https://youtu.be/WWYdayRnKUA
For more about me, see: https://ralphbond.wixsite.com/aboutme
Story 1: Biggest 5G breakthrough may be this harmless, little plastic strip – Ericsson is working on an antenna that could be placed under carpets or hung on walls. Think coverage everywhere.
Source: C/Net Story by Roger Cheng
Link: https://www.cnet.com/news/the-biggest-5g-breakthrough-may-be-this-harmless-little-plastic-strip/
5G is going to change your life. But first, it actually needs to get to you.
Though 5G networks are starting to go live, the deployments remain limited. That’s because many of the carriers, including Verizon and AT&T, are employing super high-frequency airwaves through something called millimeter wave spectrum, which offers a fat data pipe for insane speeds but has limited range. Another of its big issues is an inability to get through walls — even a leaf could theoretically disrupt the service.
Enter a seemingly innocuous strip of plastic found in the Mobile World Congress [story posted March 2] booth of Ericsson, the Swedish supplier of telecom equipment. The strip contains printed circuit boards and tiny antennas able to pick up and send 5G data. Along the walls at one of Ericsson’s demos, the strip was embedded behind a thin piece of wallpaper or hidden by a thin plastic housing. Another strip was laid under a long train of carpet that was rolled up.
“This is how easy your network rollout will be,” Pal Frenger, a researcher at Ericsson, said as he placed the roll on the floor and kicked it open. He liked the joke so much, I heard him say it again a few minutes later.
This little strip could have big implications for how 5G might get deployed. Carriers are still struggling with how to deal with the limitations of millimeter wave spectrum, which is why many are opting to use lower-frequency (slower, but broader) spectrum. The huge number of small cells — miniature cellular towers — required to create a network is another obstacle, since many cities don’t want that many eyesores in their communities.
AT&T Chief Technology Officer Andre Fuetsch, in an interview with CNET at MWC [Mobile World Congress], referred to its 5G deployments as “small pockets.”
But the ease with which you could hang up (or roll out) these strips, or even temporarily install them at an outdoor venue, could turbocharge the deployment of 5G by offering better coverage in little corners. By offering a simpler, easier method for stringing up antennas that are compatible with millimeter wave spectrum or even mid-band frequencies, the strip could let users get the maximum benefit of 5G.
Story 2: This wireless stethoscope lets you listen in on nature
Source: Mental Floss Story by Jake Rossen
If you’ve ever been envious of your physician’s ability to grab a stethoscope and get aural information about the heart or a fetus in the womb, the Stemoscope might be music to your ears.
The wireless electronic stethoscope, which is currently enjoying a successful launch on Kickstarter [story posted March 1], allows users to position a 1.5-inch device up against the body. A Bluetooth signal delivers data to your phone, where you can listen with a set of headphones. The app also allows you to record the signal for playback at a later date.
The Stemoscope isn’t limited to informal heart or lung examinations. (And obviously, it’s no substitute for professional medical attention.) Part of the appeal of the device is having the ability to eavesdrop on sounds in the world around us. Trees, for example, make detectable noises as their hydration levels change. Some pet owners may find useful to assess a dog or cat’s heart rate. It might also be possible to use it as an aid in safecracking. We’ll leave that to the experts.
The Stemoscope is available for a $29 pledge, with delivery expected in May.
Buy it on Kickstarter.
Story 3: This robot gripper looks like a wilted flower, but it can lift 100 times its own weight
Source: The Verge Story by James Vincent
Link: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/18259883/soft-robot-origami-gripper-mit-csail-daniela-rus
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byqGFH6AZuk
If someone asked you to imagine a robot, says Daniela Rus, a professor at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), you’d probably think of a human-shaped bot or some heavy-duty industrial robot arm. “But for me, I would like to see a change,” she tells The Verge.
The latest work from her team at MIT is a perfect example. It’s a robot gripper that’s designed to pick up objects, but its looks are unconventional, to say the least. Visually, it has more in common with a rubber tulip or a deflated balloon than a sci-fi robot hand.
But it’s this unique look that makes the gripper so potentially useful. Underneath its rubber skin is an origami skeleton that’s shaped like starfish. As gas is pumped in and out of the gripper’s airtight enclosure, the whole device opens and closes like a flower. This allows the device to pick up delicate objects without harming them, while still maintaining a strong enough grip to lift 100 times its own weight.
