Walking up stairs, keeping your balance and doing some light cleaning are easy for people. Less so for robots.
Read more
Steve Jurvetson is a man of many facets – and he can 3D print a rocket that achieves Mach 1.8 (that’s 1,363 mph) in 2.6 seconds and reach an altitude of nearly 9,500 feet.
The Mach number is named after the Austrian physicist and philosopher, Ernst Mach. The terms “subsonic” and “supersonic” basically refer to speeds below and above the local speed of sound, so you should have some idea how fast these tiny rockets are traveling.
Jurvetson is a partner and managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson, a venture capital firm, and his board responsibilities include projects like SpaceX, Synthetic Genomics, and Tesla Motors. He was also a founding venture capital investor in Hotmail, led DFJ’s investments in companies acquired for $12 billion in aggregate, and he was an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard. His technical experiences include programming, materials science research, and computer design at HP’s PC Division, the Center for Materials Research, and Mostek.
Read more
One of the biggest rumors surrounding the iPhone 7 is that Apple is adding a second camera module (at least on the Plus model), and it makes a lot more sense than you might realize.
After all, other manufacturers have already caught on. LG’s G5 comes with a ultra-wide angle lens, Huawei’s new P9 sports a dedicated black-and-white camera, and HTC beat everyone to the punch with the One M8’s depth-sensing camera a couple of years ago.
Our biggest ever edition of TNW Conference is fast approaching! Join 10,000 tech leaders this May in Amsterdam.
Read more
Time to brush up on my Yeats, Browning, or Frost.
Demand for chatting virtual assistants and other artificial intelligence (AI) products is creating favorable job prospects for writers, poets, comedians, and other people of artistic persuasion in Silicon Valley.
The industry is tapping them to engineer the personalities of AI tools to make them capable of seamless interaction with people.
AI writers are tasked with imbuing the AIs with natural-seeming conversational capabilities.
Along with equipment and supplies for the astronauts, the rocket was supposed to deliver several scientific experiments, including one Grattoni and his team spent five years perfecting: a study of how drug-like particles disperse through 100 tiny channels etched in a dime-sized microchip. […] it hit him: the rocket — and his work — was gone. Led by Grattoni, the center has secured coveted approval to conduct several experiments in coming years aboard the $100 billion space station, where scientists can exploit the lack of gravity about 200 miles above the Earth’s surface to perform studies they wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to do on Earth.
Read more
Most traditional vaccines have safety and efficacy issues, whereas particulate vaccine delivery systems—which utilize nano- or micro-particulate carriers to protect and deliver antigens—are efficient, stable, include molecules to bolster immune responses, and minimize adverse reactions due to the use of biocompatible biomaterials.
A new review, titled “Particulate delivery systems for vaccination against bioterrorism agents and emerging infectious pathogens,” summarizes the current status of research efforts to develop particulate vaccine delivery systems against bioterrorism agents and emerging infectious pathogens.
Read more
New Zealand could become one of the first developed countries to scrap benefits and introduce a basic citizens’ income.
Leader of the opposition Andrew Little said his Labour party was considering the idea as part of proposals to combat the “possibility of higher structural unemployment”.
Citizens’ income, also known as Universal Basic Income (UBI), involves a basic, unconditional, fixed payment made to every person in the country by the state in lieu of benefits.
Read more
SpaceX has finally landed its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea, after launching the vehicle into space this afternoon. It’s the first time the company has been able to pull off an ocean landing, after four previous attempts ended in failure. Today’s success is a crucial milestone for SpaceX, as it shows the company can land its rockets both on solid ground and ocean.
This is the second time SpaceX has successfully landed one of its rockets post-launch; the first time was in December, when the company’s Falcon 9 rocket touched down at a ground-based landing site in Cape Canaveral, Florida, after putting a satellite into space. Now that SpaceX has demonstrated it can do both types of landings, the company can potentially recover and reuse even more rockets in the future. And that could mean much greater cost savings for SpaceX.
Mastering the ocean landing is going to be important, since that’s the type of landing SpaceX will probably conduct more often. At a recent NASA press conference, Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of mission assurance for SpaceX, said the next two to three flights will involve drone ship landings. Ultimately, the company expects to land one-third of its rockets on land, and the rest at sea.
Read more
