Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2019 face_with_colon_three

“You could train your particular ‘tongue’ to know what one of these whiskies ‘tasted’ like, so that when the fake stuff came along it could identify it and when the real stuff came along it could confirm that it was the real stuff,” said Dr Alasdair Clark, the lead author of the research from the University of Glasgow.

Clark said the technology could be incorporated into a small, portable device and have a wide range of applications, from identifying poisons to environmental monitoring of rivers.

Continue reading “Scientists develop ‘artificial tongue’ to detect fake whiskies” »

Electric vehicles have often been hailed as the future. Major motoring companies are aiming to produce nothing but electric vehicles in the future, and some aspire to hit that target by the end of the decade. Cars that are traditionally seen as so-called gas guzzlers — like pickup trucks, muscle cars, and hummers — all have electric equivalents. Governments, including the one running the United States, are improving infrastructure, offering tax incentives, and enacting policies aimed at getting more electric vehicles on the road. And modern-day industrial icons like Elon Musk, who obviously has a vested interest in the electric car’s success, constantly promote the concept. Musk recently published a tweet that likened internal combustion engines to the steam engine — an archaic method of producing mechanical power.

The loss of life would be equivalent to six planes, each carrying 200 passengers, killing everyone on board, every year.

Reducing air pollution from road transport will save thousands of lives and improve the health.

In our published research we evaluated the costs and benefits of a rapid transition. In one scenario, Australia matches the pace of transition of world leaders such as Norway. The modeling estimates this would save around 24,000 lives by 2042. Over time, the resulting greenhouse emission reductions would almost equal Australia’s current total annual emissions from all sources.

Continue reading “Rapid adoption of electric vehicles could save money and avoid 24,000 deaths over 20 years” »

A team at Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a novel approach for comparing neural networks that looks within the “black box” of artificial intelligence to help researchers understand neural network behavior. Neural networks recognize patterns in datasets; they are used everywhere in society, in applications such as virtual assistants, facial recognition systems and self-driving cars.

“The artificial intelligence research community doesn’t necessarily have a complete understanding of what neural networks are doing; they give us good results, but we don’t know how or why,” said Haydn Jones, a researcher in the Advanced Research in Cyber Systems group at Los Alamos. “Our new method does a better job of comparing neural networks, which is a crucial step toward better understanding the mathematics behind AI.”

Jones is the lead author of the paper “If You’ve Trained One You’ve Trained Them All: Inter-Architecture Similarity Increases With Robustness,” which was presented recently at the Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence. In addition to studying network similarity, the paper is a crucial step toward characterizing the behavior of robust neural networks.

This is also the fastest IPMSM built with commercialized lamination materials.

Researchers at the University of New South Wales Sydney have developed a new electric motor that can clock 100,000 revolutions per minute. The high power density achieved as a result of this new design could help reduce the weight of electric vehicles (EVs) and thereby increase their range, a university press release said.

EV makers around the world have been looking for ways to address the range anxiety of their battery-powered vehicles. One of the options is to increase the size of the battery pack, which also increases the weight of the vehicle, creating more problems to solve.

China appears to be a leader in maglev technology and continues to find innovative ways to use it.

A car equipped with magnetic levitation (maglev) technology has been successfully tested on a highway in East China’s Jiangsu province, according to an article by China Daily.

Provincial transport authorities are testing a new highway lane for maglev cars. The experiment saw a 2.8-tonne car float 35 millimeters above the road and run smoothly on a highway without crashing or veering.

Continue reading “China tests maglev cars that travel at 230kph while floating 35mm above the road” »

A high-tech sponge can absorb water vapor from the air and convert it to pure hydrogen for use in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and machines. This…

“We think that each car needs to sound for itself.”

It was roughly six years ago when Audi started designing bold soundtracks for its growing line of hybrids and EVs. Why did the 111-year-old carmaker need custom sounds for its forward-looking product line? It all comes down to one thing: electric vehicles are practically silent, even when traveling at high speeds.

Audi.

Continue reading “Cool Job: Meet the engineer who designs the sounds for Audi’s EVs” »

Visit https://brilliant.org/Veritasium/ to get started learning STEM for free, and the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual premium subscription. Digital computers have served us well for decades, but the rise of artificial intelligence demands a totally new kind of computer: analog.

Thanks to Mike Henry and everyone at Mythic for the analog computing tour! https://www.mythic-ai.com/
Thanks to Dr. Bernd Ulmann, who created The Analog Thing and taught us how to use it. https://the-analog-thing.org.
Moore’s Law was filmed at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Welch Labs’ ALVINN video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0igiP6Hg1k.

Continue reading “Future Computers Will Be Radically Different (Analog Computing)” »