New’s of the week selected by Impactscool – July 15th
15 July 2019 | Written by La redazione
The most important news about future and technology selected by Impactscool team
Some crops are more difficult to harvest than others. If for the wheat it is sufficient to cut the plant in the right place, other plants, such as lettuce, require greater precision and delicacy to avoid damaging them. Today this operation is done by hand, but a new robotic system called Vegebot could perform the task done by humans: thanks to a machine learning algorithm it is able to recognize plants ready for harvesting and therefore, thanks to a special tool placed at the end of the arm cuts and retrieves the lettuce. The system is currently slow and inaccurate but it lays the foundation for future developments and applications.
An alternative to the cemetery
In England, 500,000 people die every year and according to some estimates, within 5 years there will be no
more space in cemeteries. Professor John Ashton, a public health expert, suggests in an article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, to build green corridors used as cemeteries alongside roads and railways in which to use green burial methods in which instead of coffins and gravestones there are trees. In this way, it will also be possible to contribute to the sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere.
The scientist AI: making new discoveries with algorithms
In an article published in Nature, researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed how, through machine learning, they trained an artificial intelligence called Word2vec to read scientific paper texts and, putting together information – intended as keywords – collected from various publications has been able to make new discoveries. The research was carried out in the field of materials science, but in the future, it could also be applied to other areas.
After the impossible meat, the impossible fish
The search for alternatives to products of animal origin has taken new directions thanks to the efforts of Impossible Foods, the company already famous for the production of “meat” derived from plants, the impossible meat, is now working to create a plant version of the fish. Despite the success of the impossible meat, there are doubts about the success of this new venture. Many of those who supported the development of vegetable meat did so because they were worried about the health effects of excessive consumption of red meat. Fish instead it is not seen as dangerous food and its success may not be guaranteed.
