Technological advances that will directly affect you in the next 2 years

[Omni]

Posted by TargeT (here)

Posted by bluestflame (here)
drones tuned to hunt
rfid chips

luckily, for now; RFID is super super short range.

Public RFID is child's play compared to the black project stuff. Remote neural monitoring allows for direct monitoring of the mind down to the deepest motivations, all done remotely and likely done to basically the entire global population by now. They figured out remote neural monitoring and electromagnetic mind control decades ago and 7 trillion+ dollars later the pentagon and intelligence agencies have a fully operational mind influencing electronic control grid.

Have you seen any of my recent work TargeT? I know you are a tech head (or it seems), here are two of my best articles exposing the modern day tech conspiracy:

Bird's Eye View of the Global Technological Conspiracy
http://www.neuroweaponry.com/2016/09...overt-ops.html

Bird's Eye View of New Age Psychological Operations ▲ The New Age Deception
http://www.newagedeception.net/2016/...deception.html

[TargeT]

Practical AI.... it begins:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-96BEoXJMs0

In contrast to the usual approach to operating self-driving cars, we did not program any explicit object detection, mapping, path planning or control components into this car. Instead, the car learns on its own to create all necessary internal representations necessary to steer, simply by observing human drivers.

The car successfully navigates the construction site while freeing us from creating specialized detectors for cones or other objects present at the site. Similarly, the car can drive on the road that is overgrown with grass and bushes without the need to create a vegetation detection system. All it takes is about twenty example runs driven by humans at different times of the day. Learning to drive in these complex environments demonstrates new capabilities of deep neural networks.

The car also learns to generalize its driving behavior. This video includes a clip that shows a car that was trained only on California roads successfully driving itself in New Jersey .

Learn more about NVIDIA DRIVE technology: http://nvda.ws/2cBewNI

[petra]

I was watching a news item about automated cars recently, and one fellow remarked "there's going to be a lot more sex in cars"...
Top addon for automated cars: Curtains... hehe

[TargeT]

Scientists May Have Identified the Protein That Controls Aging
TL;DR:
Two biochemists have discovered a link between a protein called carbonic anhydrase and aging in the brains and muscle cells of mice.
While still in the early stages of development, their research could lead to treatments for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
A Powerful Protein

In addition to being the “powerhouse of the cell,” the mitochondria could also be home to a certain protein that’s in charge of the body’s aging, according to a new study by two biochemists at Nottingham University.

Dr. Lisa Chakrabarti and PhD student Amelia Pollard examined the brain and muscle cells of both young and middle-aged mice and noted that high levels of a protein called carbonic anhydrase were found in those of the older mice. A high concentration of carbonic anhydrase was also reflected in samples from young brains suffering from early degeneration, suggesting that an increased concentration of the protein could be linked to the aging process.

To further test the theory, the scientists fed carbonic anhydrase to tiny nematode worms and found that their lifespans were shortened as well.

Clues To Further Research

Knowing that carbonic anhydrase has this effect could help us unlock future treatments to slow general aging or mitigate such neurodegenerative diseases as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease.

“This gives us a very promising start in working out how we can best target this protein within the mitochondria to slow the effects of aging in the body while limiting other unwanted side effects on the body,” said Chakrabarti. “It could potentially offer a significant new avenue in both tackling degenerative illnesses and the general effects of aging on the body.”

Though Chakrabarti and Pollard’s work is promising, we are still quite a long way from fully understanding the causes of cellular degeneration. There’s a big leap from mice to men, so further testing will need to be done before their research can be applied to human subjects.

http://futurism.com/scientists-may-h...ontrols-aging/

Scientists accidentally stumble on possible way to slow brain's ageing process
In an accidental discovery, researchers appear to have slowed the ageing process in the brains of laboratory mice, using ultrasounds or sound wave therapy.

Dr Robert Hatch, from the University of Queensland, said scientists had used the technique to stop the normal reduction in the structure of brain cells in the hippocampus — an important area for learning and memory — and were now envisioning a future where people could get their brains tuned up like a car.

However, he said the result had initially been a surprising one to the team of researchers.

"We didn't actually envision that this would have the effect it has," he said.

"I still remember I was doing some data analysis on Thursday night and said 'this can't be right' — and it was."

Dr Hatch said they had been continuing on the same thread as last year's research, where the team had discovered ultrasounds could be used to reverse Alzheimer's in mice.

The team of researchers had expected to confirm the therapy would not damage a healthy brain, which they did.

But then realised they had found something else — a way to slow down the brains ageing process.

"What we found is that by applying the ultrasound to these mice you could slow down or stop the change in the structure of these cells as the animals age."

The University of Queensland research was published today in the Public Library of Science online journal, PLOS One.
Finding a way to keep the brain 'forever young'

The team will now examine whether their findings could help stop the brain from declining in learning and memory as people age.
"Our idea is that if you can keep the structure of the brain in a young state, then we should be able to keep the function," he said.

"So we're currently actually testing that exact idea right now."

Dr Hatch said the ultrasound worked by activating cells in the brain which were the "immune cells".
"And you can activate them to help clear out toxic proteins, and our idea is that it's basically helping these cells maintain the brain in a more healthy state."

Dr Hatch said if they could understand how the brain changed normally, that would help them to work out what to do when something went wrong, and dementia or Alzheimer's developed.

"We then know, 'ok how do we change what's happening to take it back to a more normal situation?'," he said.

"What we're envisioning at some point down the track is — once it's gone through treatments and approvals and everything — we envision that this would be like a check up for your car.

"So you could then come in, receive a scanning ultrasound treatment and that would act to help preserve the structure of your brain."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-1...-young/7924796

[PathWalker]

New perovskite solar cell design could outperform existing commercial technologies
High-efficiency tandem cells created
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...1020142037.htm

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=MJqh5A3A2Cs

A new design for solar cells that uses inexpensive, commonly available materials could rival and even outperform conventional cells made of silicon. In a new article, researchers describe using tin and other abundant elements to create novel forms of perovskite -- a photovoltaic crystalline material that's thinner, more flexible and easier to manufacture than silicon crystals.

