Industries
Guiding the industry towards greater productivity
Over recent years Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) have advanced from simple materials handlers to intelligent autonomous robots. How has this happened? Jonathan Wilkins, Marketing Director of obsolete industrial parts supplier, EU Automation, explains.
They think they’re all robots… They are now
It has been announced that the University of Twente’s RoboTeam, a multi-disciplinary student group that aspires to innovate in both robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), has received sponsorship from Nexperia, the former Standard Products division of NXP. The team competed in RoboCup 2017, the world championships of robot soccer in Japan which focuses mainly on AI.
Bots: the good, the bad and the ugly
Chatbots are over 50 years old, but the technology is still evolving. Despite recent advancements, the history of chatbots hasn’t been all plain sailing.
Instrumentation allows simultaneous 3D view of galaxies
For many years astronomers have struggled to get good-quality 3D data of galaxies. Although this technique is very powerful as it allows researchers to “dissect” objects, this was a slow process as each galaxy had to be observed independently. Novel Australian designed and built instrumentation called the “Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral-field” (SAMI) unit at the 3.9m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT) now allows astro...
Solar eclipse could help understand Earth’s energy system
It was midafternoon, but it was dark in an area in Boulder, Colorado on Aug. 3, 1998. A thick cloud appeared overhead and dimmed the land below for more than 30 minutes. Well-calibrated radiometers showed that there were very low levels of light reaching the ground, sufficiently low that researchers decided to simulate this interesting event with computer models. Now in 2017, inspired by the event in Boulder, NASA scientists will explore the moon...
Tracking the total solar eclipse from NASA’s WB-57F jets
For most viewers, the Aug. 21, 2017, total solar eclipse will last less than two and half minutes. But for one team of NASA-funded scientists, the eclipse will last over seven minutes. Their secret? Following the shadow of the Moon in two retrofitted WB-57F jet planes. Amir Caspi of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and his team will use two of NASA’s WB-57F research jets to chase the darkness across America on Aug...
How does cell segregation can prevent cancer spread?
Scientists have uncovered how cells are kept in the right place as the body develops, which may shed light on what causes invasive cancer cells to migrate. In order for organs to develop properly, cells from different tissues need to be separated by sharp borders that persist throughout our lifetime. The mechanisms that keep cells in the right place are lost in cancer cells, allowing them to invade other cell populations and spread to differ...
Illuminating neural pathways in the living brain
Using light alone, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried are now able to reveal pairs or chains of functionally connected neurons under the microscope. The new optogenetic method, named Optobow, allows probing the pathways along which information flows by targeted activation of individual neurons and monitoring the responses of neighboring cells.
Antibiotic-releasing polymer to prevent joint implant infection
A team of Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) investigators has developed an antibiotic-releasing polymer that may greatly simplify the treatment of prosthetic joint infection. In their recent report published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the researchers describe how implants made from this material successfully eliminated two types of prosthetic infection in animal models.
Blue light from digital devices lessens sleep quality
A study by researchers at the University of Houston College of Optometry, published in Ophthalmic & Physiological Optics, found that blue light emitted from digital devices could contribute to the high prevalence of reported sleep dysfunction. Study participants, ages 17-42, wore short wavelength-blocking glasses three hours before bedtime for two weeks, while still performing their nightly digital routine.