Lifeboat Foundation

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Continue reading “Video Friday: This Free-Flying Robot Head Is Like Alexa for Astronauts” »

Algae biofuel certainly faces an uphill battle these days, what with the global oil price crash and competition from electric vehicles. Nevertheless, there may be a glimmer of hope for algae biofuel fans, in the form of an ultra-fast 3D printer housed in a California laboratory. In an interesting sustainability twofer, the same machine might also spit out an assist for the world’s ailing coral reefs.

Thanks to 3D-printing, 25,000 homeless people in Texas have somewhere to live.

In recent years, 3D printing has opened up interesting new possibilities for the large-scale production of electronic components, as well as of a variety of other objects. To this end, research teams worldwide have been trying to create materials and structures that can easily change shape, as these could be particularly useful for 3D printing applications.

Although many of the programmable and shape-shifting materials developed so far have proved to be promising for 3D printing, they are often not mechanically robust. This makes them unideal for printing objects that are resistant to a lot of weight or strain.

To overcome this limitation, researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology, Peking University and Beijing Institute of Technology have recently proposed a new shape-morphing material system that is also mechanically robust. This new material, created via the volatilization of a volatile component that has not fully reacted, was presented in a paper published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces. The lead authors of this paper are Qiang Zhang and Xiao Kuang.

Most of us have heard that coral reefs around the world are dying, largely because of warmer ocean temperatures and the increased acidity of seawater, but few people realize why that is important to humans. Who really cares if the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia is nearly lifeless? So a few rich scuba divers won’t get to see it. Boo-hoo. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that.

3D-printed ‘flexoskeletons’ make it possible to build a soft robot in less than two hours without extravagant costs.

The world is facing a global shortage of ventilators, and companies including GE and Ford have shifted production over to making more.

#Technology in #medicine: What will the #future #healthcare be like? https://www.neurozo-innovation.com/post/future-health Technologies have made many great impacts on our medical system in recent years. The article will first give a thorough summarization of them, and then the expectations and potential problems regarding future healthcare will be discussed. #AI #5G #VR #AR #MR #3DPrinting #BrainComputerInterface #telemedicine #nanotechnology #drones #SelfDriving #blockchain #robotics #innovation #trend

Technology has many beneficial effects on modern people’s lives, and one of them is to prolong our lifespan through advancing the medical field. In the past few years, new techniques such as artificial intelligence, robots, wearable tech, and so on have been used to improve the quality of our healthcare system, and some even newer innovations such as flying vehicles and brain computer interface are also considered valuable to the field. In this article, we will first give a thorough discussion about how these new technologies will shape our future healthcare, and then some upcoming problems that we may soon face will be addressed.

As we enter our third decade in the 21st century, it seems appropriate to reflect on the ways technology developed and note the breakthroughs that were achieved in the last 10 years.

The 2010s saw IBM’s Watson win a game of Jeopardy, ushering in mainstream awareness of machine learning, along with DeepMind’s AlphaGO becoming the world’s Go champion. It was the decade that industrial tools like drones, 3D printers, genetic sequencing, and virtual reality (VR) all became consumer products. And it was a decade in which some alarming trends related to surveillance, targeted misinformation, and deepfakes came online.

For better or worse, the past decade was a breathtaking era in human history in which the idea of exponential growth in information technologies powered by computation became a mainstream concept.