Lifeboat Foundation

Huc enzyme means ‘sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy,’ researchers say.

But as I describe in my book “Spark: The Life of Electricity and the Electricity of Life,” even before humanmade batteries started generating electric current, electric fishes, such as the saltwater torpedo fish (Torpedo torpedo) of the Mediterranean and especially the various freshwater electric eel species of South America (order Gymnotiformes) were well known to produce electrical outputs of stunning proportions. In fact, electric fishes inspired Volta to conduct the original research that ultimately led to his battery, and today’s battery scientists still look to these electrifying animals for ideas.

Prior to Volta’s battery, the only way for people to generate electricity was to rub various materials together, typically silk on glass, and to capture the resulting static electricity. This was neither an easy nor practical way to generate useful electrical power.

Continue reading “How electric eels inspired the first battery two centuries ago” »

On Monday, a group of AI researchers from Google and the Technical University of Berlin unveiled PaLM-E, a multimodal embodied visual-language model (VLM) with 562 billion parameters that integrates vision and language for robotic control. They claim it is the largest VLM ever developed and that it can perform a variety of tasks without the need for retraining.

PaLM-E does this by analyzing data from the robot’s camera without needing a pre-processed scene representation. This eliminates the need for a human to pre-process or annotate the data and allows for more autonomous robotic control.

Driven by a microcontroller Lisp port, this laptop-from-scratch project has the eventual goal of unlimited runtime via energy harvesting.

A relative of the tuberculosis bacterium has long been known to convert hydrogen from the air into electricity. Now, scientists have discovered how.

Are they pushing Maverick to retirement?😅

A group of researchers has claimed that an artificial intelligence-powered fighter pilot has beaten all humans in a close-range dogfight.

Recently, a research team from Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, proposed a bionic quadruped soft thin-film microrobot actuated by magnetic fields with a mass of only 41 mg, which promises to be applied to stomach examination and treatment. Researchers realized the multimodal locomotion control of the soft microrobot in magnetic fields and the grasping and transportation of micro-objects by the soft microrobot.

The new paper, published in Cyborg and Bionic Systems, details the process of making the microrobot and the magnetization process, presents the mechanism of microrobot’s locomotion and cargo transportation, and demonstrates the microrobot transporting multiple microbeads from different locations to the target position.

Untethered microrobots have received much attention for their potential in biomedical applications and small-scale micromanipulation. “Due to the fact that magnetic fields are harmless to biological cells and tissues, magnetic fields are widely used to actuate microrobots for biomedical applications,” explained study author Tiantian Xu, a professor at the Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

During a conference with Morgan Stanley, Tesla CEO Elon Musk reiterated the promise that the company’s next-generation vehicle will operate mostly in autonomous mode. The event was primarily focused on Twitter, but Musk fielded questions about Tesla and SpaceX during the latter half of the conference. One of the questions was about the potential capabilities of the company’s upcoming vehicle, which was previously discussed at Tesla’s Investor Day event. The promise of a mostly autonomous vehicle is not new for Tesla, but it continues to generate interest and speculation from investors and the public alike.

Tesla’s upcoming vehicle, which will be manufactured at the company’s latest factory in Mexico, is anticipated to function in “almost entirely autonomous mode.” Tesla has been working on developing Full Self-Driving for a few years now, and the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, has consistently stated for at least four years that Teslas will be able to drive themselves. Despite impressive strides made in this area, Tesla’s vehicles are still not completely capable of autonomous driving.

Continue reading “Elon Musk Just Made a Big Announcement About Tesla’s Next-Gen Vehicle” »

Elon Musk’s company Neuralink has developed a technology that can link human brains to computers, and according to Musk, it is now ready for human testing. This groundbreaking technology has the potential to revolutionize the way we communicate and interact with machines, and could pave the way for new treatments for neurological disorders. With the announcement that Neuralink is ready for human testing, the future of human-computer integration is closer than ever before.

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