News of the week selected by Impactscool – April 14th

A glacier in Antarctica is falling into an underwater canyon

The Denman glacier in eastern Antarctica could face a rapid collapse in the coming years. With a 20 km front this slow ice flow has shrunk by about 5 km in the past 22 years. The problem is that this icy is resting on a deep underwater canyon, called Denman’s pit and 3 km and a half deep. Withdrawing the glacier is ever closer to the edge of the canyon and when this is overcome the warm water of the ocean will pour into the canyon, speeding up the melting process. If the glacier melts completely it could raise the sea level by 1.5 meters.

IoConto, the open data platform on Coronavirus

In this time of crisis, making the right decisions is crucial and the best way to do this is by relying on data. On this basis, the IoConto committee was created and the simultaneous release of a data collection and dissemination platform open to the public. “IoConto – reads the note accompanying the announcement – wants to provide all institutions and individuals, an easy-to-use, efficient, public system to collect data, normalize it and distribute it to anyone who needs it in order to design scenarios, make wise decisions and inform. ” The initiative was born from a collaboration of Milanese startuppers and journalists who immediately followed the Coronavirus issue. The committee asked for the collaboration of the institutions and citizens in order to have free access to the data, collecting it in the most widespread and precise way possible.

Google manages to fill the holes in the audio of your video calls

“It is not understood, the audio has skipped, can you repeat?”. How many times have you heard this phrase during a video call in the past few days? This is a phenomenon however due to the loss of data packets to which Google has found a solution: an artificial intelligence that imitates your way of speaking to fill the small empty spaces in your voice by generating the missing parts.

The “flexoskeleton” robots arrive

University of California San Diego engineers developed a method using 3D printing to create soft and flexible robots. Innovation comes from the new paradigm in which soft robots are built: instead of understanding how to add soft materials to a rigid body, UC San Diego researchers started from a soft body and added rigid characteristics where necessary. The structures were inspired by insect exoskeletons, which have both soft and rigid parts: the researchers called their creations “flexoskeletons”. Flexoskeletons are made with 3D printing in just a few minutes of printing and at a cost of less than a dollar.