[TargeT]

One of the bigger worries for a long time has been antibiotic resistant diseases... but it seems like we've already overcome that hurdle in a few ways.. here's the newest one:

New antibiotic mined from human gut reverses drug resistance in superbugs
Using DNA sequences, scientists decode new antibiotics used in gut warfare.

For years, scientists have been digging into dirt mounds and mud pits across the globe to uncover new antibiotics. But they may have to look no further than their own pile of poop.

The microbes bustling in our bellies may be gold mines for new antibiotic drugs, researchers report this week in Nature Chemical Biology. As proof of gut-bugs’ potential, the authors dug up a new bacteria-busting drug that can reverse resistance in pathogens and help kill off methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria. In mice with lethal MRSA infections, the drug helped cure 100 percent of infections.

The finding shouldn’t be surprising; many of modern medicine’s most powerful antibiotics were pilfered from microbes. The tiny critters use the drugs to defend themselves from other microbes and battle for turf and resources. But, as bacteria develop resistance—creating an urgent public health crisis—scientists have been seeking new drugs to usurp. In their search, many scientists turned to sifting through exotic soils and sediments. They assumed that the molecular weaponry of bacteria closest to us had already been tapped. Yet, as more researchers delve into the complex microbial communities within us—our microbiomes—they’re finding new depths to plumb.

The study isn’t the first example of scientists looking within for new drugs. As Ars reported back in July, researchers found another MRSA-killing antibiotic among bacteria battling over boogers in the nose. In the new study, researchers at Rockefeller University and Rutgers University searched the deep depths of our guts.

As is often the case, the researchers weren’t able to grow the microbes that live in our innards for their research. (Scientists have yet to figure out the right conditions and resources needed to grow the vast majority of microbes in labs, which are very different from their natural environments.) Instead, the researchers pored over the microbes’ genetic sequences—which can be deciphered without having to grow them—and tried to spot unique codes for large peptides that could be antibiotics. They found 25 such sequences and used the code to synthetically create compounds.

Two of those turned out to be antibiotics, dubbed humimycin A and humimycin B. The two drugs, derived from related DNA sequences in Rhodococcus equi and R. erythropolis bacteria, could kill off pathogenic and harmless gut microbes alike. MRSA strains could survive much higher doses of the two drugs, but they rendered the resistant microbes susceptible to another class of antibiotics called β-lactam. When researchers infected 10 mice with MRSA and gave them just a β-lactam antibiotic, only two survived 48-hours. In another group of ten that the scientists treated with humimycin alone, only five lived. But with a combination of a β-lactam and humimycin, all the mice survived.

While the data suggests humimycins could be a new treatment regimen, the researchers’ tracks could be a path to even more antibiotics. “We believe this approach will enable broad and rapid access to diverse bioactive compounds inspired by gene clusters found in the ever-growing assemblage of microbial sequence data,” they concluded.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/...-in-superbugs/

[TargeT]

That "50 million a year" in savings is a direct loss to what's left of the "middle class" in the US, autonomous vehicles will EVISCERATE our current "blue collar" working class.

This is the start of an interesting shift.... I can't wait till there's "high way pirates" that rob these autonomous vehicles, then instead of drivers they'll hire security guards to ride along with the truck... haha!

Uber Self-Driving Truck Packed With Budweiser Makes First Delivery in Colorado
The ride-hailing giant teamed up with AB InBev to transport beer in an autonomous vehicle, which they say is the world’s first such commercial delivery.

A tractor trailer full of beer drove itself down Colorado's I-25 last week with nobody behind the wheel. Uber Technologies Inc. and Anheuser-Busch InBev NV teamed up on the delivery, which they said is the first time a self-driving truck had been used to make a commercial shipment.

With a police cruiser in tow, the 18-wheeler cruised more than 120 miles while a truck driver hung out back in the sleeper cab, the companies said. The delivery appears to be mostly a stunt—proof that Otto, the self-driving vehicle group that Uber acquired in July, could successfully put an autonomous truck into the wild.

"We wanted to show that the basic building blocks of the technology are here; we have the capability of doing that on a highway," said Lior Ron, the president and co-founder of Uber's Otto unit. "We are still in the development stages, iterating on the hardware and software."

AB InBev said it could save $50 million a year in the U.S. if the beverage giant could deploy autonomous trucks across its distribution network, even if drivers continued to ride along and supplement the technology. Those savings would come from reduced fuel costs and a more frequent delivery schedule.

Proving the viability of autonomous trucking has become more important amid mounting regulatory and public scrutiny. Surveys show most Americans aren't sold on the technology. The U.S. trucking industry is particularly sensitive to it. While fatalities in the industry far exceed those of other businesses and could therefore benefit from improved safety, it employed 1.5 million people in September, jobs that may be threatened by autonomous vehicles.

The death of a driver using Tesla Motors Inc.'s autopilot system in May has focused political attention on self-driving vehicles and hastened calls for regulations to keep pace with the technological advances. The U.S. Transportation Department released policy guidelines for autonomous driving, which acknowledged the technology's life-saving potential while warning of a world of "human guinea pigs."
Uber's Otto team worked with Colorado regulators to get permission for the delivery and to arrange for police supervision of the shipment, said Ron. Otto spent two weeks scoping out the driving route from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs, carefully mapping the road to make sure the technology could handle it. The team wanted the trip to take place in the early morning when traffic would be relatively light and on a day when the weather was clear. Those conditions were met last Thursday, when the delivery took place.

Ron said Uber does not plan to build its own trucks and instead wants to partner with automakers, as it's doing with Volvo on self-driving cars. He said the company's discussions with truck manufacturers are in early phases.

