Lifeboat Foundation

U.S. apparel chain Gap is speeding up its rollout of warehouse robots for assembling online orders so it can limit human contact during the coronavirus pandemic, the company told Reuters.

Gap reached a deal early this year to more than triple the number of item-picking robots it uses to 106 by the fall. Then the pandemic struck North America, forcing the company to close all its stores in the region, including those of Banana Republic, Old Navy and other brands. Meanwhile, its warehouses faced more web orders and fewer staff to fulfill them because of social distancing rules Gap had put in place.

“We could not get as many people in our distribution centers safely,” said Kevin Kuntz, Gap’s senior vice president of global logistics fulfillment. So he called up Kindred AI, the vendor that sells the machines, to ask: “Can you get them here earlier?”

The launch of the billionaire’s vessel will be the first manned US flight since shuttle missions were shut down nine years ago.

In our efforts to domesticate Artificial Intelligence and prepare people for future jobs in Africa. We are glad to announce our first Robotic boot camp tagged Introduction to Robotics 1.0. The Artificial Intelligence Hub is training young people between the ages 7 and 20 on Robotic Engineering. Take advantage of this opportunity to learn and be equipped with future skills. Register with the link provided below. https://forms.gle/yTx2obDkSQ5ULTLM9

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Our civilization is made up of countless individuals and pieces of material technology, which come together to form institutions and interdependent systems of logistics, development and production. These institutions and systems then store the knowledge required for their own renewal and growth.

Continue reading “Opting In for a Positive Future — Allison Duettmann” »

Mars’ early surface likely resembled a mud stew of water and volcanic-like processes, say researchers.

A large number of mountain cones in Mars’ northern hemisphere are likely the product of ancient mud volcanoes, says a new paper.

Some of these guys could live more than 500 years…

At the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, team members are building the Coronagraph Instrument for the spacecraft and contributing to the mission’s science goals.

NASA is naming its next-generation space telescope currently under development, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST), in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer, who paved the way for space telescopes focused on the broader universe.

Continue reading “Next-Generation NASA Space Telescope Named for ‘Mother of Hubble’ Nancy Grace Roman” »

Acoustofluidics is the fusion of acoustics and fluid mechanics which provides a contact-free, rapid and effective manipulation of fluids and suspended particles. The applied acoustic wave can produce a non-zero time-averaged pressure field to exert an acoustic radiation force on particles suspended in a microfluidic channel. However, for particles below a critical size the viscous drag force dominates over the acoustic radiation forces due to the strong acoustic streaming resulting from the acoustic energy dissipation in the fluid. Thus, particle size acts as a key limiting factor in the use of acoustic fields for manipulation and sorting applications that would otherwise be useful in fields including sensing (plasmonic nanoparticles), biology (small bioparticle enrichment) and optics (micro-lenses).

Although acoustic nanoparticle manipulation has been demonstrated, terahertz (THz) or gigahertz (GHz) frequencies are usually required to create nanoscale wavelengths, in which the fabrication of very small feature sizes of SAW transducers is challenging. In addition, single nanoparticle positioning into discrete traps has not been demonstrated in nanoacoustic fields. Hence, there is a pressing need to develop a fast, precise and scalable method for individual nano- and submicron scale manipulation in acoustic fields using megahertz (MHz) frequencies.

An interdisciplinary research team led by Associate Professor Ye Ai from Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and Dr. David Collins from University of Melbourne, in collaboration with Professor Jongyoon Han from MIT and Associate Professor Hong Yee Low from SUTD, developed a novel acoustofluidic technology for massively multiplexed submicron particle trapping within nanocavities at the single-particle level.

Using two flat-top diamonds and a lot of pressure, scientists have forced a magnetic crystal into a spin liquid state, which may lead to insights into high-temperature superconductivity and quantum computing.

It sounds like a riddle: What do you get if you take two small diamonds, put a small magnetic crystal between them and squeeze them together very slowly?

The answer is a magnetic liquid, which seems counterintuitive. Liquids become solids under pressure, but not generally the other way around. But this unusual pivotal discovery, unveiled by a team of researchers working at the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science User Facility at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, may provide scientists with new insight into high-temperature superconductivity and quantum computing.