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Oct 1, 2019

This new wearable tech is closing the gap between humans and cyborgs

Posted by in categories: computing, cyborgs, engineering, wearables

A professor at the University of Chicago believes he is on his way to creating a wearable for market that will manipulate your muscles with electrical impulses to cause you to move involuntarily so you can perform a physical task you otherwise didn’t know how to do, like playing a musical instrument or operating machinery.

Dr. Pedro Lopes, who heads the Human Computer Integration lab at the university, is all about integrating humans and computers, closing the gap between human and machine. His team, which focuses on engineering the next generation of wearable and haptic devices, is exploring the endless possibilities if wearables could intentionally share parts of our body for input and output, allowing computers to be more directly interwoven in our bodily senses and actuators.

Lopes’ vision: a wearable EMS device that would look like a sleeve and be able to send electrical impulses in the right timing and in the right fashion to make a user’s muscles move involuntarily to perform a physical task. EMS stands for electrical muscle stimulation.

Oct 1, 2019

Amazon’s Vesta no-show highlights the challenges of home robots

Posted by in category: futurism

Amazon was expected to announce a home robot this week. It didn’t — perhaps because the market is more challenging than the company anticipated.

Oct 1, 2019

How AI will transform healthcare (and can it fix the US healthcare system?)

Posted by in categories: finance, internet, quantum physics, robotics/AI

This thorough review focuses on the impact of AI, 5G, and edge computing on the healthcare sector in the 2020s as well as a look at quantum computing’s potential impact on AI, healthcare, and financial services.

Oct 1, 2019

UPS Gets FAA Approval to Run America’s First Drone Delivery Airline

Posted by in category: drones

The Federal Aviation Administration has given UPS approval to run a drone fleet, enabling the company to create a UAV delivery airline.

UPS announced on Tuesday that the federal agency granted the company a Part 135 certification—a high level of certification used by charter airlines—to operate its drones. This permits UPS to fly drones that carry loads exceeding 55 pounds, to fly drones at night, and to fly the devices out of sight of operators. As UPS puts it, the “certification has no limits on the size or scope of operations.”

Oct 1, 2019

Mining water from space rocks could ‘fuel future exploration’

Posted by in category: space travel

ASTEROID experts increasingly believe mining water-rich space rocks can create the next-generation of rocket fuel, it has been revealed.

Oct 1, 2019

Chasing gravitational waves

Posted by in categories: cosmology, physics

When LIGO and Virgo detected the echoes that likely came from a collision between a black hole and a neutron star, dozens of physicists began a hunt for the signal’s electromagnetic counterpart.

Oct 1, 2019

“Lifespan” – a book to accelerate the emerging paradigm change in healthcare

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

~ David Wood

“Harvard Medical School professor David Sinclair has written a remarkable book that will do for an emerging new paradigm in healthcare what a similarly remarkable book by Oxford University professor Nick Bostrom has been doing for an emerging new paradigm in artificial intelligence.”

Oct 1, 2019

Fruit flies live longer with combination drug treatment

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, life extension

A triple drug combination has been used to extend the lifespan of fruit flies by 48% in a new study led by UCL and the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing.

The three drugs are all already in use as : lithium as a mood stabiliser, trametinib as a and rapamycin as an immune system regulator.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), suggest that a combination treatment may one day be helpful at preventing in people.

Oct 1, 2019

Elon Musk Releases Video Showing Interior of Starship Prototype

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel

Musk revealed the stainless steel monstrosity during a presentation at SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas testing site on Saturday. The hope is that it’ll one day allow up to 100 passengers to travel to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.

The record-breaking rocket will eventually be 160 feet tall and twice as powerful, according to Musk, as NASA’s retired Saturn V rocket that took American astronauts to the Moon during the Apollo missions.

Oct 1, 2019

Beyond Einstein: Physicists solve mystery surrounding photon momentum

Posted by in categories: particle physics, transportation

Albert Einstein received the Nobel Prize for explaining the photoelectric effect: in its most intuitive form, a single atom is irradiated with light. According to Einstein, light consists of particles (photons) that transfer only quantised energy to the electron of the atom. If the photon’s energy is sufficient, it knocks the electrons out of the atom. But what happens to the photon’s momentum in this process? Physicists at Goethe University are now able to answer this question. To do so, they developed and constructed a new spectrometer with previously unattainable resolution.

Doctoral student Alexander Hartung became a father twice during the construction of the apparatus. The device, which is three meters long and 2.5 meters high, contains approximately as many parts as an automobile. It sits in the experiment hall of the Physics building on Riedberg Campus, surrounded by an opaque, black tent inside which is an extremely high performing laser. Its photons collide with individual argon atoms in the apparatus, and thereby remove one electron from each of the atoms. The momentum of these electrons at the time of their appearance is measured with extreme precision in a long tube of the apparatus.

The device is a further development of the COLTRIMS principle that was invented in Frankfurt and has meanwhile spread across the world: it consists of ionising individual , or breaking up molecules, and then precisely determining the momentum of the particles. However, the transfer of the photon momentum to electrons predicted by theoretic calculations is so tiny that it was previously not possible to measure it. And this is why Hartung built the “super COLTRIMS.”