Here’s a quick look at everything that caught my eye this week:
Fat Transplant
Want a quick and easy way to lose weight? Try a fat transplant!
As New Atlas puts it, “There’s good fat, and there’s bad fat – although we mostly only hear about the latter. Finding ways to decrease levels of bad (white) fat and increase good (brown) fat could help us lose weight and avoid obesity-related illness, and now researchers at Columbia Engineering have developed a transplant method, where white fat is removed from the body, cultivated in a lab for a few weeks, then reinserted into the body as brown fat.”
This method could be a real game-changer when it comes to managing the ever worsening obesity epidemic in America.
A Car That Runs On Air
A group of Egyptian students have designed a car capable of running purely on oxygen.
According to Reuters:
“The students say their vehicle can hit 40 kilometers an hour and last 30 kilometers before needing to be refueled, and it only costs about 18,000 Egyptian pounds ($1,008.40) to build.
‘The operational cost of the vehicle… will be almost nothing. You are basically using compressed air. You are not paying for fuel and also you do not need cooling,’ said Mahmoud Yasser, a student who helped design it.
The team is now looking to raise funding to expand the project and mass produce the vehicles. They believe they can eventually get the vehicles to top 100 kilometers an hour and run for 100 kilometers before needing to come up for air.”
Hopefully their claim isn’t full of hot air.
The Future of Car Dashboards
Speaking of cars two tech giants are working on ways to enhance the entertainment options you’ll have available to you during your drive. We’ll start with the news from Apple.
As Fortune puts it:
“Apple tends to be tight-lipped about its research and development efforts, especially when it comes to car technology. But a patent application filed by the company this month gives a glimpse into an intriguing product it may offer in the future: a smart windshield.
According to Patently Apple, a blog that scours the latest patents filed by the Cupertino giant, Apple filed a patent last week in Europe for an augmented-reality powered windshield system, which it termed a Heads-Up Display.
While innovations detailed in corporate patents often don’t see the light of day, some of the ideas that Apple is exploring are interesting. Notably, its AR windshield may allow passengers in different vehicles to conduct FaceTime calls with each other.”
Meanwhile, Amazon is working on a way to integrate Alexa into your car’s dashboard.
As Mashable puts it, “Amazon doesn’t just want to compete with Google and Apple in your home. It’s coming for your car, too. Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant will soon be “Hey Alexa” ready through the car infotainment system — a territory Apple CarPlay and Android Auto have inhabited for years. “
Speed of Light Object Recognition
One of the main pushes in today’s cutting edge Artificial Intelligence research is to imbue computers with senses, for example, with the ability to see. Current attempts to do so are a little bit clunky, as you first need a camera or other sensor to record an image, then have the computer try to figure out what it is looking at, and then act on that information. It all happens in a manner of seconds but that’s not good enough when it comes to putting AI in control of life and death situations, such as with Driverless Cars. Thankfully, there’s a new 3D printed device, modeled after the human brain, capable of identifying objects at the speed of light.
Nexpected explains:
“…a driverless car using the technology could react instantaneously – even faster than it does using current technology – to a stop sign. With a device based on the system, the car would ‘read’ the sign as soon as the light from the sign hits it, as opposed to having to ‘wait’ for the car’s camera to image the object and then use its computers to figure out what the object is.
Technology based on the invention could also be used in microscopic imaging and medicine, for example, to sort through millions of cells for signs of disease, researchers said. ‘This work opens up fundamentally new opportunities to use an artificial intelligence-based passive device to instantaneously analyze data, images and classify objects,’ said Aydogan Ozcan, a professor at UCLA.”
Are any of these the Greatest Idea Ever?
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