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Category: materials – Page 264

A model that estimates tactile properties of surfaces

The ability to estimate the physical properties of objects is of key importance for robots, as it allows them to interact more effectively with their surrounding environment. In recent years, many robotics researchers have been specifically trying to develop techniques that allow robots to estimate tactile properties of objects or surfaces, which could ultimately provide them with skills that resemble the human sense of touch.

Building on previous research, Matthew Purri, a Ph.D. student specializing in Computer Vision and AI at Rutgers University, recently developed a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based model that can estimate tactile properties of surfaces by analyzing images of them. Purri’s new paper, pre-published on arXiv, was supervised by Kristin Dana, a professor of Electrical Engineering at Rutgers.

“My previous research dealt with fine-grain material segmentation from ,” Purri told TechXplore. “Satellite image sequences provide a wealth of material about a scene in the form of varied viewing and illumination angles and multispectral information. We learned how valuable multi-view information is for identifying material from our previous work and believed that this information could act as a cue for the problem of physical surface property estimation.”

Opting In for a Positive Future — Allison Duettmann

Excellent speech.

Our civilization is made up of countless individuals and pieces of material technology, which come together to form institutions and interdependent systems of logistics, development and production. These institutions and systems then store the knowledge required for their own renewal and growth.

We pin the hopes of our common human project on this renewal and growth of the whole civilization. Whether this project is going well is a challenging but vital question to answer.

History shows us we are not safe from institutional collapse. Advances in technology mitigate some aspects, but produce their own risks. Agile institutions that make use of both social and technical knowledge not only mitigate such risks, but promise unprecedented human flourishing.

Watch this video where we investigate this landscape, evaluate our odds, and try to plot a better course.

Continue reading “Opting In for a Positive Future — Allison Duettmann” | >

SA Gets Its First Plastic Road

How do you recycle the equivalent of 1,8 million single use plastic bags, and resolve South Africa’s pothole problem? Roll out plastic roads, of course!

That’s exactly what the Kouga Municipality in the Eastern Cape is in the process of doing – and the benefits to road users are manifold.

The concept of a plastic road isn’t a new one. Several years ago, companies in Scotland and the USA pioneered the idea of breaking down plastic waste, and adding it to asphalt. Now, there are thousands of kilometres of plastic roads all over the world, from Australia, the UK and New Zealand to India, Turkey, Slovenia and now South Africa.

Moderna Taps Lonza to Scale Up Manufacturing of COVID-19 Vaccine

Moderna has accelerated its manufacturing capacity for its COVID-19 vaccine candidate mRNA-1273 and additional future products through a 10-year agreement with Lonza announced today by the companies.

The companies agreed to establish manufacturing suites for Moderna at Lonza’s facilities in the U.S. and Switzerland for the production of mRNA-1273. Technology transfer is expected to begin in June, with the first batches of mRNA-1273 set to be manufactured at Lonza’s U.S. site in July.

Moderna and Lonza also said they intend to establish additional production suites across Lonza’s worldwide facilities, ultimately allowing for the manufacture of material equivalent to up to 1 billion doses of mRNA-1273 per year for use worldwide, based on the currently expected dose of 50 mcg.

Laser-powered rover to explore Moon’s dark shadows

A laser light shone through the dark could power robotic exploration of the most tantalising locations in our Solar System: the permanently-shadowed craters around the Moon’s poles, believed to be rich in water ice and other valuable materials.

ESA’s Discovery & Preparation programme funded the design of a laser system to keep a rover supplied with power from up to 15 km away while it explores some of these dark craters.

At the highest lunar latitudes, the Sun stays low on the horizon all year round, casting long shadows that keep sunken craters mired in permanent shadow, potentially on a timescale of billions of years. Data from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, India’s Chandrayaan-1 and ESA’s SMART-1 orbiters show these ‘permanently shadowed regions’ are rich in hydrogen, strongly suggesting water ice can be found there.

“Super steel” breakthrough makes for stronger and tougher alloy

It’s a frustrating fact that whenever you try to improve materials like steel, you end up introducing new weaknesses at the same time. It’s a balancing act between different properties. Now, engineers have developed a new type of “super steel” that defies this trade-off, staying strong while still resisting fractures.

For materials like steel, there are three main properties that need to be balanced – strength, toughness and ductility. The first two might sound like the same thing, but there’s an important difference. Strength describes how much of a load a material can take before it deforms or fails, measured in Pascals of pressure. Toughness, meanwhile, measures how much energy it takes to fracture a material.

For reference, glass has relatively high strength but low toughness, so it’s able to support quite a bit of weight but it doesn’t take much energy to break.

Researchers create durable, washable textile coating that can repel viruses

Masks, gowns, and other personal protective equipment (PPE) are essential for protecting healthcare workers. However, the textiles and materials used in such items can absorb and carry viruses and bacteria, inadvertently spreading the disease the wearer sought to contain.

When the coronavirus spread amongst and left PPE in short supply, finding a way to provide better protection while allowing for the safe reuse of these items became paramount.

Research from the LAMP Lab at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering may have a solution. The lab has created a textile coating that can not only repel liquids like blood and saliva but can also prevent viruses from adhering to the surface. The work was recently published in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces.

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