Michelle Lee Photography/iStock.
The domes can be placed upside down, or in different directions. The purpose of these dome shaped designs is to give the drone a way to consider what dangerous conditions are like and react quickly to them.
Channeling light from one location to another is the backbone of our modern world. Across deep oceans and vast continents, fiber optic cables transport light containing data ranging from YouTube clips to banking transmissions—all within fibers as thin as a strand of hair.
University of Chicago Prof. Jiwoong Park, however, wondered what would happen if you made even thinner and flatter strands—in effect, so thin that they’re actually 2D instead of 3D. What would happen to the light?
Through a series of innovative experiments, he and his team found that a sheet of glass crystal just a few atoms thick could trap and carry light. Not only that, but it was surprisingly efficient and could travel relatively long distances—up to a centimeter, which is very far in the world of light-based computing.
Ali Rogin:
With the cost of owning a car out of reach for many today ride sharing gives commuters an alternative. And a handful of U.S. cities, self-driving taxis are getting the green light to pick up passengers. Several companies including Waymo Cruise and Motional are touting driverless taxis as the way of the future.
But the rollout of these robo cabs has hit some speed bumps. Not everyone is comfortable with autonomous cars on the road. And major technical questions remain. Aarian Marshall is a staff writer for WIRED, and she covers transportation. Aarian, thank you so much for joining us.
A single protein can self-assemble to build the scaffold for a biomolecular condensate that makes up a key nucleolar compartment.
Inside all living cells, loosely formed assemblies known as biomolecular condensates perform many critical functions. However, it is not well understood how proteins and other biomolecules come together to form these assemblies within cells.
MIT.
While many new cars are equipped to assist drivers at the wheel, experts say we’re a long way from seeing cars capable of fully automated driving.
Blog post with show notes, audio player, and transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/02/11/epis…omplexity/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll.
Continue reading “Episode 33: James Ladyman on Reality, Metaphysics, and Complexity” »
Peter Atkins, James Ladyman, and Joanna Kavenna argue over the existence of physical reality.
Watch the full debate at https://iai.tv/video/the-world-that-disappeared?utm_source=Y…escription.
Continue reading “Is physical reality a hoax | Peter Atkins, James Ladyman, Joanna Kavenna” »
In the morning hours of Sept. 24, a small capsule containing surface samples from asteroid 101,955 Bennu careened into Earth’s atmosphere after a seven-year journey through space. The landing of this sample capsule is the culmination of NASA’s historic Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) asteroid sample return mission, which is now the first American mission to return samples from an asteroid.
The sample return capsule (SRC) landed within a 14 by 58-kilometer ellipse at a Department of Defense property at the Utah Test and Training Range and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Touchdown of the SRC occurred at 8:52 AM MDT (14:52 UTC) — three minutes earlier than planned. Low winds and dry weather was present at Dugway during the landing — optimal conditions for the return and recovery of the SRC.
Continue reading “Historic OSIRIS-REx asteroid samples successfully return to Earth” »
Norway has installed the world’s northernmost solar farm and battery storage in the Svalbard archipelago, just south of the North Pole.
State-owned energy company Store Norske Energi installed the solar and storage at Isfjord Radio on the island of Spitsbergen, the largest and the only permanently populated island in the archipelago, and the solar farm is expected to come online tomorrow.
Isfjord was built as a radio station in 1933 to provide a communication link between the Svalbard archipelago and Norway’s mainland. It’s still a radio station and a weather station, and now there’s a hotel for tourists and researchers.
Beguš is a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. He got the chance, last summer, to observe sperm whales in their wild Caribbean habitat off the coast of the island nation of Dominica. With him were marine biologists and roboticists. There were also cryptographers and experts in other fields. All have been working together to listen to sperm whales and figure out what they might be saying.
They call this Project CETI. That’s short for Cetacean Translation Initiative (because sperm whales are a type of cetacean).
Continue reading “How artificial intelligence could help us talk to animals” »
