Mar 12, 2020 10:40 PM
SpaceX's Starship will soon be made of different stuff (engineering)
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-ne...alloy.html
EXCERPT: . . . The California-based company built its first few Starship prototypes out of a stainless-steel alloy known as 301. But aerospace engineers have been using that particular metallic blend since the middle of the last century, and it's time for SpaceX to make a change, Elon Musk said.
"We should be able to do better in the 2020s than they did in, like, the '50s, you know?" Musk said Monday (March 9) during a keynote conversation at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington, D.C. "So, I think we'll start switching away from 301 maybe in the next month or two."
SpaceX is still committed to stainless steel for both the 100-passenger Starship and Super Heavy, the giant rocket that will launch the ship off Earth. The company will just migrate to a different alloy, whose constituents SpaceX will tweak over time, Musk said... (MORE - details)
Robots popular with older adults (droid design)
https://www.uni-jena.de/en/200312_Seniorenundroboter_en
INTRO: A world without robots is now almost inconceivable. Not only do they take on important tasks in production processes, they are also increasingly being used in the service sector. For example, machines created to resemble humans – known as androids – are helping to care for elderly people. However, this development conflicts with the preconception that senior citizens are rather hostile to technology and would be sceptical about a robot. A study by psychologists of Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany suggests, however, that older people are far less anxious and hostile regarding such ‘human robots’ than previously thought.
Robots need to look human. During their series of experiments, the results of which have now been published in the specialist journal ‘Computers in Human Behaviour’, the Jena researchers showed videos of various robots to 30 participants aged around 70 and 30 others aged around 20. The participants were asked to evaluate whether they found the robot friendly or threatening and whether they could imagine it as a daily companion.
“In the tests, the older participants made a clearly positive assessment of the machines – and were even more open-minded towards them than the younger comparison group,” says Prof. Stefan Schweinberger of the University of Jena. “In the older participants, we were unable to confirm a scepticism towards robots that is frequently assumed in science.”
Although it was a relatively small series of tests, two further, yet unpublished, studies carried out in Jena arrived at the same result. The decisive factor had been how human the machines looked, for example whether they had facial expressions, arms and legs, and how human-like these appeared to be. The new findings could perhaps help in designing service robots... (MORE)
https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-ne...alloy.html
EXCERPT: . . . The California-based company built its first few Starship prototypes out of a stainless-steel alloy known as 301. But aerospace engineers have been using that particular metallic blend since the middle of the last century, and it's time for SpaceX to make a change, Elon Musk said.
"We should be able to do better in the 2020s than they did in, like, the '50s, you know?" Musk said Monday (March 9) during a keynote conversation at the Satellite 2020 conference in Washington, D.C. "So, I think we'll start switching away from 301 maybe in the next month or two."
SpaceX is still committed to stainless steel for both the 100-passenger Starship and Super Heavy, the giant rocket that will launch the ship off Earth. The company will just migrate to a different alloy, whose constituents SpaceX will tweak over time, Musk said... (MORE - details)
Robots popular with older adults (droid design)
https://www.uni-jena.de/en/200312_Seniorenundroboter_en
INTRO: A world without robots is now almost inconceivable. Not only do they take on important tasks in production processes, they are also increasingly being used in the service sector. For example, machines created to resemble humans – known as androids – are helping to care for elderly people. However, this development conflicts with the preconception that senior citizens are rather hostile to technology and would be sceptical about a robot. A study by psychologists of Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Germany suggests, however, that older people are far less anxious and hostile regarding such ‘human robots’ than previously thought.
Robots need to look human. During their series of experiments, the results of which have now been published in the specialist journal ‘Computers in Human Behaviour’, the Jena researchers showed videos of various robots to 30 participants aged around 70 and 30 others aged around 20. The participants were asked to evaluate whether they found the robot friendly or threatening and whether they could imagine it as a daily companion.
“In the tests, the older participants made a clearly positive assessment of the machines – and were even more open-minded towards them than the younger comparison group,” says Prof. Stefan Schweinberger of the University of Jena. “In the older participants, we were unable to confirm a scepticism towards robots that is frequently assumed in science.”
Although it was a relatively small series of tests, two further, yet unpublished, studies carried out in Jena arrived at the same result. The decisive factor had been how human the machines looked, for example whether they had facial expressions, arms and legs, and how human-like these appeared to be. The new findings could perhaps help in designing service robots... (MORE)