Transhumanismus

A new generation of “flying cars” promises to revolutionize urban mobility, but limited battery power holds them back from plying longer routes. A new hydrogen-powered variant from Joby Aviation could soon change that.

Rapid advances in battery technology and electric motors have opened the door to a new class of aircraft known as eVTOLs, which stands for electric vertical takeoff and landing. The companies making the aircraft tout them as a quieter, greener alternative to helicopters.

However, current battery technology means they’re limited to ranges of approximately 150 miles. That’s why they have primarily been envisaged as a new form of urban mobility, allowing quick hops across cities congested with traffic.

Joby is already developing a battery-powered eVTOL that it expects to start commercial operations next year. But this week, the company announced it has created a hydrogen-powered version of the aircraft, which recently completed a 523-mile test flight. The company says this could allow eVTOLs to break into regional travel as well.

“With our battery-electric air taxi set to fundamentally change the way we move around cities, we’re excited to now be building a technology stack that could redefine regional travel using hydrogen-electric aircraft,” JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby, said in a press release.

“Imagine being able to fly from San Francisco to San Diego, Boston to Baltimore, or Nashville to New Orleans without the need to go to an airport and with no emissions except water.”

Joby’s demonstrator is a converted battery-electric aircraft that had already completed 25,000 miles of test flights. It features the same airframe with six electric-motor-powered tilting propellers that allow it to take off vertically like a helicopter but cruise like a light aircraft. Joby says this should significantly speed up the certification process if the company decides to commercialize the technology.

What’s new is the addition of a hydrogen fuel cell system designed by H2FLY, a German startup Joby acquired in 2021, and a liquid hydrogen fuel tank that can store about 40 kilograms of fuel. The fuel cell combines the liquid hydrogen with oxygen from the air to generate the electricity that powers the aircraft’s motors. The H2FLY team used the same underlying technology in a series of demonstration flights with a more conventional aircraft design last year.

The new Joby aircraft will still carry some batteries to provide additional power during takeoff and landing. But hydrogen has a much higher energy density—or specific energy—than batteries, which makes it possible to power the aircraft for significantly longer.

“Hydrogen has one hundred times the specific energy of today’s batteries and three times that of jet fuel,” Bevirt wrote in a blog post. “The result is an electric aircraft that can travel much farther—and carry a greater payload—than is possible not only with any battery cells currently under development, but even with the same mass of jet fuel.”

However, switching to hydrogen fuel poses some challenges. For a start, hydrogen requires complicated cooling equipment, which means airports or other landing facilities would need to invest significant amounts in new fueling infrastructure.

“The industry is already scratching its head figuring out how to support battery electric aircraft with charging infrastructure at airports,” Cyrus Sigari, co-founder and managing partner of VC Up.Partners, told TechCrunch. “Adding hydrogen filling stations into that equation will present even more challenges.”

Hydrogen’s green credentials are also somewhat weaker than those of batteries. While it’s possible to generate hydrogen from water using only renewable electricity, at present the vast majority is produced from fossil fuels.

However, efforts are underway to increase the supply of green hydrogen, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed in 2021 set aside $9.5 billion to help boost these efforts. And if hydrogen-powered flight can piggyback on innovations in eVTOL technology, it could prove a powerful way to curb emissions in one of the world’s most polluting sectors.

Image Credit: Joby

OpenAI Reportedly Nears Breakthrough With ‘Reasoning’ AI, Reveals Progress Framework
Benj Edwards | Ars Technica
“[According to OpenAI’s new AGI framework] a Level 2 AI system would reportedly be capable of basic problem-solving on par with a human who holds a doctorate degree but lacks access to external tools. During the all-hands meeting, OpenAI leadership reportedly demonstrated a research project using their GPT-4 model that the researchers believe shows signs of approaching this human-like reasoning ability, according to someone familiar with the discussion who spoke with Bloomberg.”

