Lifeboat Foundation

Social robots, robots that can interact with humans and assist them in their daily lives, are gradually being introduced in numerous real-world settings. These robots could be particularly valuable for helping older adults to complete everyday tasks more autonomously, thus potentially enhancing their independence and well-being.

Researchers at University of Bari have been investigating the potential using social robots for ambient assisted living applications for numerous years. Their most recent paper, published in UMAP’22 Adjunct: Adjunct Proceedings of the 30th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization, specifically explores the value of allowing social robots who are assisting seniors to learn the relationships between a user’s routines and his/her mood.

“Social robots should support older adults with daily activity and, at the same time, they should contribute to emotional wellness by considering affective factors in everyday situations,” Berardina De Carolis, Stefano Ferilli and Nicola Macciarulo wrote in their paper. “The main goal of this research is to investigate whether it is possible to learn relations between the user’s affective state state and daily routines, made by activities, with the aid of a social robot, Pepper in this case.”

Potential applications include pressure-monitoring bandages, shade-shifting fabrics.

The bright iridescent colors in butterfly wings or beetle shells don’t come from any pigment molecules but from how the wings are structured—a naturally occurring example of what physicists call photonic crystals. Scientists can make their own structural colored materials in the lab, but it can be challenging to scale up the process for commercial applications without sacrificing optical precision.

To efficiently navigate real-world environments, robots typically analyze images collected by imaging devices that are integrated within their body. To enhance the performance of robots, engineers have thus been trying to develop different types of highly performing cameras, sensors and artificial vision systems.

Many artificial vision systems developed so far draw inspiration from the eyes of humans, animals, insects and fish. These systems have different features and characteristics, depending on the environment in which they are designed to operate in.

Most existing sensors and cameras are designed to work either in on the ground (i.e., in terrestrial environments) or in water (i.e., in aquatic environments). Bio-inspired artificial vision systems that can operate in both terrestrial and aquatic environments, on the other hand, remain scarce.

One of the primary methods used by malware distributors to infect devices is by deceiving people into downloading and running malicious files, and to achieve this deception, malware authors are using a variety of tricks.

Some of these tricks include masquerading malware executables as legitimate applications, signing them with valid certificates, or compromising trustworthy sites to use them as distribution points.

According to VirusTotal, a security platform for scanning uploaded files for malware, some of these tricks are happening on a much larger scale than initially thought.

Its process is faster than the human brain, and it is ready for deep learning.

Quantum computing, though still in its early days, has the potential to dramatically increase processing power by harnessing the strange behavior of particles at the smallest scales. Some research groups have already reported performing calculations that would take a traditional supercomputer thousands of years. In the long term, quantum computers could provide unbreakable encryption and simulations of nature beyond today’s capabilities.

A UCLA-led interdisciplinary research team including collaborators at Harvard University has now developed a fundamentally new strategy for building these computers. While the current state of the art employs circuits, semiconductors and other tools of electrical engineering, the team has produced a game plan based in chemists’ ability to custom-design atomic building blocks that control the properties of larger molecular structures when they’re put together.

The findings, published last week in Nature Chemistry, could ultimately lead to a leap in quantum processing power.

Photoemisssion orbital tomography extended beyond pi orbitals.

Experimentally-generated map of copper surface using photoemission orbital tomography (top left) and the projected densities of states of σ and π orbitals (top right). The bianthracene investigated in the study (bottom left) and maps of its σ orbitals (bottom middle, right)

Continue reading “Visualising sigma orbitals opens path to new understanding of surface chemistry” »

Rob Barnett, a senior clean energy analyst for Bloomberg, forecasts a 30% increase in global PV deployment this year, and double-digit growth through 2025.

Demand is pushing solar growth across the world to new heights, as Bloomberg senior analyst Rob Barnett forecasts deployment to increase by 30% this year. Total global solar deployment is closing in on 1 TW installed – an impressive milestone for the energy transition.

“The global solar picture is just staggering at this point,” Barnett told Yahoo Finance. “We are on track to install something like 250 GW of solar capacity this year.”

Continue reading “World could install 250 GW of solar this year, claims Bloomberg analyst” »

While wind farms in the region could help power and lower energy costs for at least 9 million homes, significant infrastructure upgrades would be needed to supply electricity from the region to other parts of the state.