This Co-Pilot Won't Tire, Get Bored Or Feel Stressed

From the outside, the single-engine Cessna Caravan that took off from a small airport on 17 October looked unremarkable. But inside the cockpit, in the right seat, a robot with metal tubes and rods for arms and legs and a claw hand grasping the throttle, was doing the flying. In the left seat, a human pilot tapped commands to his mute colleague using an electronic tablet. The demonstration was part of a government and industry collaboration that is attempting to replace the second human pilot in two person flight crews with robot co-pilots that never tire, get bored, feel stressed out or become distracted. The programme’s leaders even envision a day when planes and helicopters, large and small, will fly people and cargo without any human pilot on board. Personal robot planes may become a common mode of travel. Consider it the aviation equivalent of the self driving car. The programme, known as Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System or Alias, is funded by the Defence Advanced Research Project Agency and run by Aurora Flight Sciences, a private contractor. With both the military and airlines struggling with shortages of trained pilots, defense officials say they see an advantage to reducing the number of pilots required to fly large planes or helicopters while at the same time making operations safer and more efficient by having a robot step in to pick up the mundane tasks of flying. The idea is to have the robot augment the human pilot by taking over a lot of the workload, thus freeing the human pilot – especially in emergencies and demanding situations – to think strategically. It’s really about a spectrum of increasing autonomy and how humans and robots work together so that each can be doing the thing that it’s best at. Sophisticated computers flying planes aren’t new. In today’s airliners, the autopilot is on nearly the entire time the plane is in the air. Airline pilots do most of their flying for brief minutes during takeoffs and landings, and even those critical phases of flight could be handled by the autopilot. But the Alias robot goes steps further. For example, an array of cameras allows the robot to see all the cockpit instruments and read the gauges. It can recognize whether switches are in the on or off position, and can flip them to the desired position. And it learns not only from its experience flying the plane, but also from the entire history of flight in that type of plane. In some ways, the robot is better than human, reacting faster and able to call up every emergence checklist in a situation.

Soon, A 3D-Printed Device That Can Grow Food In A Week

Soon you may grow ingredients for a healthy meal right inside your kitchen within a span of a week, thanks to scientists who have developed a new 3D-peinted device that provides a novel way to produce food at home. The first prototype of the device called CellPod developed by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in the UK is already producing a harvest. The device resembles a design lamp and is ideal for keeping on a kitchen table. Urbanization and the environmental burden caused by agriculture are creating the need to develop new ways of producing food – CellPod is one of them. It may soon offer consumers a new and exciting way of producing local food in their own homes. The idea of the CellPod concept is based on growing the undifferentiated cells of plant rather than a whole plant. In other words, only the best parts of a plant are cultivated. These cells contain the plant’s entire genetic potential, so they are capable of producing the same healthy compounds as the whole plant.

Cavities In Great Pyramid Of Giza Discovered

Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza could contain two previously unknown “cavities”, scientists using radiography to scan the millennia-old monument said on 15 October. On 13 October, the antiquities ministry cautiously announced finding “two anomalies” in the pyramid built 4,500 years ago under King Khufu, with further tests to determine their function, nature and size. At 146 metres (480 feet) tall, Khufu pyramid, named after the son of pharaoh Snefru, is considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. It has three known chambers, and like other pyramids in Egypt was intended as a pharaoh’s tomb. Researchers are now able to confirm the existence of a ‘void’ hidden behind the north face that could have the form of at least one corridor going inside the Great Pyramid. Another “cavity” was found in the pyramid’s northeast flank, said the researchers who are using radiography and 3D reconstruction for their study.

