Lifeboat Foundation

Reaching the highest levels of safety for self-driving cars will depend on how well the cars are engineered to know when communications are needed, and to be able to communicate with other cars, with bikes, with people on foot. Where to go? When to walk?

Uber Technologies has filed a patent toward that end, with a discussion on how self-driving cars might communicate with pedestrians.

The patent title is “Light output system for a self-driving vehicle.” The patent applicant is Uber Technologies.

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You may have thought, “Hey, if we’re threatened by an incoming asteroid, we should just nuke it!” You’re not alone: a team of Russian scientists are working on a plot to do so, by detonating miniature asteroids in a lab.

In fact, several groups of researchers are now toying with the idea of asteroid nuking for the sake of planetary defense. The Russian team has even calculated about how much firepower they’d need to perform such a feat.

According to the translated paper published in the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Physics: “Given the scale factor and the results of laboratory experiments, the undeniable destruction of a chondritic asteroid 200 m in diameter by a nuclear explosion with an energy above 3 Mt was shown to be possible.”

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Scientists have mapped 6,000 new craters on the Moon with the help of a newly developed technique based on artificial intelligence (AI).

“When it comes to counting craters on the Moon, it’s a pretty archaic method,” said Mohamad Ali-Dib from the University of Toronto, Scarborough in Canada.

“Basically we need to manually look at an image, locate and count the craters and then calculate how large they are based off the size of the image. Here we’ve developed a technique from artificial intelligence that can automate this entire process that saves significant time and effort,” Ali-Dib said.

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Researchers are building a case that long before the nervous system works, the brain sends crucial bioelectric signals to guide the growth of embryonic tissues.

All galaxies, no matter how big they are, rotate once every billion years, astronomers have discovered. The Earth spinning around on its axis once gives us the length of a day, and a complete orbit of the Earth around the Sun gives us a year. “It’s not Swiss watch precision. But regardless of whether a galaxy is very big or very small, if you could sit on the extreme edge of its disk as it spins, it would take you about a billion years to go all the way round,” said Gerhardt Meurer, from of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) in Australia.

By using simple maths, you can show all galaxies of the same size have the same average interior density. “Discovering such regularity in galaxies really helps us to better understand the mechanics that make them tick — you won’t find a dense galaxy rotating quickly, while another with the same size but lower density is rotating more slowly,” Meurer said.

Researchers also found evidence of older stars existing out to the edge of galaxies. “Based on existing models, we expected to find a thin population of young stars at the very edge of the galactic disks we studied,” Meurer said.

The power of quantum technology in 2018: how does this develop nowadays

Quantum technology is a new field in physics, derived from quantum physics and, especially, quantum mechanics and it transposes their principles into every day use applications such as quantum computers, quantum cryptography or quantum imaging. Ever since the study of quantum technology has been taking very seriously across the globe, a lot of new technologies and applications were developed to make our lives easier, faster and more secure.

Quantum technology still needs to be promoted.

Piezoelectric materials, which generate an electric current when compressed or stretched, are familiar and widely used: think of lighters that spark when you press a switch, but also microphones, sensors, motors and all kinds of other devices. Now a group of physicists has found a material with a similar property, but for magnetism. This “piezomagnetic” material changes its magnetic properties when put under mechanical strain.

“Piezomagnetic materials are rarely found in nature, as far as I’m aware,” said Nicholas Curro, professor of physics at UC Davis and senior author of a paper on the discovery published March 13 in the journal Nature Communications.

Curro and colleagues were studying a barium-iron-arsenic compound, BaFe2As2, that can act as a superconductor at temperatures of about 25 Kelvin when doped with small amounts of other elements. This type of iron-based superconductor is interesting because although it has to be kept pretty cold to work, it could be stretched into wires or cables.

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A paper submitted for publication just two weeks ago could prove the “multiverse” theory which Hawking loved.