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Month: September 2018

I woke up this morning to the sad news that maker-pal and pioneering hobby roboticist, Gordon McComb, had passed away. I wrote a brief eulogy on Make:

It is with a heavy heart that we here at Make: announce the passing of hobby robotics pioneer, Gordon McComb. He died on Monday, Sept 10th, apparently of a heart attack. Gordon was a great friend to Make: and to makers and robotics hobbyists from around the world.

Gordon’s Robot Builder’s Bonanza book, first published in 1987, arguably marks the beginning of hobby robotics as a significant maker category. It was the book that I bought in the late 80s that got me into robot building, and by extension, all forms of hardware hacking…

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With iOS 12, Apple is giving third-party apps more flexibility and new capabilities within CarPlay. As an example, for the first time, you can use other apps besides Apple Maps as your preferred navigation software for Apple’s in-car platform. With that change now possible, Google Maps and Waze are both planning to support CarPlay and have begun beta testing.

Unfortunately it’s not a beta test most of us can join, so you’ll have to wait for the proper release before you can use either of these in your own vehicle through CarPlay. But some early screenshots posted by 9to5Mac provide a good preview of how Google Maps and Waze will look once that happens.

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Today, we have an update from the MitoSENS team over at the SENS Research Foundation. As some of you may recall, MitoSENS was the first project we hosted on our research fundraising platform Lifespan.io back in August 2015. The project was successfully funded and raised $46,128, which was 153% of the funds needed. The extra funds were used to increase the scope of the project, which resulted in a paper being published in the prestigious Oxford Journal.

Since then, the team has been busy working on transferring the other mitochondrial genes to the nucleus, and they have given us an update to let everyone know how things are progressing at the lab. Dr. Matthew “Oki” O’Connor had the following to say about progress and the future.

Hi, everyone! Time for another exciting mito update. This time, we’ve got 2 teasers for you. The first is that we’re preparing a story about a new trick that we’ve discovered to improve the allotopic expression of mito genes. We’re still confirming that we’re 100% sure that we’re right before writing up the manuscript and making an announcement, but we’re very close. Yes, that means we’re getting it to work on more genes. Stay tuned!

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A recent contest challenged participants to create utopian designs of future human Mars settlements, and their creations are stunning.

In the HP Mars Home Planet Rendering Challenge, over 87,000 people from all over the world flexed their creative muscles to design the perfect colony on the Red Planet. Last summer, when HP launched the challenge, the participants started working on their designs, and the winners were announced on Aug. 14.

This challenge wasn’t just about creating a pretty, futuristic-looking, idealistic Martian colony. Indeed, the designs also had to show how the settlements would support 1 million colonists. The surface of the Red Planet is harsh, with an extremely thin atmosphere, intense radiation and dust storms that occasionally envelop the planet. [Mars Ice Home: A Red Planet Colony Concept in Pictures].

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Chinese vice-premier Liu He called on the world to work together to address complex ethical, legal and other questions raised by artificial intelligence as he kicked off a gathering in Shanghai bringing together the globe’s AI elites.

“As members of a global village, I hope countries can show inclusive understanding and respect to each other, deal with the double-sword technologies can bring, and together embrace AI,” said Liu, a highly influential official who has been China’s top trade negotiator in the US-China trade war and is also on the country’s technology development committee.

The star-studded World Artificial Intelligence Conference, which opened Monday morning, comes as China has emerged as one of the world’s top players in AI, which promises to revolutionise everything from health care to driving to policing.

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A 5 km settlement radius corresponds roughly to the sweet design spot where earthlike radiation shielding is produced for free by the required structural mass.

Overall, the settlement concept satisfies the following generic requirements for long-term large-scale settling of the solar system:

1g artificial gravity, earthlike atmosphere, earthlike radiation protection. 2. Large enough size so that internals of the settlement exceed a person’s lifetime-integrated capacity to explore. 3. Standard of living reminiscent to contemporary royal families on Earth, quantified by up to 25,000 m2 of urban living area and 2000 m2 of rural area per inhabitant (290,000 square feet per person). 4. Access to other settlements and Earth by spacecraft docking ports, using safe arrival and departure procedures that do not require impulsive chemical propulsion.

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