Lifeboat Foundation

If the Airbus patent ever becomes reality, this boarding style would be a thing of the past. (Photo: Thinkstock)

Unless you’re deathly afraid of planes, one of the worst things about flying is the sheer tedium of it. It’s nothing but indeterminate waiting — waiting for security, waiting to board, waiting to reach your destination.

Airbus has just been granted a patent for a wild new way to try to speed up boarding on planes — and as Ars Technica points out, it’s just like something out of the classic kids TV show Thunderbirds.

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“Stanford and UC Berkeley researchers have a solution to the problem of storing energy from wind, water and solar power overnight (or in inclement weather): store it underground. The system could result in a reliable, affordable national grid, replacing fossil fuel, they believe.”

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It seems evident that Microsoft is joining other top tech companies in betting on quantum computing with a clear business strategy in mind: to become the market leader in software development platforms for quantum computing. If quantum computers become the next supercomputing revolution in 2025, Microsoft stock will take a quantum leap.

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Watch: This amazing, tiny origami robot could revolutionize healthcare around the world » http://cnnmon.ie/1l0VlfQ

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A ‘head-up’ display for passenger vehicles developed at Cambridge, the first to incorporate holographic techniques, has been incorporated into Jaguar Land Rover vehicles.

Cambridge researchers have developed a new type of head-up display for vehicles which is the first to use laser holographic techniques to project information such as speed, direction and navigation onto the windscreen so the driver doesn’t have to take their eyes off the road. The technology – which was conceptualised in the University’s Department of Engineering more than a decade ago – is now available on all Jaguar Land Rover vehicles. According to the researchers behind the technology, it is another step towards cars which provide a fully immersive experience, or could even improve safety by monitoring driver behaviour.

Cars can now park for us, help us from skidding out of control, or even prevent us from colliding with other cars. Head-up displays (HUD) are one of the many features which have been incorporated into cars in recent years. Alongside the development of more sophisticated in-car technology, various companies around the world, most notably Google, are developing autonomous cars.

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Self-driving cars could disrupt the airline and hotel industries within 20 years as people sleep in their vehicles on the road, according to a senior strategist at Audi.

Short-haul travel will be transformed and the hassle of getting to and from airports eliminated, said Sven Schuwirth, vice president of brand strategy and digital business at the German car brand.

Business travellers will be able to avoid taking domestic flights to meetings and will sleep and work in their cars en route instead of checking into city-centre hotels, he said.

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In general relativity, closed timelike curves can break causality with remarkable and unsettling consequences. At the classical level, they induce causal paradoxes disturbing enough to motivate conjectures that explicitly prevent their existence. At the quantum level such problems can be resolved through the Deutschian formalism, however this induces radical benefits—from cloning unknown quantum states to solving problems intractable to quantum computers. Instinctively, one expects these benefits to vanish if causality is respected. Here we show that in harnessing entanglement, we can efficiently solve NP-complete problems and clone arbitrary quantum states—even when all time-travelling systems are completely isolated from the past. Thus, the many defining benefits of Deutschian closed timelike curves can still be harnessed, even when causality is preserved. Our results unveil a subtle interplay between entanglement and general relativity, and significantly improve the potential of probing the radical effects that may exist at the interface between relativity and quantum theory.

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“What happens when you put artists and technologists together? Forty-nine years ago last month, Robert Rauschenberg and a Bell Telephone Laboratories engineer named Billy Kluver answered that question with a tennis match.”

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Scientists have developed a graphene based microphone nearly 32 times more sensitive than microphones of standard nickel-based construction.

The researchers, based at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, created a vibrating membrane — the part of a condenser microphone which converts the sound to a current — from graphene, and were able to show up to 15 dB higher sensitivity compared to a commercial microphone, at frequencies up to 11 kHz.

The results are published today, 27th November 2015, in the journal 2D Mater ials.

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