The European Space Agency (ESA) is launching the first mission to remove a piece of space debris, set for 2025. The ClearSpace-1 mission will collect a piece of the Vespa (Vega Secondary Payload Adapter) second stage which was left by an ESA mission in 2013, which weighs approximately 100 grams and is the size of a small satellite.
The ESA selected a Swiss startup called ClearSpace to lead the mission. “This is the right time for such a mission,” Luc Piguet, founder and CEO of ClearSpace, said in a statement. “The space debris issue is more pressing than ever before. Today we have nearly 2000 live satellites in space and more than 3000 failed ones. And in the coming years, the number of satellites will increase by an order of magnitude, with multiple mega-constellations made up of hundreds or even thousands of satellites planned for low Earth orbit to deliver wide-coverage, low-latency telecommunications and monitoring services. The need is clear for a ‘tow truck’ to remove failed satellites from this highly trafficked region.”
The problem of space debris is becoming increasingly urgent, with more and more potentially hazardous objects in orbit around the planet, some at extremely high speeds. Debris can pose a risk to manned missions and the International Space Station as well as satellites and other unmanned missions.
With companies offering free shipping to gain a competitive edge, radical new technologies are being tested to cut the cost of the supply chain’s expensive “last mile”.
The Songar drone is a regular unmanned aerial vehicle — that just so happens to come with a mounted machine gun and 200 rounds of ammunition for riddling targets with bullets from the sky. Here’s how it works, and how its aerial targeting capabilities could shape up on the battlefield.
Carnegie Mellon University computer scientists have taken a deep learning method that has revolutionized face recognition and other image-based applications in recent years and redirected its power to explore the relationship between genes.
The trick, they say, is to transform massive amounts of gene expression data into something more image-like. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which are adept at analyzing visual imagery, can then infer which genes are interacting with each other. The CNNs outperform existing methods at this task.
The researchers’ report on how CNNs can help identify disease-related genes and developmental and genetic pathways that might be targets for drugs is being published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. But Ziv Bar-Joseph, professor of computational biology and machine learning, said the applications for the new method, called CNNC, could go far beyond gene interactions.
Human intelligence is not linear. Machine intelligence can be summed up in three words; efficiency, efficacy and trade off. The more we automate human thinking, the less we need humans. Get it?
From the subtle advancements in technology to the birth of SKYNET!!!! Join us as we explore facts about the Technological Singularity. 11. What is the Technological Singularity? What’s that? You don’t know what it is? No worries, it is a pretty scientific term. To quote Wikipedia, the Technological Singularity, “is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.“ What’s more, this is NOT a new theory or idea. And it honestly wasn’t proposed by various sci-fi movies. In fact, it was proposed by a book in 1993 via Vernor Vinge in The Coming Technological Singularity. What’s more, while this may seem like a “sci-fi future”, there are many who actually believe that not only will this come, but it could come to bear as soon as 2050. 10. Where Are We Now In The Technological Singularity? To fully understand how the Technological Singularity could happen, we need to understand where we are as a society that could lead us to the Technological Singularity future that many fear. 9. Intelligence Boom The key word here to note is “IntelligenceBoom”. No, I don’t mean like our own brains exploding (that would be bad…), but rather, an boom of potential via Artificial Intelligence. This is one of the potential “outcomes” of a Technological Singularity. Think of it like this. Every generation of computer we make is technically better than the next, right? The difference between what we do and what an Intelligence Boom is, is that the A.I. is the one “making” the next generation. That’s a scary thought, huh? And that’s actually a reason why many are opposed to the research on super-intelligent (and always evolving) A.I’s. This included the late Stephen Hawking and current eccentric Billionaire Elon Musk. They feel that humanity will be doomed because of A.I’s. Whether it be through Intelligence Boom, or something of our own making. 8. Making A “Better Tomorrow“ There is another way that many dispute the Technological Singularity will come via A.I. and that’s simply by creating an A.I. ourselves that goes far beyond what we intended it to be. Which may not be as far-fetched as you might think. If I were to say the names Alexa, Siri, and Watson, you’d recognize them as various machines with various intelligence, right? Well technically, they’re all A.I., just with different levels of intelligence. Siri came first and could react to certain things on your iPad or iPhone. Some think that we are very close to that point. Including a man named Ray Kurzweil, who believes that we could be at the Singularity point by 2045 at the earliest. 7. The Predictions Of Ray Kurzweil Part 1 If you’re not familiar with ray kurzweil, you honestly should read up on him, he’s not just another guy predicting the end of civilization, he’s actually an engineer at Google, and sees himself as a Futurist. One who has made predictions in the past about technologies advances with accuracy. 6. Robotics When you think of the “future” that humanity “wants” and that various sci-fi and movies have “predicted”, the obvious things you see are robots and people with robotic appendages. Let’s look at robots first. The Technological Singularity notes that as robots get more advanced, humans will become less and less important. All part of the “A.I. Overlord” scenarios if you will. Then again, WE could be the robots, not unlike another robotic race with brilliant intelligence: The Borg. 5. Artificial Limbs and Cyborgs One of the biggest and most worrying things about a person in regards to their life is the chance that they could lose a limb. The loss of a limb is something that cannot be overcome simply. 4. The Predictions Of Ray Kurzweil Part 2 ( ray kurzweil 2019) But again, the question becomes, “How far are we from that future?” If Ray Kurzweil is to be believed, not as far as you think. For he believes a key part of the singularity will come in 2029, a mere decade in the future.
In 1893, Japanese entrepreneur Kokichi Mikimoto succeeded in creating the world’s first cultured pearls in the coastal city of Toba, Mie Prefecture. Mikimoto changed the world of jewelry and launched a new industry. Today, steps away from the island where Mikimoto created the pearls, Toba is aiming to launch another new industry: flying taxis to offshore settlements. Earlier this year, NEC showed off its eVTOL flying car concept, which hovered 3 meters off the ground for about a minute. These developments are part of a global push to develop autonomous aircraft that could become a $1.5 trillion market by 2040, according to Morgan Stanley Research.
