Lifeboat Foundation

Holographic teleportation sounds like something out of Star Wars or Star Trek, but instead of the bridge of a flashy interstellar spaceship, a world-first technological achievement took place in a nondescript boardroom on campus at Western recently.

The term holographic teleportation, or holoport, is a combination of hologram and teleport: when a hologram of a person or object is transmitted instantaneously to another location.

Continue reading “Researchers achieve world’s first international holographic teleportation” »

Researchers from TU Delft have constructed the smallest flow-driven motors in the world. Inspired by iconic Dutch windmills and biological motor proteins, they created a self-configuring flow-driven rotor from DNA that converts energy from an electrical or salt gradient into useful mechanical work. The results open new perspectives for engineering active robotics at the nanoscale.

The article is now published in Nature Physics (“Sustained unidirectional rotation of a self-organized DNA rotor on a nanopore”).

Rotary motors have been the powerhouses of human societies for millennia: from the windmills and waterwheels across the Netherlands and the world to today’s most advanced off-shore wind turbines that drive our green-energy future.

Researchers have developed a new chip-based beam steering technology that provides a promising route to small, cost-effective and high-performance lidar (or light detection and ranging) systems. Lidar, which uses laser pulses to acquire 3D information about a scene or object, is used in a wide range of applications such as autonomous driving, free-space optical communications, 3D holography, biomedical sensing and virtual reality.

“Optica l beam steering is a key technology for lidar systems, but conventional mechanical-based beam steering systems are bulky, expensive, sensitive to vibration and limited in speed,” said research team leader Hao Hu from the Technical University of Denmark. “Although devices known as chip-based optical phased arrays (OPAs) can quickly and precisely steer light in a non-mechanical way, so far, these devices have had poor beam quality and a field of view typically below 100 degrees.”

In Optica, Hu and co-author Yong Liu describe their new chip-based OPA that solves many of the problems that have plagued OPAs. They show that the device can eliminate a key optical artifact known as aliasing, achieving beam steering over a large field of view while maintaining high beam quality, a combination that could greatly improve lidar systems.

Members of the public are helping professional astronomers identify nascent planetary systems.

Government-backed Shenzhen Capital Group has led Series B funding for Origin Quantum.

A Purdue University chemical engineer has improved upon traditional methods to produce off-the-shelf human immune cells that show strong antitumor activity, according to a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Cell Reports.

Xiaoping Bao, a Purdue University assistant professor from the Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, said CAR-neutrophils, or chimeric antigen receptor neutrophils, and engraftable HSCs, or hematopoietic stem cells, are effective types of therapies for blood diseases and cancer. Neutrophils are the most abundant white cell blood type and effectively cross physiological barriers to infiltrate solid tumors. HSCs are specific progenitor cells that will replenish all blood lineages, including neutrophils, throughout life.

“These cells are not readily available for broad clinical or research use because of the difficulty to expand ex vivo to a sufficient number required for infusion after isolation from donors,” Bao said. “Primary neutrophils especially are resistant to genetic modification and have a short half-life.”

Innovative Solutions For Unmet Needs Of Older Adults & Their Caregivers — Keith Camhi, Managing Director, Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator — A Partnership With Melinda Gates Pivotal Ventures.

Keith Camhi is Managing Director, Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator (https://www.techstars.com/accelerators/longevity), a program, run in partnership with Pivotal Ventures (https://www.pivotalventures.org/), an investment and incubation company created by Melinda French Gates, focusing on innovative solutions to address the unmet needs of older adults and their caregivers. The longevity accelerator core program themes include: Caregiver Support, Care Coordination, Aging in Place, Financial Wellness and Resilience, Preventive Health (both Physical and Cognitive), and Social Engagement.

Continue reading “Keith Camhi — Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator — Innovative Solutions For Older Adults” »

More on Tesla’s new battery tech.

Cory and Antonio overview Tesla’s improved cell interconnects, current collector layout, voltage sensor harness (VSH), and battery management system (BMS) of the 4,680 structural pack.

Continue reading “Tesla’s 4680 Current Collector Layout” »

AI Philosophy

The AI model was trained using answers from Dennett on a range of questions about free will, whether animals feel pain and even favorite bits of other philosophers. The researchers then asked different groups of people to compare the AI’s responses and Dennett’s real answers and see if they could tell them apart. They used responses from 302 random people online who followed a link from Schwitzgebel’s blog, 98 confirmed college graduates from the online research platform Prolific, and 25 noted Dennett experts. Immersion in Dennett’s philosophy and work didn’t prevent anyone from struggling to identify the source of the answers, however.

The research platform participants only managed an average success rate of 1.2 out of 5 questions. The blog readers and experts answered ten questions, with the readers hitting an average score of 4.8 out of 10. That said, not a single Dennett expert was 100% correct, with only one answering nine correctly and an average of 5.1 out of 10, barely higher than the blog readers. Interestingly, the question whose responses most confused the Dennett experts was actually about AI sentience, specifically if people could “ever build a robot that has beliefs?” Despite the impressive performance by the GPT-3 version of Dennett, the point of the experiment wasn’t to demonstrate that the AI is self-aware, only that it can mimic a real person to an increasingly sophisticated degree and that OpenAI and its rivals are continuing to refine the models so that similar quizzes will likely get harder to pass.