Items of Interest

Near Silent Drone Delivery

#363
The autonomous drone delivery company Zipline released details of their impressive new delivery platform. A whisper quiet drone with specially designed propellers based on hummingbirds hovers overhead and lowers a shuttlecraft looking storage box that uses its own propeller fans to guide its descent to the ground, where it opens a hatch and delivers your package. Zipline already deliver medical suppliers across Rwanda as part of the 600,000 deliveries they have made so far. Check out the Irish connection at 34:30 in their latest keynote.
Innovation
Tech

Generating Viewpoints From Reflections

#363
Researchers at MIT have developed an Objects as Radiance-Field Cameras (ORCa) technique that uses reflections on shiny objects as image sensors to generate viewpoints outside the view of the original camera.If you remember the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Identity Crisis (s04e18) where Geordie recreates an incident on the holodeck and generates a previous unseen viewpoint, we can now do this with AI.
AI & ML
Innovation

Coal Mine Battery

#363
Scientists published a paper in the Energies journal that outlines how to use abandoned coal mine shafts as batteries. The Underground Energy Storage (UGES) system raises containers of sand raised to the top of the mine to store the energy, which when released to fall generate electricity. Scottish company Gravitricity have developed and tested a similar system.
Environment
Science

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