How AI Revolutionized Protein Science, but Didn’t End It
Yasemin Saplakoglu | Quanta
“Three years ago, Google’s AlphaFold pulled off the biggest artificial intelligence breakthrough in science to date, accelerating molecular research, and kindling deep questions about why we do science. …’The field of protein biology is ‘more exciting right now than it was before AlphaFold,’ Perrakis said. The excitement comes from the promise of reviving structure-based drug discovery, the acceleration in creating hypotheses, and the hope of understanding complex interactions happening within cells.”

New Fiber Optics Tech Smashes Data Rate Record 
Margo Anderson | IEEE Spectrum
“An international team of researchers have smashed the world record for fiber optic communications through commercial-grade fiber. By broadening fiber’s communication bandwidth, the team has produced data rates four times as fast as existing commercial systems—and 33 percent better than the previous world record.”

‘Superhuman’ Go AIs Still Have Trouble Defending Against These Simple Exploits
Kyle Orland | Ars Technica
“In the ancient Chinese game of Go, state-of-the-art artificial intelligence has generally been able to defeat the best human players since at least 2016. But in the last few years, researchers have discovered flaws in these top-level AI Go algorithms that give humans a fighting chance. By using unorthodox ‘cyclic’ strategies—ones that even a beginning human player could detect and defeat—a crafty human can often exploit gaps in a top-level AI’s strategy and fool the algorithm into a loss.”

Google Creates Self-Replicating Life From Digital ‘Primordial Soup’
Matthew Sparkes | New Scientist
“A self-replicating form of artificial life has arisen from a digital ‘primordial soup’ of random data, despite a lack of explicit rules or goals to encourage such behavior. Researchers believe it is possible that more sophisticated versions of the experiment could yield more advanced digital organisms, and if they did, the findings could shed light on the mechanisms behind the emergence of biological life on Earth.”

How Good Is ChatGPT at Coding, Really?
Michelle Hampson | IEEE Spectrum
“Programmers have spent decades writing code for AI models, and now, in a full circle moment, AI is being used to write code. But how does an AI code generator compare to a human programmer? [A new study shows] that ChatGPT has an extremely broad range of success when it comes to producing functional code—with a success rate ranging from anywhere as poor as 0.66 percent and as good as 89 percent—depending on the difficulty of the task, the programming language, and a number of other factors.”

OpenAI Anticipates Decrease in AI Model Costs Amid Adoption Surge
Shubham Sharma | VentureBeat
“‘We introduced GPT-4, the first version, some 15 months ago. Since then, the cost of a token/word on the model has been reduced by 85-90%. There’s no reason why that trend will not continue,’ Olivier Godement, [OpenAI’s] head of API Product said. …He expects the company’s work on affordability, spanning efforts to optimize costs at both hardware and inference levels, will continue, leading to a further decline in the cost of running frontier AI models—much like what has been the case with smartphones and televisions.”

Watch These Supernovas in (Time-Lapse) Motion
Dennis Overbye | The New York Times
“This spring, the astronomers who operate Chandra combined its X-ray images into videos that document the evolution of two astrophysical landmarks: the Crab nebula, in the constellation Taurus, and Cassiopeia A, a gas bubble and hub of radio noise in the constellation Cassiopeia. The videos show twisting, drifting ribbons of the remains of the star being churned by shock waves and illuminated by radiation from the dense, spinning cores left behind.”

Image Credit: BoliviaInteligente / Unsplash

Tired: Listening to music.
Wired: Feeling the music.

A mind-bending new suit straps onto your torso, ankles and wrists, then uses actuators to translate audio into vivid vibration. The result: a new way for everyone to experience music, according to its creators. That’s especially exciting for people who have trouble hearing.

The Music: Not Impossible suit was created by design firm Not Impossible Labs and electronics manufacturing company Avnet. The suit can create sensations to go with pre-recorded music, or a “Vibrotactile DJ” can adjust the sensations in real time during a live music event.”

Billboard writer Andy Hermann tried the suit out, and it sounds like a trip.

“Sure enough, a pulse timed to a kickdrum throbs into my ankles and up through my legs,” he wrote. “Gradually, [the DJ] brings in other elements: the tap of a woodblock in my wrists, a bass line massaging my lower back, a harp tickling a melody across my chest.”

