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Chasing a dream: How to become Adventure Builder and make giant spider robot with your own hands

Level of difficulty Easy
Reading time 12 min
Views 60

Have you ever wondered how difficult it is to turn something you have in mind into a real product? For example, would you be surprised to see someone controlling a huge iron robot spider that can turn on the spot and walk obediently to his pilot's directions?

To realize his idea, this persistent designer overcame many obstacles: he invented the mechanism himself, mastered the skills of aluminum welding, laser cutting, 3D printing, created a reduced prototype and built one. His project stands out even among the most interesting self-made devices you've read about.

Please sit back and relax while reading this rather lengthy article. During the scrolling through, you will learn about some remarkable inventor and his resourcefulness, irrepressible life energy and practical advice to help you realize your dreams, and someone, perhaps, will be pushed to tell about his own project.

Become the adventure builder
Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
Comments 0

Interview with Stephanie Planque from Covalent Bioscience

Reading time 8 min
Views 504

What is ageing? We can define ageing as a process of accumulation of the damage which is just a side-effect of normal metabolism. While researchers still poorly understand how metabolic processes cause damage accumulation, and how accumulated damage causes pathology, the damage itself – the structural difference between old tissue and young tissue – is categorized and understood pretty well. By repairing damage and restoring the previous undamaged – young – state of an organism, we can really rejuvenate it! It sounds very promising, and so it is. And for some types of damage (for example, for senescent cells) it is already proved to work!

Today in our virtual studio, somewhere between cold, rainy Saint-Petersburg and warm, sunny Huston, we meet Stephanie Planque! For those of you who are not familiar with her, here is a brief introduction.

Stephanie Planque was awarded the PhD in 2009 by the University of Texas-Houston Medical School for her advances in applying electrophilic analogs of proteins to decipher the beneficial and harmful functional effects of catabodies. She then expanded her focus to vaccination and therapeutic catabody identification using proprietary electrophilic target analogs. Her work was published in 49 peer-reviewed scientific articles, she has numerous national/international conference presentations. She moved fulltime as a co-founder to Covalent Bioscience in 2018 to focus on rapidly translating their electrophilic vaccine/catabody technologies to clinical reality.

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Total votes 5: ↑4 and ↓1 +3
Comments 0

Uniform gravity, can it exist?

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 2 min
Views 804

V. Komen, I. Tikhonenkov

In the previous post we've considered a model example of a motion of a free particle within a uniform gravitation field where a coupling to the field is defined by an observed inertion mass (see eq. (2) in https://habr.com/en/articles/739714/). The equation of motion was:

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Total votes 2: ↑2 and ↓0 +2
Comments 0

Uniform gravity, can it exist?

Level of difficulty Medium
Reading time 3 min
Views 940

Uniform gravity, can it exist?

1. The motion of a free particle-like cat

V. Komen, I. Tikhonenkov

Good morning! You've woke up. Having prepared coffee and toasts of bread you are drifting from a kitchen to a table before a large wall TV. The left hand keeps a small plate with toasts and the right one controls coffee level within your beloved mug. The life is plotted out for ten seconds to come. But Ervin is already worried that you, as usual, made conspiracy and decided not to share your breakfast with him. So the damned cat thrusts himself across you pass, hits your legs. By the next moment the plate, toasts and the mug are falling. And – yes! All those precious things reached a floor level by the same time. Physics...It's how it shows up, unexpected. And we used to identify ourselves as physicists. The unexpected thing is that we still do. It's whence our motivation originates. We cannot pass by any falling objects quietly.

15
Total votes 2: ↑2 and ↓0 +2
Comments 0

Langton's ant: a mystery cellular automaton

Reading time 4 min
Views 2.4K

The life of Langton's Ant seems sad and lonely, but, as we'll soon discover, he is not ready to put up with such an outrageous situation and is trying his best to escape. American scientist Christopher Langton invented his ant back in 1986. Since then, no one has been able to explain the strange behavior of this mysterious model...

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Total votes 8: ↑8 and ↓0 +8
Comments 3

The Collatz conjecture is the greatest math trick of all time

Reading time 4 min
Views 3K

On the Internet and in non-fiction literature you can often find various mathematical tricks. The Collatz conjecture leaves all such tricks behind. At first glance, it may seem like some kind of a trick with a catch. However, there is no catch. You think of a number and repeat one of two arithmetic operations for it several times. Surprisingly, the result of these actions will always be the same. Or, may be not always?

