“The subtitle to this post is a variation of William Gibson’s famous remark: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” An obvious follow up question is: if the future is already here, where can I find it?”
If you’re like me, you think a little too much. Your thoughts and ideas swirl around so much in your mind that it can be hard to get much done, and it results in anxiety.
Welcome to #24 Avatar Technology Digest! We provide you with the latest news on Technology, Medical Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence the best way we can. Here are the top stories of the last week!
1) Did you know that Disney does more than shoot box office hits and sell toys to your kids? They also have a very active Research Department that specializes in a variety of applications that can be used throughout the Disney empire. And now another interesting innovation has come out of the Research Department, as they have developed a method for generating those 3D printable robots without the need for time and energy-consuming work at all.
2) Being able to identify problems with a person’s body without subjecting them to invasive procedures is the fantasy of all Star Trek doctors. There’s even a prize offering a fortune to anyone who can effectively recreate the tricorder technology out in the real world. Now, Stanford scientists think that they’ve developed a system that, in time, could be used to spot cancerous tumors from a foot away.
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Because of its unique chemical and physical properties, graphene has helped scientists design new gadgets from tiny computer chips to salt water filters. Now a team of researchers from MIT has found a new use for the 2D wonder material: in infrared sensors that could replace bulky night-vision goggles, or even add night vision capabilities to high-tech windshields or smartphone cameras. The study was published last week in Nano Letters.
Night vision technology picks up on infrared wavelengths, energy usually emitted in the form of heat that humans can’t see with the naked eye. Researchers have known for years that because of how it conducts electricity, graphene is an excellent infrared detector, and they wanted to see if they could create something less bulky than current night-vision goggles. These goggles rely on cryogenic cooling to reduce the amount of excess heat that might muddle the image. To create the sensor, the researchers integrated graphene with tiny silicon-based devices called MEMS. Then, they suspended this chip over an air pocket so that it picks up on incoming heat and eliminates the need for the cooling mechanisms found in other infrared-sensing devices. That signal is then transmitted to another part of the device that creates a visible image. When the researchers tested their sensor, they found that it clearly and successfully picked up the image of a human hand.
The G-Cans project is the largest flood protection in the world. Its official name is Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel, but it is most known as G-Cans Underground Temple because of its support pillars and interior that reminds the visitor of a giant cave. The purpose of this facility is to protect the city of Tokyo from floods. The northern edge of G-Cans touches Kasukabe, a city located in Saitama Prefecture, 30 km north of Tokyo. The necessity of building such facility originated from the danger of overflowing of the rivers and main waterways during typhoons and rain periods.
That’s why researchers have developed high-tech glasses, called Amblyz, which can be programmed to treat lazy eye. The results of the first clinical trial assessing their efficacy were presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology.
Amblyz works because its lenses contain programmable LCDs. If a doctor suggested that a child wear a patch for two hours per day, for example, the lens over the lazy eye would go dark for a few seconds out of every 30 seconds during that time, effectively working as a patch. And since children with amblyopia often have other vision problems such as astigmatism or nearsightedness, Amblyz corrects their vision when not occluding it.
Scientists have proposed a laser model that can could heat materials to temperatures hotter than the centre of the Sun in just 20 quadrillionths of a second. That’s 10 million degrees Celsius almost instantaneously.
The discovery brings us one step closer to the dream of achieving thermonuclear fusion energy — the production of clean, sustainable, and limitless energy using the same process the Sun uses to produce heat.
The challenge in harnessing the energy from thermonuclear fusion is that, as with any form of energy production, you need to get out more than you put in, and heating things to temperatures that rival the centre of the Sun is not easy. Current laser technology has failed to make the heating process efficient enough to make the process worthwhile, but a team from Imperial College London in the UK has come up with a model for a laser than can heat things about 100 times faster than the world’s most powerful fusion experiments.
“Just a few years ago, automated parking was a revolutionary new technology — now it comes as a standard option in some production models. This is how I believe driverless vehicles will come to be accepted in the future,” says Wei-Bin Zhang, IEEE fellow and a researcher engineer at the California PATH program, Institute of Transportation Studies of University of California at Berkeley.
That’s right — we may be on the brink of an all-out self-driving car revolution.
We’ve already seen cars that can stay in their lanes and apply the breaks by themselves, so to many, an autonomous car is just the next step in the natural progression. And the automotive industry is taking this very seriously. According to a study by Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), the self-driving market is estimated to grow to $33.89 billion in the next five years.