“By combining this foldable skeleton with the soft exterior, we get the best of both worlds,” Rus tells The Verge. “I’m excited about using such a robot hand to start grasping groceries.”
Soft robot grippers like this aren’t new. Over the past decade, the field has experienced a boom, with engineers looking to take advantage of soft machines of all shapes and sizes. One natural use case is logistics: handling items in warehouses and factories. Although much of this work has been automated, humans are still widely employed by companies like Amazon to pick and sort individual items, packing them into bags and boxes.
This is because traditional robot grippers made of metal and hard plastics struggle with delicate items and irregular shapes. The old cliché of an out-of-control killer robot chanting “crush, destroy” isn’t too far off here. Your average factory robot today couldn’t unpack your shopping without turnings eggs into omelets and oranges into orange juice.
Soft robot grippers look like the best solution to this problem, and the past few years have seen an explosion of this technology. Labs like CSAIL [MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory] as well as commercial companies like RightHand Robotics have all gotten in on the action, developing everything from inflatable robot hands to beanbag-like grippers to modules shaped like octopus tentacles.
Rus says her new gripper is a better solution than any previous design though. Its tulip shape means it can approach objects from a variety of angles, as opposed to a hand gripper, which usually has to come at an object from the side. And because of its origami skeleton, which Rus and her team developed in 2017, it has strength as well as flexibility.
As to why such devices haven’t been adopted more widely yet, Rus says that’s because commercial solutions have yet to catch up with “innovations coming out the lab.” Another reason might be institutional inertia. Once companies have invested in expensive equipment, replacing it isn’t an easy decision. Especially if updating your hardware might mean rearranging your entire workflow.
There’s no doubt that the field of soft robotics continues to spit out bizarre and potentially useful creations. And if Rus and her colleagues get their way, it won’t be long until our mental picture of what a robot looks like changes for good. “This is a first, to our knowledge, in creating a robot hand that can do such useful work,” says Rus.
Story 4: US will get world’s first exascale computer in 2021
Source: Popular Mechanics Story by Avery Thompson
Link: https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a26886243/first-exascale-computer/
For the past several years, the world’s power have been locked in a supercomputing arms race, one-upping one another with biggest and faster achievements. According to a new announcement, the world’s fastest supercomputer is coming to the United States in 2021 and will be the first to break the so-called “exascale” barrier. ***announcement made March 18
Supercomputers measure their performance in flops, or calculations per second. A computer that has ten flops can make ten calculations in a second, which is pretty abysmal for a modern computer. Your laptop or desktop is likely capable of several teraflops, or trillions of calculations per second.
***In computing, FLOPS or flops (an acronym for floating-point operations per second) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific calculations that make heavy use of floating-point calculations.
The top-performing supercomputer in the world right now is the Summit computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That computer reaches 150 petaflops, several thousand times as much processing power as a typical laptop. Several other top supercomputers reach a few dozen petaflops as well.
***Petaflop is a unit of computing speed equal to one thousand million million (1015) floating-point operations per second.
But the big target in supercomputer construction right now is building the first exascale computer, capable of a quintillion calculations per second. Such a computer would be a million times faster than a typical desktop and could dramatically advance scientific and artificial intelligence research.
[quintillion – a thousand raised to the power of six (1018)]
According to an announcement from the Department of Energy, that first exascale computer is finally coming. Thanks to $500 million from the DoE, a 1 exaflop computer named Aurora will be built at Argonne National Laboratory. The computer will be built using architecture and technology from Intel.
“Aurora and the next-generation of exascale supercomputers will apply [high performance computing] and AI technologies to areas such as cancer research, climate modeling, and veterans’ health treatments,” said Secretary of Energy Rick Perry in a press release. “The innovative advancements that will be made with exascale will have an incredibly significant impact on our society.”
Story 5: Surprising facts about tech, gadgets and the wonderful World Wide Web
Source: Pocket-lint Story by Adrian Willings
Link: https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/147627-surprising-facts-about-tech
The world is a wonderful place and in our mind, it’s made even better by the technology, gadgetry and modern marvels that surround us.
To celebrate all this wonder we’ve put together some interesting facts about tech, gadgets and the history of the web that you might not know. You might be surprised and amused by what we’ve found.
