Lifeboat Foundation

The knock on superheroes is that they’re unrealistic. This isn’t fair. Many superheroes have powers that we are close to or will be capable of engineering for ourselves. What’s unrealistic is the way those powers are doled out. Radioactive spiders aren’t going to make anyone strong any time soon.

Throw away those old origin stories and replace them with new scientific narratives and you’ve got something closer to the truth, which is this: We’re all going to have superpowers. Here’s the order in which we’re going to get them.

Superhuman Marksmanship

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K-Glass, smart glasses reinforced with augmented reality (AR) that were first developed by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in 2014, with the second version released in 2015, is back with an even stronger model. The latest version, which KAIST researchers are calling K-Glass 3, allows users to text a message or type in key words for Internet surfing by offering a virtual keyboard for text and even one for a piano.

Currently, most wearable head-mounted displays (HMDs) suffer from a lack of rich user interfaces, short battery lives, and heavy weight. Some HMDs, such as Google Glass, use a touch panel and voice commands as an interface, but they are considered merely an extension of smartphones and are not optimized for wearable smart glasses. Recently, gaze recognition was proposed for HMDs including K-Glass 2, but gaze is insufficient to realize a natural user interface (UI) and experience (UX), such as user’s gesture recognition, due to its limited interactivity and lengthy gaze-calibration time, which can be up to several minutes.

As a solution, Professor Hoi-Jun Yoo and his team from the Electrical Engineering Department recently developed K-Glass 3 with a low-power natural UI and UX processor to enable convenient typing and screen pointing on HMDs with just bare hands. This processor is composed of a pre-processing core to implement stereo vision, seven deep-learning cores to accelerate real-time scene recognition within 33 milliseconds, and one rendering engine for the display.

We’ve talked a lot about sending people to Mars, but what about Earth’s sister? NASA engineering are planning to send HAVOC airships to Venus.

Just as the single-crystal silicon wafer forever changed the nature of electronics 60 years ago, a group of Cornell researchers is hoping its work with quantum dot solids – crystals made out of crystals – can help usher in a new era in electronics.

The multidisciplinary team, led by Tobias Hanrath, associate professor in the Robert Frederick Smith School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and graduate student Kevin Whitham, has fashioned two-dimensional superstructures out of single-crystal building blocks. Through directed assembly and attachment processes, the lead selenide quantum dots are synthesized into larger crystals, then fused together to form atomically coherent square superlattices.

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Satellites and spacecraft are generally complex to build on the ground, expensive to launch and obsolete in a decade or less.

These objects end up floating in orbit around the planet contributing to the pollution surrounding the Earth. But what if there was an alternative?

That’s the question David Barnhart, director of USC’s Space Engineering Research Center and lead for the Space Systems and Technology group for the USC Information Sciences Institute, is contemplating. What if we could just “grow” spacecraft, repurpose a hybrid of inorganic and organic materials and even allow food to grow in space?

Facebook today announced the launch of the Telecom Infra Project (TIP), which is bringing together a coalition of internet service providers and tech companies to focus on the engineering challenges of delivering high-res video and virtual reality. The group has 30 initial members including T-Mobile, Nokia, Intel, Deutsche Telekom, and SK Telecom. The approach is modeled after the Open Compute Project, which was started by Facebook in 2011 to share designs of data-center products, and has ties to Facebook’s Internet.org initiative to bring connectivity to rural areas and developing countries.

“Every day, more people and more devices around the world are coming online, and it’s becoming easier to share data-intensive experiences like video and virtual reality,” Jay Parikh, Facebook’s global head of engineering and infrastructure, writes in a blog post. “Scaling traditional telecom infrastructure to meet this global data challenge is not moving as fast as people need it to.”

The TIP’s technology companies and hardware makers will work together to contribute designs for products like wireless radios and optical fiber gear to better manage, store, and deliver intensive data, while telecoms can then use those designs in practice. “This will result in significant gains in cost and operational efficiency for both rural and urban deployments,” Parikh adds. The group will also work toward accelerating the development of 5G networks.

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Now we can turn sugar into Nylon.

Genetically engineered yeast plus electro-catalyst yields bio-based nylon.

The job advertisement was highly specific: applicants had to be passionate about computer games and live in the UK. Oh, and they also had to be amputees who were interested in wearing a futuristic prosthetic limb.

James Young knew straight away he had a better shot than most. After losing an arm and a leg in a rail accident in 2012, the 25-year-old Londoner had taught himself to use a video-game controller with one hand and his teeth. “How many amputee gamers can there be?” he asked himself.

In the end, more than 60 people replied to the ad, which was looking for a games-mad amputee to become the recipient of a bespoke high-tech prosthetic arm inspired by Metal Gear Solid, one of the world’s best-selling computer games. Designed and built by a team of 10 experts led by London-based prosthetic sculptor Sophie de Oliveira Barata, the £60,000 carbon-fibre limb is part art project, part engineering marvel.

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Unfortunately, much of this (teaching morals, developing a defense plan in case of a preemptive strike, etc,) is not going to work and key reason is simple. Robots are and will always be a machine at it’s core foundation. And, as a result, criminals and terrorists will be able to pay enough money to someone to over ride the technology; therefore, enabling criminals and others to do whatever they wish with the technology.

Instead of trying to promote book reading as a means to preventing an up rising; let’s be a little more realistic in this by stating we’re teaching the machine to have more of an interpersonal approach in its communications and interactions with people. Also, I highly encourage robotic companies need to include a well diverse engineering team especially where robotics is being developed for domestic usage and caregiver usage; otherwise, you will be only as good as the next competitor’s product that did include a right mix of engineers and deliver a better product that meets both male and female needs as well as cultural needs.

In other words, it will be hard for a robot designed & created with a dominate male (20 to 30 something year olds) minded to relate how a female 50 yr old thinks about her house. Again, I would love to see more females get into this space especially female owned companies because they could truly own this market.
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