoacetate polymerization creates the C–C main chain from single-carbon units. This unique process, known as C1 polymerization, is a distinctive and significant feature of this synthesis method.

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“We don’t care about professional coders anymore,” Masad said.

“Yet it has grown its revenue five-fold over the past six months, Masad said, thanks to a breakthrough in artificial-intelligence capabilities that enabled a new product called ” Agent,” a tool that can write a working software application with nothing but a natural language prompt.

Amjad Masad talks about their new AI developments that will allow anyone to code naturally.

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Since the invention of the laser in 1960, nonlinear optics has aimed to broaden light’s spectral range and create new frequency components. Among the various techniques, supercontinuum (SC) generation stands out for its ability to produce light across a wide portion of the visible and infrared spectrum.

However, traditional SC sources rely on weak third-order optical nonlinearity, requiring long interaction lengths for broad spectral output. In , second-order optical nonlinearity offers far greater efficiency and lower power requirements, though mismatching in bulk crystals has historically limited its spectral coverage and overall efficiency.

In a study published in Light: Science & Applications, a collaborative research team from Aalto University, Tampere University, and Peking University, led by Professor Zhipei Sun, has demonstrated a revolutionary method for generating octave-spanning coherent light at the deep-subwavelength scale (100 nm). Their innovative approach employs phase-matching-free second-order nonlinear optical frequency down-conversion in ultrathin gallium selenide (GaSe) and niobium oxide diiodide (NbOI2) crystals.

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