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NASA’s Artemis 1 mission, slated for take off as soon as this March, aims to send an Orion spacecraft around the moon. The cabin will be largely empty, save for an a interactive tablet that has been dubbed “Callisto,” which will sit propped up to face an astronaut mannequin. Callisto is essentially a touch-screen device that features reconfigured versions of Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant, and Cisco’s teleconferencing platform WebEx.

Among the many aspects that will be closely watched on the ground — at least by the group behind this Alexa experiment — is how the virtual assistant performs in space. And if nothing else, it’ll be some well-placed advertising.

It’s all part of a collaboration between Amazon, (AMZN) Cisco (CSCO) 0, and Lockheed Martin (LMT) 0, which built the Orion capsule for NASA. Lockheed approached the other two companies with the idea of developing a virtual assistant about three years ago, the companies said, and they are paying the full cost of including the virtual assistant on the Artemis 1 mission. Lockheed is also reimbursing NASA for any help the agency has lent on this project through an arrangement called a Space Act Agreement, which allows the space agency to be compensated for expertise or resources it gives to companies working on certain space-related projects.

Recently, a group of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology researchers made a major breakthrough in the graphene based desalination process. They were able to remove 97% of common salts in an energy efficient way. The current reverse osmosis desalination technology is energy intensive, and desalination plants’ capital costs are high. By the year 2025, 14% of the world’s population will experience water scarcity, which makes this discovery very important. Moreover, graphene-based filtration technology could come to your kitchen very soon.

Links to their work — https://www.nature.com/articles/nnano.2017.21#:~:text=Abstract, of%20common%20salts4%2C6. 0, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6172/752

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It affects one in three people in the U.S.

After co-developing the world’s first mRNA vaccine to combat COVID-19 and providing humanity with a game-changing tool to help address the most devastating pandemic in a century, Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE are teaming up once more to create a vaccine using the same technology for shingles, also known as herpes zoster, which is a debilitating and painful disease that affects about one in every three people in the United States.

An … See more.

It’s the first flying car firm to be granted a safety certificate in Japan.

SkyDrive, the Tokyo-based startup developing a personal eVTOL aircraft, revealed its ultra-light compact flying car, the SD-03, on the show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week.

That makes it the first time the company has showcased its technology outside of Japan, a symbol of the global ambitions of the firm, which aims to kickstart a flying taxi service by 2025.

A flying car built for ‘door-to-door’ transportation

Switch your disposable masks with Zephyr.

If you think your voice has been dulled by wearing masks in this pandemic, then electronics company Razer has the product for you. Zephyr Pro is a wearable mask that has a voice amplification feature in addition to built-in speakers.

In January last year, Razer had unveiled the initial concept and called it Hazel. A year later, it is now Zephyr and Razer already has a Pro version of the product. At first glance, the Zephyr Pro does… See more.

An evolution of its 2018 ‘Valkyrie’ hypersonic airliner concept.

If you work out of an office, you know that the coffee machine is the favorite spot in the office to hang out or have conversations at. From giving us the first cup of the day to keeping us awake for late-night meetings, that machine is a lifesaver. But just for a day, try not getting your coffee from the coffee machine. Don’t skip coffee entirely, but instead, go out to your local coffee shop that doesn’t use coffee machines or make yourself a flask at home. You will realize that hand-made coffee is inherently better than the one that is made from a machine. Not just making coffee, but highly creative jobs–like designing an outfit or writing a book–are considered best left to human creators. Many do not think that machines could emulate them. But with the takeover of artificial intelligence, this belief is steadily being challenged. Creativity and AI are together transforming many spaces that were traditionally reserved for the “artists.” In this article, we’ll be exploring these spaces and how AI is making a significant impact on them.

Creativity and AI Are Literally Changing the World When you think “creative,” the first things that come to mind are music, poetry and novels. The best works in these three areas of art have been the results of human imagination and innovation. Every significant progress in these fields has challenged traditional ways of creating art and presented a new side to human creativity. For example, there was a time when classical music was considered to be the peak of musical art, but today, we see hip-hop and K-pop taking over the world, their styles and structures very different from classical music.

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Of course, a minimum level of fidelity is required, but what’s far more important is perceptual consistency. By this, I mean that all sensory signals (i.e. sight, sound, touch, and motion) feed a single mental model of the world within your brain. With augmented reality, this can be achieved with relatively low visual fidelity, as long as virtual elements are spatially and temporally registered to your surroundings in a convincing way. And because our sense of distance (i.e. depth perception) is relatively coarse, it’s not hard for this to be convincing.

But for virtual reality, providing a unified sensory model of the world is much harder. This might sound surprising because it’s far easier for VR hardware to provide high-fidelity visuals without lag or distortion. But unless you’re using elaborate and impractical hardware, your body will be sitting or standing still while most virtual experiences involve motion. This inconsistency forces your brain to build and maintain two separate models of your world — one for your real surroundings and one for the virtual world that is presented in your headset.

When I tell people this, they often push back, forgetting that regardless of what’s happening in their headset, their brain still maintains a model of their body sitting on their chair, facing a particular direction in a particular room, with their feet touching the floor (etc.). Because of this perceptual inconsistency, your brain is forced to maintain two mental models. There are ways to reduce the effect, but it’s only when you merge real and virtual worlds into a single consistent experience (i.e. foster a unified mental model) that this truly gets solved.