Category Archives: Futurism

In Brief A teenager from India recently won a satellite-design competition co-sponsored by NASA. His winning invention, probably the world's lightest satellite, will be launched by NASA this June for a sub-orbital test flight. Tiny Space Cube

Not very many people can claim that theyve sent something they made into space. Oneof those who will soon be sending his own invention a 64-gram (0.14-lb) satellite into sub-orbital flight is an 18-year-old named Rifath Shaarook. His satellite design won a competition hosted by an organization called I Doodle Learning, which issponsored by NASA and the Colorado Space Grant Consortium, called Cubes in Space.

The main challenge was to design an experiment to be flown to space which would fit into a four-meter cube weighing 64 grams, Shaarook told Business Standard. He named his tiny winning satellite the KalamSat, after Indian nuclear scientist and former president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.

Its set to embark on a 4-hour sub-orbital mission, launching from NASAs Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on June 21. We designed it completely from scratch, Shaarooksaid, It will have a new kind of on-board computer and eight indigenous built-in sensors to measure acceleration, rotation, and the magnetosphere of Earth.

Cubes for Space is an example of how NASAs been actively seeking out talents and minds outside of just the agency. NASAs also launching a device developed by another teenager to the ISS, to test space-fairing microbes. Apart from getting helped by young inventors like Shaarook, NASAs also been corrected by a teenager who pointed out an error in some of the agencys data on energy levels.

NASA also has a program called Open Innovation, where it employs the help of the public for outside-the-box thinking about human space exploration challenges. Such crowdsourcing efforts seem to be fruitful for the space agency, and the KalamSat is just one proof.

The KalamSat will spend about 12-minutes in a micro-gravity environment of space, where it will test the durability of its extremely light casing, 3D-printed from reinforced carbon fiber polymer. The main role of the satellite will be to demonstrate the performance of [3D-printed] carbon fiber, Shaarook explained to the Times of India. The success ofthe satellite could lead to the development of similar technology: such lightweight payloads would certainly be morecost-effective for NASA. The space agency is seeking innovative ideasfor payload service, too: back in March, they wrapped up an open call forpayload concepts for a mysterious mission.

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A Teen Created the World's Lightest Satellite & NASA Is Going to Launch It - Futurism

In Brief A company in Israel, in conjunction with the Israeli government, has shown that it is possible to charge a bus using technology embedded in the street. So, how does this technology work and how could it contribute to a greener world? What are the Developments?

A recent collaboration between the Israelian government and ElectRoad, a company focused on enabling thelarge-scale use of all-electric buses, to develop technology that allows buses to charge while driving has recently passed its first round of testing. This has won the company $120,000 in investmentand the chance to test the technology in 2018 on a 1/2 mile route in Tel Aviv. If this testing goes well, an 11-mile path will be implemented between the city of Eilat and the Ramon International Airport. But more importantly, the success of this testing could signal the feasibility of the technology in other countries.

The technology works using electromagnets. Inverters are installed along the side of the road to provide power to plates of copper embedded in the road, and when these interact with similar copper plates under the bus, the fields interact and power is produced. In addition to this mechanism, the bus will be equipped with a small battery that will provide it with power when it is not above the electromagnetic strip, and allow it to accelerate, which requires a greater force. To learn more, watch the video below:

While this technology is promising, there are still significant hurdles that need to be overcome. The first is the issue of implementation. ElectRoad claims that they can equip one kilometer of road in a single evening, but this is yet to be tested in a city context.

The second problem is that this solution may have come too late because of more recent advances in battery technology. Over the last few years, the cost per kilowatt hour of a lithium battery has decreased from 1000 dollars to 200-300 dollars. Dustin Grace, Director of the battery company Proterra, has stated that What these auto manufacturers are finding when theyre getting into the $100-to-$200-per-kilowatt-hour range is these vehicles are really on parity with other vehicles. Therefore, if we just look at these numbers, there is no pressing need to work on rechargeable solutions.

The biggest advantage of this form of powering buses is sustainability. The Buses will not use polluting fossil fuels that simultaneously rob the planet of natural resources and damage caused by pollution. If the technology could be extendedand applied in cars and other types of vehicles, this could be a feasible solution to the problem of cars and trucks accounting for 20% of U.S emissions.

