https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdwpW4YpaXg

Robotics company Engineered Arts developed a robot that can perform complex human mannerisms, including a pitch perfect rendition of “My Heart Will Go On” by

Celine Dion. Mashable is your source for the latest in tech, culture, and entertainment. Subscribe to Mashable: https://bit.ly/2DR64oM Watch more

episodes of Future Blink: http://bit.ly/2NI1AFz

https://youtu.be/EdwpW4YpaXg

The race is now on to convert body heat into battery power. Just like the action/sci-fi movie The Matrix. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder have come one

step closer to harness the human bodies' thermoelectric energy to power low-cost wearable devices.

"In the future, we want to be able to power your wearable electronics without having to include a battery," said Jianliang Xiao, senior author of the new paper and an associate professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder.

As we noted above, the human-powered battery to power machines is straight out of The Matrix film. Xiao said the battery could generate about 1 volt of energy for every square centimeter of skin - allowing it to power wearable devices, such as fitness trackers.

In a short informational video, CU Boulder explains how the new battery works. "Whenever you use a battery, you're depleting that battery and will, eventually, need to replace it," Xiao said. "The nice thing about our

thermoelectric device is that you can wear it, and it provides you with constant power."

Though the technology is still in its infancy, he said it generates less voltage per area than a conventional battery.While more research is needed to increase the amount of power produced before it can be commercialized. He figured it

would take about a decade before the new battery is introduced for the retail market. "Just don't tell the robots. We don't want them getting any ideas," Xiao concluded.

https://youtu.be/hexScHvEFwQ

https://youtu.be/IojqOMWTgv8

A team of engineers at CU Boulder has developed a new wearable device that is stretch enough that you can wear it like a ring or bracelet. And it taps into your natural body heat, using your internal temperature to generate

electricity that can power a range of small sensors and other tools.

https://youtu.be/hexScHvEFwQ

https://youtu.be/IojqOMWTgv8

A team of engineers at CU Boulder has developed a new wearable device that is stretch enough that you can wear it like a ring or bracelet. And it taps into your natural body heat, using your internal temperature to generate

electricity that can power a range of small sensors and other tools.

On Tuesday, Boston Dynamics uploaded a video of Spot, the autonomous robot dog designed to inspect hazardous job sites, with a new trick. The robot dog has been programmed to self-charge, allowing it to replenish its batteries

without humans' help.In recent months, an industrial version of Spot has been deployed to an oil rig, a Ford Motor Company factory, and

even at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, conducting tasks that humans would normally complete. But during those deployments, human intervention was needed with the robot to replace batteries.

The upgraded version of industrial Spot with self-charging capabilities allows it to operate in dangerous areas for longer while mitigating health risks to humans.

It appears Spot is getting better at doing human jobs. That's great for productivity but will have profound implications down

the line for the labor force.By the end of the decade, automation and artificial intelligence

could displace tens of millions of jobs - this trend has been thrown into hyperdrive since the virus pandemic. Lawmakers must see the downside to the robot revolution, that is, one

where income inequality will continue to expand. The great displacement is underway - if you're a reader and work in an industry that could be highly disruptive due to

automation, such as working in a warehouse - maybe now is the time for job retraining.

A string of tourist hotspots, including Greece and Spain, are considering plans to allow travelers to skip quarantine if they can show they have had the jab.

British Airways is trialling a digital 'Travel Pass' which will allow passengers to store coronavirus test results and proof of a

vaccination jab to show while travelling.

Despite this, Downing Street has been adamant that it does not plan to issue vaccine passports to allow people to travel once

they have had both doses of a vaccine.

Hancock said that anyone caught breaking their

quarantine could be fined ten thousand pounds

Cities are rushing to replace their legacy street lights with "smart" LED fixtures that could one day

be able to find you a parking space, monitor air quality, and announce an oncoming

thunderstorm.Why it matters: Despite a bumpy and controversial

start to some smart street light programs, cities are saving tons of money on energy by banishing traditional bulbs — and may soon be able to turn

a profit by monetizing data from smart LED sensors or leasing space on light poles.

The big picture:

Streetlights are becoming the backbone of larger smart city

"Overall, over 90% of streetlights will be LED by 2029 and 35% will be connected," Northeast Group

said.

But, but, but: There's been pushback on various fronts.•Surveillance: San Diego got scolded by community activists after its

police started using video from its $30 million "Smart Streetlights" program.

•Aesthetics: Light poles gunked up with sensors, cameras and advertisements can look hideous.

•Health: "Cities and towns throughout Northern California are issuing ordinances that would exclude new 5G cell sites from residential areas,

citing supposed health concerns," per the WSJ.Smart street light experts say the industry has taken heed from the San

Diego debacle and pulled back on intrusive applications.

