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Sep 29, 2016

The future of robots: singing lullabies, testing motorcycles

Posted by in categories: business, drones, geopolitics, robotics/AI, transhumanism

Cool new story in the San Francisco Chronicle about the robotics conference. I gave a speech at it yesterday.


At the two-day RoboBusiness Conference, about 2,000 people were serenaded with lullabies and Disney tunes, including “Let It Go” from the hit film “Frozen,” by a human-like robot designed to comfort senior citizens and autistic children.

And next to a man-size robot that can drive a motorcycle 190 mph around a race track, a half-dozen ant-size robots quickly scurried about a miniature factory floor.

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Sep 29, 2016

D-Wave launches new quantum computer with first 2,000-qubit processor

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Anyone upgrading their D-Wave 2?


We’re actually a little bit scared of it.

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Sep 29, 2016

Stopping Light: Physicists Move Quantum Computers Closer to Reality

Posted by in categories: computing, engineering, particle physics, quantum physics

Hmmm; like the graphic reminds of one of my posts.


In Brief.

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Sep 29, 2016

Quantum computing breakthrough: Israeli scientists invent cannon for entangled photon clusters

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Scientists have developed a device that can guarantee producing an endless sequence of entangled photons.

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Sep 29, 2016

Will quantum teleportation defeat quantum decryption?

Posted by in categories: computing, encryption, finance, quantum physics, security

Nice article; however, not sure if the author is aware Los Alamos already has a quantum net as well as some Europe banks have the capabilities and 4 months ago it was announced that a joint effort by various countries from Europe, Asia, etc. have come together to re-engineer the Net infrastructure with QC technology…


Maybe the quantum will giveth what the quantum taketh away… at least when it comes to secure transmissions.

There’s been much speculation that emerging quantum computers will become capable of breaking advanced public key cryptography systems, such as 2048-bit RSA. This might leave encrypted data transmissions exposed to anyone who happens to own such a quantum computer.

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Sep 29, 2016

Promising biomaterial to build better bones with 3D printing

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, biotech/medical, engineering

A Northwestern Engineering research team has developed a 3D printable ink that produces a synthetic bone implant that rapidly induces bone regeneration and growth. This hyperelastic “bone” material, whose shape can be easily customized, one day could be especially useful for the treatment of bone defects in children.

Bone implantation surgery is never an easy process, but it is particularly painful and complicated for children. With both adults and children, often times bone is harvested from elsewhere in the body to replace the missing bone, which can lead to other complications and pain. Metallic implants are sometimes used, but this is not a permanent fix for growing children.

“Adults have more options when it comes to implants,” said Ramille N. Shah, who led the research. “Pediatric patients do not. If you give them a permanent implant, you have to do more surgeries in the future as they grow. They might face years of difficulty.”

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Sep 29, 2016

The first episode of the MegaBots webseries takes a wrecking ball to its six-ton robot

Posted by in categories: entertainment, robotics/AI

Seems like we’ve been waiting forever for the big showdown between Team USA and Japan. We’re seemingly no closer at the moment, but at least the team at MegaBots can offer a bit of good old-fashioned destruction to tide us over before the massive machines go toe-to-toe.

In the premier of its new web series (the trailer for which was shown off at Disrupt the other week), the team behind the fighting robot startup league go to town on their own robot, the $200,000 Mk. II.

In order to stress test the six-ton bot’s protective casing, the team shoots it with its own gun and gives it several whacks with a wrecking ball. At the risk of spoiling the seven-and-a-half minute long video, it turns out it’s really tough to knock over a 15-foot-tall fighting robot.

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Sep 29, 2016

FDA clears first-ever artificial pancreas for automated insulin delivery

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, robotics/AI

Monitoring blood-glucose levels and injecting insulin to keep them in a safe range is a never-ending headache for sufferers of type 1 diabetes. A number of research projects have made promising steps recently to promise easier ways of doing things, and now this type of convenience is set to move out of the lab and into the real-world. For the first time, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a so-called artificial pancreas designed to both monitor and inject insulin automatically, requiring minimal input from the user.

In a healthy person, beta cells in the pancreas secrete vital insulin, which in turn regulates blood-sugar levels. But for sufferers of type 1 diabetes, this process breaks down along the way, requiring them to administer finger-prick blood tests to keep tabs on their insulin levels and inject the hormone as required.

For years, scientists have been exploring better ways to keep the condition in check. These have included implanting beta cells, tracking glucose levels through contact lenses and ways insulin can be delivered via a capsule rather than a needle. But perhaps the most attractive solution is what is known as a closed-loop system, which seeks to automate both monitoring and administration of insulin to dramatically reduce the burden on the user.

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Sep 29, 2016

Making rocket fuel from water could drive a power revolution on Earth

Posted by in category: space travel

Researchers led by NASA’s former chief technologist are hoping to launch a satellite carrying water as the source of its fuel.

The team from Cornell University, guided by Mason Peck, want their device to become the first shoebox-sized ‘CubeSat’ to orbit the Moon, while demonstrating the potential of water as a source of spacecraft fuel.

It’s a safe, stable substance that’s relatively common even in space, but could also find greater use here on Earth as we search for alternatives to fossil fuels.

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Sep 29, 2016

Physicists believe they can create antimatter and matter via lasers… per their calculations

Posted by in category: particle physics

Dramatic advances in laser technologies are enabling novel studies to explore laser-matter interactions at ultrahigh intensity. By focusing high-power laser pulses, electric fields (of orders of magnitude greater than found within atoms) are routinely produced and soon may be sufficiently intense to create matter from light.

Now, intriguing calculations from a research team at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IAP RAS), and reported this week in Physics of Plasmas, explain the production and dynamics of electrons and positrons from ultrahigh-intensity laser-matter interactions.

READ MORE ON AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS | AIP PUBLISHING

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