Menu

Blog

Page 5170

Mar 19, 2022

This carbon-negative dream house ships in a box

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

With both homelessness rates and the cost of housing continuing to climb in the U.S., one startup described as the “IKEA of houses” is determined to make beautifully-designed, energy efficient homes more affordable for everyone.

The founders of NODE believe that access to affordable housing should be a fundamental right. They’re working toward a sustainable solution to the current housing crisis, and it’s one that goes above and beyond the status quo.

Continue reading “This carbon-negative dream house ships in a box” »

Mar 19, 2022

Could we make cars out of petroleum residue?

Posted by in categories: sustainability, transportation

As the world struggles to improve the efficiency of cars and other vehicles in order to curb greenhouse gas emissions and improve the range of electric vehicles, the search is on for ever-lighter materials that are strong enough to be used in the bodies of cars.

Lightweight materials made from carbon fiber, similar to the material used for some tennis rackets and bicycles, combine exceptional strength with low weight, but these have been more expensive to produce than comparable structural elements made of steel or aluminum. Now, researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a way of making these lightweight fibers out of an ultracheap feedstock: the heavy, gloppy waste material left over from the refining of petroleum, material that refineries today supply for low-value applications such as asphalt, or eventually treat as waste.

Not only is the new carbon fiber cheap to make, but it offers advantages over the traditional carbon fiber materials because it can have compressional strength, meaning it could be used for load-bearing applications. The new process is described in the journal Science Advances, in a paper by graduate student Asmita Jana, research scientist Nicola Ferralis, professor Jeffrey Grossman, and five others at MIT, Western Research Institute in Wyoming, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Mar 19, 2022

Robots won’t steal our jobs if we put workers at center of AI revolution

Posted by in categories: employment, robotics/AI

Rather than fret about how many jobs future technologies will destroy, we should focus on how to shape them so that they complement the workforce of tomorrow.

Mar 18, 2022

NASA’s Artemis 1 moon megarocket rolls out to the launch pad today and you can watch it live

Posted by in category: space travel

The action is scheduled to start at 5 p.m. EDT (2100 GMT).


CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida — The first mission in NASA’s Artemis moon program is set to roll out to the launch pad today (March 17).

Continue reading “NASA’s Artemis 1 moon megarocket rolls out to the launch pad today and you can watch it live” »

Mar 18, 2022

Homing in on the Higgs boson’s interaction with the charm quark

Posted by in category: particle physics

Since the discovery of the Higgs boson a decade ago, the ATLAS and CMS collaborations at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have been hard at work trying to unlock the secrets of this special particle. In particular, they have been investigating in detail how the Higgs boson interacts with fundamental particles such as those that make up matter, that is, quarks and leptons. In the Standard Model of particle physics, these matter particles fall into three categories, or “generations”, of increasing mass, and the Higgs boson interacts with them with a strength that is proportional to their mass. Any deviation from this behaviour would provide a clear indication of new phenomena.

ATLAS and CMS have previously observed the interactions of the Higgs boson with the heaviest quarks and leptons, i.e. those of the third generation, which agree with the predictions from the Standard Model within the current measurement precision. They have also obtained the first indications that the Higgs boson interacts with a muon, a lepton of the second generation. However, they have yet to observe it interacting with second-generation quarks. In two recent publications, ATLAS and CMS report analyses that place tight limits on the strength of the Higgs boson’s interaction with a charm quark, a second-generation quark.

ATLAS and CMS study the Higgs boson’s interactions by looking at how it transforms, or “decays”, into lighter particles or how it is produced together with other particles. In their latest studies, using data from the second run of the LHC, the two teams searched for the decay of the Higgs boson into a charm quark and its antimatter counterpart, the charm antiquark.

Mar 18, 2022

AI Autonomy: Self-Initiation, Adaptation and Continual Learning

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

As more and more AI agents are used in practice, it is time to think about how to make these agents fully autonomous so that they can learn by themselves continually in a self-motivated and self-initiated manner rather than being retrained offline periodically on the initiation of human engineers and accommodate or adapt to unexpected or novel circumstances. As the real-world is an open environment that is full of unknowns or novelties, detecting novelties, characterizing them, accommodating or adapting to them, and gathering ground-truth training data and incrementally learning the unknowns/novelties are critical to making the AI agent more and more knowledgeable and powerful over time.

Mar 18, 2022

US government clients unaffected by Viasat cyberattack

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, government, law enforcement

“The investigation into the recent cyber event on the KA-SAT European network continues in partnership with law enforcement, government partners and Viasat’s third-party cybersecurity firm,” Viasat said in a statement March 11. “We currently believe this was a deliberate, isolated and external cyber event.”

Mar 18, 2022

Pulsar Shoots 7-light-year-long Phaser Blast

Posted by in categories: cosmology, particle physics

Nature proves truth is still stranger than fiction: A pulsar has shot energetic particles in a thin, straight line that extends for light-years into space. The discovery might explain how antimatter makes its way to Earth.

Star Trek can keep its ray guns — pulsars make far more powerful beams of radiation.

Crushed stellar cores, left behind when a massive star goes supernova, are among nature’s own particle accelerators. Though pulsars are only the size of Manhattan, their dizzying spins and powerful magnetic fields can energize particles to a significant fraction of the speed of light. In addition, pulsars glow with high-energy radiation, which can itself convert into pairs of electrons and their antimatter counterpart, positrons.

Mar 18, 2022

How to map the brain

Posted by in category: neuroscience

As efforts to chart the brain’s neurons gather pace, researchers must find a way to make the accumulating masses of data useful.

Mar 18, 2022

First ship-to-containership LNG bunkering operation in Asia

Posted by in category: futurism

Singapore has performed the first liquefied natural gas bunkering operation from ship to containership in Asia. It is also the first time that bunkering took place simultaneously with cargo operations. This is a step forward for the decarbonisation of Singapore’s port.

Follow us:
CNA: https://cna.asia.
CNA Lifestyle: http://www.cnalifestyle.com.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/channelnewsasia.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/channelnewsasia.
Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/channelnewsasia