It can fly for 40 minutes and go up to 100 km per hour (Picture: Masatoshi Okauchi/REX)

By Anugraha Sundaravelu

Flying motorbikes are not something that exist in science fiction anymore.

On Thursday, a hoverbike built by Japanese manufacturers made its debut at the Detroit Auto Show.

Drawing inevitable comparisons to the speeder bikes of ‘Star Wars’, the futuristic bikes are scheduled to launch in the United States next year.

The XTURISMO hoverbike is made by Japanese startup AERWINS Technologies and can fly for 40 minutes, reaching speeds of up to 100 km per hour.

‘I feel like I’m literally 15 years old and I just got out of “Star Wars” and jumped on their bike,’ said Thad Szott, co-chair of the auto show after taking a test drive – or, perhaps, a test hover.

‘I mean, it’s awesome! Of course, you have a little apprehension, but I was just so amped. I literally had goosebumps and feel like a little kid,’

Air Canada is ordering 30 units of the new zero-emission aircraft.

By Griffin Davis

The Air Canada-backed startup, Heart Aerospace, launched a new electric airplane. The giant airline company announced that it had already ordered 30 units of the new zero-emission aircraft. 

Now, it seems like they are getting the attention of major airlines across the globe. This can be seen in the latest investment made by Air Canada in Heart Aerospace.

Air Canada-Backed Startup Launches New Electric Airplanes!

According to Electrek’s latest report, Heart Aerospace unveiled the new ES-30, the successor of the recent ES-19 model.

After 80 hours of printing concrete, Ontario-based Nidus3D has finished a two-storey 3D printed home in a test of how technology could speed up construction and ease a shortage in trade skills.

The home, Nidus3D’s second, is a 2,300 sq ft space with a studio on the ground floor and residence above.

Using a COBOD BOD2 printer, the company cut construction time by more than half from its first 3D printed home, which took 200 hours to build.

Another innovation, it said, was 3D printing a horizontal beam on site and lifting into place by a crane.

Although there are other 3D printed homes in the US and Canada, these have either been one-storey houses or included a second non-3D printed storey.

In Europe, a company called Kamp C built the continent’s first two-storey 3D printed house in July 2020. Created entirely on site, the building in Westerlo, Belgium also used a BOD2 printer.

Tiny folded diamonds that fell to Earth from an ancient dwarf star may sound like something from an intergalactic feature film, but researchers from Australia and the United Kingdom have proven the existence of the rare gems after examining a stony meteorite.

BY TYLER DURDEN

Scientists from Australia and the UK have established the existence of lonsdaleite, a rare hexagonal diamond, no bigger than a human hair, that researchers note is layered into a distinctive folded pattern, unlike the earth-formed diamonds that have a cubic structure.

The existence of Lonsdaleite—named after the pioneering British crystallographer Dame Kathleen Lonsdale—has previously been the subject of debate because its very existence could not be proven.

The lead scientist on the research team Prof. Andy Tomkins, from Monash University’s School of Earth, Atmosphere, and Environment, said the mysteries of the rare diamond were what drove him continue researching ureilite meteorites in his lab.

Tomkins said it was a case of curiosity-driven science.

“This is exactly the sort of curiosity-piquing observation that sends scientists diving down rabbit holes for months on end,” he said.

By Tiffany Winfrey

Jed McCaleb, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and founder of Vast Space, wants to build an artificial-gravity space station in low Earth orbit.

According to McCaleb (via Space News), there will be a lot of humans living all around the solar system in the future.

Since other businesses are assisting in lowering launch costs, McCaleb believes that building substantial buildings for people to live and work in space will be the next crucial step.

By ERIC HAL SCHWARTZ

Robot toymaker Robosen has debuted a new Buzz Lightyear toy based on the recent Disney and Pixar film built with conversational AI and voice recognition to interact with children. The robot incorporates natural language understanding to detect when it is addressed and respond like the character from the film, though the AI makes it seem more like the Toy Story action figure that comes to life when no humans are around. The $650 robot is available for pre-order and will arrive next spring (when its price will rise to $800).

Keith J. Bucklew, Freight Planning Practice Leader, HDR

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES COULD RESHAPE THE TRUCKING INDUSTRY, PRESENTING A SOLUTION TO IMPROVE SAFETY AND CAN BE A FREIGHT MOBILITY MULTIPLIER TO SUPPORT SUPPLY CHAIN EFFICIENCY AND RELIABILITY. BUT A PATCHWORK OF STATE LAWS CREATES A HINDRANCE TO IMPLEMENTING EMERGING TECHNOLOGY.

Currently the United States has no federal guidelines for how autonomous trucking vehicles should operate. In the absence of uniform standards, the trucking industry should unite to encourage states to act jointly to create consistent regulations for the implementation of new technology.

In sports, a football team knows, regardless of where they play, that the field dimensions and game rules are the same, but that is not true for the trucking industry. It’s as if Soldier Field in Chicago was twice as long as the field at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. That discrepancy would invite chaos.

