Hello, and welcome to The Edge, the newsletter that brings you groundbreaking stories from the frontiers of technology and science.
We’ve got some great stories for you today, including driverless deliveries in California, NASA’s plans for a lunar base and WhatsApp limiting message forwarding. As always, we’ve added extra stories under each article should you find yourself in a curious state of mind.
Next step - the moon, once more
NASA’s Plan to Build a Base Camp on the Moon Sounds like Sci-Fi, But it’s Real.
For a while now, there has been talk of getting people to Mars, Mars One being one such project. The problem is, Mars is really quite far away - between 34 and 140 million miles away, in fact. For many reasons, putting people on Mars is an incredibly challenging task, one that requires a great deal of progress and innovation. To prepare for such missions in the future, NASA is going to create a lunar base camp, among other exciting plans.
NASA recently released a report for what it’s calling the Artemis program, which covers its plans in space for the next decade. There are three key aspects to the Artemis program: low-Earth orbit, the moon and Mars. The program brings humanity one step closer to stepping foot on Mars, which is the next frontier for space exploration.
Are we alone in the universe? Let’s ask Fermi.
Could we go intergalactic?
Driverless deliveries, dude
Image credit: Nuro
Nuro gets the green light to test driverless delivery robots in California.
Nuro, a startup founded by two ex-Google engineers, has received approval by the California DMV to test its new driverless delivery robots on Californian roads. Having already tested their driverless vehicles in Arizona and Texas, Nuro will now be testing two light-duty delivery vehicles in California - the R2, to be specific - in 9 Bay Area cities. There are limitations to the permit though - the vehicles cannot exceed 25 mph, they may only operate in fair weather and must stay on streets where the speed limit doesn’t exceed 35 mph. Nuro is also the first producer of autonomous vehicles to receive permission to ditch side-mirrors and steering wheels. Nuro hope to use their R2 robots to make last-mile deliveries cheaper and more efficient.
Congestion on the path to a driverless future.
Lead the Waymo.
Moving forward with forwarding
WhatsApp is limiting message forwarding to combat coronavirus misinformation.
WhatsApp, the instant messaging application with 1.5 billion users, will be imposing limits on how much its users can forward messages to other users. The move comes as a result of growing concerns that WhatsApp is being used to spread misinformation about coronavirus. Now, messages identified as “highly forwarded” can be forwarded to only one person, not five, which is usually the case. WhatsApp hopes the moves will help slow the spread of misinformation about coronavirus.
How to avoid misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.
A history of WhatsApp.
Say what?
Google’s auto-complete for speech can cover up glitches in video calls.
Choppy video calls no more. A team at Google has built an artificial intelligence that can mimic an individual’s way of talking and repair choppy audio on the fly. In other words, if audio cuts out during a video call, the AI will cover those gaps in a mimicked voice, making speech sound fluid and continuous.
Why do gaps like this happen? When you’re in an online video call, your voice gets divided and put into what’s known as packets, which are then sent to the receiver. These packets are then reassembled into coherent speech by the software on the receiver’s device. However, sometimes these packets don’t arrive, resulting in glitches and gaps in a conversation. This is what Google’s WaveNetEQ, a neural network based on an already existing neural network that can generate realistic speech from text, aims to solve. During a call, WaveNetEQ learns characteristics of a speaker’s voice. When a packet is lost, the AI generated voice replaces it. While it’s still early days, the technology is promising for video calls and global communication.