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Category: transportation – Page 437

How Is AI Helping To Commercialize Space?

AI on the mars rover is used to help it navigate the planet. The computer is able to make multiple changes to the rover’s course every minute. Technology behind the Mars rovers are very similar to that used by self-driving cars. The major difference is that the rover has to navigate more complicated terrain and does not have other vehicular or pedestrian traffic to take into account. That complicated terrain is analyzed by the computer vision systems in the rover as it moves. If a terrain problem is encountered, the autonomous system makes a change to the course of the rover to avoid it or adjust navigation.

AI and Space: Made for Each Other

Over the last few years we have continued to see a large effort to commercialize space. Several companies are even looking to start tourist trips into space. Artificial intelligence is working to make space commercialization a possibility and to make space a safe environment in which to operate. The various benefits of AI in space all work together to enable further venturing into the unknown.

Artificial solid fog material creates pleasant laser light

With a porosity of 99.99 %, it consists practically only of air, making it one of the lightest materials in the world: Aerobornitride is the name of the material developed by an international research team led by Kiel University. The scientists assume that they have thereby created a central basis for bringing laser light into a broad application range. Based on a boron-nitrogen compound, they developed a special three-dimensional nanostructure that scatters light very strongly and hardly absorbs it. Irradiated with a laser, the material emits uniform lighting, which, depending on the type of laser, is much more efficient and powerful than LED light. Thus, lamps for car headlights, projectors or room lighting with laser light could become smaller and brighter in the future. The research team presents their results in the current issue of the renowned journal Nature Communications, which was published today.

More light in the smallest space

In research and industry, has long been considered the “next generation” of light sources that could even exceed the efficiency of LEDs (light-emitting diode). “For very bright or a lot of light, you need a large number of LEDs and thus space. But the same amount of light could also be obtained with a single diode that is one-thousandth smaller,” Dr. Fabian Schütt emphasizes the potential. The materials scientist from the working group “Functional Nanomaterials” at Kiel University is the first author of the study, which involves other researchers from Germany, England, Italy, Denmark and South Korea.

If Americans used bidets fifteen million trees could be saved

Justin Thomas considers bidets to be “a key green technology” because they eliminate the use of toilet paper. According to his analysis, Americans use 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper every year, representing the pulping of some 15 million trees. Says Thomas: “This also involves 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to produce the paper and 253,000 tons of chlorine for bleaching.” He adds that manufacturing requires about 17.3 terawatts of electricity annually and that significant amounts of energy and materials are used in packaging and in transportation to retail outlets.

That’s a lot of water, far more than is actually used by the bidet itself.

toto toiletLloyd Alter/ toto toilet with washlet/CC BY 2.0

Three national laboratories achieve record magnetic field for accelerator focusing magnet

In a multiyear effort involving three national laboratories from across the United States, researchers have successfully built and tested a powerful new magnet based on an advanced superconducting material. The eight-ton device—about as long as a semi-truck trailer—set a record for the highest field strength ever recorded for an accelerator focusing magnet and raises the standard for magnets operating in high-energy particle colliders.

The Department of Energy’s Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory designed, built and tested the new magnet, one of 16 they will provide for operation in the High-Luminosity Large Hadron Collider at CERN laboratory in Europe. The 16 magnets, along with another eight produced by CERN, serve as “optics” for charged particles: They will focus beams of protons into a tiny, infinitesimal spot as they approach collision inside two different particle detectors.

The ingredient that sets these U.S.-produced magnets apart is niobium-tin—a superconducting material that produces strong magnetic fields. These will be the first niobium-tin quadrupole magnets ever to operate in a particle accelerator.

Behold the smooth, gliding motions of this robot noodle chef

I have spent the past several years of my life desperately trying to warn humanity that the robots are coming to destroy us all, and everybody laughed at me. But this week—shortly after the T-1000 was seen smooching his miniature horse and donkey—a robot noodle chef has taken over soba-making duties at a Tokyo train station, so who’s laughing now? (The robots are laughing now.)

An Earth-sized exoplanet found with a star that zooms *way* up and down in the Milky Way

I frankly think this of exotic species unknown but it has exotic movement.

With over 4,000 exoplanets found so far, it takes a particularly interesting one to stand out.

LHS 1815b literally does that. While most planet-bearing stars we find orbit the Milky Way in the plane of its disk, this planet’s host star’s orbit takes it well out of that plane, flying way up over the galaxy and way down below it over time, giving it a pretty interesting view of our galaxy.

First, the planet: It was found in TESS data, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. This mission is surveying the entire sky, looking for planets around brighter stars. These tend to be closer to us, so TESS is finding planets that are in our neighborhood, galactically speaking.

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