Lifeboat Foundation

Skyline Robotics is disrupting the century-old practice of window washing with new technology that the startup hopes will redefine a risky industry.

Its window-washing robot, Ozmo, is now operational in Tel Aviv and New York, and has worked on major Manhattan buildings such as 10 Hudson Yards, 383 Madison, 825 3rd Avenue and 7 World Trade Center in partnership with the city’s largest commercial window cleaner Platinum and real estate giant The Durst Organization.

The machine is suspended from the side of a high-rise. A robotic arm with a brush attached to the end cleans the window following instructions from a LiDAR camera, which uses laser technology to map 3D environments. The camera maps the building’s exterior and identifies the parameters of the windows.

There’s a new kind of leadership taking hold in organizations. Strikingly, these new leaders don’t like to be called leaders, and none has any expectation that they will attract “followers” personally — by dint of their charisma, status in a hierarchy, or access to resources. Instead, their method is to get others excited about whatever problem they have identified as ripe for a novel solution. Having fallen in love with a problem, they step up to leadership — but only reluctantly and only as necessary to get it solved. Leadership becomes an intermittent activity as people with enthusiasm and expertise step up as needed, and readily step aside when, based on the needs of the project, another team member’s strengths are more central. Rather than being pure generalists, leaders pursue their own deep expertise, while gaining enough familiarity with other knowledge realms to make the necessary connections. They expect to be involved in a series of initiatives with contributors fluidly assembling and disassembling.

Page-utils class= article-utils—vertical hide-for-print data-js-target= page-utils data-id= tag: blogs.harvardbusiness.org, 2007/03/31:999.199848 data-title= The Power of Leaders Who Focus on Solving Problems data-url=/2018/04/the-power-of-leaders-who-focus-on-solving-problems data-topic= Leadership styles data-authors= Deborah Ancona; Hal Gregersen data-content-type= Digital Article data-content-image=/resources/images/article_assets/2018/04/apr18_16_840591218-383x215.jpg data-summary=

Can you get people excited about the problems that excite you?

Summary: Researchers identify a crucial protein, Tenm3, in mice’s visual system that stabilizes circadian rhythms by modulating the brain’s response to light. This discovery has significant implications for treating sleep disorders and jet lag.

Circadian rhythms play a vital role in regulating sleep, alertness, and other cyclic behaviors, and disruptions can lead to health problems.

By understanding Tenm3’s role, researchers aim to develop interventions for sleep disorders and jet lag, ultimately benefiting human health.

When the theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind encountered a head-scratching paradox about black holes, he turned to an unexpected place: computer science. In nature, most self-contained systems eventually reach thermodynamic equilibrium… but not black holes. The interior volume of a black hole appears to forever expand without limit. But why? Susskind had a suspicion that a concept called computational complexity, which underpins everything from cryptography to quantum computing to the blockchain and AI, might provide an explanation.

He and his colleagues believe that the complexity of quantum entanglement continues to evolve inside a black hole long past the point of what’s called “heat death.” Now Susskind and his collaborator, Adam Brown, have used this insight to propose a new law of physics: the second law of quantum complexity, a quantum analogue of the second law of thermodynamics.

Continue reading “Can a New Law of Physics Explain a Black Hole Paradox?” »

JAC Motors, a Volkswagen-backed Chinese automaker, is set to launch the first mass-produced electric vehicle (EV) with a sodium-ion battery through its new Yiwei brand. Although sodium-ion battery tech has a lower density (and is less mature) than lithium-ion, its lower costs, more abundant supplies and superior cold-weather performance could help accelerate mass EV adoption. CarNewsChina reports that the JAC Yiwei EV hatchback deliveries will begin in January.

Yiwei is a new brand in 2023 for JAC. Volkswagen has a 75 percent stake in (and management control of) JAC and owns 50 percent of JAC’s parent company, Anhui Jianghuai Automobile Group Holdings (JAG). The Chinese government owns the other half of JAG, making for one of the auto industry’s stranger pairings.

The Yiwei EV appears to be a rebranded version of the Sehol E10X hatchback (above), announced earlier this year. CarNewsChina describes the Sehol model as having a 252 km (157 miles) range with a 25 kWh capacity, 120 Wh / kg energy density, 3C to 4C charging, and a HiNa NaCR32140 cell. When JAC revealed the Yiwei brand in May, it said it would drop the Sehol label and rebrand all its vehicles to either JAC or Yiwei, leading us to this week’s EV reveal. JAC hasn’t yet said whether the Yiwei-branded model will keep the E10X moniker.

Neutron-star cores contain matter at the highest densities reached in our present-day universe, with as much as two solar masses of matter compressed inside a sphere of 25 km in diameter. These astrophysical objects can indeed be thought of as giant atomic nuclei, with gravity compressing their cores to densities exceeding those of individual protons and neutrons many-fold.

These densities make neutron stars interesting astrophysical objects from the point of view of particle and nuclear physics. A longstanding open problem is whether the immense central pressure of neutron stars can compress protons and neutrons into a new phase of matter, known as cold quark matter. In this exotic state of matter, individual protons and neutrons no longer exist.

“Their constituent quarks and gluons are instead liberated from their typical color confinement and are allowed to move almost freely,” explains Aleksi Vuorinen, professor of theoretical particle physics at the University of Helsinki.

Japan’s space agency announced Thursday it will launch its next-generation H3 rocket in February after two failed attempts early this year.

The rocket, billed as a flexible and cost-effective new flagship, is scheduled to lift off between 9:22 am and 1:06 pm (0022 and 406 GMT) on February 15 from the southern island of Tanegashima, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) said in a press release.

The third launch attempt comes after the spacecraft was forced to self-destruct in March when the command center concluded its mission could not succeed.

CRISPR had a huge year. Even better, it’s still a work in progress, with the potential to reshape biotechnology for decades to come.

Scientists looking to tackle our ongoing obesity crisis have made an important discovery: Intermittent fasting leads to significant changes both in the gut and the brain, which may open up new options for maintaining a healthy weight.

Researchers from China studied 25 volunteers classed as obese over a period of 62 days, during which they took part in an intermittent energy restriction (IER) program – a regime that involves careful control of calorie intake and fasting on some days.

Not only did the participants in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 percent of their body weight on average – there was also evidence of shifts in the activity of obesity-related regions of the brain, and in the make-up of gut bacteria.