This technology could also contribute to a greener world in a more subtle way: by producing power. This idea has not yet been integrated into the design, but Oren Ezer, chief executive and co-founder of ElectRoad, claims that the system could be usedtwo-ways, meaning that the buses would feed electricity produced by braking back into the grid.

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Scientists Have Officially Started Testing Wireless Charging Roads for Electric Vehicles - Futurism

In Brief Toyota is working with startup Cartivator to develop the SkyDrive flying car in time to light the torch at the 2020 Olympic Games. This is just one of many flying car projects in motion right now.

Toyota is throwing its hat into the flying car ring, backing the SkyDrive flying car, the brainchild of a startup called Cartivator. The drone-esque, 2.9 meter (9.5 foot) long SkyDrive vehicle is designed to max out at speeds of up to 100 km/h (62 mph) as it floats 10 meters (33 feet) above the ground. It would be simple and intuitive enough for a non-pilot to control, and could simply take off from the regular old highway.

Cartivator consists of about 30 volunteers led by Tokushima University drone expert Masafumi Miwa, but theyre not going it alone. Theyre also backed by Toyotas mechanical engineers, not to mention its 40 million yen ($353,000). The group is also getting support from Taizo Sun, the founder of GungHoOnline Entertainment, along with an enthusiastic group of crowdfunders who have pledged about 2.5 million yen ($22,000) to help the group meet its goal: getting SkyDrive in the air by 2018 and commercialized in time to be the torchbearer for the 2020 Tokyo Olympic games.

Toyota isnt the only big company whos looking to get in on the perennial flying car dream. Ehang of China, Lilium Aviation of Germany, AeroMobil, Uber, and the Kitty Hawk startup project from Larry Page are all working on flying cars. Anything related to developing aircraft is heavily regulated particularly in the U.S. making each step of the way cost extensive amounts of money and time. According to Kazuyuki Okudaira of Nikkei Asian Review, Toyotas leadership is taking a pro-innovation investment standpoint on the flying car issue: Chairman Takeshi Uchiyamada decided things will not progress if you wait and provide money only when the technology is ready.

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Toyota is Making a Flying Car to Light the 2020 Olympic Torch - Futurism

In Brief Observations of the exoplanet HAT-P-26b have expanded our knowledge of how universes are formed. New satellites set to launch in October will give us even more information

Scientists at the University of Exeter have discovered peculiar aspects of the Neptune-sized exoplanet HAT-P-26b using NASAs Hubble and Spitzer Space Telescopes. Their findings contribute to our knowledge of the diversity of planets as well as how they are formed.

As the planet which is around 437 light-years from earth passed in front of its sun, allowing the telescopes to measure it, scientists discovered an atmosphere rich in helium, hydrogen, and water vapor. Hannah Wakeford, co-leader of the new study and postdoctoral researcher at NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), said that this atmosphere would result in a very alien sky [] a kind of scattery, washed-out, gray sky.

The planet is also of interest because of its formation. In Earths Solar System,metallicity (astronomy terminology for anything heavier than helium) tends to decrease as mass increases,but HAT-P-26b defies this pattern. While it is about the size of Neptune, its metallicity is more inline with Jupiter.

So, why does this matter?

David Sing, a professor at the University of Exeter said, this new discovery about its atmosphere feels like a big breakthrough in our pursuit to learn more about how solar systems are formed, and how it compares to our own because This exciting new discovery shows that there is a lot more diversity in the atmospheres of these exoplanets than we have previously thought. And, while thousands of exoplanets have been discovered, we know relatively little about the compositions of their atmospheres.

This is the first in what promises to be a series of breakthroughs that will emerge as new telescopes launch this upcoming October. The James Webb Space Telescope(JWST) will allow us to explore further with a mirror that has a diameter of 6.5 meters in comparison to the Hubble-Telescopes 2.4 meter. In addition to this, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite(TESS) will provide detailed characterizations of planets and their atmospheresand is expected to survey more than 200,000 planets during its 2 year mission.

