Dutch design company MX3D plans to 3D print a steel bridge in Amsterdam.
The bridge will be designed by Joris Laarman in a collaboration between MX3D, design software company Autodesk, construction company Heijmans and many others; they research, test and share their knowledge within an AMS-3D Building FieldLab.
From September 2015 the progress of the project can be followed in their visitor center. MX3D and the City of Amsterdam are yet to announce the exact location of the bridge.
Chalmers University of Technology announced the use of a 3D-bioprinter to produce objects made of cellulose. And then added carbon nanotubes making way to electricity use in the objects.
Wood cellulose, differently from plastic of metal, does not melt. Hence a new technique using hydrogel as a fixer.
“A THIRD OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST GROUNDWATER BASINS ARE IN DISTRESS – RESERVES LIKELY FAR SMALLER THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT, NEW STUDIES FIND”
An alert by researchers from NASA, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, National Taiwan University and UC Santa Barbara used readings generated by NASA’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites that measure dips and bumps in Earth’s gravity, which is affected by the weight of water.
The studies are the first to characterize groundwater losses via data from space. The new findings have been accepted for publication in Water Resources Research, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, and appear online today.
For the first paper, researchers examined the planet’s 37 largest aquifers between 2003 and 2013. The eight worst off were classified as overstressed, with nearly no natural replenishment to offset usage.
A companion paper in the same journal shows that volume of the world’s usable groundwater is poorly known but is likely far less than rudimentary estimates made decades ago.
By comparing their satellite-derived groundwater loss rates to what little data exists on groundwater availability, they found major discrepancies in projected “time to depletion.” In the overstressed Northwest Sahara Aquifer System, for example, this fluctuated between 10 and 21,000 years….
University of Twente’s researchers Claas Willem Visser, Ralph Pohl, Chao Sun, Gert-Willem Römer, Bert Huis in ‘t Veld, and Detlef Lohse published “Toward 3D Printing of Pure Metals by Laser-Induced Forward Transfer”
Their paper describes 3D printing of gold and copper structures, by piling metal droplets.
Bringing metallic components to 3D printing opens new possibilities of applying electricity and heat conducting components.
The first organ chips are coming to market and, regulators permitting, will speed up drug testing and reduce the use of laboratory animals.. read full article
Yes everybody now believes there’s water on the moon. “Moonshine: Diurnally varying hydration through natural distillation on the Moon, detected by the Lunar Exploration Neutron Detector (LEND)” by authors Dana M. Hurley,G. Chin,R.Z. Sagdeev,I.G. Mitrofanov,W.V. Boynton,L.G. Evans,M.L. Litvak,T.P. McClanahan,A.B. Sanin,R.D. Starr,J.J. Su now tells us that it is theoretically possible to use water that is in the surface and thin atmosphere.
Not as simple a process as we use on earth, but basically it gets to vaporize water into a condenser that would funnel distilled water to a recipient. Sunlight would provide the necessary energy to power the system.
This application, found by Reddit user shrubit shows Space X filing for a plan to provide a satellite network that could provide internet connectivity to a vast of people currently out of the grid.
This attempts is a different approach to the same issue Google’s Loon Project and Facebook’s Aquila.
“Baxter, introduced two years ago, was designed to be far simpler, safer, and more intuitive to operate than a conventional industrial robot (see “This Robot Could Transform Manufacturing”). Traditional industrial robots are expensive to install and use, and must be separated from human workers for safety. To function properly they typically require that their environments be highly structured and unchanging.
Rethink says sales of Baxter, which costs $25,000, and is only available to manufacturers in the U.S., have only reached “several hundred.” This limited success, and the effort to develop Sawyer, suggest that Rethink may have misjudged the opportunity that comes with balancing simplicity and safety with accuracy and speed…” full story in MIT Technology Review
Microsoft revealed its image recognition software was wrong just 4.94% of the time
A month later, Google reported it had achieved a rate of 4.8%.
Now, Chinese search engine giant, Baidu, says their specialized supercomputer, Minwa, has bested Google with an error rate of 4.58%
Anexpert human ? 5.1%.
