Ford patents self-driving car that repossesses itself if the owner fails to keep up with payments – and drives itself back to the showroom or scrapyard

source: dailymail.co.uk/, contributed by Artemus Founder, Bob Wallace  |  image: pixabay.com

Ford is not taking any chances with owners missing car payments – the company is working on a system that prompts the vehicle to repossess itself. 

A newly awarded patent describes a car self-driving back to the showroom or a scrapyard if the owner does not answer messages about their delinquent account. 

The American carmaker would start the process by disabling ‘comfort features,’ playing noises inside the car and limiting where the vehicle can drive.

If all else fails, Ford will activate the self-driving feature and the owner has no choice but to give up the car.

While patent applications do not always turn into real-world services, Ford describes using a ‘repossession computer’ that could be installed to let it take control of functions.

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Shape-shifter

source: newatlas.com, contributed by FAN, Bill Amshey  |  image: pexels.com

Scientists reported this week they’ve created a material that can be molded into forms that can shift between being liquid and solid.

Why it matters: Shape-shifting materials could be used for a range of applications — from biomedical devices to electrical circuitry that could be wirelessly repaired, study co-author Carmel Majidi, a professor of mechanical engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, told me in an email.

How it works: The material is made from the metal gallium — which melts at about 86 degrees Fahrenheit — embedded with magnetic particles.

• Electricity generated from a rapidly alternating magnetic field creates heat that liquifies the metal.
• A magnet is then used to move the material around. When it cools back down to room temperature, the metal solidifies.
• The researchers’ inspiration? Sea cucumbers that can soften into a material that sinks between your fingers — and then stiffen again.

In one experiment, the material was cast as a Lego-like figure, liquified and moved out of a jail cell, then recast in a mold.

• They also tested the material by having it jump over moats and climb walls.
• In another experiment, it softened around a small ball in order to remove it from a model stomach — a proof of concept for potential biomedical applications.

Yes, but: Operating in the human body would likely require a non-toxic material that could degrade and one with a higher melting point, which could possibly be created by adding other metals to gallium, the authors note.

Ants can detect the scent of cancer in urine

source: livescience.com, contributed by FAN Steve Page  |  image: pexels.com

Ants use their antennae to sniff out cancer

Ants can be trained to detect cancer in urine, a new study finds.

Although ant sniffing is a long way from being used as a diagnostic tool in humans, the results are encouraging, the researchers said.

Because ants lack noses, they use olfactory receptors on their antennae to help them find food or sniff out potential mates. For the study, published Jan. 25 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences(opens in new tab), scientists trained nearly three dozen silky ants (Formica fusca) to use these acute olfactory receptors for a different task: finding tumors.

In a lab, scientists grafted slices of breast cancer tumors from human samples onto mice and taught the 35 insects to “associate urine from the tumor-bearing rodents with sugar,” according to The Washington Post(opens in new tab). Once placed in a petri dish, the ants spent 20% more time next to urine samples containing cancerous tumors versus healthy urine, according to the study.

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You’ll Soon Be Able To Run Holograms

On Your Smartphone

source: iflscience.com, contributed by FAN Steve Page  |  image: Pixabay.com

In 1943, Thomas Watson, the president of IBM, famously predicted the world market for computers would top out at “maybe five” of the machines. He was wrong – you likely have more than that in your own house, let’s face it – but at the time, it made sense. After all, if computers were still gigantic, vacuum-tube-powered addition machines, you probably wouldn’t want more than about five either.

It’s a similar story with holograms. Even back in the 1990s, more than 40 years after Dennis Gabor first came up with the idea of using wavefront interference to reconstruct images in three dimensions, science fiction was still assuming the need for entire decks and suites to power our holographic adventures.

In fact, they can run on a smartphone.

Almost two years ago, researchers at MIT made a breakthrough – a technology they dubbed “tensor holography”. Since then, the project has continued to improve, and today, the team are working with a system they say is “fully automatic, robust to rendered and misaligned real-world inputs, produces realistic depth boundaries, and corrects vision aberrations.”

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