Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Boston Dynamics – famous for robots like Atlas, BigDog, Handle, and Spot – has now revealed Stretch, its new box-moving robot designed to support the growing demand for flexible automation solutions in the logistics industry. This debut marks the company’s official entrance into warehouse automation, a fast-growing market fuelled by increased demand in e-commerce.

Stretch is Boston Dynamics’ first commercial robot specifically designed for warehouse facilities and distribution centres, of which there are more than 150000 around the world. The multi-purpose, mobile robot is designed to tackle a number of tasks where rapid box moving is required, first starting with truck unloading and later expanding into order building. Stretch’s technology builds upon Boston Dynamics’ decades of advancements in robotics to create a flexible, easily-integrated solution that can work in any warehouse to increase the flow of goods, improve employee safety in physically difficult tasks and lower expensive automation costs.

Read more | >

Engineers at Duke University have developed an electronics-free, entirely soft robot shaped like a dragonfly that can skim across water and react to environmental conditions such as pH, temperature or the presence of oil. The proof-of-principle demonstration could be the precursor to more advanced, autonomous, long-range environmental sentinels for monitoring a wide range of potential telltale signs of problems.

The soft robot is described online March 25 in the journal Advanced Intelligent Systems.

Soft robots are a growing trend in the industry due to their versatility. Soft parts can handle delicate objects such as biological tissues that metal or ceramic components would damage. Soft bodies can help robots float or squeeze into tight spaces where rigid frames would get stuck.

Read more | >

https://youtube.com/watch?v=m3Hm0PGQb0I&feature=share

On March 28, 2021 NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity took vertical position (upright) under Perseverance Rover at Helipad. Helicopter release system unlocked yesterday. Today ingenuity made one more step to be deployed from Perseverance. As for now, NASA’s rover prepares to unlock Helicopter’s landing legs and put it on the Mars’s surface. Flight scheme is known. Solar panel charges Lithium-ion batteries, providing enough energy for one 90-second flight per Martian day (~350 Watts of average power during flight). Atmospheric weather relates to conditions such as air density at flight time, which affects the thrust that can be produced by the rotor and could result in adjustments of flight parameters. Temperature and wind profiles during the day are used to estimate the energy required to operate heaters. Winds at the time of the flight are tied to risks associated with takeoff, landing, and flying in high winds or very gusty conditions. All the things that a pilot on Earth would care about too!

Credit: nasa.gov, NASA/JPL-Caltech, NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

Source for NASA’s Mars Helicopter Ingenuity page: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/helicopter/

#mars #helicopter #perseverance

Continue reading “Mars Helicopter Ingenuity takes vertical position under Perseverance Rover” | >

“The results were surprising, but convincing, says Yannick Pauchet, a molecular entomologist also at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology. ” According to the data they provide, horizontal gene transfer is the most parsimonious explanation,” he says.

But how the whitefly managed to swipe a plant gene is unclear. One possibility, says Turlings, is that a virus served as an intermediate, shuttling genetic material from a plant into the whitefly genome.

As researchers s… See More.

Discovery that a whitefly uses a stolen plant gene to elude its host’s defences may offer a route to new pest-control strategies.

Continue reading “First known gene transfer from plant to insect identified” | >

COVID-21 is the product of all these changes in aggregate. It’s the disease as it will be experienced in the months and years to come: with new variants of the virus, new public policies and health behaviors, various degrees of immune memory, and—most important—a cavalcade of new vaccines.

One-quarter of all Americans have now received at least one shot, and that number is racing up. This month, New Yorkers lined up outside Yankee Stadium throughout the night at a makeshift 24/7 vaccination site, until the supply ran out. “If we open 3000 appointments, they will immediately fill,” says Ramon Tallaj, a physician who oversees clinical care in underserved communities across New York City. Demand seems to be growing. If there were sufficient supply, Tallaj told me, his team could be giving out 40000 doses every day. And this should happen soon; the White House says that shortages will end in the coming weeks.

The vaccination effort is sure to change the nature of COVID in unexpected ways. The habitat for the virus is changing: It may still stick in the nasal passages of an immunized person, but it shouldn’t continue on its way into the lungs, much less the toes. The key question is just how long this protection will last, especially against a rapidly mutating virus. Clinical trials have shown the vaccines to be fantastic at preventing serious illness so far, but haven’t yet been able to observe how protection might dissipate over long periods.

Read more | >

And unexpectedly, Covid-19 has proved to be the catalyst. “What the pandemic has done is accelerate the adoption of genomics into infectious disease by several years,” says deSouza, the Illumina chief executive. He also told me he believes that the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of genomics into society more broadly — suggesting that quietly, in the midst of chaos and a global catastrophe, the age of cheap, rapid sequencing has arrived.

Ultrafast and ultracheap sequencing could reshape the future of health care.

Read more | >

Post-mortem changes may shed light on important brain studies.

In the hours after we die, certain cells in the human brain are still active. Some cells even increase their activity and grow to gargantuan proportions, according to new research from the University of Illinois Chicago.

In a newly published study in the journal Scientific Reports, the UIC researchers analyzed gene expression in fresh brain tissue — which was collected during routine brain surgery — at multiple times after removal to simulate the post-mortem interval and death. They found that gene expression in some cells actually increased after death.

Read more | >

“The Office of Racial Equity at the San Francisco Human Rights Commission will handle the program and artists from ”historically marginalized communities” are encouraged to apply.

Other basic income programs under development in San Francisco include funds for emergency medical technicians and Black and Pacific Islander expectant mothers, FOX 2 reported.

You could call it art for art’s sake — plus $1000 a month.

San Francisco plans to start paying 130 local artists $1000 a month starting in May through the fall in a pilot program announced on Thursday.

Continue reading “San Francisco to pay ‘essential’ artists

“The Office of Racial Equity at the San Francisco Human Rights Commission will handle the program and artists from ”historically marginalized communities” are encouraged to apply.

Other basic income programs under development in San Francisco include funds for emergency medical technicians and Black and Pacific Islander expectant mothers, FOX 2 reported.

You could call it art for art’s sake — plus $1000 a month.

San Francisco plans to start paying 130 local artists $1000 a month starting in May through the fall in a pilot program announced on Thursday.,000 per month basic income in pilot program amid pandemic” | >