To show the suit off, Not Impossible and Avnet organized a performance this past weekend by the band Greta Van Fleet at the Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas. The company allowed attendees to don the suits. Mandy Harvey, a deaf musician who stole the show on America’s Got Talent last year, talked about what the performance meant to her in a video Avnet posted to Facebook.

“It was an unbelievable experience to have an entire audience group who are all experiencing the same thing at the same time,” she said. “For being a deaf person, showing up at a concert, that never happens. You’re always excluded.”

READ MORE: Not Impossible Labs, Zappos Hope to Make Concerts More Accessible for the Deaf — and Cooler for Everyone [Billboard]

More on accessible design: New Tech Allows Deaf People To Sense Sounds

The post Make Music A Full Body Experience With A “Vibro-Tactile” Suit appeared first on Futurism.

Today’s prosthetics can give people with missing limbs the ability to do almost anything — run marathons, climb mountains, you name it. But when it comes to letting those people feel what they could with a natural limb, the devices, however mechanically sophisticated, invariably fall short.

Now researchers have created a “synthetic skin” with a sense of touch that not only matches the sensitivity of natural skin, but in some cases even exceeds it. Now the only challenge is getting that information back into the wearer’s nervous system.

When something presses against your skin, your nerves receive and transmit that pressure to the brain in the form of electrical signals.

To mimic that biological process, the researchers suspended a flexible polymer, dusted with magnetic particles, over a magnetic sensor. The effect is like a drum: Applying even the tiniest amount of pressure to the membrane causes the magnetic particles to move closer to the sensors, and they transmit this movement electronically.

The research, which could open the door to super-sensitive prosthetics, was published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

Tests shows that the skin can sense extremely subtle pressure, such as a blowing breeze, dripping water, or crawling ants. In some cases, the synthetic skin responded to pressures so gentle that natural human skin wouldn’t be able to detect them.

While the sensing ability of this synthetic skin is remarkable, the team’s research doesn’t address how to transmit the signals to the human brain. Other scientists are working on that, though, so eventually this synthetic skin could give prosthetic wearers the ability to feel forces even their biological-limbed friends can’t detect.

READ MORE: A Skin-Inspired Tactile Sensor for Smart Prosthetics [Science Robotics]

More on synthetic skin: Electronic Skin Lets Amputees Feel Pain Through Their Prosthetics

The post “Synthetic Skin” Could Give Prosthesis Users a Superhuman Sense of Touch appeared first on Futurism.

There’s a gadget that some say can help alleviate depression and enhance creativity. All you have to do is place a pair of electrodes on your scalp and the device will deliver electrical current to your brain. It’s readily available on Amazon or you can even make your own.

But in a new paper published this week in the Creativity Research Journal, psychologists at Georgetown University warned that the practice is spreading before we have a good understanding of its health effects, especially since consumers are already buying and building unregulated devices to shock them. They also cautioned that the technique, which scientists call transcranial electrical stimulation (tES), could have adverse effects on the brains of young people.

“There are multiple potential concerns with DIY-ers self-administering electric current to their brains, but this use of tES may be inevitable,” said co-author Adam Green in a press release. “And, certainly, anytime there is risk of harm with a technology, the scariest risks are those associated with kids and the developing brain”

Yes, there’s evidence that tES can help patients with depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, and other serious conditions, the Georgetown researchers acknowledge.

But that’s only when it’s administered by a trained health care provider. When administering tES at home, people might ignore safety directions, they wrote, or their home-brewed devices could deliver unsafe amounts of current. And because it’s not yet clear what effects of tES might be on the still-developing brains of young people, the psychologists advise teachers and parents to resist the temptation to use the devices to encourage creativity among children.

The takeaway: tES is likely here to stay, and it may provide real benefits. But for everyone’s sake, consumer-oriented tES devices should be regulated to protect users.

READ MORE: Use of electrical brain stimulation to foster creativity has sweeping implications [Eurekalert]

More on transcranial electrical stimulation: DARPA’s New Brain Device Increases Learning Speed by 40%

The post People Are Zapping Their Brains to Boost Creativity. Experts Have Concerns. appeared first on Futurism.

