Lifeboat Foundation

Cost-slashing innovations are underway in the electric power sector and could give electricity the lead over fossil-based combustion fuels in the world’s energy supply by mid-century. When combined with a global carbon price, these developments can catalyze emission reductions to reach the Paris climate targets, while reducing the need for controversial negative emissions, a new study finds.

“Today, 80 percent of all energy demands for industry, mobility or heating buildings is met by burning—mostly fossil—fuels directly, and only 20 percent by electricity. Our research finds that relation can be pretty much reversed by 2050, making the easy-to-decarbonise electricity the mainstay of global energy supply,” says Gunnar Luderer, author of the new study and researcher the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “For the longest time, fossil fuels were cheap and accessible, whilst electricity was the precious and pricier source of energy. Renewable electricity generation—especially from solar photovoltaics—has become cheaper at breath-taking speed, a pace that most climate models have so far underestimated. Over the last decade alone prices for solar electricity fell by 80 percent, and further cost reductions are expected in the future. This development has the potential to fundamentally revolutionize energy systems.

In the future, soft robotic hands with advanced sensors could help diagnose and care for patients or act as more lifelike prostheses.

But one roadblock to encoding soft robotic hands with human-like sensing capabilities and dexterity has been the stretchability of pressure sensors. Although pressure sensors—needed for a robotic hand to grasp and pick up an object, or even take a pulse from a wrist—have been able to bend or stretch, their performance has been significantly affected by such movement.

Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago have found a way to address this issue and have designed a new pressure sensor that can be stretched up to 50 percent while maintaining almost the same sensing performance. It is also sensitive enough to sense the pressure of a small piece of paper, and it can respond to pressures almost instantaneously.

To address the growing threat of cyberattacks on industrial control systems, a KAUST team including Fouzi Harrou, Wu Wang and led by Ying Sun has developed an improved method for detecting malicious intrusions.

Internet-based industrial control systems are widely used to monitor and operate factories and critical infrastructure. In the past, these systems relied on expensive dedicated networks; however, moving them online has made them cheaper and easier to access. But it has also made them more vulnerable to attack, a danger that is growing alongside the increasing adoption of internet of things (IoT) technology.

Conventional security solutions such as firewalls and antivirus software are not appropriate for protecting industrial control systems because of their distinct specifications. Their sheer complexity also makes it hard for even the best algorithms to pick out abnormal occurrences that might spell invasion.

Artificial intelligence has reached a point where it can compose text that sounds so human that it dupes most people into thinking it was written by another person. These AI programs—based on what are called autoregressive models—are being successfully used to create and deliberately spread everything from fake political news to AI-written blog posts that seem authentic to the average person and are published under human-sounding byline.

However, though autoregressive models can successfully fool most humans, their capabilities are always going to be limited, according to research by Chu-Cheng Lin, a Ph.D. candidate in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Department of Computer Science.

“Our work reveals that some desired qualities of intelligence—for example, the ability to form consistent arguments without errors—will never emerge with any reasonably sized, reasonably fast autoregressive model,” said Lin, a member of the Center for Language and Speech Processing.

Walmart has launched an instant drone delivery system for customers living within a 50-mile radius of its headquarters in northern Arkansas.

The retail giant has partnered with drone company Zipline to launch the new system that will offer on-demand delivery for health and wellness and consumable items within 50 miles of the Walmart Neighborhood Market in Pea Ridge, according to a press release.

“It’s unbelievably exciting, we’ve been working towards this day for many many years,” Zipline’s CEO Liam O’Connor told CBS News.

Discorver how to formulate and train Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) using the LIF model, and how to encode data so that it can be processed by SNNs.

Astronauts on the International Space Station plan a “turkey trot” and some special food in honor of U.S. Thanksgiving on Thursday (Nov. 25).

Five astronauts of the seven-person Expedition 66 crew gathered to film a YouTube video released Monday (Nov. 22) by NASA’s Johnson Space Center about how they will celebrate the holiday while in orbit.

Blue Origin has announced its next suborbital space flight for December and it includes two special guests among the crew of six.

Keisha S., a health and energy coach from the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda, just won a free trip to suborbital space with Virgin Galactic.