Lifeboat Foundation

Spot is an agile mobile robot that you can customize for a wide range of applications. The base platform provides rough-terrain mobility, 360 degree obstacle avoidance, and various levels of navigation, remote control and autonomy. You can customize Spot by adding specialized sensors, software and other payloads. Early customers are already testing Spot to monitor construction sites, provide remote inspection at gas, oil and power installations, and in public safety. Spot is in mass production and currently shipping to select early adopters. Find out more about using Spot in your application by visiting us at https://www.BostonDynamics.com/Spot.

A molten salt reactor (MSR) is a type of nuclear reactor that uses liquid fuel instead of the solid fuel rods used in conventional nuclear reactors. Using liquid fuel provides many advantages in safety and simplicity of design.

The figure above shows one type of MSR design. As shown towards the left, the reactor contains “fuel salt”, which is fuel (such as uranium-235) dissolved in a mixture of molten fluoride salts. After a fission chain reaction starts in the reactor, the rate of fission stabilizes once the fuel salt reaches around 700 degrees Celsius. If the reactor gets hotter than 700 degrees, the resulting expansion of the fuel salt pushes some of the fuel into the circulation loop; this, in turn, decreases the fission rate (since fission cannot be maintained in the loop), causing the fuel to cool.

Unlike conventional reactors, the rate of fission in an MSR is inherently stable. Nonetheless, should the fuel salt become too hot to operate safely, a freeze plug (made of salts kept solid by a cooling fan) below the reactor will melt and the liquid content of the reactor will flow down into emergency dump tanks where it cannot continue to fission, thus allowing it to cool safely.

Elon Musk shares more progress on the Starship prototype ahead of Saturday’s update.

For all the talk about how artificial intelligence could transform what happens in the classroom, AI hasn’t yet lived up to the hype.

AI involves creating computer systems that can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence. It’s already being experimented with to help automate grading, tailor lessons to students’ individual needs and assist English language learners. We heard about a few promising ideas at a conference I attended last week on artificial intelligence hosted by Teachers College, Columbia University. (Disclosure: The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

Shipeng Li, corporate vice president of iFLYTEK, talked about how the Chinese company is working to increase teachers’ efficiency by individualizing homework assignments. Class time can be spent on the problems that are tripping up the largest numbers of students, and young people can use their homework to focus on their particular weaknesses. Margaret Price, a principal design strategist with Microsoft, mentioned a PowerPoint plug-in that provides subtitles in students’ native languages – useful for a teacher leading a class filled with young people from many different places. Sandra Okita, an associate professor at Teachers College, talked about how AI could be used to detect over time why certain groups of learners are succeeding or failing.

As we venture onto the moons of Jupiter and Saturn to look deep below their frozen surface, might we find new forms of life there?

When NASA’s Cassini performed more than 100 flybys of Saturn’s moon Titan, scientists piecing together the data began forming a picture of a pretty treacherous environment, with liquid methane rain, cold rivers and icy volcanoes all potentially part of the mix. The agency’s scientists are already at work developing vehicles that will one day be used to explore such surrounds, with its newly revealed Shapeshifter robot another interesting example.

The Shapeshifter is a developmental concept at this early stage, and is designed to change its shape depending on the type of alien terrain it encounters. The team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have 3D printed a prototype of the robot that is already capable of some impressive maneuvers.

Continue reading “NASA’s rolling Shapeshifter robot concept splits into two drones” »

Having a slow connection is always frustrating, but just imagine how supercomputers feel. All those cores doing all kinds of processing at lightning speed, but in the end they’re all waiting on an outdated network interface to stay in sync. DARPA doesn’t like it. So DARPA wants to change it — specifically by making a new network interface a hundred times faster.

The problem is this. As DARPA estimates it, processors and memory on a computer or server can in a general sense work at a speed of roughly 10¹⁴ bits per second — that’s comfortably into the terabit region — and networking hardware like switches and fiber are capable of about the same.

“The true bottleneck for processor throughput is the network interface used to connect a machine to an external network, such as an Ethernet, therefore severely limiting a processor’s data ingest capability,” explained DARPA’s Jonathan Smith in a news post by the agency about the project. (Emphasis mine.)

Elon Musk is doling out more and more details about SpaceX’s next Starship prototype ahead of his big presentation this weekend.

On Saturday (Sept. 28), Musk will reveal the latest design of Starship and Super Heavy, the reusable spaceship and rocket that SpaceX is developing to take people to the moon, Mars and other distant destinations.

THE MIND, EXPLAINED takes a five-episode deep dive into how our brains handle memory, anxiety, psychedelics and dreams. Narrated by Emma Stone.

After nearly a year of labor behind the scenes, we have an announcement for you: Explained is finally back! And during this year, we’ve turned our attention to a crucial question: Why can’t we remember what is in the fridge?

Continue reading “Memory, explained | Narrated” »