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MIT spin-off Quaise says it’s going to use hijacked fusion technology to drill the deepest holes in history, unlocking clean, virtually limitless, supercritical geothermal energy that can re-power fossil-fuelled power plants all over the world.

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Smartwatches have a reputation for losing battery power at the worst time — like in the middle of a jog. The all-day sync drains the power quickly.

But imagine being able to power up while you run: with a built-in, ultrathin solar panel, a Fitbit or any wearable device could keep a constant charge by just soaking up the sun.

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Why is learning effortful? Why do we struggle to learn calculus but easily learn our mother tongue? How can we make hard skills easier to learn? Cognitive load theory is a powerful framework from psychology for making sense of these questions.

Cognitive load theory, developed in the 1980s by psychologist John Sweller, has become a dominant paradigm for the design of teaching materials. In this essay, I explain the theory, some of its key predictions, and potential applications for your learning.

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For all the recent improvements in artificial intelligence, the technology still cannot take the place of human beings in situations where it must frame its perceptions of the world in words that people can understand.

You might have thought that the many apparent advances in speech recognition would have solved the problem already. After all, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home are all very impressive, but these systems function solely on voice input: They can’t understand or react to the environment around them.

To bridge this communications gap, our team at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories has developed and built an AI system that does just that. We call the system scene-aware interaction, and we plan to include it in cars.

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General Motors (GM) and self-driving car company Cruise have asked regulators for permission to deploy the Cruise Origin — an autonomous vehicle (AV) with no steering wheel, rearview mirrors, or pedals.

If approved, it could be on the assembly line within a year.

“The Cruise Origin is among the most innovative vehicles in history: a zero-emission, shared, electric vehicle that has been purposefully designed from the ground up to operate without a human driver,” Rob Grant, a senior VP at Cruise, wrote in a blog post.

You first.

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We’ve gone beyond “the revolution will be televised,” and are in a reality where the the latest European war is live-streamed not just through social media, but on online mapping services without Google or Apple intending it.

The sheer volume of mapping data now available at our fingertips means it was possible for civilians half a world away to see when Russian forces began moving. Specifically, that data pinpointed a traffic jam starting on the Russian side of the border, actively moving into Ukraine in the first few minutes of the Russian and Ukraine conflict.

Just as with any cartography, this information required interpreting. Google Maps did not specifically say that it was troop movements, nor was its satellite imagery up to the minute. During the process of researching this story, we’ve confirmed that Apple Maps presented similar inbound troop movement information — but it wasn’t setting out to do that either.

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Let’s just head over the to the stock market and place some bets….

May I suggest MPLX?

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Beware of writing critical things about Eileen Gu, a teenaged skiing triple-medalist at the Beijing Olympics. You’ll be accused of racism.

Gu was born and raised in San Francisco, but after competing for the USA, she decided in 2019 that she was going to ski for communist China, where her mother grew up. The most pronounced irony of this flip-flop is how she’s cashing in by straddling the two countries.

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Ammonia is commonly used in commercial crop fertilizers, which in turn can pollute waterways when they run off of fields. New research, however, suggests that engineered bacteria could one day take the place of such fertilizers.

In a study led by Asst. Prof. Florence Mus, scientists at Washington State University genetically engineered new strains of a soil-inhabiting bacteria by the name of Azotobacter vinelandii. While the bacteria was already known to convert ambient nitrogen gas into ammonia, the new strains are able to consistently produce and excrete ammonia at much higher concentrations, regardless of environmental conditions.

And if this means there is less ammonium nitrate fertilizer around for terrorists to make bombs out of, that’s even better.

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For nearly eight hours one day in late January, the power to Sam Bryan’s house blinked off after a transformer near his greater Third Ward lot blew a fuse.

The same transformer has long had issues, he said, leading to blackouts at Bryan’s house and those of his neighbors several times a year. But in January, Bryan’s lights stayed on, thanks to 43 photovolatic solar panels bolted onto his roof and a battery system stored in his garage. Instead of comforting his 4-year-old, who had grown anxious during power outages since the freeze of February 2021, they played a game.

“It was a pretty neat experience,” he said. “Part of the fun was that I don’t have to explain why we can’t turn the lamp on.”

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A new smart type of food packaging promises to eliminate food poisoning by killing harmful bacteria.

According to scientists, the packaging destroys hazardous bacteria like E.coli, Salmonella, and Listeria, allowing meat, fish, fruit, and vegetables to last longer.

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The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley.

Cloud People have this fantasy that everybody wants to ride trains. They don’t.

The Economist.

Clunky, costly, highly regulated health systems, often dominated by rent-seeking middlemen, are being shaken up by firms that target patients directly, meet them where they are—which is increasingly online—and give them more control over how to access care. Scientific advances in fields such as gene sequencing and AI make new modes of care possible. E-pharmacies fulfil prescriptions, wearable devices monitor wearers’ health in real time, tele-medicine platforms connect patients with physicians, and home tests enable self-diagnosis.

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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Now watch governments screw it up.

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Be the first on your block….

