Lifeboat Foundation

Giant technology companies in the US, which include some of the world’s most profitable firms, have been pledged at least $9.3bn in state and local subsidies over the last five years – much of it coming from the coffers of cities and states with failing infrastructure, struggling schools and broken budgets.

Fostering local hi-tech success doesn’t have to mean offering huge tax breaks to companies like Apple and Amazon. Here are some alternative strategies.

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These prosthetics are so realistic that it’s hard to tell what is real or fake.

Honeybee Robotics has been working on a Planetary Deep drill. It has been tested to a depth of about 100 feet (30 meters). The plan has to been to have the lightweight system reach kilometers of depth. This would be able to reach the liquid Lake on Mars.

The Planetary Deep Drill is a wire-line drill designed to reach miles below extraterrestrial surfaces. The lightweight drill meets the payload and excavation requirements required to reach far below the icy surface formations of Mars, Enceladus or Europa.

Continue reading “Drilling deep to the Mars Lake” »

Amazon’s Echo lineup, like some smart speakers, uses proximity detection to decide which device is best-suited to responding to your voice commands. It’s a clever way to prevent multiple devices from waking up at the same time. There’s just one problem: support in non-Amazon devices has been inconsistent at best, creating a mess if you have third-party gear that doesn’t use the feature. Thankfully, that shouldn’t be an issue from here on out. Amazon has moved its Echo Spatial Perception technology to the cloud, ensuring that all devices can use it.

The ESP upgrade is automatic and doesn’t require any changes on the part of hardware makers. It’s also more accurate, according to Amazon, and can change over time as Alexa receives upgrades.

This doesn’t change some limitations for multi-device households. Many commands still apply specifically to the device where they’re set, such as reminders and timers. Even so, this could be a crucial update for Amazon. If it’s going to bring Alexa to virtually every device it can, it has to create a harmonious ecosystem.

Continue reading “Amazon will prevent command confusion on all Alexa devices” »

A series of earthquakes have shaken a region of ocean off the west coast of the UScientists have detected a cluster of 11 earthquakes, ranging in magnitude from 2.8 to 5.6 on the Richter scale. The cluster occurred on the seabed at the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate, around six miles (10km) underwater. This plate forms part of the Cascadia subduction zone, which runs from Northern California to British Columbia. Previous studies have warned this geological spot of weakness has the potential to deliver an earthquake much stronger than the infamous San Andreas fault. Seismologists say a full rupture along the 650-mile-long (1,000 km) …→

The trouble with microphones is that they don’t just hear — they have to listen. Powering the mic and its signal processor means using energy, and energy means a battery, and a battery means charging. This new microphone-like system hears more like the way our own ears do, requiring little or no power, and could help fill the world with voice-responsive machines. (If that’s something we really want.)

The device is called a “triboelectric auditory sensor,” and it works via what’s called the triboelectric effect — essentially when two surfaces rub together and create a charge. They’re still trying to figure out why this happens, but what matters to engineers is that it happens reliably.

Triboelectric nanogenerators have been around for a few years, creating power by having two compatible materials interact with each other at super-small scales. While they’re tiny and highly efficient, they don’t actually produce a lot of power. Researchers from Chongqing University found that, fortunately, you don’t need a lot of power for the purposes of detecting sound.

Continue reading “Nanotech powers this super-sensitive microphone” »

And while we’re at it, why don’t the other planets in our solar system seem to twinkle?

BALTIMORE (WJZ) — Two new permanent exhibits just opened at the Maryland Science Center, capturing the imagination of children of all ages.

The two new exhibits are titled “Science Aglow” and “Water Play.”

Science Aglow is an exhibit on the Electromagnetic Spectrum. It was developed and built in-house, involving topics of light, radiation, energy and optics. Kids can capture their shadow, use infrared cameras, experiment with light sensors, and observe how different animals view light.

Continue reading “Two New Permanent Exhibits Open At Maryland Science Center” »

That may be about to change. Behind the scenes, big tech companies are funding secret projects to develop robots. Amazon.com Inc. has been working on a robot version of its Echo voice-activated speaker for a while now and this year began throwing more money and people at the effort. Alphabet Inc. is also working on robots, and smartphone maker Huawei Technologies Inc. is building a model for the Chinese market that will teach kids to speak English.

Alphabet and Huawei join Amazon in the race to build androids, the first of which could debut by 2020.