Will Your Next Whip Pack Memory Chainmail Tires? NASA’s Glenn Research Center is experimenting with nickel-titanium memory alloy tires that resemble chain mail. It’s an intriguing angle — the tires can withstand heavier loads and at higher speeds. They’re airless and immune to puncture. Presumably they’re not literally chainmail but closer to a sweater in construction. This tire is a culmination of a number of fascinating research drives. NASA has been experimenting with tensegrity structures as a means of building in space without spending a ton of rocket fuel on heavy hardware. These structures use tensioned cables to maintain a three-dimensional structure.
The tires use the stiffness of the wire as well as internal stiffeners to maintain shape, without the need for a whole rim. In addition to structural tensegrity, the memory alloy also helps keep its original shape by resisting deformation — it springs back into its original shape. Want to know more about how tires are made here on earth? [Thanks, Steve!] Stunning AI Breakthrough Takes Us One Step Closer to the Singularity. Intel moves towards production quantum computing with new 17-qubit chip | TechCrunch.
Intel’s quantum computing efforts have yielded a new 17-qubit chip, which the company has just delivered to its partner in that field, QuTech in the Netherlands. It’s not a major advance in the actual computing power or applications — those are still in very early days — but it’s a step toward production systems that can be ordered and delivered to spec rather than experimental ones that live in a physics lab somewhere. Intel’s celebration of this particular chip is a bit arbitrary; 17 isn’t some magic number in the quantum world, nor does this chip do any special tricks other quantum computer systems can’t. Intel is just happy that its history and undeniable expertise in designing and fabricating chips and architectures is paying off in a new phase of computing.
I chatted with Intel’s director of quantum hardware, Jim Clarke, about the new system. The test chip itself (the gold ports aren’t the qubits themselves, obviously) Featured Image: Intel. IBM Stuffs a Whopping 330TB of Data into a Tiny Cartridge - ExtremeTech. This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use. Some of the earliest computers relied upon tape drives for storage, but we’ve since moved on to faster and more versatile storage technologies. Still, tape drives continue to exist in enterprise, and they’ve been advancing by leaps and bounds while you haven’t been paying attention.
IBM just announced a new record in data storage density — 201 gigabits per square inch on a magnetic tape (that’s one square inch of it above). That works out to a whopping 330TB of uncompressed data on a single tape drive cartridge. IBM reached this plateau in magnetic tape density by developing several new technologies. The new magnetic tape design was created in partnership with Sony, which has been working with IBM on this technology for several years. IBM claims by using sputtered tape technology, it will be able to double the data capacity of its tape drive cartridges every two years for at least the next decade. Intel Can Now Mesh Different Process Nodes on the Same Chip - ExtremeTech. This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page.
Terms of use. One constant of CPU manufacturing for decades has been that different components on the same die must share a common process node. It’s certainly possible to build a package that combines, say, a 14nm CPU with a large pool of on-chip cache built at 22nm, or to have a CPU built at one process node that has a GPU built at a different process node adjacent to it, but on the same physical piece of silicon. Intel has used both approaches in the past. At Hot Chips last week, however, the chip manufacturer showed off something different — a new packaging solution that offers an alternative to expensive 2.5D interposers (used by both AMD and Nvidia for various high-end GPUs).
Here’s how Intel describes EMIB on its site: “We sought a solution that is practical to design, reliable across any die, and simple to implement in a design. Images from Intel’s Manufacturing Day earlier this year. Google has started using AI to build more advanced AI - Business Insider Nordic. Google has announced another big push into artificial intelligence, unveiling a new approach to machine learning where neural networks are used to build better neural networks - essentially teaching AI to teach itself. These artificial neural networks are designed to mimic the way the brain learns, and Google says its new technology, called AutoML, can develop networks that are more powerful, efficient, and easy to use.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed off AutoML on stage at Google I/O 2017 last week - the annual developer conference that Google throws for app coders and hardware makers to reveal where its products are heading next. "The way it works is we take a set of candidate neural nets, think of these as little baby neural nets, and we actually use a neural net to iterate through them until we arrive at the best neural net," explains Pichai. One neural net selects others. Credit: Google Google says its computers are now even better at recognising what's in a photo than humans are. Russia is building the world's largest civilian submarine. A submarine twice the size of the world's largest commercial passenger jet, and with a similar winged design, will soon be exploring the depths of the Arctic circle. Russia is developing the gigantic new vessel in the hope of exploiting previously untapped natural resources and undertaking scientific research.
