Innovation

Feathered Drone

#235
A team at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland have created a winged and feathered drone that can change the position of its wings to control speed and maneuverability during flight. In other drone news, a team at Imperial College London have created a drone that can shoot darts with sensors on them.
Innovation
Tech

3D Printed Textiles

#235
MIT media lab student Jack Forman used the under extrusion of a 3D printer to print a flexible textile material. Under-extrusion is when not enough plastic is consistently poured from the nozzle of a 3D printer, resulting in gaps in the printed material. By purposefully introducing these gaps, the printed material is solid and flexible. Check out the demo video which shows rolls of material being printed as well as applications like clothing and shuttlecocks.
Innovation
Tech

Bill Gates On Vehicles

#226
Bill Gates published a blog post about his thoughts on the future of transport, in particularly vehicle transport. Electric vehicles are great for short haul, provided the efficiency of battery weight to range is improved. He sees the future of long-haul transport in biofuels, that can take CO2 from the atmosphere and combine with water to create hydrogen without any waste. These biofuels power vehicles and extract CO2 from the air, a win win!
Environment
Innovation
Tech

Lockpicking With Sound

#225
Researchers at the National Unviersity of Singapore have developed a system called SpiKey that can predict 10 possible options of a key design just by recording the sound of a key in a lock. Of the 586,584 possible key combinations for a 6-pin lock, SpiKey can be used on approx. 56% of them to generate candidate key options that will open the lock.
Audio
Innovation
Tech

NeRF

#224
Neural Radiance Fields For Unconstrained Photo Collections (NeRF) is a neural network project from researchers at Google that can take in a set of pictures of a place from the internet and automatically generate a representation of the scene that can be explored in 3D. The lighting and environmental effects of the scene can also be manipulated at a realistic level.
AI & ML
Innovation
Video

Power Bricks

#224
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a method to turn mason bricks into batteries. By soaking the bricks in a PEDOT conductive polymer, the bricks become capable of storing and conducting energy. One brick can be charged to 3 Volts in 10 seconds and then power a LED light for 10 minutes!
Innovation
Tech

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