Nividia’s AI Smart Drive — nice concept and practical.
NVIDIA is using artificial intelligence to teach a conventional car how to drive intuitively without lane markers and other visual cues.
Continue reading “NVIDIA Brings Artificial Intelligence Technology To The Street” »
Please sign this petition to the NIH to help get more funding for aging research.
Every year about two million Americans die of illnesses doctors cannot cure. Cancer afflicts 50% of men and 30% of women. Five hundred and ninety five thousand Americans will die of cancer this year. Millions get heart diseases, strokes, etc. Every year 1,612,552 Americans die of the top 8 illnesses that doctors are unable to cure. Over a 30-year period, 48,376,560 United States citizens will die of the top 8 illnesses. Let us not forget other disabling and potentially curable illnesses. How much is it worth to save them? We have the resources and opportunity to cure age-related disease.
History has shown that medical research actually saves money. We now spend three trillion two hundred billion dollars yearly for health care. The health care expenditures will increase as our population grows with more senior citizens.
Continue reading “Fund Medical Research to End Age-Related Disease” »
Elon Musk unveils SpaceX’s future Mars vehicle and discusses the long-term technical challenges that need to be solved to support the creation of a permanent, self-sustaining human presence on Mars. The presentation focuses on potential architectures for sustaining humans on the Red Planet that industry, government and the scientific community can collaborate on in the years ahead.
Overview:
00:00. Why Mars and become a multi-planetary civilisation.
Continue reading “Elon Musk unveils plan to colonise Mars (2016.9.27)” »
In Brief.
Tesla and SolarCity are working on making their cars capable of powering a household, and even the entire grid. Using vehicle-to-grid technology, Tesla may be on to something here, and its more than just saving on your electric bills.
Continue reading “Soon, Tesla Cars Could Power the Grid (and Our Homes)” »
The Oxfordshire-based firm has been developing a turbine that combines both jet and rocket technologies to achieve rates five times the speed of sound, to fly anywhere in the world in just four hours.
Rather than aiming for a demonstrator that can achieve more than 150,000 lb thrust, the firm will instead now target an engine size capable of roughly 44,000 lb thrust, according to Aviation Week Network.
Komatsu’s latest autonomous truck fully embraces the notion of unmanned operation by ditching the cabin and adopting a design that optimizes load distribution and doesn’t distinguish between forwards and backwards.
Komatsu began trials of its Autonomous Haulage Systems (AHS) in a partnership with mining company Rio Tinto in 2008, and since then the technology has hauled hundreds of millions of tonnes of material in Chile and Australia’s Pilbara region.
Continue reading “Komatsu’s robotic mining truck completely dumps the driver” »
Google said that one of its self-driving cars was involved in an accident in Mountain View, California last week. The accident was first reported Friday by 9to5 Google, which characterized the incident as Google’s “worst accident yet.”
In a statement, Google insisted its driverless car was not at fault. A crash report with the DMV has yet to be posted, so all the details have yet to be confirmed.
According to the Google, the accident occurred when a vehicle heading west on El Camino Real in Mountain View ran a red light and collided with the right side of a Google self-driving vehicle that was traveling northbound on Phyllis Ave. “Our light was green for at least six seconds before our car entered the intersection,” a spokesperson said.
Continue reading “Google’s ‘worst’ self-driving accident was still a human’s fault” »
The combination of graphene nanoribbons made with a process developed at Rice University and a common polymer could someday be of critical importance to healing damaged spinal cords in people, according to Rice chemist James Tour.
The Tour lab has spent a decade working with graphene nanoribbons, starting with the discovery of a chemical process to “unzip” them from multiwalled carbon nanotubes, as revealed in a Nature paper in 2009. Since then, the researchers have used them to enhance materials for the likes of deicers for airplane wings, better batteries and less-permeable containers for natural gas storage.
Now their work to develop nanoribbons for medical applications has resulted in a material dubbed Texas-PEG that may help knit damaged or even severed spinal cords.
