Top TechTop Tech #122: Hydrogen Conversion, Robot Farmer, Smarter Surveillance
Important innovations in science and technology, every day
By Paul Worthington
Tuesday’s Top Tech:
• Efficient conversion of water and light to hydrogen
• Robot farmer
• Smarter Surveillance via Deep Learning
Efficient conversion of water and light to hydrogen
Researchers at Michigan Technological University converted visible light and water to hydrogen fuel more efficiently — a big step closer to mimicking photosynthesis, Kurzweil AI reports, and generating hydrogen “as a practical fuel to power vehicles and electrical devices.”
Visible light constitutes about 45 percent of solar energy, and the Michigan Tech scientists say that by absorbing the entire visible light spectrum, they have increased the yield and energy efficiency of creating hydrogen fuel by up to two magnitudes (100 times) greater than previously reported — and the new setup is “convenient for scaling up commercially.”
Robot farmer
It’s not just a greenhouse — Agbotic is making an automatized mini-farm run by a robot.
The 15,000-square-foot greenhouse’s robot isn’t miniaturized or modeled after a human in anyway: it spans the 52-foot width, “sliding back and forth on tracks to water vegetables and till soil to prevent weeds,” Watertown Daily Times reports.
Startup Agbotic has already designed automated lawn tractors and other projects.
The company says the $350,000 greenhouses can let farmers easily grow organic vegetables.
Smarter Surveillance via Deep Learning
In-home security cameras aren’t new, and neither is connecting one to the Cloud for image storage — but using a neural network to identify intruders? That’s innovative.
San Mateo, California-based Camio already provides an app that uses an old smartphone as a surveillance camera — and that used “machine learning to point out the most significant events captured by a user’s camera that day,” Technology Review reports, “and to let users search for vehicles and passersby as they come and go.”
Now it will advance the artificial neural network’s technique to search recordings for “several trickier-to-identify objects like cats, dogs, bikes, trucks, and packages.”
It will also work with the online response-triggering service IFTTT (“If This, Then That”) for preprogrammed actions. Here’s more information on that.
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