The Italian sports-car company teamed up with MIT researchers to produce custom supercapacitors, an alternative to lithium batteries.
At the Department of Energy Manufacturing Demonstration Facility at ORNL, this part for a scaled-down prototype of a reactor was produced for industry partner Kairos Power. Credit: Kairos Power.
On Saturday, May 30 at 3:22pm, for a glorious moment we were given a glimpse of the future of space travel. The successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 reorbital rocket system carrying the Crew Dragon to the International Space Station was historic in successfully sending NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley within a privately developed spacecraft. The mission also revealed the next generation of astronautical wear, the SpaceX spacesuit.
Alongside the amount of life-supporting technologies tethered from seat to suit via “umbilical cord”, each spacesuit is bespoke to its wearers for optimal safety and comfort, as described by SpaceX spacesuits and crew equipment manager, Chris Trigg:
We’ve always had a soft spot for supernumerary robotic limbs here at The Verge, but this latest example of the genre is one of the most impressive we’ve seen to date. Designed by researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada, it’s a hydraulic arm that sits on the wearer’s hip and uses a three-fingered manipulator to carry out a range of tasks.
Someday, we might be able to carry around tiny, AI brains that can function without supercomputers, the internet or the cloud. Researchers from MIT say their new “brain-on-a-chip” design gets us one step closer to that future. A group of engineers put tens of thousands of artificial brain synapses, known as memristors, on a single chip that’s smaller than a piece of confetti.
In a paper published in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers explain how their brain-inspired chip was able to remember and recreate a gray-scale image of Captain America’s shield and reliably alter an image of MIT’s Killian Court by sharpening and blurring it. Those tests may seem minor, but the team believes the chip design could advance the development of small, portable AI devices and carry out complex computational tasks that today only supercomputers are capable of.
“So far, artificial synapse networks exist as software. We’re trying to build real neural network hardware for portable artificial intelligence systems,” says Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Imagine connecting a neuromorphic device to a camera on your car, and having it recognize lights and objects and make a decision immediately, without having to connect to the internet.”
Lipitoids, which self-assemble with DNA and RNA, can serve as cellular delivery systems for antiviral therapies that could prevent COVID-19 and other coronavirus infections. Credit: Illustration courtesy of R.N. Zuckermann.
Over the years I have been covering electric vehicles, I’ve seen several companies attempt to add value to EVs by using swappable battery packs.
The idea is that if charging takes longer than refueling a tank of gas, we could just swap a battery pack for a fully charged one.
A startup called Better Place built its entire business model around it and went bankrupt.
Mentions aging!
Obesity affects more than 40 percent of adults in the United States and 13 percent of the global population. With obesity comes a variety of other interconnected diseases including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and fatty liver disease, which makes the disease one of the most difficult—and most crucial—to treat.
“Obesity is the biggest health problem in the United States. But, it is hard for people to lose weight and keep it off; being on a diet can be so difficult. So, a pharmacological approach, or a drug, could help out and would be beneficial for all of society,” said Webster Santos, professor of chemistry and the Cliff and Agnes Lilly Faculty Fellow of Drug Discovery in the College of Science at Virginia Tech.
Santos and his colleagues have recently identified a small mitochondrial uncoupler, named BAM15, that decreases the body fat mass of mice without affecting food intake and muscle mass or increasing body temperature. Additionally, the molecule decreases insulin resistance and has beneficial effects on oxidative stress and inflammation.
Persistently engaging in negative thinking patterns may raise the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, finds a new UCL-led study.
In the study of people aged over 55, published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia, researchers found ‘repetitive negative thinking’ (RNT) is linked to subsequent cognitive decline as well as the deposition of harmful brain proteins linked to Alzheimer’s.
The researchers say RNT should now be further investigated as a potential risk factor for dementia, and psychological tools, such as mindfulness or meditation, should be studied to see if these could reduce dementia risk.