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Alongside advances in space exploration, we’ve recently seen much time and money invested into technologies that could allow effective space resource utilization. And at the forefront of these efforts has been a laser-sharp focus on finding the best way to produce oxygen on the Moon.

In October, the Australian Space Agency and NASA signed a deal to send an Australian-made rover to the Moon under the Artemis program, with a goal to collect lunar rocks that could ultimately provide breathable oxygen on the Moon.

Although the Moon does have an atmosphere, it’s very thin and composed mostly of hydrogen, neon, and argon. It’s not the sort of gaseous mixture that could sustain oxygen-dependent mammals such as humans.

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A long-term fallout of the Covid crisis has been the rise of the contactless enterprise, in which customers, and likely employees, interact with systems to get what they need or request. This means a pronounced role for artificial intelligence and machine learning, or conversational AI, which add the intelligence needed to deliver superior customer or employee experience.

Deloitte analysts recently analyzed patents in the area of conversational AI to assess the direction of the technology and the market — and the technology has been fast developing. “Rapid adoption of conversational AI will likely be underpinned by innovations in the various steps of chatbot development that have the potential to hasten the creation and training of chatbots and enable them to efficiently handle complex requests — with a personal touch,” the analyst team, led by Deloitte’s Sherry Comes, observes.

Conversational AI is a ground-breaking application for AI, agrees Chris Hausler, director of data science for Zendesk. “Organizations saw a massive 81% increase in customer interactions with automated bots last year, and no doubt these will continue to be key to delivering great experiences.”

Solar car is better option.

The influx of electric vehicles into Australia could put an additional load of 20 gigawatts a day — or a doubling of peak electricity demand — on the electricity grid by 2030 if most owners charged up at the same time every night, a new report has found.

The $350 million research collaboration between industry, universities and government has identified a raft of challenges for the arrival of EVs which are expected to make up 80 per cent of new vehicles sales by the end of the decade, making up almost 25 per cent of Australia’s total car fleet.

While there will be huge benefits from taking petrol-guzzling cars off the road, the arrival of EVs – which need to be charged either at home or at public charging stations – creates a range of new headaches, not the least for the electricity grid.

Continue reading “Electric vehicle revolution puts pressure on energy grid” | >

Princeton researchers have invented bubble casting, a new way to make soft robots using “fancy balloons” that change shape in predictable ways when inflated with air.

The new system involves injecting bubbles into a liquid polymer, letting the material solidify and inflating the resulting device to make it bend and move. The researchers used this approach to design and create hands that grip, a fishtail that flaps and slinky-like coils that retrieve a ball. They hope that their simple and versatile method, published Nov. 10 in the journal Nature, will accelerate the development of new types of soft robots.

Traditional rigid robots have multiple uses, such as in manufacturing cars. “But they will not be able to hold your hands and allow you to move somewhere without breaking your wrist,” said Pierre-Thomas Brun, an assistant professor of chemical and and the lead researcher on the study. “They’re not naturally geared to interact with the soft stuff, like humans or tomatoes.”

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When the researchers bathed this engineered silk in sunlight, they found that it stayed 3.5°C cooler than the surrounding air because of its ability to reflect most sunlight and radiate heat. It is the first fabric to be developed that stays colder than the surrounding air when in sunlight.

The researchers also found that when they draped the engineered silk over a surface designed to simulate skin, it kept the skin 8°C cooler under direct sunlight than natural silk did – and it kept the skin 12.5°C cooler than cotton did. The simulated skin was made of silicone rubber that was wrapped around a heater to mimic body warmth.

In the final part of their experiments, they made a collared long-sleeved shirt from the engineered silk and asked a volunteer to wear it while standing out in the sun on a 37°C day. Infrared images revealed that the shirt stayed cool. Similar infrared images captured of the volunteer wearing shirts made of natural silk or cotton showed that these fabrics warmed up. “Wearing the engineered silk on a hot day under sunlight, one feels much cooler than wearing normal textiles such as cotton,” says Zhu.

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As robots are introduced in an increasing number of real-world settings, it is important for them to be able to effectively cooperate with human users. In addition to communicating with humans and assisting them in everyday tasks, it might thus be useful for robots to autonomously determine whether their help is needed or not.

