Top TechTop Tech #61: Better Nukes, Bionic Boots, VR Faces
Important innovations in science and technology, every day
By Paul Worthington
Today’s Top Tech:
• Build a better nuclear reactor
• Run faster with a Bionic Boot
• 3D-map your expressions onto your VR Avatar
Build a better nuclear reactor
Molten salt reactors have lower chance of meltdown, and “this simple reactor design, updated with modern technology and materials, has the potential to revolutionize the nuclear industry,” claim two MIT grads who have formed Transatomic Power — and received about $6 million in funding.
The company says its reactors “can convert the 270,000 metric tons of waste that exists today” — the spent fuel of other reactors — “into enough carbon-free electricity to power the world for 72 years.” It has a 96 percent fuel conversion efficiency as compared to 4 percent in today’s standard reactors.
The nuclear industry abandoned the idea 50 years ago: a molten salt reactor operated in the 1960s, but was all-but forgotten as light-water reactors became standard. However, the design is “inherently safe,” Transatomic Power says, “and doesn’t require a constant supply of external electric power to pump water over their core to keep them from heating up catastrophically. If our reactor were to lose external electric power, and even if there were no operators on site, its fuel would drain via gravity and naturally freeze solid. In addition, our system operates at atmospheric pressure which means that there is no driving force to push the reactor material beyond the site boundary.”
Here is their full white paper.
Popular Science looks at the company and tech here, and reports “Their next step will be to design and build a 20-megawatt demonstration reactor that they hope to have running by 2020. Their ultimate goal is a 520-megawatt commercial reactor, which they say can be built for $1.7 billion—half the cost of a light-water reactor.”
Run faster with a Bionic Boot
Yesterday we covered tech that helps the disabled walk better — but from the other end of the spectrum comes the Bionic Boot for letting athletes run even faster — up to 25 miles per hour.
Based on the gait of ostriches and kangaroo, it uses springs to better propel you forward.
Popular Science has more on the Bionic Boot here.
Here’s a video from the developer.
3D-map your expressions onto your VR Avatar
Advanced virtual reality headsets such as Facebook’s Oculus and Microsoft’s HoloLens are coming to market soon — and techniques to make it feel more lifelike are crucial to its comfortable use. Now a USC computer science researcher has developed a system for tracking expressions and reelecting them in the VR.
That’s more complicated than it might sound as, after all, the user’s face is covered by the head-mounted displays these VR devices use.
The new system uses “ultra-thin flexible electronic materials mounted on the foam liner of the headset to measure surface strain signals corresponding to upper face expressions,” the assistant professor says. “These strain signals are combined with a head-mounted RGB-D camera to enhance the tracking in the mouth region and to account for inaccurate HMD placement. To map the input signals to a 3D face model, we perform a single-instance offline training session for each person.” (Phew!) “The resulting animations are visually on par with cutting-edge depth sensor-driven facial performance capture systems and hence, are suitable for social interactions in virtual worlds.”
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