The software still has a long way to go, too. The autonomous drive in Colorado was limited to the highway, meaning truck drivers shouldn't have to worry about finding a new profession anytime soon. "The focus has really been and will be for the future on the highway. Over 95 percent of the hours driven are on the highway," Ron said. "Even in the future as we start doing more, we still think a driver is needed in terms of supervising the vehicle."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...ry-in-colorado

[TargeT]

Harvard researchers created solid metallic hydrogen in the lab and studied it - This is already huge but could be fantastic if properties are as predicted
Harvard researchers have studied and observed solid hydrogen under pressure at low temperatures. With increasing pressure we observe changes in the sample, going from transparent, to black, to a reflective metal, the latter studied at a pressure of 495 GPa. They have measured the reflectance as a function of wavelength in the visible spectrum finding values as high as 0.90 from the metallic hydrogen. They have fit the reflectance using a Drude free electron model to determine the plasma frequency of 30.1 eV at T= 5.5 K, with a corresponding electron carrier density of 6.7x10^23 particles/cm3 , consistent with theoretical estimates. The properties are those of a metal. Solid metallic hydrogen has been produced in the laboratory.

* they have made some metallic hydrogen and have it in a cryostat in liquid nitrogen
* they might leave it under pressure and let it warm to room temperature or they could keep it cold and release the pressure
* they are planning to test for high temperature superconductivity

If it stays a metal at room temperature and after releasing pressure and was also a superconductor then it would be the holy grail of physics.

Controlled nuclear fusion, production of metallic hydrogen, and high temperature superconductivity have been listed as the top three key problems of physics. These problems all involve hydrogen and its isotopes.
Early theoretical predictions of metallic hydrogen being created at a pressure of 25 GPa (100GPa=1megabar) was way off. Modern quantum Monte-Carlo methods, as well as density functional theory (DFT), predict a pressure of ~400 to 500 GPa for the transition. The most likely space group for the atomic lattice is I41/amd. Metallic hydrogen has been predicted to be a high temperature superconductor, first by Ashcroft, with critical temperatures possibly higher than room temperature. Moreover, SMH is predicted to be metastable so that it may exist at room temperature when the pressure is released. If so, and superconducting, it could have an important impact on mankind’s energy problems and would revolutionize rocketry as a powerful rocket propellant.




SMH at 495 GPa is about 15-fold denser than zero-pressure hydrogen. In Table I they compare solid atomic hydrogen to other elements in the first column of the periodic table, and see a remarkable contrast in properties.

As of the writing of this article they are maintaining the first sample of the first element in the form of solid metallic hydrogen at liquid nitrogen temperature in a cryostat. This valuable sample may survive warming to room temperature and the DAC could be extracted from the cryostat for greatly enhanced observation and further study. Another possibility is to cool to liquid helium temperatures and slowly release the load to see if SMH is metastable. An important future measurement is to study this metal for high temperature superconductivity.

http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/11...solid.html?m=1

More on rocket fuel:
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.../1/012194/meta

[Ewan]

Enjoy your contributions here TargeT. Reading the above post a section of bolded text gave me pause for thought.

and would revolutionize rocketry as a powerful rocket propellant.

It seems, despite the fact these are very clever people, they're still firmly constrained within a paradigm.

[TargeT]

Posted by Ewan (here)
Enjoy your contributions here TargeT. Reading the above post a section of bolded text gave me pause for thought.

and would revolutionize rocketry as a powerful rocket propellant.

It seems, despite the fact these are very clever people, they're still firmly constrained within a paradigm.

It's pure hydrogen but 15x denser than liquid hydrogen... it burns so hot that we don't even have an engine housing that could handle it (if burned pure) it would have to be diluted with water, or liquid O2 or something... and since it's predicted to be SUPER stable it would be safer than gasoline... it would be quite a paradigm shift.

The batteries that run our coolest electronics today were invented (lithium ion technology) over 100 years ago.... we are VERY good at taking a thing and improving it, not so good at coming up with new things.

[Cara]

Adobe just launched software that easily modifies and/or makes up pretty much any words in your voice.

Short video (7:20) with a live demo of the software at Adobe's recent conference/expo

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw

Published on 4 Nov 2016

#VoCo allows you to change words in a voiceover simply by typing new words. Presented live during the Adobe MAX 2016 Sneak Peeks, co-hosted by Jordan Peele.

//

It's pretty amazing to see how easily the words you say can be changed. I wonder how much original voice print record the software needs to work off to create new utterances in your voice.

This will certainly make it very easy for hoaxers and others with nefarious intentions to create audio to support whatever story and narrative they want to.

Question: what will be the impacts - if any - on voice biometrics for security and such?

[TargeT]

Posted by Searcher (here)
It's pretty amazing to see how easily the words you say can be changed. I wonder how much original voice print record the software needs to work off to create new utterances in your voice.

20 min of voice recording to reproduce nearly anything (from the article I read) it's pretty impressive what software can do these days.

Posted by Searcher (here)
This will certainly make it very easy for hoaxers and others with nefarious intentions to create audio to support whatever story and narrative they want to.

Question: what will be the impacts - if any - on voice biometrics for security and such?

Look at how heavily edited the video is from 1963 JFK shooting... I'm going to go a head and say this is already being done.

Voice recognition isn't commonly used, actually I don't know of any application it's used for actual authentication...

[Cara]

Posted by TargeT (here)

Posted by Searcher (here)
It's pretty amazing to see how easily the words you say can be changed. I wonder how much original voice print record the software needs to work off to create new utterances in your voice.

20 min of voice recording to reproduce nearly anything (from the article I read) it's pretty impressive what software can do these days.

Thanks - good to know.

Posted by TargeT (here)

Posted by Searcher (here)
This will certainly make it very easy for hoaxers and others with nefarious intentions to create audio to support whatever story and narrative they want to.

Question: what will be the impacts - if any - on voice biometrics for security and such?

Look at how heavily edited the video is from 1963 JFK shooting... I'm going to go a head and say this is already being done.

Voice recognition isn't commonly used, actually I don't know of any application it's used for actual authentication...

In my time working in the corporate world, I spent a couple of years working in the call centre technology sector. This was around 2006-2009. At the time call centres were starting to experiment with speech recognition in place of IVRs (Interactive Voice Response) and had begun exploring voice prints for biometric security measures. The biggest inhibitors at the time were -

1. Processing power - it took huge server infrastructure to support voice recognition. It probably still does but server infrastructure has come down in price a bit and I am sure Nuance and other industry players have improved the efficiency of their software.
2. Legal codes - we had a couple of large clients had looked into all forms digital signing including voice print biometrics, but in all cases had come up against the legal systems of their location.

