Tesla Will Make Cars 100% Auto-Pilot Ready

What this means:

Every new Tesla car, including Model S, Model X, and the forthcoming Model 3, will be loaded with $8,000 worth of gadgets which will allow the vehicles to eventually drive themselves once Tesla perfects the software to make that possible.

What it does not mean:

The car will right now NOT be able to drive themselves. What it does mean is that the cars can be updated easily to go auto-pilot once Tesla has the software ready.

The Tesla self driving package:

1. 8 surrounded cameras for 360 degree visibility around the car at up to 250m range.
2. 12 updated ultrasonic sensors for detection of both hard and soft objects.
3. Forward facing radar with enhanced processing ‘capable of seeing through heavy rain, fog, dust and even the car ahead.’
4. A new onboard computer with more than 40 times the computing power of the previous generation.

Brand Sense:

Tesla is effectively positioning itself as the self-driving car company before it actually rolls out self driving cars. Customers who would prefer an autonomous car when the technology is ready can go for a Tesla right away, and then wait for the technology to arrive.

Auto future:

1. The hardware won’t do much at the moment but, over the next year, Tesla plans to test a more advanced version of its earlier auto-pilot programme.
2. More advanced self driving capabilities in the pipeline for Tesla, although Musk has said ‘it’ll take us some time’ to perfect those.
3. Tesla hopes to demonstrate a car travelling all by itself from Los Angeles to New York, without any driver guidance, by the end of 2017.

Where the tech is at present:

The partially self driving cars being sold now have software, like Tesla’s Autopilot, that hand the controls back to humans when the computer is unsure of what to do.

Scientists Turn Carbon Dioxide Back Into Fuel

Scientists have accidentally discovered a way to reverse the combustion process turning carbon dioxide (CO₂) dissolved in water was turned into ethanol with a yield of 63 to 70%. That means that of all the CO₂ and electricity going into it, you don’t waste much of it. The majority of it ends up converted into ethanol. The researchers are now working to improve the efficiency of the process and find out more about the catalyst’s properties. A process like this would allow us to consume extra electricity when it’s available to make and store as ethanol. This could help to balance a grid supplied by intermittent renewable sources back into a fuel. Researchers used complex nanotechnology techniques to turn the dissolved gas into ethanol. Because the material used is relatively cheap, they believe the process could be used in industrial processes, for example to store excess electricity generated by wind and solar power. The researchers had hoped the techniques would turn carbon dioxide into methanol, but ethanol came out instead. Researchers taking carbon dioxide, a waste product of combustion, and they pushing that combustion reaction backwards with very high selectivity to a useful fuel. We can use ethanol in the current vehicle fleet, right now, with no modifications. Carbon dioxide is a problem right now. If we can use it, then we’re preventing it from going into the atmosphere. The team made a catalyst made from carbon, copper and nitrogen and an electric current was then used to trigger a reaction. They had expected the process to be much more complicated. Researcher discovered somewhat by accident that this material worked. Researchers are trying to study the first step of a proposed reaction when they realized that the catalyst was doing the entire reaction on its own. Ethanol is extremely difficult to go straight from carbon dioxide to ethanol with a single catalyst. The solution of CO

Now, A Tech That Recognises Words Like Humans Do

Researchers at Microsoft claimed to have developed the first technology that recognizes the words in a conversation as well as humans do. A team in Microsoft Artificial Intelligence and Research created a speech recognition system that makes the same or fewer errors than professional transcriptionists. The system had a word error rate (WER) of 5.9% - the lowest ever recorded against the industry standard Switchboard speech recognition task. The research milestone does not mean the computer recognized every word perfectly. In fact, humans do not do that, either. Instead, it means that the error rate – or the rate at which the computer misheard a word like “have” for “is” or “a” for “the” – is the same as you would expect from a person hearing the same conversation. The milestone means that, for the first time, a computer can recognize the words in a conversation as well as a person would. The milestone comes after decades of research in speech recognition, beginning in the early 1970s with DARPA, the US agency tasked with making technology breakthroughs. This accomplishment is the culmination of over twenty years of effort. The milestone will have broad implications for consumer and business products that can be significantly augmented by speech recognition. That includes entertainment devices like the Xbox, accessibility tools such as instant speech to text transcription and personal digital assistants such as Cortana.

