And they could soon help explore the deep sea.
New York-based firm Pliant Energy Systems is building a marine system reminiscent of the cuttlefish with its rippling underwater motion, a report from The Economist reveals.
The company’s biomimetic machine, called Velox, is based on the principle that propellers are nowhere near as efficient as the fins of sea creatures that are prevalent in nature.
In science fiction stories about contact with extraterrestrial civilisations, there is a problem: What kind of propulsion system could make it possible to bridge the enormous distances between the stars? It cannot be done with ordinary rockets like those used to travel to the moon or Mars. Many more or less speculative ideas about this have been put forward—one of them is the “Bussard collector” or “Ramjet propulsion”. It involves capturing protons in interstellar space and then using them for a nuclear fusion reactor.
Peter Schattschneider, physicist and science fiction author, has now analyzed this concept in more detail together with his colleague Albert Jackson from the USA. The result is unfortunately disappointing for fans of interstellar travel: it cannot work the way Robert Bussard, the inventor of this propulsion system, thought it up in 1960. The analysis has now been published in the scientific journal Acta Astronautica.
People in movies are often quick to resort to sawing off someone’s hand to get past a fingerprint scanner. A report from the Kraken Security Labs Team shows that it would be much easier—and less gruesome—to recreate someone’s fingerprint using a little bit of off-the-shelf wood glue.
Kraken notes that biometric security has become increasingly common as smartphone, tablet, and laptop manufacturers have incorporated fingerprint scanners into their products. These scanners offer a convenient way to access those devices without entering a password.
The report says a fingerprint scanner can be “hacked” by using a picture of the target’s fingerprint, creating a negative in Photoshop, printing the resulting image, and then putting some wood glue on top of the imitated fingerprint so it can be used to trick many commercial scanners.
Iowa’s first 3D-printed home could be ready for its new owners by this time next year.
The Iowa Economic Development Authority on Friday approved $1.4 million for the Iowa State University College of Design to purchase a 3D printer capable of producing concrete houses. Its goal is to build a neighborhood of up to 34 3D-printed homes in Hamburg, a southwest Iowa town recovering from a massive flood two years ago.
The agency’s director, Debi Durham, said the college also will develop a curriculum for training contractors on 3D printing and new state building codes in order to allow wide use of the technique in Iowa.
Tesla has started to release a new Full Self-Driving Beta software update (10.7) that improves the situation with “phantom braking” and even helps the FSD beta be more energy efficient.
For more than a year now, Tesla has been slowly rolling out what it is calling “Full Self-Driving Beta” (FSD Beta), which is an early version of its self-driving software that is currently being tested by a fleet of Tesla owners selected by the company and through its “safety test score.”
The software enables the vehicle to drive autonomously to a destination entered in the car’s navigation system, but the driver needs to remain vigilant and ready to take control at all times.
That could change though, because Samsung and IBM have announced a partnership in which both companies are working together to develop new battery tech that could allow our smartphones to run for an entire week on a single charge.
This comes in the form of a new chip architecture that could potentially reduce the amount of energy consumed by as much as 85% called Vertical-Transport Nanosheet Field Effect Transistor (VTFET). As the name suggests, this new design will allow signals to travel across the chip vertically by stacking transistors on top of each other.
As a result, this could allow phones to perform just as well as they do right now, but with massive gains in energy efficiency. Alternatively, this design would also allow phones to improve on its performance by as much as 100% compared to modern FET alternatives.
How close to real life is the Amazon sci-fi series, “The Expanse”? Join us… and find out!
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Science fiction shows and movies can sometimes struggle with a bad reputation passed down to them by a number of low-budget, poorly executed films in the genre. The Amazon series “The Expanse”, based on the novels by James S. A. Corey, however, tries to overthrow the idea that sci-fi can’t hold up to science. So, how well does it do? In this video, Unveiled finds out!
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Lightelligence, the global optical computing innovator, revealed its Photonic Arithmetic Computing Engine (PACE), the company’s latest platform to fully integrate photonics and electronics in a small form factor.
As Lightelligence’s first demonstration of optical computing for use cases beyond AI and deep learning, PACE efficiently searches for solutions to several of the hardest computational math problems, including the Ising problem, and the graph Max-Cut and Min-Cut problems, illustrating the real-world potential of integrated photonics in advanced computation.
Visit https://www.lightelligence.ai/ to learn more.
The end of the year is a time not just for predictions of top trends but also to watch for the biggest hype and most misleading recommendations that get dished out to business leaders. There’s no scarcity of these in the artificial intelligence (AI) space.
As AI evolves, its influence on humanity continues to rise. People often focus on AI’s ability to automate and amplify tasks but underestimate its more profound impact on society. “Very few human creations have had the kind of impact as AI,” says Loomis. He compares it with the invention of language—a “tool” that has changed the trajectory of humans and helped birth civilizations. Today, we are still taking baby steps with AI. However, unlike early humans, we are waking up to the fact that AI is not just a tool but will weave deeper into our society.
“I hope 2022 will be the start of this realization, where we don’t just create new technical practices for AI but also understand how it shapes us. This should alert us to the fact that this is the time to lay the guardrails—the checks and balances needed to guide this change into something greater and not dystopian,” concludes Loomis.