Customer unhappiness and lack of user acceptance were seen as distant third place inhibitors that could be easily overcome

On a personal note, earlier this year, I updated my email address with my bank in South Africa and in the process they had me record a voice print which they said was for security. They still ask all the usual security information when I call though!

[TargeT]

Ready for the end of a lot of terrible diseases?

I had no doubt that China (famous for their forced organ harvesting) would be the first to use CRISPR on humans....

Just wait until the military gets a hold of this, genetic modification might be mandatory in future military service (or maybe even for the citizenry.. this technology is pretty flexible in what it can do).

Chinese scientists CRISPR a human for the first time

A group of Chinese scientists injected a human being with cells genetically edited using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. This is the first time CRISPR has been used on a fully formed adult human and it’s encouraged a biomedical battle between China and the United States.

The scientists from China are hoping the genetically edited cells will help their patient fend off a virulent type of lung cancer in hopes it might work on other cancer patients who have not responded to chemotherapy, radiation and other treatments.

However, another group of scientists in the U.S. proposed a similar study in June of this year. The $250 million study funded by Sean Parker’s new cancer institute is slated to take place at the University of Pennsylvania. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has already given the research a thumbs up, but it’s still awaiting approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Scientists have already tried to test other gene-editing techniques to treat human diseases. One method taking on HIV proved effective but CRISPR offers a much simpler path to healing by using an enzyme to snip out an unwanted genetic code.

Using CRISPR-Cas9 technology, scientists could take out all the genes ready to grow a genetically inherited cancer in a person before that cancer starts. In theory, they could also wipe out the disease by removing the genes causing the disease after it has already started wreaking havoc on the body. This is what both the Chinese and U.S. scientists hope to discover, but it looks like China already has its foot in the door.

The U.S. has a much more stringent medical regulatory system than many parts of the world and though the trial here is small and only intended for those patients with no other options it still must go through a process before we start altering human genetic code.

The first U.S. trial isn’t meant to see whether or not the treatment is effective, however. Instead, it’s merely to test its safety.

CRISPR isn’t fool-proof. Sometimes the Cas9 technology splices genes at the wrong place and can actually cause cancer.

Meanwhile, Editas Biotechnology has proposed running a CRISPR trial by 2017 for genes causing blindness in humans. Stanford also has plans in the works for a human CRISPR trial to repair genes causing sickle cell anemia.

But China’s early steps should be used as a cautionary tale for this new technology. Another group of Chinese scientists already ran CRISPR experiments on human embryos that didn’t go very well — at least two-thirds of the embryos were found to have genetic mutations and only a fraction of the 28 surviving embryos (out of 86 total tested) contained the replacement genetic material.

So it seems as though China has beat the U.S. to being first, we still have a long way to go in determining whether or not the technology is even safe enough at its current iteration to use for currently incurable diseases.

https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/15/ch...share=facebook

[TargeT]

3d Printed metal hasn't been widely accepted yet, traditionally machined metal is still vastly more common.

However, things like this will RAPIDLY shift this, metal working is going to be a lot different in the future. This is leading to a point where we will have the ability to fly a 3d printer to mars and built anything we need, even a nuclear power plant... and probably do it remotely.. 3d printing is still in the stone age, but with advances like this its definately rapidly moving out of it!

China successfully 3D printed its 1st pressure vessel cylinder prototype for a nuclear reactor
With fast growing technologies like 3D printing, it seems that there is an exciting “first” almost every week. Today’s first comes from China, where the China Nuclear Power Research Institute and Nanfang Additive Manufacturing Technology Co. Ltd. (Nanfang-AM) have announced their first ever 3D printed pressure vessel cylinder prototype.

The prototype, an ACP100 pressure vessel cylinder, was 3D printed using a heavy metal additive manufacturing system developed by the China Nuclear Power Research Institute and Nanfang-AM. The 3D printed cylinder prototype marks an important step for the companies towards realizing a small pressure reactor made entirely from 3D printed parts.

The pressure vessel cylinder itself was 3D printed out of an undisclosed metal material and the prototype weighs an impressive 400 kg. According to the Chinese companies that developed the prototype, its chemical composition, as well as its material and mechanical properties meet the relevant international nuclear power regulatory requirements.

On a larger scale, the 3D printed ACP100 pressure vessel cylinder prototype has positive implications within the nuclear field on a whole, as it demonstrates the applicability and potentials of using 3D printing technology within it. Like in other industries and fields, the integration of additive manufacturing into the nuclear sector could lead to significantly shorter equipment manufacturing cycles, could reduce manufacturing and overall equipment costs, and could even improve equipment quality, efficiency, and safety due to the ability to 3D model more complex parts.
Importantly, the ability to 3D print such parts as a pressure vessel cylinder prototype has pushed forward the “Made in China 2025” initiative, which seeks to transform and upgrade Chinese industries, especially the manufacturing industries. Among the goals of the initiative are to expand innovation-driven manufacturing, emphasize quality over quantity, aspire to greener development, and more.

http://www.3ders.org//articles/20161...r-reactor.html

[TargeT]

This is where it gets cool, applied robotics.

any manual labor job is a good application, farming especially.

Look how many prototypes area already out there, this is going to be a huge market for new robotics firms.

The Rise of Small Farm Robots
Or why the miniaturization of farm machinery will help encourage small, diverse farms.
[IMG]https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*BRh0wZsQk_i-Uy6jHUoNZQ.jpeg[/IMG]
Marilee Foster is not the kind of farmer who makes rash decisions. But when she recently heard about Rowbot, a lawn-mower sized autonomous machine that can fertilize the soil, mulch weeds and sow crops on 50 acres a day, she asked, “How much does it cost? And where can I get it?”

Foster, a vegetable grower whose family has been working the same piece on Long Island for nearly four centuries, isn’t particularly tech forward. This card-carrying Luddite still hand-draws her exquisite farmstand signs, plays a transistor radio in her greenhouse and isn’t on social media. So when she showed so much interest in Rowbot, I realized how disruptive the farm droids could be . Was she concerned about Rowbot replacing her? “Not at all. I would consider it a helper,” said Foster, who struggles to find willing — and well-trained — staff for nearly everything she needs help for on the farm.

