Lifeboat Foundation

Starting Monday, drive-thru customers at two Panera Bread locations in upstate New York will have their orders taken by a computer in a test of artificial intelligence technology’s accuracy and ability to decrease service times.

The sandwich chain is the latest restaurant company to invest in potential improvements to the drive-thru experience. A surge in drive-thru ordering during the Covid pandemic led to long lines of cars wrapped around restaurants, pushing chains to focus on speed of service and order accuracy.

For example, McDonald’s has also been working to automate its drive-thru lane, announcing a partnership last year with IBM to work toward that goal. Yum Brands’ Taco Bell and Restaurant Brands International’s Burger King have been building double drive-thru lanes at some locations to allow customers to pick up their digital orders more quickly. Fast-casual chains like Shake Shack and Sweetgreen that once balked at drive-thru lanes have been adding them.

From black holes to dark energy to chances for life in the Universe, our cosmic journey to understand it all is just getting started.

Anna Severin explains how her team used machine learning to try to assess the quality of thousands of reviewers’ reports.

Leadership expert and former Medtronic CEO Bill George ripped Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a wide-ranging interview with Yahoo Finance Live (video above).

“Facebook and Mark are not grounded in values, so he is all over the map,” the corporate insider said in a scathing assessment of Zuckerberg’s leadership as CEO.

George, known for his very successful stint as Medtronic’s CEO from 1991 to 2001, is the author of new leadership book “True North: Emerging Leader Edition.” In the book, George and co-author Zach Clayton study top executives such as GM CEO Mary Barra and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to see what has made them successful leaders.

Breakthroughs in modern microelectronics depend on understanding and manipulating the movement of electrons in metal. Reducing the thickness of metal sheets to the order of nanometers can enable exquisite control over how the metal’s electrons move. By doing so, one can impart properties that aren’t seen in bulk metals, such as ultrafast conduction of electricity. Now, researchers from Osaka University and collaborating partners have synthesized a novel class of nanostructured superlattices. This study enables an unusually high degree of control over the movement of electrons within metal semiconductors, which promises to enhance the functionality of everyday technologies.

Precisely tuning the architecture of metal nanosheets, and thus facilitating advanced microelectronic functionalities, remains an ongoing line of work worldwide. In fact, several Nobel prizes have been awarded on this topic. Researchers conventionally synthesize nanostructured superlattices—regularly alternating layers of metals, sandwiched together—from materials of the same dimension; for example, sandwiched 2D sheets. A key aspect of the present researchers’ work is its facile fabrication of hetero-dimensional superlattices; for example, 1D nanoparticle chains sandwiched within 2D nanosheets.

“Nanoscale hetero-dimensional superlattices are typically challenging to prepare, but can exhibit valuable physical properties, such as anisotropic electrical conductivity,” explains Yung-Chang Lin, senior author. “We developed a versatile means of preparing such structures, and in so doing we will inspire synthesis of a wide range of custom superstructures.”

Enigmas — August 2022

Mathematical derivations have unveiled a chaotic, memristor-based circuit in which different oscillating phases can co-exist along six possible lines.

Unlike ordinary electronic circuits, chaotic circuits can produce oscillating electrical signals that never repeat over time—but nonetheless, display underlying mathematical patterns. To expand the potential applications of these circuits, previous studies have designed systems in which multiple oscillating phases can co-exist along mathematically-defined “lines of equilibrium.” In new research published in The European Physical Journal Special Topics, a team led by Janarthanan Ramadoss at the Chennai Institute of Technology, India, designed a chaotic circuit with six distinct lines of equilibrium—more than have ever been demonstrated previously.

Chaotic systems are now widely studied across a broad range of fields: from biology and chemistry, to engineering and economics. If the team’s circuit is realized experimentally, it could provide researchers with unprecedented opportunities to study these systems experimentally. More practically, their design could be used for applications including robotic motion control, secure password generation, and new developments in the Internet of Things—through which networks of everyday objects can gather and share data.

NASA’s new moon rocket sprang another dangerous fuel leak Saturday, forcing launch controllers to call off their second attempt to send a crew capsule into lunar orbit with test dummies.

The first attempt earlier in the week was also marred by escaping hydrogen, but those leaks were elsewhere on the 322-foot (98-meter) rocket, the most powerful ever built by NASA.

Continue reading “Fuel leak ruins NASA’s 2nd shot at launching moon rocket” »

I want to thank Alex Sludds for his efforts in helping me research and produce his video. Check out his work here: https://alexsludds.github.io.

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