Menu

Blog

Page 8228

Aug 29, 2019

Brain waves detected in mini-brains grown in a dish

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

Scientists have created miniature brains from stem cells that developed functional neural networks. Despite being a million times smaller than human brains, these lab-grown brains are the first observed to produce brain waves that resemble those of preterm babies. The study, published August 29 in the journal Cell Stem Cell, could help scientists better understand human brain development.

“The level of neural activity we are seeing is unprecedented in vitro,” says Alysson Muotri, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego. “We are one step closer to have a model that can actually generate these early stages of a sophisticated neural network.”

The pea-sized brains, called , are derived from . By putting them in culture that mimics the environment of brain development, the stem differentiate into different types of brain cells and self-organize into a 3D structure resembling the developing human brain.

Aug 29, 2019

Why This New 16-Bit Carbon Nanotube Processor Is Such a Big Deal

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, particle physics

Carbon isn’t just the stuff life is made of—it’s also the stuff our future is being built on.

Carbon—a versatile element that frequently trades off its electrons to create various forms of itself—has been gaining an exciting reputation in tech thanks to the successful exfoliation of graphene, a sheet of carbon that’s just one atom thick and has remarkable chemical properties.

But carbon nanotubes, a sort of cousin to graphene, has been quietly staking out its own place in the world of materials science.

Aug 29, 2019

Elevator from Earth to Moon unveiled in breakthrough for space missions

Posted by in categories: nanotechnology, space travel, sustainability

Astronauts would have to fly their rocket into the Spaceline, attach to a solar-powered shuttle and be dragged up to the Moon.

Carbon nanotubes will need to be built on a large scale for the design.

Zephyr Penoyre, one of the Columbia astronomy graduate students behind the Spaceline, told Futurism: The line becomes a piece of infrastructure, much like an early railroad.

Aug 29, 2019

Jack Ma: AI could enable a 12-hour work week

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Alibaba Group chairman Jack Ma told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai Thursday that artificial intelligence should enable people to work 4 hours a day, 3 days a week, Bloomberg reports.

Why it matters: It’s a remarkable demonstration of Ma’s faith in AI, given he’s endorsed the Chinese tech sector’s standard “996” schedule, which consists of a 72-hour workweek: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week.

Aug 29, 2019

MacOS Catalina likely to launch on 23 September

Posted by in categories: electronics, media & arts

Apple’s update to macOS for 2019 will be known as Catalina and will bring many third-party iOS apps to the Mac, new Music and TV apps, as well as lots of other exciting features. Find out what else we expect from the new macOS Catalina update.

Aug 29, 2019

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says Starship could be followed by a dramatically larger rocket

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, space travel

Hinted at in a brief tweet on August 28th, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that SpaceX’s massive Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle – set to be the most powerful rocket ever built upon completion – could eventually be followed by a rocket multiple times larger.

SpaceX is currently in the process of assembling the first full-fidelity prototypes of Starship, a 9m (30 ft) diameter, 55m (180 ft) tall reusable spacecraft and upper stage. Two prototypes – Mk1 and Mk2 – are simultaneously being built in Texas and Florida, respectively, while the beginnings of the first Super Heavy prototype has visibly begun to take shape at SpaceX’s Florida campus.

Once complete, Starship’s Super Heavy booster will be the single most powerful rocket booster ever built, standing at least 70m (230 ft) tall on its own and capable of producing as much as ~90,000 kN (19,600,000 lbf) of thrust with 30 250-ton-thrust and 7 200-ton-thrust Raptor engines installed. Assuming 31 throttleable 200-ton Raptors, Super Heavy’s minimum max thrust is a still record-breaking ~62,000 kN (13.7 million lbf).

Aug 29, 2019

How This Unconventional Oxford Startup Plans To Win The Fusion Energy Race

Posted by in category: nuclear energy

Fusion energy startup First Light Fusion is working towards demonstrating “first fusion” before the end of the year, in their Oxford-based laboratory. If they succeed, they join only a few companies and research groups on the path to demonstrating “gain,” where the energy created outstrips the energy required to start the reaction, which they hope to do by 2024.

Demonstrating gain is the key marker of success and the proof required for the industry to start building the commercial infrastructure to scale the technology, but no company or research group has managed it yet. The history of fusion is littered with a few high-profile failures, prompting many to believe the “it’s always 30 years away” narrative, but with investment in the space heating up with more private investors starting to see the potential in recently-formed startups, belief in fusion is growing again.

In the fusion energy race, it’s arguably anybody’s game among the few key global leaders of both startups and publicly-funded research efforts. There’s the huge international research effort in the south of France, ITER, looking to demonstrate first plasma–not gain–at the end of 2025. And there’s the various startups with their different technological approaches attracting private funding worldwide, such as TAE with $600 million funding in Los Angeles, Boston-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems with $115 million raised in June and General Fusion with over $100 million based in British Columbia. In the U.K., Tokamak Energy has raised over $50 million.

Aug 29, 2019

Break in temporal symmetry produces molecules that can encode information

Posted by in categories: computing, particle physics, quantum physics

In a study published in Scientific Reports, a group of researchers affiliated with São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil describes an important theoretical finding that may contribute to the development of quantum computing and spintronics (spin electronics), an emerging technology that uses electron spin or angular momentum rather than electron charge to build faster, more efficient devices.

The study was supported by São Paulo Research Foundation—FAPESP. Its principal investigator was Antonio Carlos Seridonio, a professor in UNESP’s Department of Physics and Chemistry at Ilha Solteira, São Paulo State. His graduate students Yuri Marques, Willian Mizobata and Renan Oliveira also participated.

The researchers observed that molecules with the capacity to encode information are produced in systems called Weyl semimetals when is broken.

Aug 29, 2019

BMW Unveils a Car Coated in Vantablack

Posted by in category: transportation

Vantablack is a coating so black, anything covered in it appears to disappear, replaced by the blackest of black voids.

Now, the company behind the coating, Surrey NanoSystems, has teamed up with BMW to see what it looks like when you paint a vehicle with Vantablack — and it’s about as trippy as you’d expect.

Aug 29, 2019

Tesla rolls out Key Fob security update for Model S to address risks of cloning

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, security, sustainability

As part of continuing efforts to ensure their vehicles are the safest cars on the road, Tesla’s “Bug Bounty” program gives awards to security researchers that uncover vulnerabilities in the company’s various product systems. Perhaps one of the most impressive parts of that program, however, is Tesla’s ability to remedy the flaws quickly. In the most recent example of their dedication to security, a Bug Bounty find from April this year is now being patched via an over-the-air (OTA) update in 2019.32.

Last year, a Tesla Model S key fob was hacked by a team led by Lennert Wouters of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium (KU Leuven). The security flaw enabled would-be car thieves to clone a fob in less than two seconds, after which the vehicle could be driven off. Tesla subsequently offered a multi-part fix: PIN to Drive, a software update, and a new fob. Wouters again found a very similar flaw in the new fob, but this time the fix only required an OTA update which patched both the vehicle software and the fob’s configuration via radio waves.