For decades, farm machinery has targeted industrial-sized farmers, underpinning the “get big or get out” ag model of consolidation. Now, the miniaturization of farm machinery may be the ag-tech counter-trend that actually encourages smaller, more diverse farms.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=l9XAtf5Xm8w

“When we think about the future in ten years, we’re going to see smaller machines rather than big ones,” said Rowbot’s founder Kent Cavender-Bares in a recent conversation of This Week in Startups podcast. The 64-row corn planters that crawl across the Heartland today are so large and expensive that they only make sense for the most gargantuan, and debt-worthy, farmers. They’re so heavy they compact the soil. And they don’t work if you decide to plant a rye, sorghum or anything besides corn. In contrast, Rowbot is small enough to get between the rows of corn, dropping fertilizer in microdoses, when the crop needs it. Much less fertilizer gets wasted and runs off the field to contaminate the water supply. These are things a big tractor simply cannot do. “Let’s say we just wanted to mix corn and soybeans on the same field. Today you can’t do that easily at scale.”

By making it easier to take care of a diverse landscape, the Rowbot actually allows the landscape to be resettled with a different type of farm. Small machines can get to spots on a field that farmers sitting in the cabs of big vehicles have struggled to tend well — ecological niches like the understory of a bean plant, in between two rows of corn, between layers of grape leaves.

When I recently spoke to Paul Hoff, COO of Agribotix, a drone-maker and drone analytics platform based in Boulder, CO, he confirmed that the majority of their customers are smaller farms. Hoff said the plummeting costs of drone components, like the near-infrared and thermal sensors drones use to “see” how plants are doing, as well as easy access to software used to analyse drone data, are the big reasons for wide use among smaller farms, whether in Poland, China or Egypt. Agribotix is used in 35 countries, on at least 42 different crops. In fact, Hoff suggested the benefits are greatest on complicated, diverse farms; not vast monocultures. Where labor is short, a surveying flight by a drone can help optimize when a vineyard decides to harvest its grapes, or a vegetable grower decides to check her eggplant for potato beetles.The downsizing isn’t just about the hardware, but also the business model and outlay for the farmer. Rowbot doesn’t sell its machines but instead leases them. “You heard it here first: RAAS, or Robots as a service,” said This Week in Startups host Jason Caalcanis, modifying the popular (and lucrative) acronym for Software as a Service or SAAS.

And while the incredible shrinking machine may be trite metaphor to a techie used to the faster, cheaper, smaller trends defined by Moore’s law, the notion of smaller machines is radical for the farm space. And yet the vast majority of the farms on the planet remain relatively small, particularly in poorer nations. A few years ago, when my colleague Danielle Nierenberg and I surveyed those technologies that are most effective at reducing hunger and poverty, for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, our Gates colleagues repeatedly asked about answers to weed control, harvesting and other labor-intensive tasks on small African and South Asian farms. They knew that even in poorer nations, farm labor is not always available, as people are flocking to cities in increasing numbers.

Which brings us to HelloTractor. Calling itself the Uber of Farm Machinery, this startup based in Washington, DC and Nairobi, Kenya, allows farmers to request farm machinery, just as you might “hail” a car with Uber. HelloTractor’s delivery system is tied to its own small, smart tractors, which monitor usage and location for the security of the owner. Owners can help offset the cost of their purchase by renting it out. And because labor shortages on farms can lead to poor harvests and lost income, the wider availability of these size-appropriate machines can help whole communities grow.

[IMG]https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*GvifpcRA75Mx8fLy1QMXxQ.jpeg[/IMG]
HelloTractor owners can help offset the cost of their purchase by renting it out via an Uber-like interface.

Rent to Own Zambia takes this idea one step further allowing small-scale entrepreneurs in rural Zambia to “rent one water pump, one refrigerator and one hammermill at a time.” The platform isn’t just for farm implements, but the concept remains the same: targetted use of machinery to help humans boost production and income. According to an investor in Rent to Own, the company is just beginning to spread, but there is demand across Africa and a clear need for the same sort of machine “helpers” that my neighbor Marilee was so excited about. I think of the farmers in my community who envy a neighbor’s compost spreader or grain mill or legion of budding apprentices. And the farms that either fail, or never get started, because they don’t work as a one-man, or one-woman, operation. In this context, being able to call on Rowbot or HelloTractor, might make the difference between farm survival and farm extinction.

Companies are rolling out small machine products seemingly every week. I just came across BeanIoT, a sensor the size and shape of a bean developed by Cambridgeshire-based RFMOD that can be added to silos or other grain storage to monitor humidity, temperature and spoilage. And Infratab is developing active RFID labels that record freshness data points every 30 seconds and can be put on food packages — or even individual fruits, vegetables or groceries — to indicate if the foods have exceeded certain temperature or humidity thresholds that would compromise quality and safety. The soil-based sensor company CropX has just raised $10 million on the notion that its “internet of the soil” tool will save farmers time and money. These don’t have moving parts like what we think of as robots or machines, but they do “help” farmers in the same way a Rowbot or Agribotix drone will.

Yes, big machines may have allowed a single person to farm miles of land. But they also created farms low on diversity. Small machines could not only help large farms to become more diverse and ecologically sound, they can be a huge help to small, diversely planted farms that suffer from too little machine solutions to help them.

In his classic description of rural decline, The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry recounted the process by which a declining number of very large farmers manage most of the American farmscape. A re-settling is the only antidote. And the rise of small farm machines might actually encourage it.
[IMG]https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*rru5cxQliBQ4MpOv.[/IMG]

To assist. Not to disrupt.

Earlier this summer, writing in Food is the New Internet, I took a dive into the world of small farm machines that will soon be crawling farm fields near you. In the sort of thoughtful, enthusiastic reaction that makes any storyteller smile, I was inundated with tips from robot builders, imaginers, investors and watchers from around the world.

