Lifeboat Foundation

“It was so easy to get support from Northeastern, especially considering that we were fresh out of college,” Gurijala says. Through the Venture Mentoring Network, the co-founders were advised on how to create a business model and pitch investors. “They even connected us to our first investor. I’m not sure we could have started Boston Materials without the support of the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem at Northeastern.”

Boston Materials, which recently raised $8 million from investors, is looking to expand its team.

“We’re looking to grow across the company, from the manufacturing team, to the engineering team, to the technical sales team,” Gurijala says. “It’s an exciting time. There’s so much momentum behind us right now.”

With the established success of flexible computer screen displays, many users are wondering how display technology will advance next. So far, free-form displays have grown popular as a next-generation product that offers both portability and high-resolution visuals.

While this technology is still quite new, a wealth of research already exists into the stretchable displays that make up free form displays, products that can stretch into any direction like rubber.

On June 4, 2021, research at Samsung appeared in the well-known journal Science Advances discussing a technology that bypasses the limitations of stretchable devices. The associated experiment showed stable performance even when the display was significantly elongated. As these products can already be used in existing semiconductor processes, Samsung researchers have high hopes about what this could mean for the commercialization and salability of stretchable devices.

Norway’s Wind Catching Systems (WCS) has made a spectacular debut with a colossal floating wind turbine array it says can generate five times the annual energy of the world’s biggest single turbines – while reducing costs enough to be immediately competitive with grid prices.

Standing more than 1000 ft (324 m) high, these mammoth Windcatcher grids would deploy multiple smaller turbines (no less than 117 in the render images) in a staggered formation atop a floating platform moored to the ocean floor using established practices from the oil and gas industry.

Just one of these arrays, says WCS, could offer double the swept area of the world’s biggest conventional wind turbines – the 15 MW Vestas V236 – and its smaller rotors could perform much better in wind speeds over 40 to 43 km/h (25 to 27 mph), when larger turbines tend to start pitching their blades to limit production and protect themselves from damage. The overall effect, says WCS, is a 500 percent boost in annual energy output, with each array making enough power to run 80000 European homes.

BMW Motorrad may not have arrived very early to the electric motorcycle party, but the company is making up for it now with what could become an industry first electric motorcycle with a driveshaft.

BMW loves its driveshaft motorcycles, but the electric motorcycle industry hasn’t been as keen on them.

Electric motors and batteries have freed motorcycle manufacturers from the typical design constraints of gas-powered drivetrains. Unshackled from traditional gas tanks and bulky internal combustion engines, designers have been granted unprecedented levels of freedom thanks to the modularity of electric motorcycle components.

Deep neural networks have achieved highly promising results on several tasks, including image and text classification. Nonetheless, many of these computational methods are prone to what is known as catastrophic forgetting, which essentially means that when they are trained on a new task, they tend to rapidly forget how to complete tasks they were trained to complete in the past.

Researchers at Université Paris-Saclay-CNRS recently introduced a new technique to alleviate forgetting in binarized neural networks. This technique, presented in a paper published in Nature Communications, is inspired by the idea of synaptic metaplasticity, the process through which synapses (junctions between two nerve cells) adapt and change over time in response to experiences.

“My group had been working on binarized neural networks for a few years,” Damien Querlioz, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. “These are a highly simplified form of deep neural networks, the flagship method of modern artificial intelligence, which can perform complex tasks with reduced memory requirements and energy consumption. In parallel, Axel, then a first-year Ph.D. student in our group, started to work on the synaptic metaplasticity models introduced in 2005 by Stefano Fusi.”

There may be life in Enceladus’ deep sea plumes.

The Cassini probe revealed a subsurface ocean beneath Enceladus’ icy surface that may be habitable. A new analysis shows that the chemistry has the right stuff.

Calico has made some important discoveries about Yamanaka factors.

In a preprint paper, scientists from Calico, Google’s longevity research behemoth, suggest that contrary to our previous understanding, transient reprogramming of cells using Yamanaka factors involves suppressing cellular identity, which may open the door to carcinogenic mutations. They also propose a milder reprogramming method inspired by limb regeneration in amphibians [1].

Rejuvenation that can give you cancer

Continue reading “Calico Scientists Develop Safer Cellular Reprogramming” »

Analog AI processor company Mythic launched its M1076 Analog Matrix Processor today to provide low-power AI processing.

The company uses analog circuits rather than digital to create its processor, making it easier to integrate memory into the processor and operate its device with 10 times less power than a typical system-on-chip or graphics processing unit (GPU).

The M1076 AMP can support up to 25 trillion operations per second (TOPS) of AI compute in a 3-watt power envelope. It is targeted at AI at the edge applications, but the company said it can scale from the edge to server applications, addressing multiple vertical markets including smart cities, industrial applications, enterprise applications, and consumer devices.

“I didn’t think I would be emotional about this.”

It’s not just humans that use prosthetic limbs—wounded or disabled animals can benefit from them, too. In the past, we’ve reported on cats, dogs, and even an elephant who have been fitted for prosthesis. The latest creature who’s now learning to walk on an artificial foot is an adorable duck named Waddles.

Waddles was born with a deformed leg, but his adoptive owner Ben Weinman wanted to help him live a better life. He contacted Derrick Campana, a Certified Pet Prostheticist at Bionic Pets who made a 3D-printed prosthetic leg and foot.

Continue reading “Waddles the Disabled Duck Walks for the First Time on His 3D-Printed Prosthetic Leg” »