Everyone’s talking about quantum computing these days. The experts claim the future will be full of amazing tech advances, but what does that really mean? property= description.
While a promising route to boosting crop yields, experts say more work needs to be done to understand why the tweak works.
A new kind of brain-computer interface (BCI) that uses neural implants the size of a grain of sand to record brain activity has been proven effective in rats — and one day, thousands of the “neurograins” could help you control machines with your mind.
Mind readers: BCIs are devices (usually electrodes implanted in the skull) that translate electrical signals from brain cells into commands for machines. They can allow paralyzed people to “speak” again, control robots, type with their minds, and even regain control of their own limbs.
Most of today’s interfaces can listen to just a few hundred neurons — but there are approximately 86 billion neurons in the brain. If we could monitor more neurons, in more places in the brain, it could radically upgrade what’s possible with mind-controlled tech.
Battery-and carmakers are already spending billions of dollars on reducing the costs of manufacturing and recycling electric-vehicle (EV) batteries — spurred in part by government incentives and the expectation of forthcoming regulations. National research funders have also founded centres to study better ways to make and recycle batteries. Because it is still less expensive, in most instances, to mine metals than to recycle them, a key goal is to develop processes to recover valuable metals cheaply enough to compete with freshly mined ones. “The biggest talker is money,” says Jeffrey Spangenberger, a chemical engineer at Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Illinois, who manages a US federally funded lithium-ion battery-recycling initiative, called ReCell.
Reducing the use of scarce metals — and recycling them — will be key to the world’s transition to electric vehicles.
The results make “a significant step toward ignition,” the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced on Tuesday.
At the National Ignition Facility, which is the size of three football fields, super powerful laser beams recreate the temperatures and pressures similar to what exists in the cores of stars, giant planets and inside exploding nuclear weapons, a spokesperson tells CNBC.
On Aug. 8 a laser light was focused onto a target the size of a BB which resulted in “a hot-spot the diameter of a human hair, generating more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power for 100 trillionths of a second,” the written statement says.
Continue reading “A national lab just achieved a ‘Wright Brothers moment’ in nuclear fusion” »
Showing how Atlas falls and gets back up again.
Boston Dynamics has shared two new videos of its bipedal Atlas robot. The first shows a dual-hander gymnastic routine, and the second offers insight into how such videos are programmed and practiced.
Artificial gravity for spaceflight is a concept older than spaceflight itself, but we’ve only ever seen one small scale test ever flown in space. However decades of research have been performed to show that the human body can adapt to the conditions required for rotating artificial gravity. This shows that it’s an engineering problem that likely solvable for interested parties who want to spend the time, effort and money creating the classic rotating space stations from Science Fiction.
Here’s a couple of papers which were heavily referenced in researching this.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19720019454/downloads/19720019454.pdf.
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19730003384/downloads/19730003384.pdf.
Continue reading “Can The Human Body Handle Rotating Artificial Gravity?” »
The field of neuroprosthetics was around in its earliest stage in the 1950s, but it’s only just starting to show its true potential, with devices that allow amputees to feel and manipulate their surroundings.
A group of researchers from MIT and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, recently collaborated with the goal of making neuroprosthetic hands, which allow users to feel in a more accessible way. The result is an inflatable robotic hand that costs only $500 to build, making it much cheaper than comparable devices, a post from MIT reveals.
Continue reading “New Inflatable Low-Cost Prosthetic Allows Users to Feel” »
FUSION BREAKEVEN ACHEIVED FOR FIRST TIME:
A tiny pellet of deuterium and tritium released more energy than it absorbed from the National Ignition Facility’s bank of 192 lasers.
Interesting ArsTechnica article on the delay of the BE-4 engine from Blue Origin. It brings up a point many outside the actual industry miss in that Blue Origin has to meet more stringent and complicated regulatory and certification standards that SpaceX does since they are actually producing engines for sale rather than company use. Since SpaceX only provides ‘services’ rather than ‘products’ (they have no plans for every selling Merlin’s, Raptor’s or any other item they produce including the “mini-Raptor” the Air Force actually paid them to produce) they don’t have to meet or even consider most of the requirements that Blue Origin has had to in order to produce the BE-4.
After these tests, a fully assembled flight engine no. 1 will be shipped to Texas to undergo a fairly brief round of tests, known as acceptance testing. If this engine passes, as expected, it will be shipped to ULA. Then a virtually identical BE-4 engine will be sent from Kent to Texas. This “qual” engine will undergo a much more rigorous series of tests, known as qualification testing. The idea is to push the engine through its paces to find any flaws. Then a similar process will follow with flight engine no. 2 followed by a second “qual” engine.
The risk is that ULA will receive the flight engines before the full qualification testing is complete. This qualification work on Blue Origin’s test stands will be occurring even as ULA integrates the engines with its first Vulcan rocket for testing and ultimately a launch during the second half of 2022. So if Blue Origin finds a last-minute issue with the BE-4 engine, ULA may have to unwind its work on final Vulcan development.
Continue reading “Blue Origin’s powerful BE-4 engine is more than four years late—here’s why” »
