Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Blog – Page 10466

A future robot’s body could combine soft actuators and stiff structure, with distributed computation throughout — an example of the new “material robotics.” (credit: Nikolaus Correll/University of Colorado)

Future robots won’t be limited to humanoid form (like Boston Robotics’ formidable backflipping Atlas). They’ll be invisibly embedded everywhere in common objects.

Such as a shoe that can intelligently support your gait, change stiffness as you’re running or walking, and adapt to different surfaces — or even help you do backflips.

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Some of the earliest computers relied upon tape drives for storage, but we’ve since moved on to faster and more versatile storage technologies. Still, tape drives continue to exist in enterprise, and they’ve been advancing by leaps and bounds while you haven’t been paying attention. IBM just announced a new record in data storage density — 201 gigabits per square inch on a magnetic tape (that’s one square inch of it above). That works out to a whopping 330TB of uncompressed data on a single tape drive cartridge.

IBM reached this plateau in magnetic tape density by developing several new technologies. Older versions of IBM’s magnetic tape used a thin film of barium ferrite particles applied to the surface like paint. “Sputtered tape” uses several layers of thin metal film that are applied using a new vacuum technology. A layer of lubricant is also applied to the reading surface of the tape to keep the tape in good working order as it’s run through the drive. The higher density arrangement of magnetic nanoparticles will, of course, require new drive technology to read.

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For many of us, remembering faces from 30 years ago can be something of a challenge. But cells in our immune system can remember old foes just fine, and we’ve never really been sure exactly how they manage it.

A new study has filled in missing details on the steps our body takes to remember pathogens, finally revealing the steps our immune cells take to preserve a reference library of past battles.

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, used a hydrogen isotope to label white blood cells inside volunteers, and tracked a specially selected virus from infection to immunity in order to record significant steps in the immune process.

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An experiment that created a 3.5 Mbps broadband internet connection won’t sound very impressive to most of us, especially since the average download speed in the US is about 75 megabits per second. But the surprising part is that it was established using a 6ft 7in piece of wet string.

While broadband connections tend to rely on wires made of materials such as copper, engineers at a small British internet service provider called Andrews and Arnold wanted to see if it was possible to send data through something less conventional.

They soaked the long piece of twine in a salt water as it’s a good conductor of electricity, though it had to be re-soaked every half an hour, and used a pair of alligator clips to establish the connection. “The upkeep of these wet string connections is very hard; in our tests, we had to continually re-wet the string approximately every 30 minutes to avoid a complete loss of sync, and this process was always disruptive to the signals,” wrote Adrian Kennard, the ISP’s director, in a blog post.

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A new technique for recording image information onto a surface creates the ability for one space to contain multiple holographic snapshots, depending on how you look at it.

With this new research, cramming numerous holograms without loss of resolution on the same material could open the way to some fascinating new applications.

Holograms have been around for over half a century, serving as art, entertainment, and foils to counterfeiting. It’s been a hard and fast rule that no matter which way you view a hologram, the same object would appear in three dimensions. Until now.

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