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Category: innovation – Page 112

Yitang (Tom) Zhang, a Chinese-American mathematician who recently revealed that he had solved the Landau-Siegel zeros conjecture, delivered an online speech at Peking University on November 8 to answer external questions on his newly published 111-page paper.

On November 7, Zhang’s new paper, “Discrete Mean Estimates and the Landau-Siegel Zero,” was officially launched on arXiv, an open-access repository of electronic preprints and postprints.

During the speech, Zhang used a whiteboard and a black marker to show the relevant proof formulas by hand and explain the innovations. He gave the speech in Chinese and didn’t use PowerPoint.

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A Tohoku University researcher has increased the performance of a high-power electrodeless plasma thruster, moving us one step closer to deeper explorations into space.

Innovations in terrestrial transportation technologies, such as cars, trains, and aircraft, have driven historical technologies and industries so far; now, a similar breakthrough is occurring in space thanks to electric propulsion technology.

Electric propulsion is a technique utilizing to accelerate a propellant and to generate thrust that propels a spacecraft. Space agencies have pioneered electric propulsion technology as the future of space exploration.

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Amazing title. Going to read it now!

Using a mix of electrical stimulation and intense physical therapy, n ine people with chronic spinal injuries have had their ability to walk restored.

All suffered from severe or complete paralysis as a result of damage to their spinal cord. Incredibly, the volunteers all saw improvements immediately, and continued to show improvements five months later.

A recent study by researchers from the Swiss research group NeuroRestore has identified the exact nerve groups stimulated by the therapy, using mice as a starting point.

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Photograph: Shutterstock

Elon Musk doesn’t follow the same standards that most entrepreneurs do. He’s different, he likes to be different!

And when you’re different, and you’re not afraid to be, it’s okay to test a cigar (or should I say ‘joint’?) of tobacco mixed with marijuana, on Joe Rogan’s famous podcast. But if you look closely, Elon was just nice (polite) and followed Rogan’s elaborate script. Before trying it, Musk even asked him if it was legal.

Then all those facial expressions of Musk, which photojournalists love to catch, go viral as if he’s there promoting some soft drug or passing abroad that his office at Tesla (or SpaceX) is enveloped in a large cloud of smoke.

Quite the opposite. The expressions themselves spoke for themselves, as if to say, “This is nothing special, Joe. Why do you waste my time with these scenes”? Musk even claimed that weed is not good for productivity at all, but it has nothing against (as I do, by the way).

Continue reading “From ‘Chief Twit’ to ‘Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator’” | >

This time I come to talk about a new concept in this Age of Artificial Intelligence and the already insipid world of Social Networks. Initially, quite a few years ago, I named it “Counterpart” (long before the TV series “Counterpart” and “Black Mirror”, or even the movie “Transcendence”).

It was the essence of the ETER9 Project that was taking shape in my head.

Over the years and also with the evolution of technologies — and of the human being himself —, the concept “Counterpart” has been getting better and, with each passing day, it makes more sense!

Imagine a purely digital receptacle with the basics inside, like that Intermediate Software (BIOS(1)) that computers have between the Hardware and the Operating System. That receptacle waits for you. One way or another, it waits patiently for you, as if waiting for a Soul to come alive in the ether of digital existence.

Continue reading “Digital Doubles and Second Selves” | >

The trial that could transform care for people with blood disorders such as sickle cell and rare blood types.

In what can be called a breakthrough in medical science, red blood cells grown in a laboratory have been transfused into volunteers in a world-first clinical trial.

The manufactured blood cells — grown from donor stem cells — could revolutionize treatments for people with blood disorders such as sickle cell disease if proven to be safe and effective.

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What are you working on next?

Rosendo: Our next steps…will be on the development of the manipulability of this robot. More specifically, we have been asking ourselves the question: “Now that we can stand up, what can we do that other robots cannot?”, and we already have some preliminary results on climbing to places that are higher than the center of gravity of the robot itself. After mechanical changes on the forelimbs, we will better evaluate complex handling that might require both hands at the same time, which is rare in current mobile robots.

Multi-Modal Legged Locomotion Framework with Automated Residual Reinforcement Learning, by Chen Yu and Andre Rosendo from ShanghaiTech University, was presented this week at IROS 2022 in Kyoto, Japan. More details are available on Github.

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“We grow them in huge bioreactors in just three weeks — while regular cannabis takes 14 to 23 weeks,” Sobel said. “Our tech can also significantly increase the levels of active ingredients, as a percent of the weight, versus what is found normally in the plant.”

An Israeli company has cloned hemp cells and used a bioreactor to grow them into a substance with all the active compounds of cannabis — and 12 times the potency.

BioHarvest Sciences says the breakthrough could make the medical benefits of cannabis available in cheaper, cleaner and greener form. It has started applying for the necessary licenses to manufacture and sell its product for medical use in Israel and the United States.

“We don’t grow the plant at all,” BioHarvest CEO Ilan Sobel told The Times of Israel. Instead, the process involves “replicating” cells taken from a hemp plant in big tanks called bioreactors to produce huge numbers of identical cells.

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