Lifeboat Foundation

In recent years, material scientists have designed a wide range of innovative materials that could be used to create new technologies, including soft robots, controllers and smart textiles. These materials include artificial muscles, structures that resemble biological muscles in shape and that could improve the movements of robots or enable the creation of clothing that adapts to different environmental conditions.

As part of an ongoing project focused on textile-based soft actuators, a team of researchers at Jiangnan University in China recently developed new artificial muscles based on free-standing, single-helical woolen yarn. Their artificial muscles, introduced in a paper published in Smart Materials and Structures, could be used to easily and affordably produce twisted actuators that can detect and respond to humidity in their environment.

“We are trying to design flexible and versatile actuators by leveraging the hierarchical structure design of textiles, ranging from microscales (e.g., molecular chains and aggregation structures) to macroscales (e.g., fiber morphology and textile architectures),” Fengxin Sun, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “Realizing a yarn-based artificial muscle with free-standing and single-helical architecture via eco-friendly and easy-fabrication manufacturing process is still challenging.”

It’s an everyday scenario: you’re driving down the highway when out of the corner of your eye you spot a car merging into your lane without signaling. How fast can your eyes react to that visual stimulus? Would it make a difference if the offending car were blue instead of green? And if the color green shortened that split-second period between the initial appearance of the stimulus and when the eye began moving towards it (known to scientists as the saccade), could drivers benefit from an augmented reality overlay that made every merging vehicle green?

Qi Sun, a joint professor in Tandon’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP), is collaborating with neuroscientists to find out.

He and his Ph.D. student Budmonde Duinkharjav—along with colleagues from Princeton, the University of North Carolina, and NVIDIA Research—recently authored the paper “Image Features Influence Reaction Time: A Learned Probabilistic Perceptual Model for Saccade Latency,” presenting a model that can be used to predict temporal gaze behavior, particularly saccadic latency, as a function of the statistics of a displayed image. Inspired by neuroscience, the model could ultimately have great implications for highway safety, telemedicine, e-sports, and in any other arena in which AR and VR are leveraged.

A budget-friendly remodel transforms an RV camper into a chic cozy home for a family of five.

To form a celestial object, start with a gas cloud and add gravity. Then, it gets complicated.

Accretion is one of the most fundamental processes in the cosmos. It is a universal phenomenon triggered by gravity, and the process by which bits of matter accumulate and coalesce with more bits of matter. It works inexorably on all scales to attract and affix smaller things to bigger things, from the tiniest dust grains to supermassive black holes.

Accretion creates everything there is: galaxies, stars, planets, and eventually, us. It is the reason the universe is filled with a whole bunch of somethings instead of a whole lot of nothing.

Continue reading “The physics of accretion: How the universe pulled itself together” »

Science, Technology, Health, Physics, Chemistry stay Updated.

Scientists from The Australian National University (ANU) and James Cook University (JCU) have identified an “exquisite” natural mechanism that helps plants limit their water loss with little effect on carbon dioxide (CO₂) intake—an essential process for photosynthesis, plant growth and crop yield.

A relic, a fossil, and a halo are among the bizarre features that defy existing theories, according to a new study.

Check out the size of these awesome orbital rings!

Filmmaker Hashem Al-Ghaili has created a micro-budget sci-fi film with amazing visual effects and megastructures in ‘Orbital.’

Get wrekt, spammers. Security researcher Troy Hunt has created a hilariously devious ‘password purgatory’ for people invading his inbox.

Whether it’s John Wick or The Count of Monte Cristo, we all love a good revenge story. Right now, my current favorite is a wholesome nerdy tale told by Troy Hunt.

You likely already know Hunt as the force behind Have I Been Pwned, an invaluable security resource for us normies on the internet. The website tells you if your email address or phone number has been found in data breaches, and if you’re so inclined, lets you register for notifications should your info become exposed later on.

Continue reading “This security guru is banishing spammers to a hilarious ‘password purgatory’” »

Were you unable to attend Transform 2022? Check out all of the summit sessions in our on-demand library now! Watch here.

The single point agenda for fast-growth enterprises today is superlative customer experience. As forward-looking organizations strategize, customer focus is at the core of any digital transformation initiative. The technology must be agile and intelligent to ensure a positive customer experience from day one. And if you think you have time to iron out your customer delight checkpoints, think again. Retail customers have indicated time and time again that they’re willing to walk away from brands after just one bad experience.

As enterprises revisit their tech stack to level up their customer experience, customer relationship management (CRM) is the ubiquitous starting point as it is a vast river from which millions of rivulets of information flow. So, how do we draw the pathways that interconnect these rivulets to form data streams that help sales teams sail straight to desirable customer outcomes?