The first photo on the World Wide Web
This is the first photo ever posted on the World Wide Web and it’s over 20 years old. The image comes from CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, the same organisation that famously discovered the Higgs Boson particle.
It shows an all-girl comedy band that was created from secretaries and partners of the CERN scientists. This image was posted online as a promotional piece and features some fairly shocking Photoshopping, but marks a fantastic piece of history.
This is the computer that was used to create the web
Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee is the man famously credited with creating the World Wide Web in the late 1980s. It was this machine, a NeXT computer, that he used as the world’s first web server. He also used it while working at CERN to code the world’s first web browser known as WorldWideWeb, in 1990.
***More to see, use the link for the full article
Story 6: TossingBot can grab objects and toss them in specified bins
Source: TechXplore Story by Bob Yirka
Link: https://techxplore.com/news/2019-04-tossingbot-toss-bins.html
See video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Zn2Up2RjQ
A group at Google with assistance from teams at Columbia and Princeton Universities and MIT has developed a robot that is able to grab a single object from among other objects in a box and toss it into a specified bin. In their paper uploaded to the arXiv preprint server, the team describes the challenges of the work and how well it turned out.
The researchers start by pointing out just how hard it is to grab a random object and throw it with any precision. The randomness of the object chosen means that the thrower must make critical decisions before tossing, taking into account the weight and shape of the object. The thrower must then be able to convert the decisions into an action that will send the object in an arc from the tosser to the target. In this new effort, the team chose to take up the challenge of building a robot arm that does it as well as a human being.
The robot designed by the team looks very simple—it is a robot arm, much like those that build cars in factories. In action, the robot bends its arm down into a box full of objects, selects one, then tosses it into a box that has been divided into separate bins—hitting the bin it has chosen as the target.
To build the robot, the team had to help it learn, first by programming it to scan and make some sense of the objects it needed to toss. After that, it had to learn how to choose an object randomly and pick it up. Next, it had to use a deep-learning network to learn how to toss each possible object and then to use what it had learned to toss the object, learning more with each repetition.
Once the system was in place, the researchers programmed a loop and let the robot toss its objects into boxes 10,000 times without assistance. The programmers added some code to allow the robot to empty the bin box back into its own box when it had tossed all of its objects.
The researchers report that testing showed the system to be approximately 87 percent accurate in grabbing an object to toss and 85 percent accurate in throwing it. As a comparison, the team tried tossing the objects themselves and found they were less accurate than their robot.
See video below here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O-E1nFm6-A
Story 7: Scientist researching brain chips to make people super intelligent
Source: CBS News, Chicago
CHICAGO (CBS) — What if you could make money, or type something, just by thinking about it? It sounds like science fiction, but it might be close to reality.
In as little as five years, super smart people could be walking down the street; men and women who’ve paid to increase their intelligence.
Northwestern University neuroscientist and business professor Dr. Moran Cerf made that prediction, because he’s working on a smart chip for the brain.
“Make it so that it has an internet connection, and goes to Wikipedia, and when I think this particular thought, it gives me the answer,” he said.
Cerf is collaborating with Silicon Valley big wigs he’d rather not name.
Facebook also has been working on building a brain-computer interface, and SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is backing a brain-computer interface called Neuralink.
“Everyone is spending a lot of time right now trying to find ways to get things into the brain without drilling a hole in your skull,” Cerf said. “Can you eat something that will actually get to your brain? Can you eat things in parts that will assemble inside your head?”
It sounds mind-blowing. Relationships might be on the line.
“This is no longer a science problem, this is a social problem,” Cerf said.
Cerf worries about creating intelligence gaps in society; on top of existing gender, racial, and financial inequalities.
“They can make money by just thinking about the right investments, and we cannot; so they’re going to get richer, they’re going to get healthier, they’re going to live longer,” he said.
The average IQ of an intelligent monkey is about 70, the average human IQ is around 100, and a genius IQ is generally considered to begin around 140. People with a smart chip in their brain could have an IQ of around 200, so would they even want to interact with the average person?
“Are they going to say, ‘Look at this cute human, Stephen Hawking. He can do differential equations in his mind, just like a little baby with 160 IQ points. Isn’t it amazing? So cute. Now let’s put it back in a cage and give it bananas,’” Cerf said.
Time will tell. Or will our minds?
Approximately 40,000 people in the United States already have smart chips in their heads, but those brain implants are only approved for medical use for now.
