Pushing the boundaries
Hello! You’re reading the second story of our weekly digest — H A Things. This time we’d like to dive into breakthrough openings and inventions that change dramatically our knowledge of human possibilities.
Innovation
The man who dared to ask ‘what if’
We’ve all dreamed of flying — but for Richard Browning, a flight is an obsession.
I’ve never heard about Richard Browning until I attended his inspirational speech at 65 Festival of Advertising and Creativity Cannes Lions this year. It’s a funny fact that I came 10 minutes earlier to take a seat closer to the stage as I thought this speech would be quite interesting and the hall will be crowded but by the time of his speech there were only a few people in the hall except me and I was sitting just in front of Richard Browning all alone. I felt quite uncomfortable at first but then the magic has happened.
Richard came to the stage and told the story of his invention supplementing it with insightful facts from his biography and personal experiences. He’s from the family of aeronauts but decided to become a corporate lawyer and succeeded in it. Nevertheless, thoughts about air and flying never left Richard’s curious brain and at his thirties, he’s been spending all weekends at his garage trying to create the flying suit. Almost nobody believed in his success at that time, but in 2017 his dreams came true thanks to hard work, countless attempts and faith in oneself, despite periods of total frustration.
It’s a pity that his speech has gone almost unnoticed at Cannes, and organizers didn’t allow to bring his suit to fly under Croisette due to safety reasons. As an all mavericks and explorers who push the boundaries, Richard made the hardest part of his journey all alone but for now, his company raised several rounds of investments and nine suites are ready to sell at the cost of $445 000 each.
This whole journey was about trying things and learning by failing at them all the time. And that included failing by falling over, — Richard Browning
See the first public flight and talk at 2017 for the full story.
Biotech
Ever heard of the interstitium?
No? That’s OK, you’re not alone — scientists hadn’t either. Until recently. And, hey, guess what — you’ve got one! Scientists had long believed that connective tissue surrounding our organs was a thick, compact layer. But!
The connective tissue turned out to be “an open, fluid-filled space supported by a lattice made of thick collagen bundles,” pathologist and study author Neil Theise told Research Gate.
With further analysis of the fluid traveling across the interstitium, the researchers hope they may be able to detect cancer much earlier than they can today.
AI
Everybody Dance Now
UC Berkeley researchers developed a deep learning system that can take dance moves from a source video and transfer them to other subjects. The system uses an algorithm to detect the poses and motion of the source dancer. The researchers trained a general adversarial network (GAN) to reproduce the dancing on a video of the target subject.
Health
The World’s Most Intelligent Fitness System
Tonal is a new home gym that can help you work out more efficiently thanks to its built-in machine learning capabilities. The system can track your progress, automatically scaling up the amount of weight in workouts based on your longterm progression.
Stay cool and don’t let to fool yourself around!