What's next: Cities hope eventually to turn their smart street lights into cash cows — some of which is

happening today.•The poles can serve as billboards where companies buy ad space.•5G providers and others can pay monthly fees to hang their equipment on light poles.•The brass ring for cities is to compile data from smart streetlights and sell it for profit.

The bottom line: "We're seeing a lot of cities buying back their streetlights from utilities," Gardner tells Axios.

People returning to work following the long pandemic will find an array of tech-infused gadgetry to improve

workplace safety but which could pose risks for long-term personal and medical privacy.

Temperature checks, distance monitors, digital "passports," wellness surveys and robotic cleaning and

disinfection systems are being deployed in many workplaces seeking to reopen.

Tech giants and startups are offering solutions which include computer vision detection of vital signs to

wearables which can offer early indications of the onset of Covid-19 and apps that keep track of health metrics.

Salesforce and IBM have partnered on a "digital health pass" to let people share their vaccination and health status on their smartphone.

Clear, a tech startup known for airport screening, has created its own health pass which is being used by organizations such as the National

Hockey League and MGM Resorts.

Fitbit, the wearable tech maker recently acquired by Google, has its own "Ready for Work" program that includes daily check-ins using data from

its devices. Fitbit is equipping some 1,000 NASA employees with wearables as part of a pilot program which requires a daily log-in using

various health metrics which will be tracked by the space agency.

Microsoft and insurance giant United HealthCare have deployed a ProtectWell app which includes a daily symptom screener, and Amazon has deployed a "distance assistant" in its warehouses to help employees

maintain safe distances.

The monitoring "blurs the line between people's workplace and personal lives

Employers face a delicate balance as they try to ensure workplace safety

without intruding on privacy

"Employers have a legitimate interest in safeguarding workplaces and keeping

employees healthy in the context of the pandemic." We should worry employers using the pandemic to pluck and store information in a systematic way beyond what is necessary to

protect health."

Some buildings are becoming obsolete for use as offices, and institutional investors are now interested. "Not all buildings can be converted," said Sebastien Lorrain, a senior director for residential,

healthcare and investment properties at international commercial real estate group CBRE in France.

"There is inertia on the markets... (but) the volumes will accelerate," said Alexandre Chirier, who heads up a conversion division at Action Logement, a public-private group that builds and operates public housing.

Created last year, it aims to invest 1.5 billion euros ($1.8 billion) over three to four years to acquire office buildings and convert them into 20,000 apartments.

Chirier said care must be taken to "build a balance where accessibility, green spaces, open spaces and the quality of accommodation make people feel good."

Talking to animals, in the way Dr Dolittle did, might seem more like appropriate subject matter for a family film than serious scientific research.

But Professor Michael Bronstein at Imperial College London says that Artificial Intelligence could provide the key to unlocking completely alien languages – such

as the complex songs of whales. Bronstein is already working on an AI chatbot that could decipher sperm whales’ unique language even though it has no points of

reference with any human communication.

He does concede, though, that the first conversations between humans and whales may be “only be a rough approximation of the true depth and meaning of what

they’re saying” because our lives and reference points are so completely different.Nevertheless, Professor Bronstein heads a team at the Cetacean Translation

Initiative – or CETI – which has been set up in the hope of one day decoding the secret language of sperm whale communication.

In a paper published in Scientific Reports in 2019, the team documented some encouraging first steps.They made thousands of recordings of whale

communication which, after analysis, enabled them to make detailed predictions about which specific whale was likely to “speak” next.

But they still had no idea what the mighty beasts were saying.

Professor Sophie Scott, a leading expert on the neuroscience of voices and speech, told the

Daily Star that while many animals are vocalizing all the time, most – for example pigs

– “don’t seem to be saying very much.”“However elephants and dolphins,” she adds,

“seem to have huge complexity to their communication.”

Octopuses, too, she says, clearly have complex problem-solving intelligence. “But with no

common frame of reference, it’s hard to see what we could find to talk about.”

Birds, too, she says, could be sharing complex information about themselves as part of the

day Dawn Chorus.

The use of AI enables ideas and wider concepts to be interpreted, rather than words and sentences. We are working with very different tools to American

neuroscientist Dr John Lilly, who hoped to use dolphin communication to teach

NASA how to talk to aliens.

The Terrafugia Transition 'roadable aircraft' has been given the all-clear by the Federal Aviation Authority in the USA. It's the world's

first flying carThe world's first flying car that can travel at 100 miles per hour and fly up to 10,000 feet has been approved for

take-off. The Terrafugia Transition 'roadable aircraft' has been given the all-clear by the Federal Aviation Authority in the USA.

It has been granted an FAA Special Light-Sport Aircraft airworthiness certificate by the official

aviation body. This means that it meets the standards for flight, at least.