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An Ultra-Rare Impossible Planet Could Revolutionize Our Understanding of Space - Futurism

In BriefElon Musk co-founded artificial intelligence non-profit OpenAIjust announced it has created an AI system that can learn tocomplete a task in reality after watching just one demonstration ofthat task in a simulated environment. One Smart Bot

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, OpenAIs newest robot system should leave humanity blushing. Not only can it successfully replicate human behaviors, it can do so after just a single demonstration of the task.

The research company co-founded and chaired by Elon Musk used two separate neural networks to develop itsone-shot imitation learning system.

The first, a vision network, analyzes an image from the robots camera to determine the location of objects in reality (in OpenAIs video example, these objects are blocks of wood on a table). The network is able to do this despite never having seenthe actual table or blocks before. Instead, the researchers trained it using hundreds of thousands of simulated images, each featuring various permutations of lighting, textures, and objects.

The second, an imitation network, determines the intent of a task it observes a human demonstrating via a virtual simulation. It then imitates the task in the real-world setting. Again, this network was trained on thousands of virtual demonstrations, but none that took place in reality.

By the time the system was called upon to imitate a simulated demonstration in reality, it could do so after viewing the demonstration only once. Even more remarkably, the system was able to complete the task even if the starting parameters didnt quite match up. For example, the blocks didnt need to be in the exact same location as the demonstration for the system to know how to stack them. If a blue block went on top of a white block in the demonstration, the system replicated that task, even if the starting locations of the blocks wasnt identical.

Unlike Musks numerous other endeavors, OpenAI is a non-profit. Its purpose isnt to make money, but to support and guide AI innovation. To that end, its already quite successful.

In December, the company launched Universe, an open source platform where users could measure and train their AI using games, web browsers, and various software. Essentially, the platform gives AI the ability to replicate how humans use computers, which allows developers to train their systems to complete any computer-based tasks humans can do.

This week, OpenAI followed that up with Roboschool, open-source software for robot simulation.It features a dozen environments in which users can test their robots, and its integrated with OpenAI Gym, a toolkit that gives developers the ability to give and receive feedback on their work, providing them with an online community to support development in AI.

Beyond OpenAI, researchers are already finding ways to teach robots to do everything from read to dream. Theyve created AI systems that can learn on their ownand even ones that canteach each other. Education is being reinvented from the ground up to meet the needs of this new technology, and as our mechanical counterparts get smarter, our lives will get easier, safer, and maybe even a little more entertaining.

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Elon Musk Just Unveiled Breakthrough AI Research. Here's What You Need to Know. - Futurism

In Brief

Apple has recently acquired Lattice Data for about $200 million, according to TechCrunch. Lattice Data uses artificial intelligence (AI) to turn unstructured data (like images and text) into usable, structured data at scale. Now, around 20 engineers from Lattice have joined the Apple team.

Although Lattice has not been very public about itself, it hasnt needed to in order to attract attention in tech circles. The company was founded in 2015 as the commercial expression of the Stanford DeepDive dark data project. DeepDive was founded by Stanford professor and MacArthur Genius Grant winner Christopher R, Hadoop co-founder Michael Cafarella, Raphael Hoffmann, and Feng Niu.

Approximately 4.4 zettabytes of dataexisted in 2013, and that number is growing rapidly and should top 44 zettabytes by 2020.According to IBM, about 90 percent of the data that exists now was produced in the past two years alone.

However, somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of all of this data is dark, meaning it is unstructured and cannot be used from an analytics standpoint. Its like having a huge pool of data without any labels, categories, or any other kind of structure. Without organization, its not useful, but once it is organized, it can be used in countless ways. Thats what DeepDive and Lattice do, and now theyll do that for Apple.

Apple is in good company when it comes to investing in AI. Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have all invested in AI, and according to The Motley Fool, 2017 is the year to invest in AI stocks. Fortune has reported on the 50 largest AI startups on the CB Insights list of 100, 39 of which are in the U.S., so clearly investment in AI is booming.

According to Tractica, the AI market was worth $643.7 million in 2016, and will double in value throughout 2017. By 2025, it is projected tobe worth $36.8 billion. Apple and the others know that now is the right time to get in on investment into AI.

