Month: September 2012

Majorana fermions

“The search for this particle is for condensed-matter physicists what the Higgs boson search was for high-energy particle physicists. It is a very peculiar object because it is a fermion yet it is its own antiparticle with zero mass and zero charge. Whether or not these particles will work for quantum computing has yet to be seen, but in the process of trying we will learn a lot of unknown quantum physics,. This could open the door to a whole new field of the topological effects of quantum mechanics.”

Drone delivery

Matternet is using drones to leapfrog transportation networks around the world with UAV.

2013-12-01: Weirdly, they had humans in the distribution center, and you have to live within a 30 min flight of the kind of suburban wasteland that would have a amazon distribution center, but still.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98BIu9dpwHU

2016-12-15: Amazon Prime Air soon expanding to 10s of customers

Amazon Prime Air is a delivery system from Amazon designed to safely get packages to customers in 30 minutes or less using drones. Amazon had their first commercial delivery on December 7, 2016

2019-07-25: UPS drones

If UPS gets its way, it’ll be known for vehicles other than its famous brown vans. The delivery giant is working to become the first commercial entity authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration to use autonomous delivery drones without any of the current restrictions that have governed the aerial testing it has done to date.

2020-04-28: While this is not at scale, it probably wouldn’t have happened for years due to inertia.

UPS and CVS are partnering up to deliver medications via drone. Deliveries will take place from a single CVS in Florida to The Villages, a nearby retirement community and the largest in the US, with over 135k residents.

2020-05-08: unclear why they limit speed to 100 km/h.

Getting medicine to remote parts of Africa isn’t easy. Drones change everything. Flying at 100km/h, they can cut a treacherous 4-hour road journey to just 30 minutes. Drones delivered 5500 units of blood to Rwandan regional hospitals over a 12-month period. It led to a reduction in maternal deaths. Fewer cases of malaria-induced anaemia. Rwanda is leading the way.

2022-02-25: Zipline is another drone delivery company. Very unclear if or why they’re further ahead than others. I suspect they’re the company alluded to in the Rwanda piece above. It appears that this is still a very nascent market. It is very telling that it is only being used for medical deliveries in essentially unregulated countries. All of these startups have less than $10m revenue.

2022-03-28: This video goes into some detail why drone delivery hasn’t taken off yet: Difficult terrain, cost advantage has eroded.

2023-03-19: Zipline tries again in the US with a more accurate drone

The new service is based on its P2 Zip drone, an autonomous winged aircraft that has the ability to hover in the sky above its destination. It sends the package down in a self-propelled droid capable of pinpointing its landing to an area as small as a patio table. “This new delivery experience works for a tiny backyard, a small patio, a stoop, or a small courtyard of a building”
Most other projects are in a beta stage, although Wing recently claimed it can now deliver 1000 packages a day in the select areas where it is operating, and has ambitions of increasing that into the millions over the next 18 months.

Rewinding evolution

a novel experimental setup that integrates 2 disparate fields – ancestral sequence reconstruction and experimental evolution. This allows us to rewind and replay the evolutionary history of ancient biomolecules in the laboratory. We anticipate that our combination will provide a deeper understanding of the underlying roles that contingency and determinism play in shaping evolutionary processes.

and

scientists in the emerging field of paleogenomics have developed new methods to begin answering some of these questions. By comparing the DNA sequences of many living organisms and working backward, they can infer ancient genomic history, such as when a gene evolved a new function.

Turing Gamebot

“The idea of the competition is to evaluate how we can make game bots, non-player characters (NPCs) controlled by AI algorithms, appear as human as possible. It is generally recognized that NPCs are relatively weak in most video games: their behavior is predictable and mechanical, and they often make mistakes that human players would be unlikely to make. Players often enjoy playing against other humans, because it provides a more interesting game experience. The goal of the competition is to promote more research in human-like bots, as well as evaluate how well we are currently doing in this area.”

Bot writers

all content on that site was written algorithmically.

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Programming Future

Computer programming might be the future

You, too, can learn computer programming to work in a dimly lit cube farm full of binders, filing cabinets, desk phones and 90s era 17″ screens. Oh also you’ll have to wear that tie you got for your 18th birthday.