The military is making it easier than ever for soldiers to distance themselves from the consequences of war. When drone warfare emerged, pilots could, for the first time, sit in an office in the U.S. and drop bombs in the Middle East.

Now, one pilot can do it all, just using their mind — no hands required.

Earlier this month, DARPA, the military’s research division, unveiled a project that it had been working on since 2015: technology that grants one person the ability to pilot multiple planes and drones with their mind.

“As of today, signals from the brain can be used to command and control … not just one aircraft but three simultaneous types of aircraft,” Justin Sanchez, director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office, said, according to Defense One.

Sanchez may have unveiled this research effort at a “Trajectory of Neurotechnology” session at DARPA’s 60th anniversary event, but his team has been making steady progress for years. Back in 2016, a volunteer equipped with a brain-computer interface (BCI) was able to pilot an aircraft in a flight simulator while keeping two other planes in formation — all using just his thoughts, a spokesperson from DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office told Futurism.

In 2017, Copeland was able to steer a plane through another simulation, this time receiving haptic feedback — if the plane needed to be steered in a certain direction, Copeland’s neural implant would create a tingling sensation in his hands.

There’s a catch. The DARPA spokesperson told Futurism that because this BCI makes use of electrodes implanted in and on the brain’s sensory and motor cortices, experimentation has been limited to volunteers with varying degrees of paralysis. That is: the people steering these simulated planes already had brain electrodes, or at least already had reason to undergo surgery.

To try and figure out how to make this technology more accessible and not require surgical placement of a metal probe into people’s brains, DARPA recently launched the NExt-Generation Nonsurgical Neurotechnology (N3) program. The plan is to make a device with similar capabilities, but it’ll look more like an EEG cap that the pilot can take off once a mission is done.

“The envisioned N3 system would be a tool that the user could wield for the duration of a task or mission, then put aside,” said Al Emondi, head of N3, according to the spokesperson. “I don’t like comparisons to a joystick or keyboard because they don’t reflect the full potential of N3 technology, but they’re useful for conveying the basic notion of an interface with computers.”

READ MORE: It’s Now Possible To Telepathically Communicate with a Drone Swarm [Defense One]

More on DARPA research: DARPA Is Funding Research Into AI That Can Explain What It’s “Thinking”

The post Military Pilots Can Control Three Jets at Once via a Neural Implant appeared first on Futurism.

Today, about 10 people on Earth have bladders they weren’t born with. No, they didn’t receive bladder transplants — doctors grew these folks new bladders using the recipients’ own cells.

On Tuesday, the BBC published a report on the still-nascent procedure of transplanting lab-grown bladders. In it, the publication talks to Luke Massella, who underwent the procedure more than a decade ago. Massella was born with spina bifida, which carries with it a risk of damage to the bladder and urinary tract. Now, he lives a normal life, he told the BBC.

“I was kind of facing the possibility I might have to do dialysis [blood purification via machine] for the rest of my life,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to play sports, and have the normal kid life with my brother.”

All that changed after Anthony Atala, a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital, decided he was going to grow a new bladder for Massella.

To do that, Atala first removed a small piece of Massella’s own bladder. He then removed cells from this portion of bladder and multiplied them in a petri dish. Once he had enough cells, he coated a scaffold with the cells and placed the whole thing in a temperature controlled, high oxygen environment. After a few weeks, the lab-created bladder was ready for transplantation into Massella.

“So it was pretty much like getting a bladder transplant, but from my own cells, so you don’t have to deal with rejection,” said Massella.

The number of people with lab-grown bladders might still be low enough to count on your fingers, but researchers are making huge advances in growing everything from organs to skin in the lab. Eventually, we might reach a point when we can replace any body part we need to with a perfect biological match that we built ourselves.

READ MORE: “A New Bladder Made From My Cells Gave Me My Life Back” [BBC]

More on growing organs: The FDA Wants to Expedite Approval of Regenerative Organ Therapies

The post Lab-Grown Bladders Can Save People From a Lifetime of Dialysis appeared first on Futurism.