What are the most read news of the last week? What have been the trending topics in the world of innovation? What has been talked about on social networks around the world? To answer these questions, we have selected the news that, in the last week, had the most visibility on our portal and aroused the curiosity of our readers. The most read news concerns Google’s record but there are also interesting articles for robotics and space engineering enthusiasts.
After 4 unsuccessful attempts, the SpaceX vector made a small flight of 150 meters and successfully re-landed after a parabolic trajectory. Since NASA reached the Moon on the Apollo missions, man has not gone to the ground of another celestial body. The Shuttle, the previously used vector, has been put into disuse after several tragic accidents. Government and private agencies are trying to develop new alternatives to the Shuttle so that they can then plan a future mission to the Moon or even to Mars. Today, a small but significant step has been taken towards this goal. SpaceX, recently very active in space (just see the Dragonproject), is developing a new vector to reach the next goals. The project is called Starship and, like the Falcon rockets, it should be able to take off and land in a vertical position, so it can operate more than one route, for example Earth – Moon and back. After the first 4 tests failed, the Starship SN5 was able to fly and land safely.
Researchers in Washington have designed a microcamera that can be installed like a backpack on the backs of insects and allows you to see how they do. What does an insect see? This is a question that researchers and entomologists have been asking themselves for years. There are many (theoretical) studies on the ocular apparatus of flies, mosquitoes, bees and beetles but we still do not know exactly “how they see” these animals. A reliable answer could come from a project of the University of Washington. A team of researchers in computer science and engineering has designed a micro-camera that can be installed on the back of beetles. Like a backpack: in this way, it is possible to “see like insects” and understand the complex physiological mechanisms that regulate the movement, perception and flight of these tiny animals. The project was presented in the authoritative magazine “Science Mag” in the section dedicated to Robotics. According to the authors, in fact, the data collected could “help us to design increasingly sophisticated and miniaturized artificial systems, in view of very small robots that can really move independently, and maybe fly with precision as flies and bees do”.
The new model will allow to instruct new machine learning algorithms in less than 30 seconds with unprecedented efficiency and speed. Machine learing algorithms play a key role in fields such as engineering and transportof services or goods. These algorithms build on past experience and improve themselves, mimicking the learning process of human beings. Recently, Google announced, through its sites, the creation of a new supercomputer with unrivalled performance. The new PC consists of TPU (tensor processing unit) chips, AI accelerators built ad hoc by Google. The first tests carried out on artificial intelligence machine learning models were amazing. The most powerful configuration managed to train the algorithm in just 30 seconds. To have a yardstick for comparison, in 2015 the same process took more than three weeks. In just 5 years the efficiency then increased by five orders of magnitude, making the process 100 thousand times faster. The size of the supercomputer is far from small. The machine is 4 times the size of its predecessor and occupies an entire room, which needs to be properly cooled. The supercompure contains 4096 TPU chips and hundreds of CPU processors in aspired machines. The units are connected through ultra-fast connectors built specifically for this use.