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Apple Is Using AI to Unlock Previously Unusable Dark Data - Futurism

In Brief A massive concept rover will be traveling the country this summer as part of NASA and the Kennedy Space Center's "Summer of Mars" educational event, which is designed to inspire interest in the Red Planet. An Otherworldly Concept

Each year, automakers around the world release futuristic concept carsthat force us to reconsider our notion of what a vehicle is, both in terms of looks and functionality. Now, one company is doing the same thing, but instead of reinventing the sedan or pickup truck, theyve offered their take on a Mars rover.

Through a partnership with NASAs Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, Parker Brothers Conceptshas built a six-wheeled, all-electric rover designed specifically to meet the challenges of exploring the surface of Mars. The estimated weight of the vehicle is 5,000 pounds, and its a staggering 28 feet long, so you definitely wouldnt see it rolling down a highway here on Earth. Although it does reportedly have a max speed of 96 to 112 kmh (60 to 70 mph).

One of the rovers creators, Marc Parker, told Business Insider that NASA provided his company with parameters for the vehicle. They then used that input to design and build their Batmobile-esque creation, which Parker calls a dual-purpose vehicle. It actually separates in the middle, he explained. The rear section is a full lab, the front area is a cockpit for going out and doing scouting.

Just a few days after its unveiling in Florida, the rover is already getting people excited about Mars exploration, and that excitement should only grow over the coming months. This summer, the vehicle will travel to various U.S. cities as part of NASA and the Kennedy Space Centers Summer of Mars event, and after that, it will be included in a new astronaut training experience opening at the center this fall.

The impact of the rover wont be limited to those who see it in person, either. Were also filming for a reality television series thats going to be coming out about this build, said Parker, who claims the show will be released on one of the bigger cable networks.

Like most concept cars, the Parker Brothers rover wont actually see any practical action, but it could serve as a prototype for future vehicles. More importantly, it could inspire interest in space exploration, in which case its creation will have been well worth the effort.

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NASA's Mars Rover Concept Looks Like the Batmobile - Futurism

In BriefResearchers have developed a model to understand howTRAPPIST-1's seven planets manage to avoid colliding with oneanother. They learned that the system follows a chain of resonancesat a scale never before seen in a planetary system. Orbital Progression

Februarys discovery of the seven Earth-like planets orbiting a dwarf star known as TRAPPIST-1 generated a great deal of excitement as the system seemed likea potential host for extraterrestrial life. However, further research revealed that the TRAPPIST planets seemed to be following an orbital path for destruction.

[I]n the original paper [when] they tried to simulate the system, planets would start colliding after a short time (astronomically speaking, about a million years), astrophysicist Dan Tamayo told Futurism via email. However, he and colleagues from the University of Toronto Scarboroughmay have found a way to explain how the TRAPPIST planets survive.

In a paper published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers explain thatthe mechanism that would lead to the TRAPPIST planets colliding with one another is the same one that keeps them stable their orbit. [I]n TRAPPIST-1, for every 2 orbits of the outermost planet, the next one in does 3 orbits, the next one 4, 6, 9, 15, and 24, Tamayo explained. This is called a chain of resonances, and this is the longest one that has ever been discovered in a planetary system.

One can liken the chain of resonances in the TRAPPIST system to how an orchestra works. The instruments create harmonious music by keeping time with one another and making sure each one is tuned to the rest.

Most planetary systems are like bands of amateur musicians playing their parts at different speeds, said Matt Russo, from the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), who took the lead in developing an animation to demonstrate this phenomenon. TRAPPIST-1 is different; its a super-group with all seven members synchronizing their parts in nearly perfect time. He added,This means that early on, each planets orbit was tuned to make it harmonious with its neighbors, in the same way that instruments are tuned by a band before it begins to play.

Using computer simulations, the researchers modeled how the TRAPPIST system was formed and how the harmonies were finely tuned to create this unprecedented stable chain of resonances.

Certainly, this research has larger implications in our search for systems that could potentially host extraterrestrial life. While these resonances are rare in systems with massive stars like the Sun, they could be a common occurrence around smaller stars like TRAPPIST-1. It may be that the formation conditions around low mass stars are gentler and better able to form harmonious, long lived planetary systems, said Tamayo.

This has implications for the prevalence of planets in the universe, since there are many small stars for every big one, he concluded. The exciting part is that this will be tested by upcoming missions like the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) launching next year.

