Advances in Technology We are beginning to see some of the research into better batteries is paying off. We have seen work on liquid batteries, plastic batteries and other types of batteries and we have yet to see any battery replacing lithium-ion batteries. This may change very soon. IBM has made a battery breakthrough and created a battery without using rare elements. The battery is said to be superior in every way to the lithium-ion-battery. The best part of all of this is that the battery will use elements extracted from seawater. It will be a lot cheaper to make, charge faster and have a higher power density. It is said we will be able to charge this battery to 80% of capacity in under five minutes. The energy efficiency is said to be over 90% as compared to lithium batteries which are rated at 80 to 90%. It will also lower the chances of the batteries going on fire. It seems to be a win-win situation. I think it is obvious these batteries will make travel by electric cars easier. Volkswagen has announced the creation of a new robot. This robot was built for one specific purpose, which is to charge your electric car. People don’t realize the high cost of building charging stations. All sorts of cables and such have to be laid and connections made to electrical systems of some sort whether it be solar power or the grid. The new robot will allow people to drive their electric car into any parking lot or other area which have the robots. No special modifications have to be made to the parking lots so it will probably be cheaper to just buy the robot. The robot will roll up to your car place a mobile battery pack on the car and then come back when the car is charged and remove the battery pack. So far, these robots exist only on paper but Volkswagen says they can be created quite quickly. Some military men a warning us that advanced technology is not only in the hands of the United States, but also in the hands of some countries we consider to be very dangerous. Recently Russia has announced new missiles which can travel twenty-five times the speed of sound and evade anything shot at them. Supposedly, they have gone into production and one can only hope we have the same capability if not better. It has been said we are trying to figure out a defense against these missiles and some articles claim scientists have said we will not be able to shoot them all down but maybe be able to take out enough of them that any country shooting them at us would never be able to be sure they would hit anything. Sometimes technology is used in a way which is just entertainment. We all know college football uses cheerleaders, but one college, Virginia Tech is adding a robot dog to the cheerleading squad. The dog will do push-ups every time the team scores a goal. Previously these push-ups were accomplished by the cheerleading squad. The dog was built by Ghost Robotics from Philadelphia. It will be carried into the end zone for the push-ups. The robot will be controlled by remote. The reason the robot dog was selected was to draw attention to the schools engineering program. When are cameras not enough to monitor city? When the city is Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore police are planning to monitor the entire city using specially equipped spy planes. They claim this is to deter violent crime, but it is said the planes cannot recognize a particular face, which seems to make them unsuited to the task. It turns out there was a similar program in Baltimore which was doing surveillance in 2016, but it was a secret until it was uncovered by the news media. Civil liberties groups are furious. They say every citizen of Baltimore will be put under constant surveillance creating a record of everywhere they go and everything they do. Google is claiming quantum supremacy. What does this mean exactly? They say for the first time a quantum computer has surpassed the performance of any conventional computer. They claim the quantum computer was able to perform a task which would have taken a traditional computer 10,000 years to complete, and it did it in only 200 seconds. One of the problems with quantum computing is the high rate of errors as compared to traditional digital computing. Some way of correcting these errors is needed and apparently Google has found a way to do this. Quantum computers run on what is known as qubits and the Google computer ran on only fifty-three of them. It was a fifty-four qubit computer, but one of the qubits was not working. As we increase the number of qubits which quantum computers can use, who knows what we may be capable of solving? Scientists are saying that someday these computers could contain thousands of qubits and eventually even more. Scientists are working on tools specifically designed for debugging quantum computers, so it may be even easier to handle the error rate in the future. Facebook was running a secret robotics program. They came out during the year with some of the facts and told us they had three robotic projects going. They said each one of the projects was designed to teach robots from experience rather than feeding data into them. They believe this will lead to more capable robots they said. One project is trying to teach a six legged robot to walk. The second project is designed to make robots curious to improve their learning process, and the third is designed for robots to learn from the sense of touch. I’m not so sure about the implications this could have in the future. It seems we are presuming robots will learn things we want them to, but could it be possible they may learn things in such a way this learning will negatively affect them? One has to wonder what safeguards are being built into this type of learning? A new type of airplane wing was demonstrated by MIT and NASA. It contains hundreds of tiny identical pieces that are joined together. The wing is able to change shape and it is felt it could provide a big boost to airplane production, along with flight and maintenance efficiency. As far as I know it is only been tested in the wind tunnel so far. The wing wouldn’t need separate movable surfaces such as ailerons which are used today to control pitch and roll. These wings will be much lighter. It turns out every stage of flight has its own optimal wing parameters, so such a flexible wing will have tremendous advantages.
|