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Total votes 7: ↑7 and ↓0 +7
Comments 2

PyGMTSAR is Next Generation Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) Software for Everyone

Reading time 6 min
Views 2.5K

Do you need to produce satellite interferometry results for your work or study? Or should you find the way to process terabytes of radar data on your common laptop? Maybe you aren't confident about the installation and usage of the required software. Fortunately, there is the next generation of satellite interferometry products available for you. Beginners can build the results easily and advanced users might work on huge datasets. Open Source software PyGMTSAR is available on GitHub for developers and on DockerHub for advanced users and on Google Colab for everyone. This is the cloud-ready product, and it works the same as do you run it locally on your old laptop as on powerful cloud servers.


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Total votes 1: ↑1 and ↓0 +1
Comments 0

Conceptogram as a method to create more effective technical documentation

Reading time 5 min
Views 1.1K

Konstantin Kotelnik, an analyst at Innotech, ponders over making technical documentation easier to understand for developers and helping the clip-thought generation work effectively with large quantities of data. Read the article to find out about the potential emergence of a graphical IT-Esperanto and the standardisation of technical language.

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Total votes 2: ↑2 and ↓0 +2
Comments 0

Wi-Fi and CWMP (TR-069) / USP (TR-369) protocols: frequency optimization attempt

Reading time 14 min
Views 5.6K

I guess, it's not a big deal to say that Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11 standards) is the one of the most popular and most spread communication technology of the current day. Especially indoors. The growing number of Wi-Fi devices still remains that leads to the overcrowded spectrums: both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz.


This fact means increasing of demand for some optimization routines for utilization of resources. And therefore some RRM (Radio Resource Management) systems become required.



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Total votes 1: ↑1 and ↓0 +1
Comments 0

PopMech and its ancestors: a foray into the history of tech

Reading time 4 min
Views 1.4K

Many of us grew up reading a classic, that was a staple of many home libraries. However, it doesn’t seem to be as prominent as it once was. To understand the ongoing shift in tech coverage, we need to explore its roots.

Continue Reading
Total votes 5: ↑5 and ↓0 +5
Comments 0

Common misconceptions about space-grade integrated circuits

Reading time 27 min
Views 21K

Space exploration was always fascinating, and recent developments have reignited the interest to the heights never seen since the last man stood on the Moon. People argue about Mars exploration and features of spaceships as their grandparents would’ve done if the internet existed fifty years ago. I’m an electronics engineer working in the aerospace industry, so I know a thing or two about the technical background of this stuff — and I see that these things aren’t common knowledge, and people often have significantly skewed ideas about the reasons behind many things and decisions. Namely, I’d love to speak of some misconceptions about radiation hardened integrated circuits and the means of protection from radiation-induced damage.

So, let's start our journey
Total votes 15: ↑15 and ↓0 +15
Comments 35

Tensodrone that do not break, and what does architecture, robotic manipulator and copter have in common

Reading time 8 min
Views 1.6K
We had ten broken drones in a year, test flights twice a day, three PhDs in the team, a prototype of sushi sticks and a desire to find a way to stop hitting drones.

Very controversial, very unusual, very strange, but it works! At the intersection of architecture, collaborative robotics and unmanned aerial vehicles. 

Introducing: Tensodrone™.



Tensodrone is a multi-rotor UAV of a new design with collision protection, made on the principle of tensegrity. This approach allows for the combination of the protective cage and the airframe in one structure, increasing impact resistance with less weight. The project is a vivid example of the interaction of various teams of the Center for Competences of the National Technology Initiative in the field of «Robotics and Mechatronics» established at the Innopolis University in 2018.
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The QC House of Cards

Reading time 4 min
Views 696
There’s Gold in Them Thar Hills

Gold rushes can make people crazy. 1848 was enough of an indicator of that. When Sam Brannan announced to the world: ‘Gold! Gold! Gold from the American River!’, half the world’s population (or so it seemed to the tiny California population which lived there at the time) descended on the soon to be the newest state of the union.

San Francisco, before a small hamlet with a few hundred pioneers living there, became a centre of vice, murder and debauchery overnight.

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Two hundred years before tulip mania hit Europe, and like in California with its argonauts or 49ers, it impoverished more than it made rich. In the early 2000s, too, the Dot.Com bubble created a speculative tendency in people when irrationality took over all reason.
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Total votes 1: ↑0 and ↓1 -1
Comments 0

Four Ways Quantum Computing Will Change Artificial Intelligence Forever

Reading time 4 min
Views 1.8K
If science were a dating app, quantum physics and machine learning probably wouldn’t be a match. They’re from completely different fields and often require completely different backgrounds and skills. But, throw in a little quantum computing and, suddenly, that science-matchmaking app becomes Tinder and the attraction between the two is palpable.

