Heiress Picks 50 Citizens to Distribute €25 Million

Daily Upsider on June 28, 2024

Marlene Engelhorn, a Millennial heiress from one of Austria’s wealthiest families, is giving away her inheritance. Her ancestors founded BSAF Pharmaceuticals and later acquired Boehringer Mannheim, another pharmaceutical company.

Engelhorn’s €25 million share of her family’s $4.2 billion fortune was distributed to 77 charitable and non-profit organizations by a group of 50 randomly selected citizens from Salzburg. This group, known as the Good Council for Redistribution, met over six weeks to decide on the allocation. The council members, chosen from a pool of 10,000, received lectures from philosophers and economics professors to guide their decisions, according to Euro News.

Engelhorn stepped back entirely once the committee was formed. The largest recipients included the Austrian Nature Conservation Association and Nuenerhaus, a homeless assistance organization, each receiving over $1.5 million. Other notable donations were €1 million each to the Momentum Institute and Attac Austria, €300,000 to the Autonomous Austrian Women’s Shelters, and €100,400 to the Común Foundation for nature restoration.

Robotic Touch

Daily Upsider on June 28, 2024

A robotic sorting system that uses touch to identify different types of domestic waste achieved a 98.85% accuracy rate.

The inventors believe this advanced system could improve recycling efficiency and aid in treating hand disabilities.

Currently, sorting robots are used in over 40 of the 600 recycling centers in the United States, operating faster and more accurately than humans. Researchers at Tsinghua University in Beijing have shown that tactile sensing and logical reasoning enhance a robot’s ability to recognize and classify objects, even with advanced visual sensors.

Today’s intelligent robots can identify many objects through vision and touch, but tactile information, combined with machine learning algorithms, also allows them to recognize objects they have previously handled. However, they often struggle with objects of similar size and shape or new items.

To address this, the Tsinghua team integrated “thermal feeling” into robotic tactile sensing. Professor Rong Zhu explained that humans use thermal sensations to differentiate materials like wood and metal based on cooling sensations. The team replicated this by designing a tactile sensing method incorporating thermal sensations for better object detection.

They developed a layered sensor with material detection at the surface, pressure sensitivity at the bottom, and a porous middle layer sensitive to thermal changes. This sensor, paired with a cascade classification algorithm, efficiently categorized objects from simple to complex, such as empty cartons to orange peels.

The system, installed in a robot, sorted common trash items like cartons, bread scraps, plastic bags, bottles, sponges, napkins, orange peels, and expired drugs into categories like recyclables, food scraps, hazardous waste, and other waste. It achieved a 98.85% accuracy rate in classifying previously unencountered waste items, as reported in Applied Physics Reviews.

The Only Gears Found In Nature

Daily Upsider on June 27, 2024

To the best of our knowledge, the mechanical gear—characterized by evenly-sized teeth cut into two rotating surfaces to lock them together as they turn—was invented around 300 B.C.E. by Greek mechanics in Alexandria. Since then, this simple concept has become a cornerstone of modern technology, enabling various machinery and vehicles, including cars and bicycles.

However, it turns out that a tiny, three-millimeter-long hopping insect known as Issus coleoptratus beat us to this invention. Malcolm Burrows and Gregory Sutton, biologists from the University of Cambridge, discovered that juvenile Issus have an intricate gearing system that locks their back legs together, allowing both appendages to rotate simultaneously, propelling the insects forward.

This discovery, published in Science, is believed to be the first functional gearing system ever found in nature. Issus insects, commonly called “planthoppers,” are found throughout Europe and North Africa. Burrows and Sutton used electron microscopes and high-speed video capture to identify the gearing and determine its function.

The gears are essential for coordination: to jump, both hind legs must push forward simultaneously. Since they both swing laterally, if one extended even a fraction of a second earlier than the other, it would push the insect off course instead of jumping straight forward.

The gears provide an elegant solution. High-speed videos showed that Issus juveniles cock their back legs into a jumping position and then push forward, with each leg moving within 30 microseconds of the other. This propels them forward at speeds up to 8-12 miles per hour and exposes them to around 200 G force.

Adult Issus insects lack these gears. As juveniles grow and molt, they do not regrow the gear teeth. Instead, adult legs are synchronized by a different mechanism involving a series of protrusions that push the other leg into action. Burrows and Sutton hypothesize that the fragility of the gearing might explain this—if one tooth breaks, it limits the design’s effectiveness. Juveniles can molt and grow new gears, but adults cannot, hence the alternative arrangement.

Voyager 1 Goes Silent After 46 Years

Daily Upsider on June 26, 2024

Last November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, one of its most celebrated explorers, temporarily ceased sending messages back to Earth, causing concern among the team responsible for its operation. Fortunately, mission controllers were able to verify that the spacecraft was still responsive to commands and functioning properly despite the lack of outgoing communications.

Now, Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object from Earth, has resumed transmitting data about its onboard systems as it continues its journey through interstellar space. It has been over 46 years since Voyager 1 was launched, and nearly 12 years since it passed Pluto and exited our solar system.

In March 2024, the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, based at the California Technical Institute, pinpointed the cause of the communication issue. They identified that a malfunctioning chip responsible for storing part of the flight data subsystem (FDS) memory, which includes some software code, was at fault. This defect rendered the science and engineering data previously unusable.

With the chip irreparable, the team strategized a new approach to overcome this obstacle. They decided to redistribute the affected code across different sections of the FDS memory. Given that no single memory location could house the entire code, it was segmented and stored across various parts. Additionally, adjustments were made to ensure that the relocated segments would still operate cohesively. References to the code’s location in the FDS memory also required updating.

On April 18th, after reconfiguring the code, it was transmitted to Voyager 1, which is currently over 15 billion miles away from Earth. Signals now take approximately 22.5 hours to travel one way between Earth and the spacecraft. By April 20th, the mission control team received confirmation that the changes were successful; for the first time in five months, they could check the spacecraft’s status and health.

Voyager 1 continues to conduct scientific studies on cosmic rays and magnetic fields in space. However, it is anticipated that within a year or slightly more, these instruments will need to be deactivated due to power constraints. By 2036, Voyager 1 is expected to exit the range of the Deep Space Network, severing communications completely.

College Lab Makes 3D Printed Arms

Daily Upsider on June 26, 2024

12-year-old Aubrey Sauvie never let her lack of hands stop her from pursuing Tae Kwon Do, art, or doing her own makeup.

Born a triple congenital amputee and missing both arms from below the elbows and several toes on one foot, Aubrey quickly showed her family she didn’t need much accommodation. “It’s just one part of me,” Aubrey told WKRN. “It doesn’t define me. Learning was a challenge, but over time it became easier.”

Aubrey’s family album is full of pictures of her in dance competitions, breaking boards with a flying side-kick, and playing snare drum in her school band with drumsticks in her elbow creases. But playing the snare didn’t produce the sound she wanted. Her middle school band teacher suggested she join the Tennessee Tech University program, Engineering for Kids, where 10 students made it their project to create custom prosthetics for her to play the drums.

The students designed a 3D-printed pair of durable, flexible prosthetics with interchangeable grips. Tennessee Tech Professor of Mechanical Engineering Stephen Canfield called it a one-in-a-million shot. The students spent the semester taking measurements and testing prototypes. Their hard work paid off, surprising them and delighting Aubrey.

Now, Aubrey enjoys the proper snap of a snare hit and dreams of playing a full drum kit.