Technology Tuesday: December 4th
Welcome to Technology Tuesday! Every week The Job Shop Blog will bring you our 5 top science and technology news stories from around the web.
This week: A self driving car that delivers packages with no human help, a NASA mission that reached it’s target with a plan to bring some home, a patch for broken hearts, a deep sea research station manned by AI, and a nuclear fusion reactor that just set several world records.
THIS SELF DRIVING CAR USES A FOLD OUT ROBOT ARM TO DELIVER PARCELS
This self-driving car can now do more than just transport packages to customers’ homes — it can actually deliver the goods.
On Friday, Cleveron — the tech firm behind Walmart’s online pickup towers — unveiled a self-driving robotic courier named Lotte at an Estonian robotics conference.
Based on a video of Lotte in action, the delivery vehicle can not only drive itself to a secure locker, but even place a package inside with a fold-out robotic arm — eliminating the need for any human intervention.
NASA’S FIRST EVER ASTEROID RETURN MISSION JUST REACHED IT’S TARGET
A spacecraft that could help us understand the history of the solar system just reached its destination.
Around noon on Monday, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft arrived at Bennu, a 1,600-foot-wide asteroid located about 100 million miles (160 million kilometers) from the Sun. OSIRIS-REx is the first NASA spacecraft designed to collect samples from an asteroid and bring them back to Earth — and those samples could contain valuable insights about our solar system’s earliest years.
A NEEDLE COVERED PATCH COULD HELP HEAL DAMAGED HEARTS
Each year, 735,000 people in the U.S. alone suffer heart attacks. And because survivors’ hearts are damaged, more than a third face an increased risk of future heart failure.
We know that cell therapies can help damaged hearts heal, but getting the cells to integrate with the blood-pumping organs has been a challenge — often, the heart tissue doesn’t fully retain the cells.
Now, an international team of researchers thinks it’s found a solution: a tiny patch covered in microneedles that deliver cardiac stromal cells directly into heart tissue.
CHINA PLANS TO BUILD A DEEP SEA BASE RUN ENTIRELY BY AI
Artificial intelligences are about to get a place to call their own — and it’s located somewhere humans are unlikely to want to visit.
According to a story published Monday in the South China Morning Post, scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences plan to construct a research base deep in the South China Sea, and they want artificially intelligent robots to run it.
This base could be the “first artificial intelligence colony on Earth,” those involved in the project told the SCMP.
A NUCLEAR FUSION REACTOR JUST BROKE SEVERAL IMPORTANT RECORDS
A team of scientists determined to “fetch the Sun’s fire to Earth” just got closer to achieving their lofty goal.
From July through November, physicists at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) conducted their second round of experiments using the Wendelstein 7-X, a device designed to test out a way to generate stable nuclear fusion on Earth.
On Monday, the IPP announced the results of that testing — data showing that the reactor already broke several world records.