So despite it not being on the road (or in the sky) just yet, it does mean that day could come

pretty soon in the future.

The vehicle has a 27-foot wingspan that folds down to make it small enough for the whole

thing to fit inside a single car garage.

The Terrafugia Transition 'flying car'The Terrafugia Transition 'roadable aircraft' has

been given the all-clear (Image: SIPA USA/PA Images)

Most homes are built block by block, or brick by brick. But a demo house in Calverton, New York, was constructed scan by scan - its walls made using a giant three-dimensional printer.

The demo house was built by construction firm SQ4D, to show the public and industry what was possible. Now the company is putting one up for sale - a still to-be-built house in the nearby town of Riverhead, which has been listed on property site Zillow at $299,000.

With a detached garage, the house will cover some 1,400 square feet (130 square meters). The footings, foundation and slab, along with the walls, will be entirely made with the 3D printer. “We instruct the machine to go around and follow your floor plan each pass as we go by. We’re constantly building up,” said Kirk Andersen, the director of operations for SQ4D. Andersen and his colleagues had to design and build their own printer to fulfill their house-sized dream.

“We took the idea of a plastic 3D desktop printer and wanted to make it much larger and spit out concrete,” said Andersen. “We set tracks on each side of the structure where we plan to print. We set up our giant gantry, our large-scale printer goes back and forth, extruding these layers one by one, stacking, building all your walls.”

Andersen said the actual printing time for the walls took about 48 hours, part of an overall eight-day process to build the entire home.

That is significantly faster and around 30% cheaper overall than a home built using standard construction methods, he said, where laborers need to tow in and stack blocks manually. “We show up with a printer. We can replace the labor-intensiveness of those guys and extrude concrete much faster than they can lay the bricks,” he said.

Not everyone in the construction industry is thrilled at that prospect, and the process has received mixed feedback, he said, with some skepticism in particular from older tradesmen. “I think people are just unprepared for how this is going to change construction,” said Andersen. “This is the beginning. This is just scratching the surface right here.”

FEBRUARY 20 – FEBRUARY 27

Healing of Covid begins and will be complete by March 2022A major discovery for health and healing involving light & energy Time to reanalyze and reassess. All about government, business, economy.We will feel a lifting and a breath of fresh air. We will see female leaders and leadership. Human rights for woman and the environment. Traveling will begin to start up and improveStock Market will go to a big high. For a short time. Things will expand. This is a Peak: Crypto will go up at this time. It will go back down by APRIL and will not spring back for a long time. Big and powerful leaders worldwide will start to take charge. Entertainment, travel, amusement parks, a new awakening. New hope for vacations. Things are going to start in that direction in February.

WAR?

FEBRUARY 22 – March 18 2021: Mars enters Taurus. We might be entering a war.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3BRAEZ6zgU

Texas prides itself on being different. Yet it is in the grip of a winter storm that typifies the Snowmageddon-size problems facing energy in America. Although nobody can be sure if this

particular freeze is a sign of climate change, the growing frequency of extreme weather across the country is. Texan

infrastructure has buckled. The problem is not, as some argue, that Texas has too many renewables. Gas-fired plants and a

nuclear reactor were hit, as well as wind turbines. Worse, Texas had too little capacity and its poorly connected grid was unable to import power from elsewhere (see article). Texas shows that

America needs both a cleaner grid and a more reliable one.

Plans to overhaul American energy will come before Congress in the next few months. President Joe Biden has said that he wants fossil-fuel emissions from power generation to end by 2035 and the economy to be carbon-neutral by 2050. America is not just the world’s second-largest emitter, but also a source of climate-related policy, technology and, potentially, leadership. What is

about to unfold in Washington will set the course in America for the next decade—and quite possibly beyond.

It has been 11 months since anyone hugged Larry. The 62-year-old accountant lives alone in Chicago, which went into lockdown last March in response to covid-19. He has heart problems so he has stayed at home since then. The only people to touch him have

been latex-sheathed nurses taking his blood pressure. Larry describes himself as a “touchy-feely” person. Sex is nice, but more

than that he longs for casual platonic contact: hugs and handshakes. He lies in bed, he says, yearning to have someone to

hold or to hold him.

The pandemic has been an exercise in subtraction. There are the voids left by loved ones who have succumbed to covid-19, the gaps where jobs and school used to be, and the absence of friends and family. And then there are the smaller things that are missing. To

stop the spread of covid-19 people have forsaken the handshakes, pats, squeezes and strokes that warm daily interactions. The loss of

any one hardly seems worthy of note.

Even miracles have their limits. Vaccines against the coronavirus have arrived sooner and worked better than many people dared hope. Without them, the pandemic threatened to take more than 150m lives. And yet, while

the world rolls up a sleeve, it has become clear that expecting vaccines to see off covid-19 is mistaken. Instead the disease will circulate for years, and seems likely to become endemic. When covid-19 first struck, governments

were caught by surprise. Now they need to think ahead.

