Collaborate Disseminate
As it aggressively pursues a future where flying taxis carry people and cargo between busy urban centers, German aviation startup Volocopter has ticked off an important milestone not just for itself, but the industry as a whole. At the Oshkosh air show… Continue reading Volocopter performs first crewed public eVTOL flight in the US
Four years is a long time in robotics, especially so for a bipedal robot developed at Oregon State University (OSU) named Cassie. Dreamt up as an agile machine to carry packages from delivery vans to doorsteps, Cassie has recently developed an ability … Continue reading Cassie the bipedal robot uses machine learning to complete a 5km jog
Startup Electric Assist Vehicles (EAV) entered the electric mobility space back in 2019 with a pedal-assist quadracycle designed to carry out urban cargo deliveries, and soon added variants with tractor trailers and refrigeration modules followed by tw… Continue reading EAV’s electric delivery trucks can join together to form a “road train”
Current plastic films do a great job of keeping food fresh while it sits on the supermarket shelf, but lately we’re seeing advanced forms of these materials that might play more than a passive role in preventing spoilage. A new “bioactive” material fro… Continue reading Bioactive plastic made with mango leaves protects food from bugs and UV
With incredible lightness, stiffness and strength, carbon fiber has a lot going for it, but even the dreamiest of materials have their shortcomings. One scientists have been working to address is carbon fiber’s tendency to burn at high temperatures, an… Continue reading Molten salt coating takes carbon fiber closer to non-flammability
We’re seeing some significant advances in efforts to leverage light-sensitive proteins to improve human health, a field known as optogenetics, but new research out of Germany flips the script on this emerging technology. Scientists have identified a pr… Continue reading “Reverse optogenetic” protein might pull back the curtain on epilepsy
Futuristic it may seem, but the idea of using sound waves to levitate tiny objects is something we’ve seen demonstrated in a number of interesting ways. Scientists in Japan have now added another one to the list that might just bring this experimental … Continue reading “Acoustic tweezers” lift tiny ball off a board with nothing but sound
The battle against plastic pollution is one being fought on many fronts, but a particularly critical one centers on the material’s capacity to persist in the environment for a long time, even centuries in some cases. By tweaking the process by which pl… Continue reading Five forms of eco-friendly plastic that break down fast
Back in 2017, Ford made a significant investment in an artificial intelligence startup called Argo that harbored big ambitions in the self-driving vehicle space. The pair are now bringing Lyft into the fold in an effort to deploy autonomous ride-hailin… Continue reading Ford’s vehicles to offer autonomous ride-hailing through Lyft
Last year DeepMind put forward a compelling a solution to a 50-year-old science problem, demonstrating how its AlphaFold AI could predict the 3D structures of unique proteins, laying the groundwork for a new era of biological discovery. The company has… Continue reading AlphaFold predicts structures for nearly every protein in the human body