Lifeboat Foundation

A multi-institutional team of researchers has found that it is possible to use a type of fungus to soften wood to the point that it could be used to generate electricity. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their process and how they tested it.

As the world works its way toward cleaner energy-producing systems, scientists seek novel approaches to producing electricity. One possibility is the use of piezoelectric devices that generate electricity by harnessing movement such as footsteps. In this new effort, the researchers have noted that much energy is wasted when people walk around. And while some have attempted to harness some of that energy with devices designed for shoes or legs, the researchers with this new effort wondered if it might be possible to add piezoelectrics to the floor to make use of that energy.

In studying the kinds of wood that are used to make floors, particularly in homes, the researchers noted that they do not have much give—a necessary component of an energy-harvesting system. To solve that problem, they found that applying a type of white rot fungus to pieces of balsa wood for a few weeks sped up the decaying process in a useful way. It made the wood spongier, which translated to give. When stepping on the wood, the researchers could feel it depress. They also found that after the wood returned to its former shape when pressure was removed.

What do you do after solving the answer to life, the universe, and everything? If you’re mathematicians Drew Sutherland and Andy Booker, you go for the harder problem.

In 2019, Booker, at the University of Bristol, and Sutherland, principal research scientist at MIT, were the first to find the answer to 42. The number has pop culture significance as the fictional answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything,” as Douglas Adams famously penned in his novel “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” The question that begets 42, at least in the novel, is frustratingly, hilariously unknown.

In mathematics, entirely by coincidence, there exists a polynomial equation for which the answer, 42, had similarly eluded mathematicians for decades. The equation x³+y³+z³=k is known as the sum of cubes problem. While seemingly straightforward, the equation becomes exponentially difficult to solve when framed as a “Diophantine equation”—a problem that stipulates that, for any value of k, the values for x, y, and z must each be whole numbers.

Two types of materials are better than one when it comes to solar cells, as revealed by an international team that has tested a new combination of materials and architecture to improve solar-cell efficiency.

Silicon has long dominated as the premier material for solar cells, helped by its abundance as a raw material. However, perovskites, a class of hybrid organic-inorganic material, are a viable alternative due to their low-cost and large-scale manufacture and potentially higher performance. While still too unstable for full commercialization, they might become available to the market by 2022.

KAUST’s Michele De Bastiani and Stefaan De Wolf, working with colleagues in Canada, Germany and Italy, now show that a combination of the two is the best approach. By optimizing the material composition and the architecture of a “tandem” device, the team has achieved efficiencies beyond commercial silicon solar panels.

Warehouse automation company Nimble Robotics today announced that it has raised a $50 million Series A. Led by DNS Capital and GSR Ventures and featuring Accel and Reinvent Capital, the round will go toward helping the company essentially double its headcount this year.

Founded by former Stanford PhD student Simon Kalouche, the system utilizes deep imitation learning – a popular concept in robotics research that helps systems map and improve through imitation.

“Instead of letting it sit in a lab for five years and creating this robotic application before it’s finally ready to deploy to the real world, we deployed it today,” says Kalouche. “It’s not fully autonomous – it’s autonomous maybe 90, 95% of the time. The other 5–10% is assisted by remote human operators, but it’s reliable on day one, and it’s reliable on day 10000.”

EA, Ubisoft, Warner Bros, and more explore how artificial intelligence innovations will lead to more believable open worlds and personal adventures within them.

Most NPCs simply patrol a specific area until the player interacts with them, at which point they try to become a more challenging target to hit. That’s fine in confined spaces, but in big worlds where NPCs have the freedom to roam, it just doesn’t scale. More advanced AI techniques such as machine learning – which uses algorithms to study incoming data, interpret it, and decide on a course of action in real-time – give AI agents much more flexibility and freedom. But developing them is time-consuming, computationally expensive, and a risk because it makes NPCs less predictable – hence the Assassin’s Creed Valhalla stalking situation.

However, as open-world and narrative-based games become more complex, and as modern PCs and consoles display ever more authentic and detailed environments, the need for more advanced AI techniques is growing. It’s going to be weird and alienating to be thrust into an almost photorealistic world filled with intricate systems and narrative possibilities, only to discover that non-player characters still act like soulless robots.

Continue reading “More human than human? How the future of video game AI will change the way that we play” »

We used to think the Milky Way was the only galaxy, but with one simple law, Henrietta Swan Leavitt changed that forever – and she didn’t even need a telescope.

Honeywell’s H1 quantum system has reached a record-high quantum volume.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=NOujMHH3LAU

Holograms deliver an exceptional representation of 3D world around us. Plus, they’re beautiful. (Go ahead — check out the holographic dove on your Visa card.) Holograms offer a shifting perspective based on the viewer’s position, and they allow the eye to adjust focal depth to alternately focus on foreground and background.

Researchers have long sought to make computer-generated holograms, but the process has traditionally required a supercomputer to churn through physics simulations, which is time-consuming and can yield less-than-photorealistic results. Now, MIT researchers have developed a new way to produce holograms almost instantly — and the deep learning-based method is so efficient that it can run on a laptop in the blink of an eye, the researchers say.

For decades, researchers assumed the cosmic rays that regularly bombard Earth from the far reaches of the galaxy are born when stars go supernova — when they grow too massive to support the fusion occurring at their cores and explode.

Those gigantic explosions do indeed propel atomic particles at the speed of light great distances. However, new research suggests even supernovae — capable of devouring entire solar systems — are not strong enough to imbue particles with the sustained energies needed to reach petaelectronvolts (PeVs), the amount of kinetic energy attained by very high-energy cosmic rays.

Continue reading “Highest-Energy Cosmic Rays Detected in Star Clusters – Energies Beyond Those From Supernovae Capable of Devouring Entire Solar Systems” »