Lifeboat Foundation

Thinking Huts intends to increase access to education.

Maggie Grout, who was born in a rural mountain village in China, was adopted rather young. “And I think that largely shaped my outlook through the rest of my life — knowing what poverty looks like, and how it impacts the opportunities you’re able to achieve in life. Having that allowed me to see more clearly what my purpose was in life — helping children gain access to education in underprivileged areas in the world,” she tells *IE* in an interview. Huts rely on additive manufacturing technologies to build sustainable schools. Recently, they built the first 3D-printed school in Madagascar.

Food recalls could be a thing of the past if artificial intelligence (AI) is utilized in food production, according to a recent study from UBC and the University of Guelph.

The average cost of a food recall due to bacterial or microbial contamination, like E. coli, is US$10 million according to study co-author Dr. Rickey Yada, a professor and the dean of the UBC faculty of land and food systems.

We spoke with Dr. Yada about how AI can help optimize the current systems used in the food processing industry, and how it can help make our food supply safer.

It’s “a revolutionary scientific advance in molecular data storage and cryptography.”

Scientists from the University of Texas at Austin sent a letter to colleagues in Massachusetts with a secret message: an encryption key to unlock a text file of L. Frank Baum’s classic novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. The twist: The encryption key was hidden in a special ink laced with polymers, They described their work in a recent paper published in the journal ACS Central Science.

When it comes to alternative means for data storage and retrieval, the goal is to store data in the smallest amount of space in a durable and readable format. Among polymers, DNA has long been the front runner in that regard. As we’ve reported previously, DNA has four chemical building blocks—adenine (A), thymine (T), guanine (G), and cytosine ©—which constitute a type of code. Information can be stored in DNA by converting the data from binary code to a base-4 code and assigning it one of the four letters. A single gram of DNA can represent nearly 1 billion terabytes (1 zettabyte) of data. And the stored data can be preserved for long periods—decades, or even centuries.

Continue reading “Scientists hid encryption key for Wizard of Oz text in plastic molecules” »

Computers that think more like human brains are inching closer to mainstream adoption. But many unanswered questions remain. Among the most pressing, what types of materials can serve as the best building blocks to unlock the potential of this new style of computing.

For most traditional computing devices, silicon remains the gold standard. However, there is a movement to use more flexible, efficient and environmentally friendly materials for these brain-like devices.

In a new paper, researchers from The University of Texas at Austin developed synaptic transistors for brain-like computers using the thin, flexible material graphene. These transistors are similar to synapses in the brain, that connect neurons to each other.

The Perseid meteor shower will peak this year in the early hours of 13 August. A full moon will make it trickier to see than usual but it is still worth a try — here’s how.