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(Credit: cmo.adobe.com/articles/2017/5/how-will-artificial-intelligence-impact-business-tlp-ptr.html#gs.5zlifl)

Even though the extent of change that quantum computing will unleash on AI is up for debate, many experts now more than suspect that quantum computing will definitely alter AI at some level. Analysts from bank holding company BBVA, for example, point toward the natural synergy between quantum computing and AI as reasons why quantum machine learning will eventually best classical machine learning.

“Quantum machine learning can be more efficient than classic machine learning, at least for certain models that are intrinsically hard to learn using conventional computers,” says Samuel Fernández Lorenzo, a quantum algorithm researcher who collaborates with BBVA’s New Digital Businesses area. “We still have to find out to what extent do these models appear in practical applications.”
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Comments 2

Could Quantum Computing Help Reverse Climate Change?

Reading time 4 min
Views 984
The unique powers of quantum computation may give humanity an important weapon — or several weapons — against climate change, according to one quantum computer pioneer.
One of the possible solutions for the excess carbon in the atmosphere and to reach global climate goals is to suck it out. It sounds pretty easy, but, in fact, the technology to do so cheaply and easily isn’t quite here yet, according to Jeremy O’Brien Chief Executive Officer, PsiQuantum, a quantum computing startup.

Currently, there is no way to simulate large complex molecules, like carbon dioxide. Current classical computers cannot simulate these types of molecules because the problem grows exponentially with the size or complexity of the simulated molecules, according to O’Brien, who wrote an article outlining the issue at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting held recently.

“Crudely speaking, if simulating a molecule with 10 atoms takes a minute, a molecule with 11 takes two minutes, one with 12 atoms takes four minutes and so on,” he writes. “This exponential scaling quickly renders a traditional computer useless: simulating a molecule with just 70 atoms would take longer than the lifetime of the universe (13 billion years).”
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Total votes 5: ↑3 and ↓2 +1
Comments 3

Scientists Turn a Quantum Computer into a Time Machine — At least, for a Second…

Reading time 5 min
Views 1.8K
Scientists said they were able to return the state of a quantum computer a fraction of a second into the past, according to a university press release. The researchers, who are from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, along with colleagues from the U.S. and Switzerland, also calculated the probability that an electron in empty interstellar space will spontaneously travel back into its recent past. The study came out recently in Scientific Reports.
“This is one in a series of papers on the possibility of violating the second law of thermodynamics. That law is closely related to the notion of the arrow of time that posits the one-way direction of time: from the past to the future,” commented the study’s lead author Gordey Lesovik, who heads the Laboratory of the Physics of Quantum Information Technology at MIPT.

While the researchers don’t expect you to take a trip back to the high school prom just yet, they added that the time reversal algorithm could prove useful for making quantum computers more precise.

“Our algorithm could be updated and used to test programs written for quantum computers and eliminate noise and errors,” Lebedev explained.

The researchers said that the work builds on some earlier work that recently garnered headlines.

“We began by describing a so-called local perpetual motion machine of the second kind. Then, in December, we published a paper that discusses the violation of the second law via a device called a Maxwell’s demon,” Lesovik said. “The most recent paper approaches the same problem from a third angle: We have artificially created a state that evolves in a direction opposite to that of the thermodynamic arrow of time.”
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Total votes 3: ↑3 and ↓0 +3
Comments 34

Research in rejuvenation biotechnology – where are we now?

Reading time 2 min
Views 1.4K


Certainly this event is an example of some of the people in our longevity community coming in and just taking over a little bit of somebody else's conference to talk about longevity… but really exposing the rest of the community to it. I'm finding that at every event I go to, I'd really love to have conference presentations where I get to talk about some interesting thing about the longevity industry, because there are a lot of really interesting things going on.

But every presentation turns out to be «hey, we exist, please notice us — because this is really, really important.» Everything that you guys think that you are doing in medicine is about to be up-ended, because suddenly we're going to be actually able to stop people from getting sick and incapacitated and debilitated in old age. This is happening right now, the first rejuvenation therapies exist. But nobody notices.
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Total votes 7: ↑6 and ↓1 +5
Comments 0
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