Lifeboat Foundation

Three New Jersey teens brought home two international awards for their artificial intelligence robot, who competed at the International Robocup Junior Championship in Sydney, Australia earlier this month.

The team — made up of high school juniors Julian Lee of Livingston and Jeffrey Cheng from Bridgewater, and senior Alexander Lisenko, also of Bridgewater — won the third place World Title for Individual Team Tournament, and the Judge’s Award for Best Rescue Engineering Strategy in the Rescue Maze League.

The trio belongs to Storming Robots, a New Jersey-based Robotics Learning Lab, and competed against teams of 14- to 19-year-olds from around the world in the July 4–9 contest.

If your interest lies with robotics there are a multitude of different platforms for you to build. [Teemu Laurila] was frustrated with what was on offer, so designed his own with four-wheel double wishbone suspension and mecanum wheels for maximum flexibility.

It’s a design that has been through multiple revisions since its first iteration in 2015, and along the way it’s clear some thought has gone into it. That double wishbone suspension features an angle for a high ground clearance, and is fully sprung. Drive comes from small motor/gearboxes at each axle. The chassis meanwhile has plenty of space for a single-board computer, and has been specifically designed with the BeagleBone Black in mind.

This build isn’t fully DIY, as the mecanum wheels appear to be off-the-shelf items, but the rest of the project makes up for this. If you need to make your own, it’s hardly as though there aren’t any projects from which you can borrow components.

The Navy sent its expeditionary fast transport ship USNS Spearhead to sea to experiment with a number of cutting-edge technologies last week, including MartinUAV’s novel V-Bat drone. V-Bat is capable of infrastructure-independent vertical takeoff and landings while also retaining the high efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft for long-endurance missions. Seeing as it can be launched and recovered in a nine square meter area and even in dense urban terrain, as well as on the tight decks of ships, the drone could have a lot of applications in the military, law enforcement/first responder, industrial, and environmental monitoring sectors.

France’s “Mastering Space” plan calls for an active defense against hostile satellites and new space-based surveillance capabilities to spot threats.

Gene editing is advancing at a faster pace than most of us can keep up with. One significant recent announcement was gene editing tool CRISPR’s application to non-genetic diseases thanks to a new ability to edit single letters in RNA.

Even as CRISPR reaches milestones like this, scientists continue to find new uses for it to treat genetic conditions. The next one that will hit clinics is a CRISPR treatment for a form of blindness called Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA).

Having been approved by the FDA in December, the treatment will be the first of its kind to be trialed in the US.

Think that robots need to be the size of a dog or even a full-grown person to be exciting? Not so, as the fast-developing field of micro-robotics demonstrates. As it turns out, in some cases the world’s most innovative robots may even be too small for many of us to see.

Scientists at work in laboratory. Photo: Public domain via Wikicommons.

CTech – When chemistry Nobel laureate Michael Levitt met his wife two years ago, he didn’t know it would lead to a wonderful friendship with a young Israeli scientist. When Israeli scientist Shahar Barbash decided to found a startup with the aim of cutting down the time needed to develop new medicine, he didn’t know that a friend’s wedding would help him score a meeting with a man many want to meet but few do. But Levitt’s wife is an old friend of Barbash’s parents, and the rest, as they say, is history.

One of the joys of being an old scientist is to encourage extraordinary young ones, Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist and a professor at Stanford University since 1987, said in a recent interview with Calcalist. He might have met Barbash because his wife knew his family, but that is not enough to make him go into business with someone, Levitt said. “I got on board because his vision excited me, even though I thought it would be very hard to realize.”

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Want to live a healthier, longer life? Try taking more prebiotics — also, don’t eat sometimes.

In this video, bestselling author Dave Asprey explains.

I am aware of many “Small Studies” that produced undeniable results.

Tucked away in 7,000 acres of beautiful Wiltshire countryside lies one of Britain’s most infamous scientific establishments. Porton Down, founded in 1916, is the oldest chemical warfare research installation in the world. The tight secrecy which has surrounded the establishment for decades has fed the growth of all sorts of myths and rumours about its experiments. One Whitehall official once remarked that Porton had an image of “a sinister and nefarious establishment”.

The Porton experiments on humans have attracted a good deal of criticism. It is, for example, alleged that the human “guinea pigs’ — drawn from the armed forces and supposedly all volunteers — were duped into taking part in the tests. There are still concerns that the tests have damaged the long-term health of the human subjects.

Continue reading “The past Porton Down can’t hide” »