Most important, I now know that the global farm robot space is bigger, more intelligent and closer-to-commercialization that I realized. We are perhaps a few short years from a day when you will drive past a farm or walk past a community garden and see a robot working the ground.
These visions are not unprecedented. As I learned from the robot geeks who came out of the woodwork, one of C3P0’s first lines in StarWars is an uptight comment about irrigation when he first meets the young moisture farmer Luke Skywalker. Gaze into the background of the shop where Skywalker tries to hack into R2D2’s memory and you’ll see other bots used by farmers on Tatooine, some of which look not unlike Rowbot and Agribotix powered drones and HelloTractors. In Asimov’s 1985 novel “Robots and Empire,” which takes place several millennia in the future, every planet in the galaxy, including the ailing Earth, grows its food entirely with the help of robots: many planets are stewarded by agricultural robots for the benefits of humans elsewhere.

I’ll admit occasional visions of a dystopic digital dirtscape. But I’m happy to report that the robots already working on farms around the world, so far, are delivering a different narrative. These bots, like the loyal R2D2 and BB8, are more concerned with assisting their human masters, than disrupting them.
It was in the middle of this back and forth volley with commenters in the robots space that I stumbled upon a picture that defines for me the great promise of farm robots. A young happy and bearded 30-something farmer in a trucker hat is wheeling a barrow between rows of carrot tops. And behind him, working in symbiosis, rolls a robot. Developed by Naio Technologies, a France-based robot builder, Oz, is a farmer’s helper, if it’s anything. It’s just that sort of farm that Naio is targeting, remarkably. That’s the transformative power of bots. Not to replace but to aid.
[IMG]https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/600/1*Hql5VMIZtz4-JW6mk0qa4g.jpeg[/IMG]
Models like their Oz, Cozy, Dino, Straddle, and Little Oz could weed veggies, move 100 pound weights (bags of compost, for instance), and collect all sorts of data on the state of the farm. Even better, they could do it continuously, day or night. There are models that plant seeds while they mulch. And there are primitive soft fruit harvesters that are not yet widely commercialized.

But it’s not hard to imagine that some major features breakthrough or price drop or increasing cost of employing human farmers, that farm robots might be seen wheeling into town to buy some odds and ends that the farmer (or farmwife) needs.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=smCKiwAL4CQ

Oz is known as a hoeing robot. It drags a metal implement or rotor through the soil, targeting weeds, and also turning the soil.

Oz uses laser-based guidance technology to determine the best weeding depth, and can maneuver between fields with different crops, without inadvertently mowing over the plants. The developers are proud to say that Naio’s spirit animal of sorts is “a Hawaiian plant, having the ability to adapt to its environment.”
In one interview from 2014 Naio engineers noted that “the purchase of a robot, which costs at least 250 Euros per month, is profitable over a hectare of surface.” But Oz can also carry a payload, work at any hour of the night, and work autonomously once it’s programmed for a task, like weeding a few acres of densely planted vegetables. Oz knows exactly which plants are Swiss chard and which are Green Globe turnips. Oz knows what the weather is and will be. It’s tied into the local weather station and connected to all the other devices and platforms being used on the farm, from Salesforce to Granular, from smart irrigation pumps and soil sensors. As the sell sheet proudly declares, “Oz works perfectly alone but you can also guide it to your needs.”

From vineyards to walnut groves, and from sugar cane to sugar beet, the buyers of Naio bots have been diverse. One buyer sought to “tropicalize” the robot with a test in Indian sugar cane plantations.
Looking beyond Oz and Robots that Hoe.

The farm robot world is really so much bigger and all around us than we realize, with robots that are playing the role of farm dogs, pruning fruit orchards (picture Edward Scissorhands) and even planning small urban gardens.

A one-minute Facebook post by New Scientist has garnered nearly 7 million views, and thousands of comments, including some from makers of robots at universities, research facilities and companies around the world. But until my friend Brian Frank shared this video with me, I had not seen ANY of these robots, or heard of these companies. (I hadn’t even yet thought of looking for farm robots on Facebook.)

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=hjd5DaxkLhQ

That is partly because most of these robots are still in the experimentation phase. But more and more are moving towards commercialization, like Naio’s creations or OctopusRobot’s food-safety monitoring chicken tender. But total available market is large and potentially increasing. Worldwide, the global “weed control” market is approaching $30 billion. And the global farm machinery market is estimated to hit $74 billion by 2020. Roughly half of that is “tractors.” But the global impact grows when we add in the time of farmers and farm workers around the world that weed fields and greenhouses.

And while Rowbot, the Midwest based small farm robot maker, is designed for corn and soybean farmers, Naio Technologies, and many of the other startups in this space, are laser focused on small vegetable farms, vineyards, orchards and generally more diverse farms than an Iowa corn fields. And if decades of agricultural technologies have criticized small diverse farms as too complicated inefficient, and labor intensive, then small farm robots can help turn that calculus on its head and be relevant to much more than the world’s commodity growers. They could be relevant to the hundreds of millions of farm families around the world who could never make use of a big machine. But for whom a small farming machine could be like a hired hand around the farm, what allows them to put in another crop, or manage the farm while also holding down a job off the farm — as most farmers around the world do.
What else is out there right now? Pretty much everything you can imagine. Bots designed to crawl up steeply sloped vineyards, seedling-sensing hoovers from Blue River Technology designed to thin, moisturize and take extra special care of every head of lettuce (while reducing agrochemical use by 90% through targeted microdosing), Kubota has developed pruning bots for fruit trees and is reportedly designing cybernetic suits that will help elderly farmers climb trees and carry large amounts of fruit.
Through my contacts at Naio I also learned about SwagBot designed to find and herd ruminants 0n Australian ranches.

It’s not inconceivable that robots like the pack mule type developed by Boston Dynamics (and parodied in Season 3 premiere of “Silicon Valley”) could be employed in “herds” to roam over the world’s grasslands, helping in restoration efforts, dropping seeds, mimicking the pasture-building impact of livestock, with a very different ecological footprint.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=TxAWlhRlQ9U

And where do self driving tractors and harvesters fit into all this? I took a close look at the CNH Industrial “Autonomous Tractor Concept,” developed by CNH’s strategic robotics partner Autonomous Solutions Inc., that got so much attention on Gizmodo recently. Love the promotional video. The farmer gets a scary looking weather alert on his tablet. He’s pulls over to the side of the road, does some mental calculus and decides to fire up the planter in anticipation of coming rain (assumption mine).