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Any Alien Life in the Trappist-1 System Exists in a Tenuous Balance - Futurism

In Brief A firm has created facial recognition software that works together with surveillance cameras to identify emotions on faces. This may allow for real time crime prevention as violent facial expressions are recognized. Recognizing Violence In Faces

A Russian firm called NTechLab has created a software that, when used in tandem with surveillance cameras, can detect emotions and identify people who are angry, nervous, or stressed in a crowd. The software then processes the emotions it perceives in the context of the age, gender, and identity (if known) of the people it is surveilling to decide who the potential criminals and terrorists are. Last year, the firms software was used to power the FindFace app, which works on the Russian version of Facebook to find anyone from missing family members to suspects in cold cases.

NTechLab claims that the technology is more than 94 percent accurate. If theyre proven right, municipalities that use it may be able to monitor situations in real time, stopping crime before it happens. Its clients mostly include retail businesses and security firms, but local, state/regional or even federal governments could conceivably use their technology.

Technology has already changed the way the authorities fight crime and work to prevent it. The FBI has been using the Next Generation Identification (NGI) facial recognition system, which allows the agency to parse more than 411 million photos to identify suspects and not just the faces of people who have committed crimes. It also searches the visa and passport application photos of the State Department. In fact, experts estimate that about 117 million Americans around half of all adults in the U.S. are in the database. This kind of technology has also been implemented in airports since the 9/11 terror attacks.

Facial recognition is also being used to boost security in other contexts:HSBC uses facial recognition software rather than more traditional security measures, as does Lloyds in partnership with Microsoft. While this technology is primarily intended to boost online security, it is in essence also working to prevent crime and fraud.

So, can a dystopian future like the one shown in Minority Report in which innocent people are imprisoned without ever committing actual crimes be possible in a world that makes use of this technology? The FBI has responded to criticisms of its use of the NGI system by saying that it uses the software to generate leads not to make positive identifications. However, state and local law enforcement agencies also have access, and might have different policies or de facto procedures. As of October 2016, Wired reported that more than 40 civil liberties groups had requested that the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department (now headed by Jeff Sessions) evaluate the use of the technology around the country and issue guidance. As yet, the matter remains unresolved.

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Software That Reads Emotions Could Be Used to Catch Criminals Before They Act - Futurism

In Brief FRB 150215 is the most recent "cosmic whistle" that's been detected and it appears to be different from other FRBs that have been discovered in the last decade. Mysterious Bursts

In February of 2015, the Parkes radio telescope in Australia detected some fast radio bursts (FRB) that havefascinated astronomers ever since.Dubbed cosmic whistles, an FRB is a quick flash of energy seen as split-second intergalactic radio wave blips. FRB 150215, however, seems to be different frompreviously recorded bursts.

What makes FRB 150215 even more intriguing is that it doesnt seem to leave any signal or trace of light behind. The Parkes researchers used 11 telescopes in an attempt to spot radio, optical, X-ray, gamma-ray, and neutrino emission from these signals but none were found. Neither transient nor variable emission was found to be associated with the burst, and no repeat pulses have been observed in 17.25 hours of observing,the researchers report in a new study(which hasyet to be peer reviewed).

How could such high energy bursts not leave any traces? As if that wasnt mysterious enough, consider that in order for FRB 150215 to have been detectedat all, it had to go through a rather dense region of the Milky Way. This means that it shouldnt have been detectable in the first place.

FRBs were first discovered in 2007, and since then, there have been 22 known FRB occurrences. It was only earlier this year that scientists finally identified the source of one of these FRBs:some distant dwarf galaxy. Back in April, another group of scientists confirmed that FRBs are indeed coming from space.

As we develop more advancedtools with which to see and hear the universe, the probabilityof discovering what really caused theses signals isimproving. For one, new and better space telescopes like the James Webb will give us a view of our cosmic surroundings like weve never seen before.

When we do see them, no doubt well definitely be in for a surprise. For now, though, astronomers are putting in additionalwork tobetter understand the phenomenon. Its not very often in science that you get to work on something thats so brand new and so unknown that you get to answer the fundamental questions, researcher Emily Petroff told Gizmodo. Its exciting to be in these very early stages of the field when you can make a big impact with your research and answer these really big questions.

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Mysterious Signals From Space Continue to Baffle Scientists - Futurism