The Arctic Research Submarine is the creation of the Rubin Design Bureau, which was responsible for the Typhoon-class missile submarines launched by the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Scroll down for video Russia is developing a gigantic new submarine in the hopes of exploiting previously untapped natural resources and undertaking scientific research in the Arctic Circle. Pictured - overlaid with the Airbus A380, the world's largest passenger airliner, which is roughly half the size The vessel will be the largest civilian submersible ever constructed and will be fuelled by a nuclear reactor. The government has laid claim to large parts of the North Pole and Arctic circle in recent years.
British entrepreneur invents, builds and files patent for Iron Man-like flight suit. Elon Musk Launches Neuralink to Connect Brains With Computers - WSJ. Researchers create artificial materials atom-by-atom. Researchers at Aalto University have manufactured artificial materials with engineered electronic properties. By moving individual atoms under their microscope, the scientists were able to create atomic lattices with a predetermined electrical response. The possibility to precisely arrange the atoms on a sample bring 'designer quantum materials' one step closer to reality. By arranging atoms in a lattice, it becomes possible to engineer the electronic properties of the material through the atomic structure.
Working at a temperature of four degrees Kelvin, the researchers used a scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) to arrange vacancies in a single layer of chlorine atoms supported on a copper crystal. "The correspondence between atomic structure and electronic properties is of course what happens in real materials as well, but here we have complete control over the structure. In principle, we could target any electronic property and implement it experimentally", says Dr. Share Video. The Future Tire by Goodyear - It's a Sphere! Google Unveils Neural Network with “Superhuman” Ability to Determine the Location of Almost Any Image - MIT Technology Review. Here’s a tricky task. Pick a photograph from the Web at random. Now try to work out where it was taken using only the image itself. If the image shows a famous building or landmark, such as the Eiffel Tower or Niagara Falls, the task is straightforward. But the job becomes significantly harder when the image lacks specific location cues or is taken indoors or shows a pet or food or some other detail.
Nevertheless, humans are surprisingly good at this task. To help, they bring to bear all kinds of knowledge about the world such as the type and language of signs on display, the types of vegetation, architectural styles, the direction of traffic, and so on. So it’s easy to think that machines would struggle with this task. Today, that changes thanks to the work of Tobias Weyand, a computer vision specialist at Google, and a couple of pals. Their approach is straightforward, at least in the world of machine learning. The results make for interesting reading. That’s pretty good. Jeri Ellsworth Is Bringing Affordable Augmented Reality to the World - Waypoint. This story appeared in the February issue of VICE magazine. Click HERE to subscribe. Portrait by Vivian Fu. It seems that around every corner is a company insisting that the future of interactive technology lies in virtual reality, but others aren't as quick to cut ties with the physical world.
Eschewing VR's helmets and headsets for a blended approach, augmented reality (AR) is the domain of creators and innovators like Jeri Ellsworth, co-founder of technology startup castAR. The firm is working on an affordable AR-glasses solution that will project images on top of what you can see in the real world. An AR interface can do something like project a map of an existing space, and add all manner of interactive elements, as Pokémon Go did earlier this year. While AR solutions like Microsoft's HoloLens promise exciting sci-fi visuals—like 3D interfaces that engineers or modelers can use to design objects—it's also pricey. What is your biggest blue-sky dream for five or ten years from now?
The Cranfield nanomembrane toilet - how it works... Ordinateur quantique : une nouvelle mémoire avec du diamant (MAJ) Interview : en quoi un ordinateur quantique est-il différent ? Le monde quantique est fascinant : à cette échelle, par exemple, les objets peuvent se trouver simultanément dans plusieurs états. Exploitant ce principe, un ordinateur quantique aurait des possibilités bien plus vastes qu’un modèle classique. Dans le cadre de sa série de vidéos Questions d’experts, sur la physique et l’astrophysique, l’éditeur De Boeck a interrogé Claude Aslangul, professeur à l’UPMC, afin qu'il nous explique le fonctionnement de cette étrange machine. De nombreux laboratoires sur la planète explorent le tout jeune domaine de l'information quantique en espérant qu'il permettra de générer une nouvelle révolution technologique, comme ce fut le cas avec les transistors et les lasers, des outils déjà quantiques par essence.
