Ascendance Flight Technologies, based in Toulouse, France, has unveiled the striking design of its new hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft, ATEA, according to a press release.
The ATEA is a five-seat hybrid-electric aircraft that can perform vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL). The concept stands out from the rest since it has a tandem wing configuration with rotors incorporated into them, giving it a strikingly unusual appearance.
The concept is the result of three years of research and development, and it’s called the “tomorrow’s aircraft” since it reflects the company’s goal of assisting in the decarbonization of aviation: The aircraft aims to reduce carbon emissions by 80 percent compared to traditional helicopter designs.
On December 2nd, we brought you the news that Microsoft Research developed a new method that allows it to read and write much faster in DNA format. In the last month or so, three other new developments have popped up in DNA storage.
Scientists at the Center for Synthetic Biology from the Northwestern University, Illinois, have revealed a demonstration on DNA storage encoding that manages to fulfill three bits of information in an hour, according to Technology Networks. This new method “relies on an enzymatic system.”
Then, a team from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has devised a microchip that can significantly improve the speed at which data can be written in DNA form, according to the BBC. The team expects a 100x improvement over current technologies for DNA storage.
Finally, a team in China at Southeast University in the country’s Jiangsu Provincemade has been reported to be engineering a new process that could produce the first mass-market DNA storage device, according to TechRadar.
The government wants to have a “search engine for faces,” but the experts are wary.
If you haven’t heard of Clearview AI then you should, as the company’s facial recognition technology has likely already spotted you. Clearview’s software goes through public images from social media to help law enforcement identify wanted individuals by matching their public images with those found in government databases or surveillance footage. Now, the company just got permission to be awarded a U.S. federal patent, according to Politico.
The firm is not without its fair share of controversy. It has long faced opposition from privacy advocates and civil rights groups. The first says it makes use of citizens’ faces without their knowledge or consent. The latter warns of the fact that facial recognition technology is notoriously prone to racially-based errors, misidentifying women and minorities much more frequently than white men and sometimes leading to false arrests.
In addition to our film, Gitcoin is also hosting several different longevity projects via Lifespan.io / Lifespan Extension Advocacy Foundation, all of which you can support by clicking below 🧬
Projects put forth by the Lifespan Extension Advocacy Foundation (LEAF) — aka Lifespan.io — and projects fiscally sponsored by LEAF.
Combining knowledge of chemistry, physics, biology, and engineering, scientists from McGill University develop a biomaterial tough enough to repair the heart, muscles, and vocal cords, representing a major advance in regenerative medicine.
“People recovering from heart damage often face a long and tricky journey. Healing is challenging because of the constant movement tissues must withstand as the heart beats. The same is true for vocal cords. Until now there was no injectable material strong enough for the job,” says Guangyu Bao, a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at McGill University.
The team, led by Professor Luc Mongeau and Assistant Professor Jianyu Li, developed a new injectable hydrogel for wound repair. The hydrogel is a type of biomaterial that provides room for cells to live and grow. Once injected into the body, the biomaterial forms a stable, porous structure allowing live cells to grow or pass through to repair the injured organs.
Google’s Deepmind is working on a rather crazy and unique plan to surpass OpenAI’s biggest and best Artificial Intelligence Model within the next few months. In a new paper, AI researchers at DeepMind present a new technique to improve the capacity of reinforcement learning agents to cooperate with humans at different skill levels. Accepted at the annual NeurIPS conference, the technique is called Fictitious Co-Play (FCP) and it does not require human-generated data to train the RL agents. – TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 How Deepmind is ahead of OpenAI 01:45 Why this AI is similar to our Brain. 04:17 New AI Features and Abilities. 06:36 How successful was this AI? 08:58 The Future of AI 10:13 Last Words. – #ai #agi #deepmind
Dr Ken Libbrecht is the world expert on snowflakes, designer of custom snowflakes, snowflake consultant for the movie Frozen — his photos appear on postage stamps all over the world. This video is sponsored by Brilliant. The first 200 people to sign up via https://brilliant.org/veritasium get 20% off a yearly subscription.
Thanks to Dr Ken Libbrecht for showing us how to grow designer snowflakes. Obviously, this video would not have been possible without his help and his expertise. His website is full of information about snowflakes http://snowcrystals.com. His new book is also available to purchase from here — https://ve42.co/SnowCrystalsBook.
▀▀▀ References: Libbrecht, K. G. (2019). A Quantitative Physical Model of the Snow Crystal Morphology Diagram. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.09067. — https://ve42.co/Libbrecht2019
▀▀▀ Special thanks to Patreon supporters: Luis Felipe, Anton Ragin, Paul Peijzel, S S, Benedikt Heinen, Diffbot, Micah Mangione, Juan Benet, Ruslan Khroma, Richard Sundvall, Lee Redden, Sam Lutfi, MJP, Gnare, Nick DiCandilo, Dave Kircher, Edward Larsen, Burt Humburg, Blake Byers, Dumky, Mike Tung, Evgeny Skvortsov, Meekay, Ismail Öncü Usta, Crated Comments, Anna, Mac Malkawi, Michael Schneider, Oleksii Leonov, Jim Osmun, Tyson McDowell, Ludovic Robillard, Jim buckmaster, fanime96, Ruslan Khroma, Robert Blum, Vincent, Marinus Kuivenhoven, Alfred Wallace, Arjun Chakroborty, Joar Wandborg, Clayton Greenwell, Michael Krugman, Cy ‘kkm’ K’Nelson, Ron Neal.
Written by Derek Muller. Filmed by Derek Muller, Raquel Nuno, Trenton Oliver and Emily Zhang. Edited by Trenton Oliver. Animations by Ivàn Tello and Trenton Oliver. Additional video supplied by Getty Images. Music from Epidemic Sound. Produced by Derek Muller, Petr Lebedev and Emily Zhang.