With the absence of consistency, the freight technology playing field can be an operational quagmire. The trucking industry should speak as one voice to advocate for both federal and state uniform regulations.

By Raj Koneru

The much-hyped metaverse concept — once thought of as a futuristic, hypothetical online destination — is quickly becoming a new kind of internet. As more users interact with one another in these virtual environments, brands will realize new opportunities for engaging their target audiences. Companies such as Meta (formerly Facebook) are rapidly making plans to expand into the metaverse, altering and advancing how people will work, socialize, shop and even bank in the future. 

While some completely disagree with the positive potential of this digital world, it cannot be refuted that the metaverse is a topic that many have heard of and will become increasingly ubiquitous. Gaming may be its most obvious initial use case, as consumers and gamers alike are steadily continuing to merge their physical and digital lives. This is something that’s been happening since the arrival of the iPhone, a device that has become an extension of our brains and bodies. As technology progresses and advances, it’s only natural that more parts of our lives will be embedded into the digital world. 

With more people opting to “live” inside the metaverse, there will be routine tasks that require more advanced and intuitive communication. Be it mailing a letter, purchasing land or buying a burger, there must be a proper way to scale communications through artificial intelligence. Technologies like CAIP (conversational AI platforms) will allow brands to design more appealing and engaging user experiences in this burgeoning virtual environment.

Modern tech has revolutionized the healthcare industry. When patients can’t be treated at the hospital, new technologies enable patients to receive quality care from the comfort of their homes.

By Sam Bowman 

But while the benefits of telehealth were once limited to virtual checkups and prescription deliveries, modern healthtech is advanced enough to completely replace several services offered by primary care providers, hospitals, and specialists.

Thanks to modern robotics — and the artificial intelligence that supports its functionality — care is more convenient, accurate, and affordable than ever. Let’s explore some of the new technology that brings doctors to patients’ homes, and how providers and patients alike can benefit from robots in the future of healthcare.

By Natasha Lomas

EU lawmakers are moving in on the metaverse and making it plain that, whatever newfangled virtual world/s and/or immersive social connectivity that tech industry hype involving the term may refer to, these next-gen virtual spaces won’t escape one hard reality: Regulation.

There may be a second metaverse certainty too, if the Commission gets its way: Network infrastructure taxes.

The EU’s internal market commissioner, Thierry Breton, said today it believes some of the profits made in an increasingly immersive software realm should flow to providers of the network backbone required to host these virtual spaces — a suggestion that’s sure to trigger a fresh round of net neutrality pearl-clutching.

The Commission has been signalling for some months that it wants to find a way to support mobile operators to expand rollouts of next-gen cellular technologies — via imposing some kind of a levy on U.S. tech giants to help fund European network infrastructure — following heavy lobbying by local telcos.

Last week, Breton revealed it plans to consult on network infrastructure cost contribution ideas in Q1 next year — as part of a wider metaverse-focused initiative, with the latter proposal coming later in the year.

More details of the bloc’s thinking on fostering development of virtual spaces and the network pipes needed to connect them has emerged today.

The machine-learning tool could help researchers discover entirely new proteins not yet known to science.

By Melissa Heikkiläarchive

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

A new AI tool could help researchers discover previously unknown proteins and design entirely new ones. When harnessed, it could help unlock the development of more efficient vaccines, speed up research for the cure to cancer, or lead to completely new materials.

Alphabet-owned AI lab DeepMind took the world by surprise in 2020 when it announced AlphaFold, an AI tool that used deep learning to solve one of the “grand challenges” of biology: accurately predicting the shapes of proteins. Proteins are fundamental to life, and understanding their shape is vital to working with them. Earlier this summer DeepMind announced that AlphaFold could now predict the shapes of all proteins known to science. 

The new tool, ProteinMPNN, described by a group of researchers from the University of Washington in two papers published in Science today (available here and here), offers a powerful complement to that technology. 

The papers are the latest example of how deep learning is revolutionizing protein design by giving scientists new research tools. Traditionally researchers engineer proteins by tweaking those that occur in nature, but ProteinMPNN will open an entire new universe of possible proteins for researchers to design from scratch. 

With its intuitive cockpit, Doroni says you only need 20 hours of flight training and a license to fly its H1. 

By MICHAEL VERDON

Miami-based Doroni has started to accept pre-orders for its “personal” flying machines. The company recently showed off the cockpit of its H1 aircraft at the EAA AirVenture in Wisconsin, using VR headsets to simulate takeoff, flight and landing.

Doroni is going after a different market than most eVTOL manufacturers, which are building air taxis for intra-city use. Instead, it’s targeting personal pilots, much like the Jetson, with an aircraft it claims will be intuitive and much easier to fly than a helicopter or conventional airplane. 

Company officials yesterday said in a webinar that they plan to “democratize” general aviation with a “semi-autonomous” aircraft designed for safety. CEO Doron Merdinger said anyone with a standard car driver’s license and 20-hour training course should be able to fly the H1.