Comme l'explique le physicien Claude Aslangul dans la vidéo ci-dessus, des ordinateurs quantiques fonctionnent selon des principes différents que les ordinateurs classiques. A phone that charges in seconds? Scientists bring it closer to reality. A team of UCF scientists has developed a new process for creating flexible supercapacitors that can store more energy and be recharged more than 30,000 times without degrading. The novel method from the University of Central Florida's NanoScience Technology Center could eventually revolutionize technology as varied as mobile phones and electric vehicles.
"If they were to replace the batteries with these supercapacitors, you could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for over a week," said Nitin Choudhary, a postdoctoral associate who conducted much of the research published recently in the academic journal ACS Nano. Anyone with a smartphone knows the problem: After 18 months or so, it holds a charge for less and less time as the battery begins to degrade. Scientists have been studying the use of nanomaterials to improve supercapacitors that could enhance or even replace batteries in electronic devices. Real holographic displays are becoming a thing - The Verge.
JetPack Aviation JB10 Principality of Monaco Flight #3 iPhone6S. Materials scientists prove 70-year-old tensile deformation prediction. Imagine pulling or compressing a block of soft material—like rubber—equally in all directions. You wouldn't expect the block to deform much because of the nature of the material. However, in 1948, an applied mathematician named Ronald Rivlin predicted that with the right amount of tensile force, a thick cube of soft material would suddenly deform into a thin, flat plate. For almost 70 years, this prediction remained purely theoretical. Materials scientists, hoping to add the instability to the pantheon of material functionality, were unable to prove the theory experimentally.
Recently, researchers at the Harvard John A. "We knew that this instability existed but no one was able to show it," said Katia Bertoldi, John L. "This research uncovers a type of instability that can be triggered in soft, elastic bodies, and widens the design space for new architected materials that use instabilities to change or enhance their functionality," said Johannes T. More information: Johannes T. The Neural Network Zoo - The Asimov Institute. With new neural network architectures popping up every now and then, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Knowing all the abbreviations being thrown around (DCIGN, BiLSTM, DCGAN, anyone?) Can be a bit overwhelming at first. So I decided to compose a cheat sheet containing many of those architectures. Most of these are neural networks, some are completely different beasts.
One problem with drawing them as node maps: it doesn’t really show how they’re used. It should be noted that while most of the abbreviations used are generally accepted, not all of them are. Composing a complete list is practically impossible, as new architectures are invented all the time. For each of the architectures depicted in the picture, I wrote a very, very brief description. Feed forward neural networks (FF or FFNN) and perceptrons (P) are very straight forward, they feed information from the front to the back (input and output, respectively).
Rosenblatt, Frank. Broomhead, David S., and David Lowe. Check Out This New Fleshy Metamaterial for Prostheses, Smiles. Scientists from Tel Aviv University have developed a soft, flesh like material that can be “programmed” to produce whatever pattern they would like, according to Haaretz. Of course the first thing they made it do was create a smiley face.
The new "soft robot" metamaterial is actually quite simple. It consists of a cube of rubbery, 3D-printed material, that, when compressed, deforms into a specific shape. This is achieved by creating smaller, precise blocks that make up the larger block, each one printed into a very specific shape, so that the geometry of the material itself is where the desired effect is coded. So by changing the shape of specific components within the material, they can make it do whatever they want in response to a physical stimulus. It's more or less the same process that atoms go through to create and program cells, this time writ large. Fraunhofer tests energy storage in a lake. Innovation Researchers from Fraunhofer IWES are putting hollow spheres in Lake Constance to see whether the technology could be used to store offshore wind energy.
StEnSEA - Stored Energy in the SEA - is an R&D project investigating a way of storing large amounts of electricity underwater. Germany’s Research Ministry and its Economics Ministry provided funding from January 2013 to June 2016. At the end of the year, the researchers will begin four-week of tests using a three-meter sphere in Lake Constance. The concrete spheres that will eventually be used later will be 10 times bigger – 30 meters in diameter. Each one will be able to store 20 megawatt-hours of electricity, equivalent to four hours of one what an offshore wind turbine can produce when it is running full blast.
