<ul>
<li>After bonding iridum to a plastic layer, researchers were able to slowly stretch the metal film to twice its original length without breaking. In fact, the metal continued stretching &#8212; it was the plastic layer that broke and ended the experiment.</li>
<li>Stretchable metal could find many uses in consumer products, such as bendable batteries, displays and smart fabrics.</li>
<li>According to one member of the team, this development is a &#8220;“a quantum improvement in stretchable electronics and wearable devices.”</li>
</ul>
<p><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/CgbG8OHgHuU?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>


Robots & Machines

Washington State University researchers have announced that they can stretch indium to twice its size.

New stretchable metal circuitry can extend to twice its size

<ul>
<li>The new technology was mounted on an otherwise &#8220;stock&#8221; hobby helicopter which was unmodified and unmanned. The legs automatically unfold as the helicopter approaches land, using sensors to feel the ground to find stable footing.</li>
<li>Eventually, robotic legs like these could give helicopters the ability to land even on 20-degree sloping terrain or on a boat on choppy seas.</li>
<li>This tech needs to be tested on a full-size helicopter, but it&#8217;s certainly a interesting development for vehicles that land vertically.</li>
</ul>
<p><iframe width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ip_WqX8nmKY?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>


Artificial Intelligence

A new project from DARPA called "Mission Adaptive Rotor robotic landing gear"  means that helicopters can land on uneven ground or even at sea.

DARPA tech allows helicopters to land on uneven ground thanks to robotic legs

<ul>
<li>Honda joins basically the rest of the auto industry, including Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, and Tesla, in realizing that self-driving cars could be significantly safer and less expensive to operate than human-driven vehicles. The permit allows Honda to test its vehicle on public California streets.</li>
<li>Honda previously built a self-driving prototype in an Acura SUV, but since then it&#8217;s been quiet about its autonomous ambitions.</li>
<li>In related news, Audi, BMW, Ford, General Motors, Mazda, Mercedes Benz, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo all said in a statement to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that autonomous braking systems would &#8220;become the norm in their new cars.&#8221;</li>
</ul>


Last week, Honda joined the list of companies in California that are legally permitted to test self-driving cars.

Now Honda is testing self-driving cars on California streets too

<ul>
<li>NASA will deliver the channel as part of a partnership with Harmonic. All video will be delivered at 4k resolution, or 4096 x 2010 pixels.</li>
<li>Content will largely come from cameras install on the International Space Station, as well as footage from other NASA missions. If old footage can be remastered in 4K, the channel will show it as well.</li>
<li>According to NASA&#8217;s press release, the channel will be available online as well as through cable and satellite TV providers. You&#8217;ll need quite a bit of bandwidth to stream it though: 13 MBps, according to NASA.</li>
</ul>


Sci-Fi Visions

Can't get enough high-resolution space porn? You're in luck -- NASA will launch a channel on November 1st with tons of high-definition content.

NASA to launch round-the-clock 4K TV channel

<ul>
<li>Although chips themselves &#8212; sophisticated electronics &#8212; are inexpensive, there&#8217;s an issue on the battlefield where it&#8217;s difficult to track and recover every device, potentially leading to important technology or data falling into enemy hands.</li>
<li>The chip is printed on a glass substrate which is then brought to its breaking point by heat. The team was able to switch a circuit on, and when a resistor got hot enough, the glass shattered into thousands of pieces.</li>
<li>The self-destructing chip could be used to store encryption keys. So instead of wiping a hard drive, you could merely destroy the chip remotely and render the data useless.</li>
</ul>


A project from Xerox PARC, funded by DARPA, has come up with a chip that can self-destruct on command.

This chip will self-destruct in 10… 9… 8…

<ul>
<li>The key to the new AI is that it&#8217;s unsupervised. Current machine learning systems ro applications such as speech processing need to be trained on data sets which associate human transcriptions to the raw speech files.</li>
<li>Because the system doesn&#8217;t require annotated data, it&#8217;s had to make a few assumptions. One is that words that occur in speech follow a standard power-law distribution. The team tested its system on six recordings of lectures given at MIT, but there were still problems. For instance, it thought that &#8220;open university&#8221; was one word, not two.</li>
<li>One big application for this kind of technology is that it might be able to be applied to languages that aren&#8217;t as widely spoken. It could also help the accuracy of systems that transcribe accented speech.</li>
</ul>


A new AI from researchers at MIT can not only learn to distinguish spoken works, but it can identify their phonetic components, without human supervision.

Robots & Machines

New stretchable metal circuitry can extend to twice its size

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