During the pandemic, the National Museum of Mathematics found new ways to build human connections.
Satellite delivery isn’t exactly cutting-edge tech these days. Lately it feels like SpaceX is doing that every week. Liftoff usually starts with a ground-based rocket, which is expensive and time-consuming to launch. Aevum believes its massive Ravn X drone can do it better, for less money.
At 80 feet long and 18 feet tall, the Ravn X is the world’s biggest drone, says Aevum. Driven by Aevum’s proprietary software, the drone would fly itself to a specified altitude, where it would launch a rocket to deliver a payload of small satellites to low Earth orbit. Click the video above for more on the delivery process.
The launch system is 70% reusable, Aevum said. CEO Jay Skylus hopes to get that close to 100%.
A team of researchers at the University of Georgia has created a backpack equipped with AI gear aimed at replacing guide dogs and canes for the blind. Intel has published a News Byte describing the new technology on their Newsroom page.
Technology to help blind people get around in public has been improving in recent years, thanks mostly to smartphone apps. But such apps, the team notes, are not sufficient given the technology available. To make a better assistance system, the group designed an AI system that could be placed in a backpack and worn by a blind person to give them much better clues about their environment.
The backpack holds a smart AI system running on a laptop, and is fitted with OAK-D cameras (which, in addition to providing obstacle information, can also provide depth information) hidden in a vest and also in a waist pack. The cameras run Intel’s Movidius VPU and are programmed using the OpenVINO toolkit. The waist pack also holds batteries for the system. The AI system was trained to recognize objects a sighted pedestrian would see when walking around in a town or city, such as cars, bicycles, other pedestrians or even overhanging tree limbs.
Nitinol, a “memory” metal that can remember its original shape when heated, is an industrial gem that will play a key role in NASA’s next mission to Mars.
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AI makes edge and IoT smarter
Posted in robotics/AI, security
Implementing artificial intelligence at the edge can not only reduce latency and networking costs but also improve security and unlock the power of distributed intelligence.
(From left) Expedition 65 crew members Pyotr Dubrov, Oleg Novitskiy and Mark Vande Hei, pose for a photo during Soyuz qualification exams in Moscow.
The Expedition 64 crew continued researching how microgravity affects biology aboard the International Space Station today. The orbital residents also conducted vein and eye checks and prepared for three new crew members due in early April.
NASA Flight Engineer Shannon Walker joined Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov for vein and eye scans on Thursday. Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi led the effort scanning veins in the trio’s neck, clavicle and shoulder areas using the Ultrasound 2 device in the morning. In the afternoon, Noguchi examined Walker’s eyes using the orbiting lab’s optical coherence tomography gear.
Walker also assisted fellow Flight Engineer Kate Rubins of NASA setting up samples of tiny worms for viewing in a microscope. Rubins captured video of the microscopic worms wriggling around to learn how microgravity affects genetic expression and muscle function. Insights from the Micro-16 study may benefit human health on and off the Earth.
Actor William Shatner celebrates his 90th birthday by preserving his memories in an AI video file that will be made publicly available in May.
The mayor of Oakland, California, on Tuesday announced a privately funded program that will give low-income families of color in the city $500 per month with no rules on how they can spend it.
The program is the latest experiment with a “guaranteed income,” the idea that giving low-income individuals a regular, monthly stipend helps ease the stresses of poverty and results in better health and upward economic mobility.”
Alan DeRossett.
After two years successfully testing Oakland, California now will expand its basic income to low income residents.
After winning a state science fair and becoming a finalist in a national competition, Dasia Taylor now has her sights set on a patent.
LOS ANGELES — UCLA neuroscientists reported Monday that they have transferred a memory from one animal to another via injections of RNA, a startling result that challenges the widely held view of where and how memories are stored in the brain.
The finding from the lab of David Glanzman hints at the potential for new RNA-based treatments to one day restore lost memories and, if correct, could shake up the field of memory and learning.
“It’s pretty shocking,” said Dr. Todd Sacktor, a neurologist and memory researcher at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. “The big picture is we’re working out the basic alphabet of how memories are stored for the first time.” He was not involved in the research, which was published in eNeuro, the online journal of the Society for Neuroscience.
Many scientists are expected to view the research more cautiously. The work is in snails, animals that have proven a powerful model organism for neuroscience but whose simple brains work far differently than those of humans. The experiments will need to be replicated, including in animals with more complex brains. And the results fly in the face of a massive amount of evidence supporting the deeply entrenched idea that memories are stored through changes in the strength of connections, or synapses, between neurons.