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Category: innovation

A disruptive new planet-hunting technology, now under study as part of NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program, could literally detect and then look for biosignatures from every Earth 2.0 within a thirty-light-year radius of our solar system.

Known as DICER (The Diffractive Interfero Coronagraph Exoplanet Resolver), the key to this NIAC study’s revolutionary means of detecting these planets is that unlike conventional optical space telescopes — which use curved, highly polished mirrors to collect starlight — this mission would employ flat sets of what are known as diffraction gratings.

Who says you need a conventional telescope to find exoplanets? NASA has funded a ‘Phase I’ study for the development of a whole new means of detecting and then teasing spectra from very nearby exoplanetary earths.

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“I think I’m probably just as guilty as everybody else,” Toyota Research Institute’s (TRI) senior vice president of robotics, Max Bajracharya, admits. “It’s like, now our GPUs are better. Oh, we got machine learning and now you know we can do this. Oh, okay, maybe that was harder than we thought.”

Ambition is, of course, an important aspect of this work. But there’s also a grand, inevitable tradition of relearning mistakes. The smartest people in the room can tell you a million times over why a specific issue hasn’t been solved, but it’s still easy to convince yourself that this time — with the right people and the right tools — things will just be different.

In the case of TRI’s in-house robotics team, the impossible task is the home. The lack of success in the category hasn’t been for lack of trying. Generations of roboticists have agreed that there are plenty of problems waiting to be automated, but thus far, successes have been limited. Beyond the robotic vacuum, there’s been little in the way of breakthrough.

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Over the past year or so, CleanTechnica has published several stories about Sakuu, the innovative battery company located in Silicon Valley (where else?) that is working to bring 3D-printed solid-state batteries to market.

Last June, Robert Bagheri, founder and CEO of Sakuu, said in a press release, “As far as our solid state battery development, we are preparing to unveil a new category of rapid printed batteries manufactured at scale using our additive manufacturing platform. The sustainability and supply chain implications of this pioneering development will be transformational.” Based on the company’s Kavian platform, the rapid 3D-printed batteries will enable customizable, mass scale, and cost effective manufacturing of solid-state batteries while solving fundamental challenges confronting battery manufacturers today, the company said at that time.

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https://youtube.com/watch?v=9PuwqjDiGcg&feature=share

Unlock the secrets of artificial intelligence in this comprehensive video. Explore the different categories of AI, such as narrow or general AI, and discover the differences between them. Delve into specific types of AI, including natural language processing, computer vision, and machine learning. Learn about the practical applications of these technologies and discover how they’re shaping the future. This is a must-see video for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of AI and how it’s transforming our world. Don’t miss out, watch now!

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A powerful plant-derived toxin with a unique way of killing harmful bacteria has been identified as one of the most promising new antibiotics in decades.

Albicidin, a new antibiotic, is produced by the plant pathogen Xanthomonas albilineans, responsible for causing sugar cane’s destructive leaf scald disease. The toxin is believed to aid the pathogen’s spread by attacking the plant. Albicidin has been shown to be highly effective against harmful bacteria, including drug-resistant superbugs such as E. coli and S. aureus.

Despite its antibiotic potential and low toxicity in pre-clinical experiments, pharmaceutical development of albicidin has been hampered because scientists did not know precisely how it interacted with its target, the bacterial enzyme DNA.

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The fate of galaxies is determined by the initial mass distribution at the birth of a new population of stars in the diverse and vast Universe. This relationship is referred to as the Initial Mass Function (IMF

In the field of astronomy, initial mass function (IMF) is an empirical function that details the distribution of stellar masses in a newly formed population of stars.

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