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In an era in which crooks are willing to drive dump trucks into a 7-11 in order to crack the ATM, and the contents of containers on railroad cars cover the L.A. tracks like a landfill, how are they going to prevent these clever little ‘ bots from being stolen and disembowelled?  Maybe it won’t be a problem in Carmel but I can’t see it working in Compton.

UPDATE: Difficult situation on campus: traffic jam of food delivery robots

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There’s a company called GO-OPV and they make this ORENgE technology, it’s Orenge with an E. It’s basically making a solar panel more like a film that you can put on top of anything and Pepsi (NASDAQ:PEP) is already actually using this both at distribution station on top of the building, but also on top of the trucks themselves.

Yeah, that would do it. Call me when they offer it for sale.

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Chatham University in Pennsylvania did away with tenure in 2005. Now the university is poised to transition to a tenure system once again.

Joseph MacNeil, interim dean of the School of Arts, Science and Business at Chatham, said two main factors are at play: faculty recruitment and faculty morale.

“We have some stories where people we’d made offers to declined us because—while they were happy to participate in the job search—when they were getting offers, the fact that we didn’t have tenure disqualified us from the conversation,” MacNeil said. “And the part that no one can quantify is the number of good faculty that never applied for a job here because it wasn’t tenure-track in first place.”

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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In response to increasing missile threats from regional terrorist groups, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced that a new laser defense system will be deployed within a year to intercept incoming missile attacks. This news highlights the increasing pace of development and utility of using high-energy lasers—a directed energy weapon—for missile defense.

Hopefully our next Republican President will buy it from them.

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Last year was a record-breaking year for robots joining the American workforce. But in China, the advent of robotic workers was equally – if not more – intense.

According to a report from Nikkei, Yum China’s network of KFC and Pizza Hut outlets has seen significant growth over the past year, even as the size of China’s workforce has remained steady.

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I’m holding out for titanium.

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Radically transparent, low cost versions of high cost generic drugs.

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A new bionic pacemaker bested normal heart implants in a recent study — by causing the heart to beat irregularly.

That may sound like a flaw, not a feature. But by matching the pacemaker to the lungs, the heart beat more naturally — dramatically improving blood flow.

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You first.

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The smart roof coating uses a simple physics trick to switch between warming and cooling properties.

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But what if instead of strapping on a FitBit or Apple Watch every day, you could pull on a T-shirt or pair of pants that instantly tracks health metrics as you move?

That’s the future that designers of E-textiles, or smart textiles, want to build.

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What you’re seeing here is the equivalent of a skateboard, only for cars. It contains the underpinning features such as an (unspecified) battery which should recharge by induction, a LOT of electronics, and what appears to be four moons on each corner of the car.

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WaterLight works through ionisation. Electrical energy is produced when salt water electrolytes react with magnesium inside the device.

As well as a portable light source, WaterLight also charges small devices through a USB port. In emergency situations, it can be powered by urine.

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I was under the impression that regular duct tape worked perfectly well for medical purposes; certainly I have seen it used to hold wounds closed. Ah, well.

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Ever wonder what would happen if somebody (somebode@!) nuked your town? Or somebody else’s town?

With NUKEMAP, you can find out.

Even more interesting is who wants to know….

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Natural Fiber Welding uses an innovative process to treat cotton and make it behave more like synthetic fibers.

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The Freedom Convoy in Canada has grown beyond just the truckers. Farmers on their tractors have joined in, and the movement enjoys widespread popular support. From my vantage point here in the Sunny South, the moment looks ripe for a general strike in the Frozen North.

The window of opportunity is a narrow one, however. The current push against the Trudeau regime cannot be maintained indefinitely, and Baby Doc has yet to roll out his big guns to try and crush what he considers a seditious rebellion. The globalists who pull his strings will want those unwashed upstarts suppressed at all costs — if they succeed, the dominos will start to fall all across the West, and who knows where that might lead?

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Scientists recently printed teeny tiny microbots in the shape of different animals, like fish, crabs, and even butterflies. But the coolest thing with these bots is that they don’t stay in one shape — they can morph into different shapes because they are 4D-printed.

4D printing works the same as 3D printing, the only difference is that the printing material allows the object to change shape based on environmental factors.

In this case, the bots’ hydrogel material allows them to morph into different shapes when they encounter a change in pH levels — and cancer cells, as it happens, are usually more acidic than normal cells.

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Additive manufacturing of food is a method of creating three-dimensional edible products layer-by-layer. While food printers have been in use since 2007, commercial cooking appliances to simultaneously cook and print food layers do not yet exist. A key challenge has been the spatially controlled delivery of cooking energy. Here, we explore precision laser cooking which offers precise temporal and spatial control over heat delivery and the ability to cook, broil, cut and otherwise transform food products via customized software-driven patterns, including through packaging. Using chicken as a model food, we combine the cooking capabilities of a blue laser (??=?445?nm), a near-infrared (NIR) laser (??=?980?nm), and a mid-infrared (MIR) laser (??=?10.6??m) to broil printed chicken and find that IR light browns more efficiently than blue light, NIR light can brown and cook foods through packaging, laser-cooked foods experience about 50% less cooking loss than foods broiled in an oven, and calculate the cooking resolution of a laser to be ~1?mm. Infusing software into the cooking process will enable more creative food design, allow individuals to more precisely customize their meals, disintermediate food supply chains, streamline at-home food production, and generate horizontal markets for this burgeoning industry.

