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Drones are everywhere these days. They’re at your local park, they’re in the ocean, they’re hovering over the White House lawn, and they may even be hovering overhead armed with tear gas.
In a world that’s becoming increasingly drone friendly, there are some serious safety considerations that shouldn’t be ignored.
Specifically, government and military officials have cautioned that drones might soon be outfitted with explosives or chemical weapons and flown into either public or sensitive spaces.
With that in mind, Boeing recently developed a portable laser cannon that can eviscerate unwanted and pesky drones mid-flight. In the future, these types of lasers might be installed in all sorts of locations, including airports and sensitive military installations.
A consortium of top tech companies, laboratories, and universities is partnering with the Department of Defense to improve the manufacturing of flexible electronics, which could one day end up in aircraft, health monitors, military tools, or consumer electronics like wearables. The department is awarding the consortium, known as the FlexTech Alliance, $75 million over five years, with other sources, including universities, non-profits, and state and local governments, contributing an additional $96 million.
The consortium is composed of well over 100 organizations, with key partners including Apple, Boeing, GE, GM, Lockheed Martin, Motorola Mobility, and Qualcomm, among many others. Partnering universities include Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, NYU, and MIT, also among many others.
Funds will be distributed to FlexTech members through a bidding process, with field experts from these organizations applying to tackle specific problems. Timelines will be set for each of these, though there don’t appear to be specific goals just yet.
Researchers fed their system a series of old masters — and it turned a modern day snap into perfect pictures in the style of some of the world’s best known paintings.
Freaky AI robot
Posted in entertainment, robotics/AI
An excerpt from PBS “NOVA science now”: “AI robot that learns new words in real-time tells human creators it will keep them in a “people zoo” #BladeRunner #TuringTest #AI #Robotics
Freaky AI robot, taken from Nova science now, here’s the full episode, enjoy bigsmile
http://video.pbs.org/video/1801365037
Also yay for me, 2 videos in one day bigsmile bigsmile
Other self-healing plastics exist, but they take much longer to repair themselves. The ability to instantly plug holes could be especially useful to protect structures in space, where flying objects can puncture spacecraft or orbiting habitats. The plastic could be incorporated into their walls, creating a seal if the atmosphere inside a vessel starts to leak out, putting astronauts at risk.
Other fabrics take a different approach: stopping projectiles altogether. A futuristic tissue combining human skin cells with spider silk can cushion a gunshot when fired at half speed. Pure graphene, which is made up of layers of carbon one-atom thick, is being investigated for use in bulletproof armour because it can handle blows better than steel.
Journal reference: ACS Macro Letters, DOI: 10.1021/acsmacrolett.5b00315.
A new experiment provides the most robust proof that quantum mechanics doesn’t follow the rules we take for granted in everyday life.
Right now, we’re falling in love with BB-8 from Star Wars—and yet, there’s still a special place in our hearts for Johnny Five, the robot from the Short Circuit films. But how much do you actually know about these films? Check out this video, featuring 16 electrifying facts about the making of this duology.
Agreeing to state-of-the art theory, a warp drive might cut the travel time between stars from tens of thousands of years to only weeks or months. Harold G. White, a physicist and innovative propulsion engineer at NASA and other NASA engineers are working to regulate whether faster-than-light travel — warp drive — might soon be possible. The group is trying to some extent warp the course of a photon, altering the distance it travels in a definite area, and then detecting the change with a device called an interferometer.
In 1994, a Mexican physicist, Miguel Alcubierre, speculated that faster-than-light speeds were conceivable in a technique that did not deny Einstein by binding the growth and reduction of space itself. Under Dr. Alcubierre’s theory, a ship still couldn’t surpass light speed in a native region of space. But a theoretical thrust system he sketched out operated space-time by producing a so-called “warp bubble” that would inflate space on one side of a spacecraft and contract it on another.
Image source: With thanks to Shutterstock.com.
An Alcubierre Warp Drive expanses spacetime in a wave producing the material of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to enlarge. The ship can ride the wave to go faster to high speeds and time travel. The Alcubierre drive, also famous as the Alcubierre metric or Warp Drive, is a mathematical model of a spacetime showing features suggestive of the fictional “warp drive” from Star Trek, which can move “faster than light”.