Hands-down, super cool. Although perhaps a bit too Porsche Cayenne to really penetrate the farm set. Yet I see that concept as transition tech, at best, as the largest farmers decide that a fleet of self driving tractors will do the job better than a bunch of human drivers. But part from disrupting the farm driver market, there’s nothing truly revolutionary that this concept vehicle can do. It’s still a huge tractor, made to pull big machinery over monocultural fields.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=T7Os5Okf3OQ

The explosive drone market, in contrast, segues neatly with the rise of small farm robots. Remotely piloted drones (of the smaller variety) are really just flying farm robots. Farmers are already the dominant commercial user of drones in America. And with more remote spaces to experiment in, it’s conceivable that farmers can be drone powerusers.

The investment bellweather Jason Calacanis just launched the “Inside Drones” newsletter. The United States just released drone ownership and usage guidelines, and industry analysts are saying that drones will figure large in the the 2016 christmas season could be the one when drone, according to a recent NPR interview with the chair of the Federal Aviation Association.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=uNkADHZStDE

Small farm machines come onto the scene at a key crossroads for global agriculture. Advances in tech (sensors, robots, cloud based AI) are smashing into the harsh demographic reality of farming: an aging and declining population of farmers in every country on the planet. At a time when the countryside is being emptied, there bots are additional eyes on the ground, which can trod the rows, help optimize farm operations and better manage the land.

Not to mention the fact that many robot builders see farming as simply dangerous and back breaking. In a recent interview on Recode, the chief technology officer of iRobot, the maker of Roomba, the household cleaning bot, noted that the “drudgery of cooking and farming,” makes robots in the food chain inevitable.
Five Near-Term Predictions on Small Farm Robots

So, here are some predictions of what we will see in farm robots in the next 5–10 years.

Small farm robots will steal increasing market share from traditional farm machine makers like John Deere and Caterpillar. Small farm robots will also blow open wide a whole new market for farms that didn’t exist or could never have made use of a large tractor or combine. Naio’s smallest model, the Little Oz is available for as little as $300 per month, with rent to own financing. It’s being promoted especially to ag colleges and farm vocation schools in Europe for classes to buy, use, and give feedback on. Companies like AGCO, CLAAS, CNH Industrial, John Deere, and Kubota, which dominate the global tractor market are eyeing their play in this space, with a potentially bifurcated food system, which still includes huge industrial farms and a growing number of diverse smaller farms. But couldn’t the small farm bots still do it better?
Helping farms collect data and make sense of it will be an increasing role of small farm robots. These will not just be dull beasts of burden. They will remind the farmer when to shut off irrigation pumps, sound the alarm on early disease signs and collect phytochemical information to tell the farmer when to fertilize or harvest. As Tom Tomich, the head of the Agricultural Sustainability Institute at UC Davis, notes, we’re moving from a dearth of farm data to a flood of farm data. Just as devices like Nest or Roomba are helping tie the various components of a smart home together, the small farm robot will be the mobile brain of the smart farm.
A farm bot for every garden. With multi-colored Ball jars and an expanded veggie patch at the White House, edible landscaping is already trending. Add small farm robots to the mix and watch out world! Consider the devoted home gardener, like me. Would I consider paying $300 per month for a companion farm bot who would weed the beds that I can’t seem to get to? How about $150 per month? It could prepare the soil before I scatter a fall lettuce mix. It could watch my chickens and tell me (or better yet, my Rachio smart irrigation module) when I need to water. It could probably also mow my lawn. All of the sudden, it seems like a great investment. And the avid home gardener is a strong growing market, in urban, suburban and rural areas alike.
Automated container farms are sorta like a small farm machine that you can walk into. Advances in relatively small-scale indoor agriculture, a la Local Roots Farms and Freight Farms, are not so different in function than a small farm robot. They are not mobile; true. But they can provide a huge machine-learning boost to an individual, small scale food grower. Platforms like Square Roots, the vertical farming incubator recently launched in Brooklyn, allow food entrepreneurs an entry level piece of hardware that can turn them into a food grower overnight. Think of it like Iron Man’s bionic suit, but for a Millennial farmer.
These machines will move beyond farms to help with ecological restoration, preserve enforcement and conservation stewardship. Machine tricking that it’s cow. They might even be important parts of the collective consciousness of a rural community, with one robot allerting whole groups of ranchers, farmers or fishers, when a crop is coming into season or pests are on the way. It’s not hard to imagine one of these robots rolling along a farm town’s Main Street.

Soon enough.

https://medium.com/@brianhalweil/ris...866#.sl0rkwc8v

https://medium.com/food-is-the-new-i...ac1#.25oqcknrf

[Ewan]

A lot of positives there, I'm all for increased diversity and smaller scale farms. You know, the way it used to be. I was just explaining to my mother (85) earlier today why fruit didn't taste so good these days, grown for size, consistency and/or crop size, flavour being the least important factor in the goal of profit.

[TargeT]

Posted by Ewan (here)
A lot of positives there, I'm all for increased diversity and smaller scale farms. You know, the way it used to be. I was just explaining to my mother (85) earlier today why fruit didn't taste so good these days, grown for size, consistency and/or crop size, flavour being the least important factor in the goal of profit.

I live in agricultural paradise,, a 365 day growing year; and when I walk into the grocery store to buy tomatoes I'm mostly offered these large pink tomato clones.. I can't even believe they are selling these things.


But it's the governments fault... Governments subsidizing food growth has priced food at a point where it is too expensive to grow your own food compared to what it costs to buy it. In fact it's so bad in the US that we produce food at a price point that pushes OTHER countries farmers out of business when we dump our excess on the market in bulk (corn, wheat, soy, we subsidize all the major agricultural products).

But the quality slip has gotten extreme, maybe this will help to re-correct the situation.





