Lifeboat Foundation

We wrote about DroneUp’s drone delivery of Coke with Coffee to residents in Coffee, GA – but how exactly did that delivery work? The A2Z Rapid Delivery System allowed packages to be delivered without landing the drone – a method that solves a lot of problems in drone delivery.

CA-based A2Z Drone Delivery, LLC, has developed a patented tethered freefall drone delivery mechanism, the Rapid Delivery System (RDS1) used by DroneUp® for the project with Walmart and Coke. The RDS1 system lowers the delivery to the ground by tether – which means that homeowners don’t have to worry about a noisy landing or the potential for a landing drone to hit obstacles on its way down. “The RDS1 was chosen for its rapid delivery capabilities which reduced time-on-station to just 30 seconds per delivery, while minimizing intrusive rotor noise and limiting the window for risk to people on the ground,” says an A2Z press release.

“For our partners at DroneUp to put their trust in our system was the best proof of concept that we could imagine and was a memorable benchmark for our whole team,” said Aaron Zhang, founder of A2Z Drone Delivery, LLC. “The unique capabilities of the RDS1 were tailor-made for this type of residential delivery where our tethered freefall mechanism can accurately and quickly deposit payloads while hovering far from people, homes, trees and utility wires.”

“The quality of VR headsets has improved exponentially since the 1990s. These graphs illustrate how the rapid improvement is likely to continue in the coming decades, with graphical resolutions practically indistinguishable from real life by 2040.”

Virtual reality – future trends.

The quality of virtual reality (VR) headsets has improved exponentially since the 1990s. These graphs illustrate how the rapid improvement is likely to continue in the coming decades, with graphical resolutions practically indistinguishable from real life by 2040.

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Discovery “requires us to rethink everything we thought we knew about peroxisomes.”

In his first year of graduate school, Rice University biochemist Zachary Wright discovered something hidden inside a common piece of cellular machinery that’s essential for all higher order life from yeast to humans.

What Wright saw in 2015 — subcompartments inside organelles called peroxisomes — is described in a study published today in Nature Communications.

Deep neural networks exploit statistical regularities in data to carry out prediction or classification tasks. This makes them very good at handling computer vision tasks such as detecting objects. But reliance on statistical patterns also makes neural networks sensitive to adversarial examples.

An adversarial example is an image that has been subtly modified to cause a deep learning model to misclassify it. This usually happens by adding a layer of noise to a normal image. Each noise pixel changes the numerical values of the image very slightly, enough to be imperceptible to the human eye. But when added together, the noise values disrupt the statistical patterns of the image, which then causes a neural network to mistake it for something else.

NASA gives Earth the all-clear for the next century, removing a particularly menacing asteroid, Apophis, from its “risk list”.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=xInLmHqWoqk

On March 27, 2021 NASA’s Perseverance Rover unlocked Mars Helicopter Ingenuity (release system unlocked) and started deployment process. As for now, NASA’s rover prepares to get the Helicopter upright. Flight scheme is known. Before Ingenuity takes its first flight on Mars, it must be squarely in the middle of its airfield – a 33-by-33-foot (10-by-10-meter) patch of Martian real estate chosen for its flatness and lack of obstructions. Once the helicopter and rover teams confirm that Perseverance is situated exactly where they want it to be inside the airfield, the elaborate process to deploy the helicopter on the surface of Mars begins.

Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

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Physicists at the LHCb Collaboration at CERN have found particles not behaving the way they should according to the guiding theory of particle physics. Could it be evidence of a brand new physics?

Plastics are one of the world’s largest polluters, taking hundreds of years to degrade in nature. A research team, led by YSE professor Yuan Yao and Liangbing Hu from the University of Maryland, has created a high-quality bioplastic from wood byproducts that they hope can solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental issues.

Efforts to shift from petrochemical plastics to renewable and biodegradable plastics have proven tricky — the production process can require toxic chemicals and is expensive, and the mechanical strength and water stability is often insufficient. But researchers have made a breakthrough, using wood byproducts, that shows promise for producing more durable and sustainable bioplastics.

A study published in Nature Sustainability, co-authored by Yuan Yao, assistant professor of industrial ecology and sustainable systems at Yale School of the Environment (YSE), outlines the process of deconstructing the porous matrix of natural wood into a slurry. The researchers say the resulting material shows a high mechanical strength, stability when holding liquids, and UV-light resistance. It can also be recycled or safely biodegraded in the natural environment, and has a lower life-cycle environmental impact when compared with petroleum-based plastics and other biodegradable plastics.

Here’s my latest video!

Papers referenced in the video:

Continue reading “Telomere Length: How Does it Compare Against Other Biological Age Metrics?” »