Researchers in Singapore and at CalTech have developed a 3D printed fabric with an interesting property: it is generally flexible but can stiffen on demand. You can see a video about the new fabric, below.
The material consists of nylon octahedrons interlocked. The cloth is enclosed in a plastic envelope and vacuum-packed. Once in a vacuum, the sheet becomes much stiffer and can hold many times its own weight.
A new study by scientists has demonstrated how researchers may be able to create an accelerating jet of antimatter from light.
A team of physicists has shown that high-intensity lasers can be used to generate colliding gamma photons – the most energetic wavelengths of light – to produce electron-positron pairs. This, they say, could help us understand the environments around some of the Universe’s most extreme objects: neutron stars.
The process of creating a matter-antimatter pair of particles – an electron and a positron – from photons is called the Breit-Wheeler process, and it’s extremely difficult to achieve experimentally.
Bionic arms used to cost $80,000. Now, a young engineer has lowered the cost by over 90%.
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This is interesting. 😃
A new discovery in rats shows that the brain responds differently in immersive virtual reality environments versus the real world. The finding could help scientists understand how the brain brings together sensory information from different sources to create a cohesive picture of the world around us. It could also pave the way for “virtual reality therapy” for learning and memory-related disorders ranging including ADHD, Autism, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy and depression.
This looks like a really big breakthrough.
A decades-old problem about how to reliably control millions of qubits in a silicon quantum computer chip has now been solved.
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University of Advancing Technology’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) degree explores the theory and practice of engineering tools that simulate thinking, patterning, and advanced decision behaviors by software systems. With inspiration derived from biology to design, UAT’s Artificial Intelligence program teaches students to build software systems that solve complex problems. Students will work with technologies including voice recognition, simulation agents, machine learning (ML), and the internet of things (IoT).
Students pursuing this specialized computer programming degree develop applications using evolutionary and genetic algorithms, cellular automata, artificial neural networks, agent-based models, and other artificial intelligence methodologies. UAT’s degree in AI covers the fundamentals of general and applied artificial intelligence including core programming languages and platforms used in computer science.
Solar Orbiter zipped by Venus earlier this week, just one day ahead of the Mercury-bound probe BepiColombo.
The sun-exploring spacecraft Solar Orbiter has captured this video of a glowing crescent of Venus as it flew past the planet during an orbit adjustment maneuver on Monday (Aug 9).
The video was taken by Solar Orbiter’s Heliospheric Imager, or SoloHI, as the joint European Space Agency (ESA)/NASA satellite zipped by the hot and cloudy planet at a distance of 4,967 miles (7,995 kilometers).
NASA has edged one step closer to building Moon and Mars colonies using the celestial bodies’ soil. Universe Today notes that NASA’s latest International Space Station resupply mission included a machine meant to demonstrate 3D printing regolith (that is, loose soil or rock) on the Moon and similar extraterrestrial surfaces.
The Redwire Regolith Print (RRP) project will work in tandem with an existing printer system (ManD) to try 3D printing simulated regolith. If that succeeds, the ISS crew will gauge the strength of the resulting material to see if it can handle the harsh conditions beyond Earth.
If all goes well, RRP could lead to colonists printing at least some of their habitats on-demand. That, in turn, could reduce the volume of construction supplies NASA brings to the Moon and Mars. Scientists have envisioned soil-based habitats for years, but this test is relatively realistic — it’s an attempt at 3D printing soil in lower gravity. While there will still be much work to do, the long-term goals for Artemis and future Mars missions may be that much more achievable.
“A new study suggests that if Europe planted trees across all the land suitable for reforestation, it might not only sequester carbon but also partially ameliorate the increasingly dry European summers predicted by climate change models.”
Plant more trees! This message has been one of the cornerstones of the European response to worsening climate change. A new study published in Nature Geoscience suggests that if Europe planted trees across all the land suitable for reforestation, it might not only sequester carbon, but also partially ameliorate the increasingly dry European summers predicted by climate change models. In all, mass reforestation could increase summer rainfall by an average of 7.6%.
“When planned carefully, reforestation could result in additional benefits in regions where it is implemented,” said Ronny Meier, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH Zürich), and lead author on the study.
Continue reading “Reforestation holds promise for Europe’s increasingly drier summers” »
A team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine have developed a deep learning model that is capable of classifying a brain tumor as one of six common types using a single 3D MRI scan, according to a study published in Radiology: Artificial Intelligence.
“This is the first study to address the most common intracranial tumors and to directly determine the tumor class or the absence of tumor from a 3D MRI volume,” said Satrajit Chakrabarty, M.S., a doctoral student under the direction of Aristeidis Sotiras, Ph.D., and Daniel Marcus, Ph.D., in Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology’s Computational Imaging Lab at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.
The six most common intracranial tumor types are high-grade glioma, low-grade glioma, brain metastases, meningioma, pituitary adenoma and acoustic neuroma. Each was documented through histopathology, which requires surgically removing tissue from the site of a suspected cancer and examining it under a microscope.