Researchers at Franklin & Marshall College have recently been trying to develop computational tools that could enhance the performance of socially , by allowing them to process social cues given by humans and respond accordingly. In a paper pre-published on arXiv and presented at the AI-HRI symposium 2021 last week, they introduced a new technique that allows robots to autonomously detect when it is appropriate for them to step in and help users.

“I am interested in designing robots that help people with , such as cooking dinner, learning math, or assembling Ikea furniture,” Jason R. Wilson, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “I’m not looking to replace people that help with these tasks. Instead, I want robots to be able to supplement human assistance, especially in cases where we do not have enough people to help.”

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The problem? Our bodies aren’t big fans of foreign substances—particularly ones that trigger an undesirable immune response. What’s more, these delivery systems aren’t great with biological zip codes, often swarming the entire body instead of focusing on the treatment area. These “delivery problems” are half the battle for effective genetic medicine with few side effects.

“The biomedical community has been developing powerful molecular therapeutics, but delivering them to cells in a precise and efficient way is challenging,” said Zhang at the Broad Institute, the McGovern Institute, and MIT.

Enter SEND. The new delivery platform, described in Science, dazzles with its sheer ingenuity. Rather than relying on foreign carriers, SEND (selective e ndogenous e n capsidation for cellular delivery) commandeers human proteins to make delivery vehicles that shuttle in new genetic elements. In a series of tests, the team embedded RNA cargo and CRISPR components inside cultured cells in a dish. The cells, acting as packing factories, used human proteins to encapsulate the genetic material, forming tiny balloon-like vessels that can be collected as a treatment.

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The virtual sphere of digital collaboration is growing.

And while the soon-to-be-defunct Facebook pivots to Meta’s Metaverse in a bid to pivot operations into the virtual world, Nvidia is expanding its Omniverse, designed to enhance workflows in the new media environment, according to a pre-brief of the GTC 2021 event that IE attended.

While the scope and scale of Nvidia’s new suite of artificial intelligence, avatar interfaces, and supercomputing prowess were impressive, perhaps the most notable development is the firm’s new digital twin.

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Researchers in Korea succeeded in developing a core material for the next-generation neuromorphic (neural network imitation) semiconductor for the first time in the country. This is a result of a research team led by Dr. Jung-dae Kwon and Yong-hun Kim of the Department of Energy and Electronic Materials of the Korea Institute of Materials Science, together with Professor Byungjin Cho’s research team at Chungbuk National University. KIMS is a government-funded research institute under the Ministry of Science and ICT.

This new concept memtransistor uses a two-dimensional nanomaterial with a thickness of several nanometers. By reproducibly imitating the electrical plasticity of nerve synapses with more than 1,000 electrical stimulations, the researchers succeeded in obtaining a high pattern recognition rate of about 94.2% (98% of simulation-based pattern recognition rate).

Molybdenum sulfur (MoS2), widely used as a , works on the principle that defects in a single crystal are moved by an external electric field, which makes it difficult to precisely control the concentration or shape of the defect. To solve the problem, the research team sequentially stacked an oxidic layer of niobium oxide (Nb2O5) and a molybdenum sulfur material and succeeded in developing an artificial synaptic device having a memtransistor structure with high electrical reliability by an external electric field. In addition, they have demonstrated that the resistance switching characteristics can be freely controlled by changing the thickness of the niobium oxidic layer, and that brain information related to memory and forgetting can be processed with a very low energy of 10 PJ (picojoule).

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Neuroscience biweekly vol. 45 27th October — 10th November.

The brain uses a shared mechanism for combining words from a single language and for combining words from two different languages, a team of neuroscientists has discovered. Its findings indicate that language switching is natural for those who are bilingual because the brain has a mechanism that does not detect that the language has switched, allowing for a seamless transition in comprehending more than one language at once.

“Our brains are capable of engaging in multiple languages,” explains Sarah Phillips, a New York University doctoral candidate and the lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal eNeuro. “Languages may differ in what sounds they use and how they organize words to form sentences. However, all languages involve the process of combining words to express complex thoughts.”

“Bilinguals show a fascinating version of this process — their brains readily combine words from different languages together, much like when combining words from the same language,” adds Liina Pylkkänen, a professor in NYU’s Department of Linguistics and Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper.

Continue reading “NS/ AI and how the brain processes language” | >