Lifeboat Foundation

Four-legged animals are innately capable of agile and adaptable movements, which allow them to move on a wide range of terrains. Over the past decades, roboticists worldwide have been trying to effectively reproduce these movements in quadrupedal (i.e., four-legged) robots.

Computational models trained via reinforcement learning have been found to achieve particularly promising results for enabling agile locomotion in quadruped robots. However, these models are typically trained in simulated environments and their performance sometimes declines when they are applied to real robots in real-world environments.

Alternative approaches to realizing agile quadruped locomotion utilize footage of moving animals collected by motion sensors and cameras as demonstrations, which are used to train controllers (i.e., algorithms for executing the movements of robots). This approach, dubbed “imitation learning,” was found to enable the reproduction of animal-like movements in some quadrupedal robots.

BUSAN, South Korea — A NASA smallsat mission to Mars remains on track to launch this fall, although without a specific launch date yet.

In a presentation at the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) 45^th Scientific Assembly here July 15, Rob Lillis of the University of California Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory said the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission was still scheduled to launch within a few months on the inaugural flight of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

ESCAPADE features two identical smallsats, called Blue and Gold, that will go into orbit around Mars. The spacecraft carry instruments to study the planet’s magnetosphere and its interaction with the solar wind.

Joe Engle, who had the distinction of being the only astronaut to pilot an X-15 aircraft and a space shuttle, died in Houston on Wednesday, July 10. He was 91 years old.

NASA announced the death of Engle, a retired U.S. Air Force major general. The space agency said in its news release that Engle was the last surviving X-15 pilot.

The Kansas native graduated in 1955 from the University of Kansas, Lawrence, with an aeronautical engineering degree. According to his NASA biography, he “received his commission through the Air Force ROTC program at the University of Kansas and entered USAF flying school in March 1956.”

There are several ways the industry is addressing this energy crisis. First, computing hardware has gotten substantially more energy efficient over the years in terms of the operations executed per watt consumed. Data centers’ power use efficiency, a metric that shows the ratio of power consumed for computing versus for cooling and other infrastructure, has been reduced to 1.5 on average, and even to an impressive 1.2 in advanced facilities. New data centers have more efficient cooling by using water cooling and external cool air when it’s available.

Unfortunately, efficiency alone is not going to solve the sustainability problem. In fact, Jevons paradox points to how efficiency may result in an increase of energy consumption in the longer run. In addition, hardware efficiency gains have slowed down substantially, as the industry has hit the limits of chip technology scaling.

Zafeirios Fountas, Martin A Benfeghoul, Adnan Oomerjee, Fenia Christopoulou, Gerasimos Lampouras, Haitham Bou-Ammar, Jun Wang Huawei’s Noah’s Ark Lab London & University College London.

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Small-angle scattering (SAS) is a powerful technique for studying nanoscale samples. So far, however, its use in research has been held back by its inability to operate without some prior knowledge of a sample’s chemical composition. Through new research published in The European Physical Journal E, Eugen Anitas at the Bogoliubov Laboratory of Theoretical Physics in Dubna, Russia, presents a more advanced approach, which integrates SAS with machine learning algorithms.

Prussian blue (PB), a well-known pigment used to dye jeans, has been recognized as an emerging material for next-generation batteries. A team of researchers, led by Professor Hyun-Wook Lee in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST has made a significant breakthrough in the development of low-cost, high-performance lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) using PB, leading to significantly reduced battery prices.

How to levitate a magnet with no batteries, external power, or trickery. It floats on pure SCIENCE!Below are some links you can use to purchase bismuth and…

Bismuth being used this way can lead to flying cars or spacecraft face_with_colon_three

The nuclear magnetic resonance in bismuth metal powder has been observed from 9 to 19 Mc/sec at 4.2\ifmmode^\circ\else\textdegree\fi{}K. The isotropic and anisotropic Knight shifts and the quadrupole coupling constant have been determined as (−1.25\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}.30)%, (−0.3\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}0.3)%, and 2.10\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}.05 Mc/sec, respectively. The intrinsic linewidth was found to be 130\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}20 kc/sec. A technique is developed to take into consideration the broadening of the observed lines due to the combined effects of the magnetic dipolar broadening and the width due to the quadrupolar splitting of each line.