This Lab In A Smartphone Detects Cancer Instantly

Scientists at Washington State University have developed a new low-cost, portable laboratory on a smartphone that can analyse several samples at once to catch a cancer biomarker with 99% accuracy, producing lab-quality results. At a time when patients and medical professionals expect faster results, researchers are trying to translate bio-detection technologies used in laboratories to the field and clinics, so patients can get instant diagnoses in a physician’s office, an ambulance or the emergency room. The researchers created an eight-channel smartphone spectrometer that can detect human interleukin-6 (IL-6), a known biomarker for lung, prostate, liver, beast and epithelial cancers. A spectrometer analyses the amount and type of chemicals in a sample by measuring the light spectrum. Although smartphone spectrometer exist, they only monitor or measure a single sample at a time, making them inefficient for real world applications. The new multichannel spectrometer can measure up to eight different samples at once using a common test called Elisa, or colorimetric test enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, that identifies antibodies and color change as disease markers. Although researchers only used the smartphone spectrometer with standard lab-controlled samples, their device has been 99% accurate. The researchers are now using the portable spectrometer in real world situations. With this eight channel spectrometer, researchers can put eight different samples to do the same test, or one sample in eight different wells to do eight different tests; this increases this device’s efficiency. The spectrometer would be especially useful in clinics and hospitals that have a large number of samples without onsite labs, or for doctors who practice abroad or in remote areas. Those can’t carry a whole lab with them. They need a portable and efficient device.

Now, A Tattoo To Detect Alcohol Level In Real Time

Scientists have developed a wearable skin tattoo that detects alcohol levels in sweat and transmits the information t a smartphone, allowing users to monitor their drinking in real time. The device could help reduce unsafe drinking that can lead to vehicle crashes, violence and the degeneration of the health of heavy drinkers. It resembles a temporary tattoo, but is actually a biosensor patch that is embedded with several flexible wireless components. One component releases a chemical that stimulated perspiration on the skin below the patch. Another component senses changes in the electrical current flowing through the generated sweat, which measures alcohol levels and sends them to the user’s cell phone. About 88,000 people in the US die from alcohol related causes including driving fatalities, which accounted for nearly 10,000 deaths in 2014. This significant problem has been addressed by the use of blood tests or breathalyzers by law enforcement. The new wearable monitor has the advantage of being non-invasive and unseen by others.

A Smartwatch That Identifies Gestures And Objects

Scientists have developed a technology that enables smart watches to recognize gestures such as taps and flicks as well as identify objects held in the user’s hand, making possible new types of interactions with wearable devices. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in the US discovered that a software upgrade that repurposes the smartwatch’s existing accelerometer enables the device to detect and distinguish a variety of taps, flicks and scratches by the hands and fingers. This function makes possible new applications that use common gestures to control the smartwatch and other objects connected through the internet of things. By monitoring vibrations that occur when people hold objects or use tools, the smartwatch would be capable of recognizing objects and activities. It could even be used to help tune a guitar, with the smartwatch displaying the note transmitted. The technology has been developed by PhD students at the Human Computer Interaction Institute (HCII).

Scientist Grow Mouse Eggs In Lab From Stem Cells

Japanese scientists said on 17 October they had grown mouse eggs entirely in the lab, then fertilized them to yield fertile offspring, a scientific first cautiously hailed by experts in human reproduction. The technique – which involved coaxing stem cells into becoming mature eggs – was still much too risky and controversial to be reproduced in humans. This is the first report of anyone being able to develop fully mature and fertilizable eggs in a laboratory setting right through from the earliest stages of oocyte (immature eggs) development. While the technique may be useful to treat infertility “one day”, the paper also showed “the complexity of the process and how it is a long way from being optimized. Only a small number of embryos which grew from the eggs developed into normal mice. The lab grown eggs were more likely to have chromosomal abnormalities. The authors of the paper – published in the science journal Nature – reported using two types of stem cells, which are neutral, juvenile cells that can become most any type of specialized cell of the body. The first kind was harvested directly from mouse embryos, the team said, and other created in the lab by reprogramming cells taken from mouse tail tips back into a juvenile state from which they can re-specialize. The stem cells were grown into mature eggs, which were fertilized in the lab as well. The resulting embryos were then transferred into surrogate mice