Story 8: Full-body virtual reality lets you hang out with ghosts, feel the Amazon rainforest – Hang out with ghosts, fly around a prehistoric world or travel to the Amazon.
Source: ABC News
Link: https://abcnews.go.com/US/full-body-virtual-reality-lets-hang-ghosts-feel/story?id=62114928
Hang out with ghosts, fly around a prehistoric world or travel with an indigenous tribe in the Amazon rainforest.
In recent years, an increasing number of pop-ups and other location-based virtual reality arcades have allowed people to go beyond simply strapping on a headset by incorporating multi-sensory interactions like motion and scent. Arcades like The Void’s “Ghostbuster” experience or Spaces’ “Terminator Salvation VR” offer a total-body experience with haptic feedback and an array of user interactions.
The Future of Storytelling (FoST) launched the Story Arcade, a NYC pop-up, in February. Story Arcade exhibits several multi-sensory VR pieces that, in addition to 360-degree visuals, incorporates actors, haptics, scents and temperature changes
“We’re going beyond two senses,” founder and CEO Charles Melcher told ABC News. “Our organization is meant to support and elevate the next generation of storytellers, marrying content and technology.”
Among the highlights:
“Chained: A Victorian Nightmare” puts users in Victorian-era London in a retelling of the Dicken’s classic “A Christmas Carol.” Upon entering, users interact with live actors — “ghosts” — in the digitally created world of old London. The “ghosts” serve as guides for the delightfully ghoulish experience, interacting in real time.
“Jurassic Flight” transforms users into a flying reptile known as a Pterosaur, providing a full-body experience. The user is placed on a robotic motion platform paired with a mechanical airflow system that together simulates flight. Once strapped in, users travel back 150 million years and soar through the skies of this ancient Jurassic world.
In “Munduruku: The Fight to Defend the Heart of the Amazon,” users sit inside a pod that, along with the headset, mimics the climate and scents of the Amazon rainforest. The story takes you to the Munduruku indigenous people of Brazil as they strive to save their home from deforestation.
FoST Story Arcade runs through April 21 in New York City.
Story 9: US companies put record number of robots to work in 2018
Source: Reuters (Reporting by Timothy Aeppel; Editing by Joe White and Tom Brown)
(Reuters) – U.S. companies installed more robots last year than ever before, as cheaper and more flexible machines put them within reach of businesses of all sizes and in more corners of the economy beyond their traditional foothold in car plants.
Shipments hit 28,478, nearly 16 percent more than in 2017, according to data seen by Reuters that was set for release on Thursday by the Association for Advancing Automation, an industry group based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Shipments increased in every sector the group tracks, except automotive, where carmakers cut back after finishing a major round of tooling up for new truck models.
Other sectors boomed. Shipments to food and consumer goods companies surged 60 percent compared to the year before. Shipments to semiconductor and electronics plants were up over 50 percent, while shipments to metal producers rose 13 percent.
Pressure to automate is growing as companies seek to cut labour costs in a tight job market. Many companies that are considering bringing work back from overseas in response to the Trump administration’s trade wars may find automation the best way to stay competitive, even with higher-cost U.S. workers.
Bob Doyle, vice president of the Association for Advancing Automation, said automation is moving far beyond its traditional foothold in auto assembly plants and other large manufacturers into warehouses and smaller factories.
One of those is Metro Plastics Technologies Inc, a family-owned business in Noblesville, Indiana, which has only 125 employees and got its start in the 1970s making, among other things, mood rings. Last March, the company bought its first robot, an autonomous machine that carries finished parts from the production area to quality inspectors. In the past, that work was done by workers driving forklifts.
“We had three propane, 5,000-pound forklifts,” said Ken Hahn, the company’s president. “We’ve eliminated those.” Hahn’s robot cost $40,000, about twice that of the cheapest option he considered, but far below the $125,000 machines also on offer.
Last year marked the first time since 2010 that auto and auto part companies failed to account for more than half of shipments, coming at just under 49 percent instead, according to the report. In 2017, over 60 percent of shipments went to automakers.
“The food industry is really starting to take off” as a market for automation, said Dan Hasley, director of sales and marketing for Kawasaki Robotics (USA) Inc, part of Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries . He added that “food and beverage is one of the segments that really responds to tight labour markets.”