I don't think these will be very impact in the next 2 years, but the concept is fascinating... a forever battery?

Diamonds turn nuclear waste into nuclear batteries

One problem with dealing with nuclear waste is that it's often hard to tell what's waste and what's a valuable resource. Case in point is the work of physicists and chemists at the University of Bristol, who have found a way to convert thousands of tonnes of seemingly worthless nuclear waste into man-made diamond batteries that can generate a small electric current for longer than the entire history of human civilization.

How to dispose of nuclear waste is one of the great technical challenges of the 21st century. The trouble is, it usually turns out not to be so much a question of disposal as long-term storage. If it was simply a matter of getting rid of radioactive material permanently, there are any number of options, but spent nuclear fuel and other waste consists of valuable radioactive isotopes that are needed in industry and medicine, or can be reprocessed to produce more fuel. Disposal, therefore is more often a matter of keeping waste safe, but being able to get at it later when needed.

One unexpected example of this is the Bristol team's work on a major source of nuclear waste from Britain's aging Magnox reactors, which are now being decommissioned after over half a century of service. These first generation reactors used graphite blocks as moderators to slow down neutrons to keep the nuclear fission process running, but decades of exposure have left the UK with 95,000 tonnes (104,720 tons) of graphite blocks that are now classed as nuclear waste because the radiation in the reactors changes some of the inert carbon in the blocks into radioactive carbon-14.

Carbon-14 is a low-yield beta particle emitter that can't penetrate even a few centimeters of air, but it's still too dangerous to allow into the environment. Instead of burying it, the Bristol team's solution is to remove most of the c-14 from the graphite blocks and turn it into electricity-generating diamonds.

The nuclear diamond battery is based on the fact that when a man-made diamond is exposed to radiation, it produces a small electric current. According to the researchers, this makes it possible to build a battery that has no moving parts, gives off no emissions, and is maintenance-free.

The Bristol researchers found that the carbon-14 wasn't uniformly distributed in the Magnox blocks, but is concentrated in the side closest to the uranium fuel rods. To produce the batteries, the blocks are heated to drive out the carbon-14 from the radioactive end, leaving the blocks much less radioactive than before. c-14 gas is then collected and using low pressures and high temperatures is turned into man-made diamonds.

Once formed, the beta particles emitted by the c-14 interact with the diamond's crystal lattice, throwing off electrons and generating electricity. The diamonds themselves are radioactive, so they are given a second non-radioactive diamond coating to act as a radiation shield. This means a person sitting next to a diamond battery would receive about as much radiation as they would sitting next to a banana. In addition, the hardness of the diamonds helps keep the radioactive material safe.

"Carbon-14 was chosen as a source material because it emits a short-range radiation, which is quickly absorbed by any solid material," says Neil Fox from the School of Chemistry. "This would make it dangerous to ingest or touch with your naked skin, but safely held within diamond, no short-range radiation can escape. In fact, diamond is the hardest substance known to man, there is literally nothing we could use that could offer more protection."

The team has already built a prototype diamond battery that uses the isotope nickel-63 as radioactive fuel and is now moving on to using carbon-14, which will be more efficient. Because c-14 has such a long half life, the researchers estimate a diamond battery would still generate 50 percent of its capacity after 5,730 years

"We envision these batteries to be used in situations where it is not feasible to charge or replace conventional batteries," says Tom Scott, Professor in Materials. "Obvious applications would be in low-power electrical devices where long life of the energy source is needed, such as pacemakers, satellites, high-altitude drones, or even spacecraft. There are so many possible uses that we're asking the public to come up with suggestions of how they would utilize this technology by using #diamondbattery."

The team's results were presented at the Cabot Institute's "Ideas to change the world" lecture.

The video below explains how the nuclear diamond battery works.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=b6ME88nMnYE

http://newatlas.com/diamonds-nuclear-batteries/46645/

[Omni]

Not sure if 2 years is right, but I thought i'd share this:

Hey, Poker Face — This Wi-Fi Router can read Your Emotions
http://thehackernews.com/2016/09/wif...-emotions.html

No issues, your Wi-Fi router may soon be able to tell how you feel, even if you have a good poker face.

A team of researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a device that can measure human inner emotional states using wireless signals.

Dubbed EQ-Radio, the new device measures heartbeat, and breath to determine whether a person is happy, excited, sad, or angry.

Another step towards remote neural monitoring. First will be neural monitoring, which might be more manual near the head, after will come remote versions and governments documenting brain waves aka thought surveillance. CCTV exchanged for RNM Hubs...

The brain wave will probably be deciphered by public science by the end of the century.

[TargeT]

CRISPR already openly being used on humans in the US... that's a bit faster than I thought it would happen.

(CRISPR) Gene editing starts to save lives as human trials get under way

In 2015, a little girl called Layla was treated with gene-edited immune cells that eliminated all signs of the leukaemia that was killing her. Layla’s treatment was a one-off, but by the end of 2017, the technique could have saved dozens of lives.

Gene editing involves altering or disabling existing genes, which used to be extremely difficult. It took many years to develop the gene-editing tool that saved Layla (pictured), but thanks to a revolutionary method known as CRISPR, this can now be done in just weeks.

In fact, CRISPR works so well that the first human trial involving the method has already begun. In China, it is being used to disable a gene called PD-1 in immune cells taken from individuals with cancer. The edited cells are then injected back into each person’s body. PD-1 codes for an “off switch” on the surface of immune cells, and many cancers evolve the ability to thwart immune attacks by flipping the PD-1 switch to “off”. On the edited immune cells there is no switch for cancer cells to flip.A trial in the US due to start soon is far more ambitious. This involves adding an extra gene engineered to make the immune cells target tumours and then using CRISPR to disable PD-1 and two other genes. The addition of tumour-targeting genes has already produced very promising results in trials for cancers like leukaemia, but it has not worked well for solid tumours. The hope is that combining the two techniques will make treatments far more effective.

If these trials show that editing cells’ genomes is safe, it could soon be used to treat a much wider range of diseases, likely starting with eye disorders.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Gene editing starts to save lives”

https://www.newscientist.com/article...-get-underway/