Lifeboat Foundation

The Matic is a fully autonomous robot vacuum that its founders claim will clean your floors without getting stuck on cables or toys and without sending a map of your home to the cloud. And it’ll only cost you $1,800.

The Matic is a new robot vacuum with a different approach to cleaning your floors. Built by two former Google Nest engineers, it’s designed to move around your home in the same way most humans would, processing things visually instead of spatially. It uses five RGB cameras to navigate, rather than the sensors, bumpers, and lidar tech found on most of today’s robot vacs. In theory, this makes it less prone to common robot vacuum pitfalls —such as high-pile rugs, cables, and tight spaces — because it can actually see where it’s going in real time rather than relying on a preprogrammed map. It also operates locally — with no cloud component at all. Mapping is done on the device, and it doesn’t require an internet connection to run, so your data should never leave your home. $1,800 robot vacuum thinks it can beat the best of them.

Google continues to integrate more AI into its suite of apps.

The new telescope would allow scientists to “understand the beginning, history, and makeup of the universe.”

In a quest to advance the knowledge concerning the beginning of the universe, known as the Cosmic Microwave Background, the National Science Foundation is set to grant up to $21.4 million to the University of Chicago. The agreement will see $3.7 million awarded to the team next year, in a project aimed at developing final designs for a next-generation set of telescopes that will map the light from the earliest moments of the universe.

The project, named CMB-S4, will be led by researchers at UOC and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and aims to construct infrastructure and telescopes… More.

Continue reading “Mapping microwave light: $21.4M boost for telescope probing universe origins” »

Acoustic resonators, found in devices like smartphones and Wi-Fi systems, degrade over time with no easy way to monitor this degradation. Researchers from Harvard SEAS and Purdue University have now developed a method using atomic vacancies in silicon carbide to measure the stability of these resonators and even manipulate quantum states, potentially benefiting accelerometers, gyroscopes, clocks, and quantum networking.

Acoustic resonators are everywhere. In fact, there is a good chance you’re holding one in your hand right now. Most smartphones today use bulk acoustic resonators as radio frequency filters to filter out noise that could degrade a signal. These filters are also used in most Wi-Fi and GPS

GPS, or Global Positioning System, is a satellite-based navigation system that provides location and time information anywhere on or near the Earth’s surface. It consists of a network of satellites, ground control stations, and GPS receivers, which are found in a variety of devices such as smartphones, cars, and aircraft. GPS is used for a wide range of applications including navigation, mapping, tracking, and timing, and has an accuracy of about 3 meters (10 feet) in most conditions.

Pro/Con Arguments | Discussion Questions | Take Action | Sources | More Debates

While humans have long thought of gods living in the sky, the idea of space travel or humans living in space dates to at least 1,610 after the invention of the telescope when German astronomer Johannes Kepler wrote to Italian astronomer Galileo: “Let us create vessels and sails adjusted to the heavenly ether, and there will be plenty of people unafraid of the empty wastes. In the meantime, we shall prepare, for the brave sky-travellers, maps of the celestial bodies.” [1]

In popular culture, space travel dates back to at least the mid-1600s when Cyrano de Bergerac first wrote of traveling to space in a rocket. Space fantasies flourished after Jules Verne’s “From Earth to the Moon” was published in 1,865, and again when RKO Pictures released a film adaptation, A Trip to the Moon, in 1902. Dreams of space settlement hit a zenith in the 1950s with Walt Disney productions such as “Man and the Moon,” and science fiction novels including Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950). [2] [3] [4].

High-resolution maps of biological annotations in the brain are increasingly generated and shared. In this Review, Bazinet and colleagues discuss how brain connectomes can be enriched with biological annotations to address new questions about brain network organization.

In a suite of 21 papers published in the journals Science (12), Science Advances , and Science Translational Medicine , a large consortium of researchers shares new knowledge about the cells that make up our brains and the brains of other primates. It’s a huge leap from previously published work, with studies and data that reveal new insights about our nervous systems’ cellular makeup across many regions of the brain and what is distinctive about the human brain.

The research consortium is a concerted effort to understand the human brain and its modular, functional nature. It was brought together by the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative.

Hundreds of scientists from around the world worked together to complete a range of studies exploring the cellular makeup of the human brain and those of other primates, and to demonstrate how a transformative new suite of scalable techniques can be used to study the detailed organization of the human brain at unprecedented resolution.

Google’s Green Light initiative uses AI and Google Maps to optimize traffic lights and reduce emissions.

Traffic jams are not only frustrating but also harmful to the environment. According to a study, road transportation accounts for a large share of global and urban greenhouse gas emissions, and the situation is worse at city intersections, where pollution can be 29 times higher than on open roads. The main reason is vehicles’ frequent stopping and starting, which consumes more fuel and emits more carbon dioxide.

But what if we could use artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize traffic lights and reduce these emissions? That is the idea behind Green Light, a Google Research initiative that… More.

Continue reading “Google’s Green Light: AI for smarter and greener traffic lights” »

Radiation mapping has evolved over the past decade, but there are still areas researchers would like to improve.

Scientists at the Berkeley Lab in the US are training a four-legged robot to detect and map radiation in any environment. This could revolutionize nuclear safety, security, and emergency response.

Thor Swift/Berkeley Lab.

Continue reading “Meet Spot, the robot dog that is helping map radiation” »