A Compound To Let You Stay Young Longer

Scientists have identified a compound that may delay the aging processes and prevent Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. As we live longer and longer, a lot of people are occupied with their state of health and, not least, quality of life in old age. However, none of the existing explanations are able to explain all the biological aspects of human aging. Previous research has shown that a main process in aging is the capacity of the cells to keep our genes, our DNA, more of less intact. However, changes in the cells’ power stations, the mitochondria, also affect aging processes. Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the National Institute of Health in the US have shown that the coenzyme NAD+ bridges the gap between two main aging theories – repairs to the DNA and poor functioning mitochondria. This study shows an age dependent decrease in the level of NAD+, and this decrease is far greater for organisms with early aging and a lack of DNA repairs. Adding NAD+ postponed both the aging processes of the cells and extended life in worms and in a mouse model. The researchers bred mice and roundworm with the illness Ataxia telangiectasia (A-T) for the purpose of the study. In A-T patients, the part of the brain that is responsible for coordination gradually degenerates, DNA repairs are lacking, and they experience other symptoms characteristic of early aging. This new study stresses that NAD+ plays a main role both in maintaining the health of the mitochondria and in their capacity for repairing the genes.

Docs Separate Twins Joined At The Head In 20-Hour Operation

Forty medical experts at a New York hospital on 14 October successfully separated conjoined twins attached at the head after a 20 hour procedure. Officials at Montefiore Medical Centre in the Bronx said the 13 month old boys, Jadon and Anias McDonald, were recovering from the marathon surgery. Their mother Nicole McDonald said the atmosphere at the hospital was one of celebration mixed with uncertainty. She said Jadon did better than Anias during the procedure, adding that doctors predicted the former might not be able to move part of his body at first. The operation was led by pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Oren Tepper. In 2004, Goodrich also successfully separated Carl and Clarence Aguirre and a half dozen other sets of twins from around the world.

1st Drone Delivery Service For Blood

Rwanda has launched a national level delivery program that will allow blood and plasma to be flown to health clinics across the country by drones. It’s considered the world’s first commercial delivery service using drones. The poor road conditions have often delayed delivery of medical supplies to the rural western part of the county by hours and sometimes even days. Recode.net reports that the program has been launched in collaboration with California based drone startup Zipline, shipping company UPS Foundation and Gavi, a vaccine fund backed by Bill Gates. The Rwandan government is paying for the service, which costs about the same as the motorbike blood deliveries the country relies on today. Zipline itself is a private company that includes among its investors Microsoft co-founder Paul Alien and Yahoo founder Jerry Yang.  CNN Money reported that earlier it took an average of four hours to make an emergency delivery to a hospital. With a drone, those can be completed in 15 minutes, according to Jean Philbert Nsengimana, Rwanda’s minister of information and communication technology. In certain cases it was really bad. Roads could become impassable during the rainy season, slowing vital deliveries from the National Centre for Blood Transfusion.

Soon, Google Maps For The Body

Scientists launched a global initiative on 14 October to map out and describe every cell in the human body in a vast atlas that could transform researchers understanding of human development and disease. The atlas, which is likely to take more than a decade to complete, aims to chart the types and properties of all human cells across all tissues and organs and build a reference map of the healthy human body. Cells are fundamental to understanding the biology of all health and disease, but scientists cannot yet say how many we have, how many different types there are, or how they differ from one organ to another. The human cell atlas initiative is the beginning of a new era of cellular understanding. Researchers will discover new cell types, find how cells change across time during development and disease, and gain a better understanding of biology. The project is currently led by a team from the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard in the United States, the Sanger Institute and Wellcome Trust in Britain. The plan is for research teams and funder worldwide to collaborate. By making the atlas – essentially a vast database of cellular detail – freely available to scientists the world over, the scientists hope to transform research into human development and the progression of diseases such as asthma, Alzheimer’s and cancer. The human body is made of trillions of cells – the fundamental units of life – which divide, grow and take on distinct functions in embryo, eventually leading to different cell types such as skin cells, neutrons or fat cells. Until recently, scientific knowledge of cells has been limited to what can be found out by looking at them under microscopes, or by genetically analyzing clumps of hundreds or thousands of cells and finding their average properties. But technological advances in field known as single cell genomics means researchers can now separate individual cells from different tissues and organs, analyze their properties and measure and describe which molecules are produced in each.