As sidewalk bots proliferate, they turn on the charm — flashing cute eyes, emoji hearts — to keep safe and get deliveries to their intended destinations.
As the U.S. corporate world continues its withdrawal from Russia due to the invasion of Ukraine, a growing stigma against anything Russian is reverberating in Silicon Valley as tech start-ups and venture capital firms reassess their exposure and limit risks.
DoorDash and GrubHub recently cancelled deals with now-shut U.S. food delivery start-ups launched by Russian founders. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology pulled out of a multi-year partnership with Moscow’s Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, while Index Ventures halted further deals in the country.
For Silicon Valley, the issues with Russian business run to the heart of immigrant founder-led culture and a global world of institutional investors that in recent years sought more access to top VC ideas.
The teeth of a mollusk can not only capture and chew food to nurture its body, but the marine choppers also hold insights into creating advanced, lower-cost and environmentally friendly materials.
David Kisailus, UC Irvine professor, and graduate student Taifeng Wang, both in materials science and engineering, took a close look at the ultrahard teeth of the Northern Pacific Cryptochiton stelleri or gumboot chiton. Their findings are published in the Small Structures April 2022 issue.
“The findings in our work are critical, as it not only provides an understanding of the precision of natural systems in mineralization to form high-performance architected materials, but also provides insights into bioinspired synthetic pathways to a new generation of advanced materials in a broad range of applications from wear-resistant materials to energy storage systems,” said Kisailus.
BOW ISLAND, AB — Patrick Fabian is quickly picking up a new skill. The seed farmer plans to start using drones…
BOW ISLAND, AB – Patrick Fabian is quickly picking up a new skill.
The seed farmer plans to start using drones to monitor his 1,250 irrigated acres.
Continue reading “Technology in agriculture is reaching new heights” »
Circa 2011
Oil that’s used to make Big Macs and fries will be converted into bio-diesel to power the fast-food giant’s trucks in the middle-east.
The Fed is expected to raise interest rates as early as next week to counteract rocketing inflation.
Converting the nation’s 40 million acres of ethanol corn farms into solar-plus-food facilities would generate 1.5 times our nation’s electricity needs, while also powering a 100% electrified passenger vehicle fleet.
The human brain, fed on just the calorie input of a modest diet, easily outperforms state-of-the-art supercomputers powered by full-scale station energy inputs. The difference stems from the multiple states of brain processes versus the two binary states of digital processors, as well as the ability to store information without power consumption—non-volatile memory. These inefficiencies in today’s conventional computers have prompted great interest in developing synthetic synapses for use in computers that can mimic the way the brain works. Now, researchers at King’s College London, UK, report in ACS Nano Letters an array of nanorod devices that mimic the brain more closely than ever before. The devices may find applications in artificial neural networks.
Efforts to emulate biological synapses have revolved around types of memristors with different resistance states that act like memory. However, unlike the brain the devices reported so far have all needed a reverse polarity electrical voltage to reset them to the initial state. “In the brain a change in the chemical environment changes the output,” explains Anatoly Zayats, a professor at King’s College London who led the team behind the recent results. The King’s College London researchers have now been able to demonstrate this brain-like behavior in their synaptic synapses as well.
Zayats and team build an array of gold nanorods topped with a polymer junction (poly-L-histidine, PLH) to a metal contact. Either light or an electrical voltage can excite plasmons—collective oscillations of electrons. The plasmons release hot electrons into the PLH, gradually changing the chemistry of the polymer, and hence changing it to have different levels of conductivity or light emissivity. How the polymer changes depends on whether oxygen or hydrogen surrounds it. A chemically inert nitrogen chemical environment will preserve the state without any energy input required so that it acts as non-volatile memory.
While hydroelectric dams are capable of generating a lot of electricity, they drastically disrupt the environment. Scientists have now proposed a simpler but still effective alternative, in which electric trucks replace such dams.
In a typical hydroelectric facility, a dam is built across a river, causing a reservoir to form directly upstream of that dam. When a gate in the dam is opened, water from the reservoir flows through and drops down to a lower elevation. As it does so, it spins up turbines which generate electricity.
Unfortunately, formation of the reservoir involves the flooding of land which may previously have contained forests, crops, or even people’s homes.
Fabien Cousteau has a vision for how humans can live and work in the ocean. He imagines that long-term stays under the waves could be enabled through the construction of underwater habitats, which would look and feel like houses, as opposed to just sealed, submarine-like bubbles.
These habitats would have a galley, kitchen, workspace, and sleeping quarters, he describes. And of course, there would be windows, or viewports, to the outside world, and a front door in the form of a moon pool that will actually be on the bottom of the house. This would allow easy access into and out of the facility.
