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BMW Personal Movers Zip Around Manufacturing Plants

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BMW Personal Movers Zip Around Manufacturing Plants In order to get factory workers from area to another in its massive plants, BMW is introducing its own personal movers concept. Their facilities are often massive spaces, and employees spend way too much time getting from place to place. According to a recent survey, BMW learned that its employees needed a solution to navigate around the campus easier, so the a personal mobility device is a great solution. These fully electric movers are designed to carry just one user, and allow the worker to stay focused on their specific task. The personal movers can travel at 25 km/h (~15 mph) and have built-in baskets for the employee to carry small items. For now, the focus is on using these BMW personal movers in BMW plants, but they can see a future where they may be introduced in large public spaces. It’s a great idea that could save the company a lot of money by increasing the productivity of its workers. Plus, it’s just ...
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This Drone Umbrella Follows You to Keep You Dry

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This Drone Umbrella Follows You to Keep You Dry Imagine pulling into your driveway and getting out of your car while your umbrella is already hovering there to protect your from a downpour as as you get out. Imagine one hovering over you as you walk down the street. Soon enough, you may never need to hold an umbrella again. Drones teaming up with umbrellas. That’s the future I want. A Japanese company called Asahi Power Services is making it happen. It’s not just for rainy days either. Drone umbrellas can help you beat the heat on a sunny day too. While the prototype requires manual piloting, the Free Parasol will eventually use a camera and AI to register, track, and autonomously follow a user’s head to keep them covered. This is technology that’s  already in use  with autonomous drones, so the concept isn’t entirely new, but they have to work out the kinks before everyone is walking around with a drone umbrella. Right now, the prototypes have a flig...
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Norman is The World’s First Psychopath AI: We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes…

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Norman is The World’s First Psychopath AI: We All Go a Little Mad Sometimes… Why? Why would anyone do this? Researchers at MIT have developed an artificial intelligence psychopath named  Norman . You know, named after the guy from Alfred Hitchcock’s  Psycho.  Don’t we have enough crazy people in the world? So now they have a psycho that does image captioning; a popular deep learning method of generating a textual description of an image. They trained Norman using captions that are dedicated to the reality of death. Naturally, because we are talking crazy after all. Then, they compared Norman’s responses with a standard image captioning neural network on Rorschach inkblots. This is a test that is used to detect underlying thought disorders. Lovely. You can see some of the comparisons below. It’s a psycho alright. Where a standard AI sees a vase of flowers, Norman sees “A man is shot dead”. Where a standard AI sees birds sitting on a tree branch, Norman sees ...
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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Could Hit Speeds up to 430,000 mph

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NASA’s Parker Solar Probe Could Hit Speeds up to 430,000 mph NASA has been talking about how hard it is to get a probe or satellite to the Sun. Apparently, it would take 55 times more energy to get to the Sun than to Mars according to scientists. It’s so hard because the Sun has massive gravity and the Earth is moving mostly sideways in relation to our source of sunlight. You have to cancel some of Earth’s 67,000 mph sideways motion to reach the Sun, and that’s what NASA hopes to do with its Parker Solar Probe. In order to overcome this, the probe will zoom around Venus seven times during its 7-year mission. While the probe is shedding sideways speed, it will pick up overall speed which seems contradictory. NASA says that by the time the Parker Solar Probe makes its final orbits around the sun it will break the record for fastest ever manmade object. It will be traveling at 430,000 mph on its final orbits. As Ricky Bobby always says, “If you ain’t first, you’re las...
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Dad Builds Working Mars Rover for His Son

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Dad Builds Working Mars Rover for His Son I know that plenty of parents would like to send their kids to Mars, and if you’re gonna do that, do it right. Build them a rover to ride around in. Hell, just build them one to ride around on Earth. That’s what cool dads do. And Kris Temmerman is a cool dad. I know this, because he built this awesome Mars rover for his son. The Rover steered via a wired controller by Kris as he walks close by, and has six articulated wheels, each with its own motor drive for tackling uneven terrain. To be honest it looks like a really fun off-road vehicle. I wouldn’t mind riding around in this thing if we could up the size, speed, and give it some Bigfoot ties and a killer paint job. You can check out videos of this thing in action, and the build process below: I bet this is what it looks like as the real deal is tooling around on Mars, except there’s a small alien riding it instead of a child; probably doing donuts and stuff, kicking up re...
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