We have the technology.

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BeerBase is a community project to make information about breweries and their beers available to everyone.

Find beer, kill beer, drag beer home.

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Doctors successfully implanted a microchip in a woman’s retina, restoring some vision to her blind eye.

After having normal vision for most of her life, the 88-year-old suffered from dry age-related macular degeneration, causing her to lose sight in one eye.

The implant is being tested in clinical trials in Europe, but this is the first patient to receive it.

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Using a novel polymerization process, MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities.

The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets.

Such a material could be used as a lightweight, durable coating for car parts or cell phones, or as a building material for bridges or other structures, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.

We have the technology.

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USNC is making micro modular reactors that the company says should cost tens of millions of dollars to deploy as opposed to the billions needed for today’s large reactors, with plans to deploy its first reactor by 2026. The company, which is also developing compact reactors for nuclear-powered rockets, says its safe design relies on a rugged fuel made of microscopic ceramic-coated uranium fuel particles that are encased in a silicon carbide matrix.

I wouldn’t mind having one of these,

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The original perovskite, calcium titanium oxide, is a mineral (see picture) discovered in the Ural mountains in 1839 and named after Count Lev Perovski, a Russian mineralogist. Since then, the name has come to be used for a number of materials that share a similar crystal structure.

Much of the interest in perovskites comes because those which combine metal atoms with chlorine, bromine or iodine (members of a group of elements called halogens) are semiconductors. This makes them potentially useful in a variety of electronics. In particular, one promising feature of metal halides is that they can be used to make new types of solar cells which are more efficient at converting sunlight into electricity than the silicon-based cells currently employed. Oxford PV, a British company, is bringing some of the first perovskite solar cells to market.

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Transfers from parents—either in the form of gifts or inheritances—have received much attention as a source of inequality. This paper uses a 19-year panel of administrative data for the population of Norway to examine the share of the Total Inflows available to an individual (defined as the capitalized sum of net labor income, government transfers, and gifts and inheritances received over the period) accounted for by capitalized gifts and inheritances. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that gifts and inheritances represent a small share of Total Inflows; this is true across the distribution of Total Inflows, as well as at all levels of net wealth at a point in time. Gifts and inheritances are only an important source of income flows among those who have very wealthy parents. Additionally, gifts and inheritances have very little effect on the distribution of Total Inflows – when we do a counterfactual Total Inflows distribution with zero gifts and inheritances, it is not much different from the actual distribution. Our findings suggest that inheritance taxes may do little to mitigate the extreme wealth inequality in society.

Wealth inequality (and it’s red-headed stepchild, income inequality) is a problem only to people who think that they ought to have as much wealth as anybody else.

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Can Godzilla be far behind?

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Apple is continuing to develop technology that could allow virtually invisible input areas that can display information to a user while replacing physical buttons or controls on its products.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Apple covering a “concealable input region for an electronic device.” The patent, U.S. Patent No. 11,237,655, describes technology that uses microperforations to sense input.

Apple says the point of the patent is to do away with the “large buttons, keys, or other mechanically-actuated structures” used to sense inputs on a device. That’s because traditional input elements “may lack flexibility or adaptability and may permanently indicate the presence of the input device.”

As a Apple stockholder, I encourage them to do so.

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The remedy was a new type of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) called “Stanford neuromodulation therapy.” By adding imaging technology to the treatment and upping the dose of rTMS, scientists have developed an approach that’s more effective and works more than eight times faster than the current approved treatment.

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If your wallet gets stolen, this facilitates identity fraud like you wouldn’t believe.

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An autonomous surgery robot is now one step closer to hospital operating rooms, having performed a tricky medical procedure on live pigs — and done it even better than a human surgeon could.

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Not to be confused with the One True Roy.

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An Israeli arms firm, Smart Shooter, has developed SMASH Dragon, an armed hexacopter that carries a stabilized gun platform that can be armed with a 5.56mm assault rifle or a 7.62mm sniper rifle. SMASH Dragon uses the same SMASH 2000 computerized rifle scope Smart Shooter introduced in 2018, but with addition of a new digital camera with zoom that enables the operator to search for and identify targets at longer ranges day or night, or set the system to automatically scan for certain types of targets. Armed with the 7.62mm rifle, SMASH Dragon can hit stationary targets over 300 meters distant with the first shot. Against moving quadcopters or fixed wing UAVs that range is closer to 200 meters. The hexacopter (six rotor motors instead of four on a quadcopter) can carry a payload of up to 10 kg (22 pounds). The rifles are equipped with larger magazines to reduce the frequency of landing the hexacopter to reload. Both the weapons system and hexacopter are battery operated, which limits flight time to under 60 minutes before a recharge is needed. There is also SMASH Hopper, a 15 kg (33 pound) version that can be mounted on vehicles or stationary platforms.

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Not a parady, so far as I can tell. (But who knows these days?)