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The UK government on Wednesday became the first country to announce it will regulate the use of self-driving vehicles at slow speeds on motorways, with the first such cars possibly appearing on public roads as soon as this year.

Britain’s transport ministry said it was working on specific wording to update the country’s highway code for the safe use of self-driving vehicle systems, starting with Automated Lane Keeping Systems (ALKS) — which use sensors and software to keep cars within a lane, allowing them to accelerate and brake without driver input.

The government said the use of ALKS would be restricted to motorways, at speeds under 37 miles (60 km) per hour.

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Intercepting record numbers of Russian aircraft off of North America’s west coast has stretched Air Force units thin, a top service official in Alaska said Wednesday.

“We have certainly seen an increase in Russian activity. We intercepted over 60 aircraft last year. … We monitor more than that,” Lt. Gen. David Krumm said from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, during an online forum hosted by the Air Force Association.

That’s the most action the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone — a region spanning 200 nautical miles that reaches past U.S. territory and into international airspace — has seen since the Soviet Union fell in 1991. In comparison, the Anchorage Daily News reported in 2015 that the ADIZ averaged about 10 incursions by Russian aircraft each year, like Tu-95 Bear bombers, anti-submarine aircraft, and intelligence-collection planes.

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O,.o What a cure for cancer! o.o

Researchers are leveraging the messenger RNA (mRNA) technology used to develop the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines for possible treatments for a range of other diseases, including HIV and cancer.

This has long been thought possible with mRNA technology, but infectious diseases were something of the low-hanging fruit, and the COVID-19 pandemic drove the innovations.

MRNA technology is a way of exploiting the body’s own genetic blueprints. Traditional vaccines used either living or dead viruses to train the immune system to recognize viruses the next time they encounter them. The COVID-19 mRNA vaccines instead use the genetic code for a piece of the virus—the spike protein—and cause the body to generate the spike proteins, which trains the immune system to recognize the virus.

Continue reading “MRNA Tech Used in COVID-19 Vaccines Could be Used to Cure HIV, Cancer and More” | >

Graphene excels at removing contaminants from water, but it’s not yet a commercially viable use of the wonder material.

That could be changing.

In a recent study, University at Buffalo engineers report a new process of 3D printing aerogels that they say overcomes two key hurdles—scalability and creating a version of the material that’s stable enough for repeated use—for treatment.

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UCLA materials scientists have developed a class of optical material that controls how heat radiation is directed from an object. Similar to the way overlapping blinds direct the angle of visible light coming through a window, the breakthrough involves utilizing a special class of materials that manipulates how thermal radiation travels through such materials.

Recently published in Science, the advance could be used to improve the efficiency of energy-conversion systems and enable more effective sensing and detection technologies.

“Our goal was to show that we could effectively beam thermal —the all objects emanate as —over broad wavelengths to the same direction,” said study leader Aaswath Raman, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “This advance offers new capabilities for a range of technologies that depend on the ability to control the flows of heat in the form of thermal radiation. This includes imaging and sensing applications that rely on thermal sources or detecting them, as well as energy applications such as , waste heat recovery and radiative cooling, where restricting the directionality of heat flow can improve performance. ”.

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It points out that to measure down to the synapse the energy needed would melt the tissue of your head.

Investigate the possibility of scanning the human brain and uploading our minds and consciousness to a digital world.

Imagine a future where nobody dies— instead, our minds are uploaded to a digital world. There they could live on in a realistic, simulated environment with avatar bodies, calling in and contributing to the biological world. Mind-uploading has powerful appeal— but what would it actually take to scan a person’s brain and upload their mind? Michael S. A. Graziano explores the challenges.

Continue reading “How close are we to uploading our minds? — Michael S.A. Graziano” | >