Lifeboat Foundation

Overall, 86 percent of the survey respondents said they’re likely or extremely likely to want to stick with a four-day work week after the trial ends in three months.

Trials of this sort are becoming more popular; Spain, Scotland, Japan, and New Zealand have all looked into or trialed a reduced work week. Before the UK trial, the largest to date took place in Iceland in 2021, and it was broadly considered a success. The 2,500 participants reported decreased stress, increased energy levels, improved focus, more independence and control over their pace of work, and less conflict between their work and home lives. Managers reported boosts in employee morale, with productivity levels maintained if not improved.

Eighty-six percent of Iceland’s working population has subsequently either moved to a shorter work week or been given the option to do so. That’s a high percentage, but a small number compared to most European countries; Iceland’s total population is around 343,000, and it’s a highly equitable society in terms of income.

Hubble last got a visitor during the Shuttle era.

Blainjett Aviation announced that initial testing of its hemi-rotor aerodynamic concept has confirmed its potential to deliver faster, more efficient performance in VTOL aircraft. Subscale tests demonstrated the novel configuration’s net positive lift and low drag through the ascent/hover, cruise, and descent/hover phases of flight.

The startup is applying the hemi-rotor concept to a subscale drone as part of a path to demonstrating that the configuration can scale to larger unmanned or manned aircraft in eVTOL applications from package delivery and cargo to transport and tactical military roles. Blainjett’s hemi-rotor design situates familiar vertical lift rotors partially inside opposite sides of an enclosed fuselage. The airfoil-shaped fuselage also houses a pair of electric motors to drive the lift-rotors. Situated in the empennage above an inverted V-tail, the third motor powers a pusher prop.

Continue reading “Blainjett’s hemi-rotor concept promises faster, more efficient VTOL performance” »

Circa 2015 face_with_colon_three

Researchers have built the world’s first artificial neuron that’s capable of mimicking the function of an organic brain cell — including the ability to translate chemical signals into electrical impulses, and communicate with other human cells.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Built Artificial Neurons That Fully Mimic Human Brain Cells” »

Crucially, they showed that the synapses were capable of Hebbian learning, the process by which the strength of the connection between two neurons increases or decreases based on activity. This is key to the way information is encoded into the brain, with the strengths of connections between neurons controlling the function of different brain circuits.

In biological neurons this ability to alter the strength of connections—known as plasticity—operates at two distinct timescales. Over shorter timescales, regular firing of the neuron leads to a buildup of ions that temporarily increase the ease with which signals pass across. In the long term though, regular activity can cause new receptors to grow at a synapse, resulting in more durable increases in the strength of the connection.

With the artificial synapses, short-term plasticity operates in much the same way due to a buildup of ions. But boosting the connection strength in the long term relies on using voltage pulses to essentially grow new material out of a soup of chemical precursors at the synapse, which increases its conductivity.

Lab experiments pinpoint extra brain growth orchestrated by a single gene change in modern humans.

Circa 2018 face_with_colon_three

A gene that evolved in humans over 3 millions years ago accelerated brain growth — but it came with a serious catch.

Construction data can quickly scale into gigabytes and terabytes of data. The field is complicated because teams use various file formats to design, construct and operate a building or facility. Teams must often load the whole file into proprietary rendering tools before showing off a new design or collaborating on schedules. These files can be even more complex when building out large-scale digital twins of whole cities like Helsinki or Singapore.

Bentley Systems hopes to change that. At a technology demonstration event in London, Bentley showed off a new 3D streaming codec for the infrastructure metaverse called 3DFT. It’s already running on the Epic Unreal Engine, and Bentley plans to support other platforms down the road.

3DFT is not the first format for streaming metaverse data. The GIS industry has been streaming 2D data for years using tiles. And the Open Geospatial Consortium has been working on the 3D Tiles standard to extend streaming into the third dimension.

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As everyday technologies get more and more advanced, cyber security must be at the forefront of every customer. Cyber security services have become common and are often used by private companies and the public sector in order to protect themselves from potential cyber attacks.

One of these services goes under the name Darktrace and has recently been acquired by Cybersprint, a Dutch provider of advanced cyber security services and a manufacturer of special tools that use machine learning algorithms to detect cyber vulnerabilities. Based on attack path modeling and graph theory, Darktrace’s platform represents organizational networks as directional, weighted graphs with nodes where multi-line segments meet and edges where they join. In order to estimate the probability that an attacker will be able to successfully move from node A to node B, a weighted graph can be used. Understanding the insights gained will make it easier for Darktrace to simulate future attacks.