These Plants Suck Carbon Out of the Air and Other Future Tech

#HappyMonday! We’re back with some latest science and technology news for the day! Let’s get started with the latest digest for today.

These Plants Suck Carbon Out of the Air

In recent times, we have seen how the world is uniting to fight carbon emissions, with countries like Germany running on solar power for 4 days straight. Now, a new method that sucks CO2 out of the atmosphere and converts it into zero-emission fuel, has been developed by a Swiss company called Climeworks.

“Climeworks CO2 capture plants feature a modular design and the capacity is scalable in multiples of 35 kg per hour (300 metric tons per year). Individual modules consist of six Climeworks CO2 Kollektors which are fitted into a standard 40-foot container. Climeworks CO2 capture plants are fully automated, controlled via key panel and touch screen display and are suitable for autonomous 24/7 operation,” reads their website.

Wearable Device Tracks and Predicts Asthma

Most asthmatics aren’t familiar with the type of environment they are about to step into. Having knowledge of when an acute asthma attack is about to occur is crucial to the patient’s well-being. To meet this end, researchers from the North Carolina State University have made a wearable system to monitor and track asthma-related attacks.

"Our goal was to design a wearable system that could track the wellness of the subjects and in particular provide the infrastructure to predict asthma attacks, so that the users could take steps to prevent them by changing their activities or environment," said Alper Bozkurt, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at NC State University.

Called Health and Environmental Tracker (HET), the device has 3 parts – a patch to track movement, heartrate & wheezes; wristwatch wearable that measures humidity and temperature; and a third component called a spirometer that the patient has to inhale into get the readings.

According to their website: “The wristband focuses largely on environmental factors, monitoring volatile organic compounds and ozone in the air, as well as ambient humidity and temperature. The wristband also includes additional sensors to monitor motion, heart rate and the amount of oxygen in the blood.”

Google’s Kill Switch for AI

Incase AI suddenly wants to dominate the world, Google has come up with a ‘Kill Switch’ because, you know – just in case. Here’s an excerpt directly from their site:

Reinforcement learning agents interacting with a complex environment like the real world are unlikely to behave optimally all the time. If such an agent is operating in real-time under human supervision, now and then it may be necessary for a human operator to press the big red button to prevent the agent from continuing a harmful sequence of actions—harmful either for the agent or for the environment—and lead the agent into a safer situation.

Researchers, such as those working at the North Carolina State University, are pioneers of a movement to develop quality medical software. Q3 Technologies is a large diversified technology company offering technology consulting and medical software development outsourcing services to the IT industry across the world.