To call vaccination a miracle is no exaggeration. A little more than a year after the virus was first recognised, medics have already administered 148m doses. In Israel, the world’s champion inoculator, hospital admissions among those aged below 60, who have not received a jab, are higher than ever. By contrast, among the largely

inoculated over-60s they are already nearly 40% below their mid-January peak and they will fall further. Although vaccines fail to prevent all mild and asymptomatic cases of covid-19, they mostly seem to spare patients from death and the severest infections that require hospital admission, which is what really matters. Early evidence

suggests that some vaccines stop the virus spreading, too. This would greatly slow the pandemic and thus make it easier to alleviate lockdowns without causing a surge of cases that overwhelms intensive-care units. Those

findings, and many more, will harden up over the next few months as more data emerge (

When the news finally comes it triggers a range of emotions. Most people told when and where they will receive their first shot of covid-19 vaccine

speak of their relief, delight, even their elation. One person danced around the room, another “screamed a bit”, yet another felt giddy. “It feels”, says

one, “that my life’s about to begin.” But for some, there are other emotions in play: concern, fear, even anger.

Almost as soon as biomedical researchers began working on vaccines against sars-cov-2, the virus that causes covid-19, people concerned with

public health began to worry about “vaccine hesitancy”. It can sound trivial, even foolish, but it regularly costs lives. Hesitancy is a large part of the

reason that few young Japanese women get themselves vaccinated against human papillomavirus, and thus are more likely than vaccine-accepting

young women elsewhere to contract cervical cancer. Widespread hesitancy during worldwide campaigns against covid-19 could cost many lives, both

among the hesitant and among their fellow citizens. Scott Gottlieb, who led America’s drug regulator, the fda, from 2017 to 2019 (and who is also on the board of Pfizer, a vaccine-maker) argued in a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that the main challenge to vaccination efforts in

America could soon move from supply and logistics to individual reluctance to be vaccinated.

Most scientific research has practical ends. But some still pursues goals better described by the field’s original name:

“natural philosophy”.

One of its most philosophical questions is, “Is there life elsewhere in the universe?”

It is philosophical for two reasons. One is its grand sweep. If there is life elsewhere, particularly of the intelligent sort, that raises the question of whether humans might ever

encounter it, or its products (see article). If there is not—if all the uncountable stars in creation waste their light on

sterile, lifeless worlds—then life on Earth must be the result of a stroke of the most astronomically improbable good luck.

As Arthur C. Clarke, a science-fiction author, is reputed to have said: “Two possibilities exist. Either we are alone in the

cosmos or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

Teegarden’s star is a tiny, dim object in the zodiacal constellation of Aries. It has a tenth of the sun’s mass and emits most of its light in the infrared part of the spectrum. That makes it too faint to see with the naked eye, even though it is only 12 light-years away. So far, so unremarkable. But

when astronomers at Calar Alto Observatory, in Spain, started scrutinizing it, they spotted tiny wobbles in its motion. In 2019, after three years of careful measurement, they concluded that these are a consequence of

the gravitational fields of two planets tugging the star around. The innermost, Teegarden b, has roughly the same mass as Earth, receives a similar amount of illumination from its host star and is probably rocky.

At the moment, Teegarden b tops the Habitable Exoplanets Catalogue (hec), a list of planets beyond the solar system

maintained by Abel Méndez and his colleagues at the University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo. They are looking for Earthlike worlds which, among other things, lie in the zones around stars that

might support terrestrial-type life. This means, in practice, planets that are the correct distance from their parent stars to be able to maintain liquid water on their surfaces without that

water either freezing or boiling. For water, the medium in which biochemical reactions take place on Earth, is assumed to be a

precondition for the existence of life elsewhere, too.

• https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2021-02-13

Thirty-one countries, from Brazil to Sweden, have flirted with nuclear weapons at one time or another. Seventeen launched a formal

weapons programme. Just ten produced a deliverable bomb. Today nine states possess nuclear arms, no more than a quarter-century ago.

Yet the long struggle to stop the world’s deadliest weapons from spreading is about to get harder.

In the past 20 years most countries with nuclear ambitions have been geopolitical minnows, like Libya and Syria. In the next decade the threat

is likely to include economic and diplomatic heavyweights whose ambitions would be harder to restrain. China’s rapidly increasing

regional dominance and North Korea’s growing nuclear arsenal haunt South Korea and Japan, two of Asia’s largest powers. Iran’s belligerence

and its nuclear programme loom over the likes of Saudi Arabia and Turkey (see article). Proliferation is not a chain reaction, but it is

contagious. Once the restraints start to weaken they can fail rapidly.