How does it work? The hydrostatic water pressure produces the energy potential. A pilot project by Canadian startup Hydrostor already shows that the system works in shallow waters. Scientists are closing in on turning hydrogen into a metal. Flexible ConFlexPave concrete is tougher, thinner and lighter than conventional mixtures | Inhabitat - Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building. This Gorgeous Natural Swiss Pool Proves We Don't Need to Swim in Chlorine. 'Tidal Fence' Will Harness the Power of the Surf. NASA Eyes First-Ever Carbon-Nanotube Mirrors for CubeSat Telescope. Temporary nanotech 'tattoos' can track your facial expressions. Next generation reusable rockets - Xodiac and XaeroB. Atlas Human-Powered Helicopter - AHS Sikorsky Prize Flight.
Super Computers: Next-Gen Nanotube Microchips. Hyperloop One zooms through first public test. This Battery-Free Computer Sucks Power Out Of Thin Air. DEFCON 2015 - Mike Walker and Jordan Wiens Machine vs Machine Inside DARPA’s Fully Automated CTF. Franky Zapata's awesome Flyboard Air redefines the concept of a hoverboard. BEAM Installation Animation. MoD gravity sensor breakthrough to 'see underground or through walls' The Visual Microphone: Passive Recovery of Sound from Video. Just When You Thought Magnets Weren’t Magic; Magnets Are Mechanisms. Researchers develop new lens for terahertz radiation. Liquid Metal Makes Stretchable Circuits. Goodyear unveils spherical concept tires for autonomous cars. SensorTape: Modular and Programmable 3D-Aware Dense Sensor Network on a Tape.
Six million dollar man's bionic eye becomes reality. Going Interstellar. Untitled. This New Shape-Changing Polymer Can Lift 1,000 Times Its Own Weight. Nuclear Fusion's "Heat Loss" Problem May Have Been Solved. Hyperloop Transportation Technologies Breaks Ground To Make Elon Musk’s Hyperloop A Reality. New metallic glue could replace welding and soldering. Human-Powered Helicopter: Straight Up Difficult. MIT's groundbreaking new transparent film stores solar energy in glass or clothing | Inhabitat - Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building. New Super-Compressible Materials Deform Like Mechanisms at Molecular Scale. Fabrication of silicon nanowires bridging thick silicon structures. Ambient Backscatter. Shigeru Ban's Incredible Cardboard Bridge Can Hold 20 People at a Time! | Inhabitat - Green Design, Innovation, Architecture, Green Building.
Advancer Technologies, LLC: MyoWare Muscle Sensor. Japanese Researchers Create Holograms You Can Touch - bcnstar. Lit Motors - AEV Driving. Google’s new quantum computer is '100 million times faster than your PC' Quantum computer by Google and NASA is more than 100 million times faster than a regular computer chip. The Clock of the Long Now. New efficient, affordable solar tech could trump fossil fuel. NASA Confirms the "Impossible" - Propellant-free Microwave Thruster for Spacecraft Works! EM-Sense: Touch Recognition of Uninstrumented Electrical and Electromechanical Objects. Tandem-Duct Aerial Demonstrator. Wove's New Flexible Touch Display. UniMorph. Boeing: Lightest. Metal. Ever. Replace Bluetooth Signals with Body Transmission system | Technology Vista | Infabode. A biker with a need for speed. Witness The Birth of a 36-Lens Panoramic Camera.
FLIKE Controlled Flight. Vision Architecture: High Speed Image Processing. Quantum-dot spectrometer is small enough to function within a smartphone. Wave Power: Harnessing the World's Largest Untapped Renewable Energy Resource. Researchers invent interactive holograms you can touch. Watch The Navy’s Railgun Catapult A 4-Ton Sled Off An Aircraft Carrier. Wearable tech 2.0 aims to alter mind, body. Scientists Use Sound Waves To Suspend And Manipulate Objects In Midair, How Does ‘Acoustic Levitation’ Work? [VIDEO] SteamVR's "Lighthouse" for Virtual Reality and Beyond.