Kawasaki has shoehorned the supercharged 1,000cc engine from its wild H2R hyperbike into a heavy-lift autonomous cargo helicopter, and has now demonstrated a robotic system for loading and unloading it without exposing humans to those big blades.
The K-Racer X1 is a beast of a drone, roughly the size of a small car. It rises vertically on a helicopter-style top rotor, but where there’s normally a tail rotor to balance out torque, this machine uses two forward-facing props mounted at the end of stubby wings. These props double as forward propulsion, with the wings providing some lift.
While they don’t give the physical thrill of a real one, model roller coasters are always fun to watch. However, they actually make a poor analog of a full-sized ride, as gravitational force and aerodynamic drag don’t scale down in the same way, model roller coasters usually move way faster than the same design would in the real world. [Jon Mendenhall] fixed this deficiency by designing a model roller coaster that accurately simulates a full-sized ride.
The track and cart are all made of 3D printed pieces, which altogether took about 400 hours to print. The main trick to the system’s unique motion is that the cart is motorized: a brushless DC motor moves it along the track using a rack-and-pinion system. This means that technically this model isn’t a roller coaster, since the cart never makes a gravity-powered drop; it’s actually a small rack railway, powered by a lithium-ion battery carried on board the cart. An ESP32 drives the motor, receiving its commands through WiFi, while the complete setup is controlled by a Raspberry Pi that runs the cart through a predetermined sequence.
Genetically modified crops have a bad rep. How could something so unnatural be good for us?
Well, we finally get to hear from the plants themselves. New evidence shows that plants have been genetically modifying themselves — and the process, called lateral gene transfer, could lead to new plants that are resilient to climate change.
The research: We all know that genes are transferred from parent to offspring. The same is true for all species, including plants. Some bacteria can swap genes with each other, but more complex life (usually) stays in its lane.
Poor Artificial Intelligence (AI). For years, it has had to sit there (like a dormant Skynet) listening to its existence being debated, without getting to have a say. A recent debate held at the University of Oxford tried to put that right by including an AI participant in a debate on the topic of whether AI can ever be ethical.
The debate involved human participants, as well as the Megatron Transformer, an AI created by the Applied Deep Research team at computer-chip maker Nvidia. The Megatron has been trained on a dataset called “the pile”, which includes the whole of Wikipedia, 63 million English news articles, and 38 gigabytes of Reddit conversations — more than enough to break the mind of any human forced to do likewise.
“In other words, the Megatron is trained on more written material than any of us could reasonably expect to digest in a lifetime,” Oxford’s Professor Andrew Stephen wrote in a piece on the debate published in The Conversation. “After such extensive research, it forms its own views.”
Athletes headed to the Beijing Olympic Winter Games are making final travel preparations, including keeping in line with China’s health measures on the “My 2022″ smartphone app. However, inadequate encryption measures within the app can leave Olympians, journalists and sports officials vulnerable to hackers, privacy breaches, and surveillance, according to a cybersecurity report by the Citizen Lab obtained exclusively by DW. Additionally, the IT forensic specialists found that the app includes a censorship keyword list. The findings come as international concern over digital safety at the Games mounts. Germany, Australia, UK and US have urged their athletes and National Olympic Committees to leave their personal phones and laptops behind and to travel with special devices over fears of digital espionage. The Dutch Olympic Committee outright banned its athletes from bringing personal phones and laptops due to surveillance concerns.
In the Olympic Playbook for athletes and team officials, the International Olympic Committee states that the “My 2022″ app is “in accordance with international standards and Chinese law.” But based on its findings, Citizen Lab concludes that the insecure transmission of personal information “may constitute a direct violation of China’s privacy laws.” This is because China’s data protection laws require that a person’s health and medical records held digitally be transmitted and stored in an encrypted manner. Citizen Lab’s findings also raise questions concerning two Western tech giants that carry the “My 2022″ app: Apple and Google. “Both Apple’s and Google’s policies forbid apps to transmit sensitive data without proper encryption, so Apple and Google will need to determine whether the app’s unresolved vulnerabilities warrant delisting,” Citizen Lab’s Knockel told DW. The Beijing Organizing Committee has stood by its app, however, saying it “passed the examination” of international mobile application markets such as Google, Apple and Samsung.“We have taken measures such as personal information encryption in the app to ensure privacy security,” the committee said Monday to Xinhua News Agency.
Billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Industries Ltd. is buying an Indian robotics startup as the conglomerate scales up automation across its businesses, from e-commerce to new energy.
The E-RA comes with a 60kWh battery meaning it likely won’t come with a world-beating range. However, Subaru hopes its new all-wheel-drive machine can excel on the race track. The car features GT-style, high-downforce composite bodywork with cutouts in the body to redirect air away from the wheel wells.
The Japanese automaker aims to set a record-breaking Nürburgring lap time of 6 minutes and 40 seconds by 2023. That would put it ahead of Tesla’s Model S Plaid, which completed the Nürburgring course in 7 minutes and 35 seconds. Before going to Nürburgring, Subaru will test the E-RA at Japanese racing circuits later this year.
Subaru also revealed the Solterra STI Concept on the show floor, a sportier version of its new Solterra all-electric SUV, which was revealed in November last year. Though Subaru didn’t reveal much in the way of specifications, the new Solterra concept features a roof spoiler, under spoilers, and “other special parts on the exterior,” the company says.
Predjama is one of the most extraordinary castles in the world, built in the mouth of a cave complex at the end of a valley in southwest Slovenia.
Set halfway up a 400-foot (123-meter) vertical cliff face, it appears in records from 1,202 and is listed by Guinness World Records as the world’s largest cave castle.
With a Renaissance facade dating back to the 1580s, the word “majestic” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Yet for tour guide and historian Vojko Jurca, one of the highlights is, on first appearances, a little underwhelming.
The human body did not evolve to handle life in space, and it shows in our very blood.
Since our species first started to spend extended periods of time beyond our planet, researchers have noticed a curious and consistent loss of red blood cells among astronauts.
The phenomenon is called ‘space anemia’, and until recently, its cause was a mystery. Some experts have argued space anemia is only a short-term phenomenon – a brief compensation for the fluid changes in our bodies under microgravity.