In this article Jason Dorrier tells us how deep learning A.I. software is applying big data to improve it further.
Named after the insect that inspired its invention, the Cicada, was designed to be smaller, cheaper and simpler than any other robotic aircraft — but still able to carry out a mission in a remote battlefield.
“The idea was why can’t we make UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that have the same sort of profile,” Aaron Kahn of the Naval Research Laboratory told AFP.
“We will put so many out there, it will be impossible for the enemy to pick them all up.”
read full news article in SpaceDaily
As we read in recently issued by TED Books “Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes”
by Rob Knight, our understanding of the multitude of living forms in our bodys grow quickly.
In such a way that it should be no surprise, as Shaunacy Ferro hints at The Microbiome Could Be the New Fingerprint, that ‘one’ may start seeing itslef as a whole environmental cluster, rather than an individual. Even if the first step is just for security identification.
Recent article from Chris Urmson – director of Google’s self-driving car program on the state of affairs of their effort in offering an alternative to human drivers.
So far, over a millin miles and 11 accidents.
in “Why Brain-to-Brain Communication Is No Longer Unthinkable”, published at Smithsonian.com, Jerry Adler guides you to the amazing ways science is throttling towards new ways brains can communicate with each other.
That is, on top of the already ingenious solutions humans developed over time, such as body, oral an then written languages to mention the most popular.
As in other developments, we rely greatly on our brains to find out how. Only it seems we may the skipping the instensive use of senses in the near future.
Instead of having a man embedded with spider, scientists thought of having spiders weave man-made material.
A group of scientists from Italian, British and Czech institutions published “Silk reinforced with graphene or carbon nanotubes spun by spiders” where they describe how the manage to sucessfully induce spiders to use added components into their webs composition.
For the first time astronomers were able to detect light bouncing off planets our of the solar system.
The new method developed by a group of Portuguese astronomers may give researchers more information on the atmospheres of exoplanets.
Radial Velocity is currently used to find planets. Starting in the ’90s t has been sucessfully applied to hundreds of planets now. It provides good information on the orbit and mass, but are not so good in providing evidence of atmosphere composition. We can see a bit more, now.
To be precise:
“Methods. Our method makes use of the cross-correlation function (CCF) of a binary mask with high-resolution spectra to amplify the minute planetary signal that is present in the spectra by a factor proportional to the number of spectral lines when performing the cross correlation. The resulting cross-correlation functions are then normalized by a stellar template to remove the stellar signal. Carefully selected sections of the resulting normalized CCFs are stacked to increase the planetary signal further. The recovered signal allows probing several of the planetary properties, including its real mass and albedo.
Results. We detect evidence for the reflected signal from planet 51 Peg…
Conclusions. We confirm that the method we perfected can be used to retrieve an exoplanet’s reflected signal, even with current observing facilities. The advent of next generation of instruments (e.g. VLT-ESO/ESPRESSO) and observing facilities (e.g. a new generation of ELT telescopes) will yield new opportunities for this type of technique to probe deeper into exoplanets and their atmospheres.”
In this recent paper researchers explores the possiblity of creating security checks directly from users activity. Verification based on activity logs of apps in the mobile would make an automated key creator.
Despite some limitation to security for some applications that require especific criptography and legal restictions to what can be used as verification, system could bring benefits: no need of previous passowrd checking, confirmation and registry, limitation of password sharing.
Users would free part of the valuable RAM memory used to remember the multitude of passwords we deal daily.
“Could a smile be a useful signal for a computer? Might we be able to do something interesting with such a genuine, unfiltered bit of input? Probably. I would like to review every YouTube video that made me laugh in 2012. I’d be delighted if my computer pointed me to a Gchat conversation, long forgotten, that made me crack up in college.
Granted, in a world of presumed total surveillance, it’s upsetting to imagine our computers having access to something as intimate as our unmediated emotions. That’s our last stand against the bureaucrats and the brands, the unquantifiable inner sanctum of self.
But supposing some alternate arrangement in which we could actually trust our devices and the people making them, emotion could be a profoundly powerful principle to design around”… full story on wired