Lifeboat Foundation

Soft materials and magnetic fields enable a new generation of dexterous, fast-moving microrobotic joints for complex object manipulation tasks.

NASA is developing a ChatGPT-style interface for future spacecraft, giving astronauts the ability to talk to the systems using natural language — and have the systems talk right back.

Space talk: In June 2018, a massive dust storm on Mars engulfed NASA’s Opportunity rover, cutting off communication with Earth. Eight months later, NASA announced an end to the rover’s 15-year Mars mission.

“The last message [NASA] received was basically, ‘My battery is low and it’s getting dark,’” tweeted science reporter Jacob Margolis after talking to NASA about the rover.

Cellular Origins and the Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult (CGT Catapult) have announced a new collaboration to demonstrate universal automation of CGT manufacturing.

33 years ago, the theoretical biologist Robert Rosen offered an answer to the question ‘Is life computable?’

All holographic displays and imaging techniques are fundamentally limited by the étendue supported by existing spatial light modulators. Here, the authors report on using artificial intelligence (AI) to learn an étendue expanding element that effectively increases étendue by two orders of magnitude.

Could autonomous CubeSats someday be used for deep space exploration? This is what a recent demonstration by SpaceX’s Starling swarm of four CubeSats hopes to address as NASA announced the 10-month primary mission of the swarm successfully completed its primary mission objectives as part of multiple experiments. This demonstration holds the potential to help develop CubeSats capable of conducting deep space exploration missions without the need for constant communication with Earth as they could communicate with each other.

“The success of Starling’s initial mission represents a landmark achievement in the development of autonomous networks of small spacecraft,” said Roger Hunter, who is the Program Manager for NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program (STTP) at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “The team has been very successful in achieving our objectives and adapting in the face of challenges.”

For the demonstration, the four CubeSats successfully studied the Earth’s ionosphere while communicating with each other regarding next steps for continued analysis. This provided the opportunity for each spacecraft to equally contribute to the mission while decreasing human involvement.

Humans can innately perform a wide range of movements, as this allows them to best tackle various tasks in their day-to-day life. Automatically reproducing these motions in virtual avatars and 3D animated human-like characters could be highly advantageous for many applications, ranging from metaverse spaces to digital entertainment, AI interfaces and robotics.

Researchers at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ETH Zurich recently developed WANDR, a new model that can generate natural human motions for avatars. This model, to be introduced in a paper presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2024) in June, unifies different data sources under a single model to attain more realistic motions in 3D humanoid characters. The paper is also posted to the arXiv preprint server.

“At a high-level, our research aims at figuring out what it takes to create virtual humans able to behave like us,” Markos Diomataris, first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “This essentially means learning to reason about the world, how to move in it, setting goals and trying to achieve them.

With advances in genomics research, personalized medicine, and sequencing-based technologies, there is a necessity for purification of high-quality genomic DNA from large volumes of blood. The rapidly growing landscape of biorepositories that store large amounts of DNA from an enormous number of biospecimens further fuels this need to find optimized solutions for reliable purification of DNA. The information derived from the purified DNA is crucial to health science research and facilitates drug discovery, biomarker discovery, clinical implementation projects, etc. For the success of these analyses and to derive relevant information, DNA extraction is the most critical step and must meet the criteria of extraction speed, yield and quality, as well as reproducibility. Many nucleic acid purification kits and automation workflows for processing blood samples in the volume range of 100–250 μL exist, but not many convenient, automated options exist for volumes as high as 2 mL without sample splitting. To fill this opening, Omega Bio-tek has developed a semi-automated solution on the MagBinder^® Fit²⁴ to extract DNA from large volumes of fresh or frozen blood. Here, we provide background information on biobanks, as well as present the solution Omega Bio-tek has developed for DNA extraction from large volumes of whole blood.

A biobank is a specialized repository that systematically collects, processes, stores, and manages biological samples for use in medical research and treatments. The primary purpose of a biobank is to provide a centralized and organized resource of high-quality biological materials, such as blood or tissue, along with relevant clinical and demographic data¹. These invaluable assets are at the center of advancements in cancer treatments, biomarker discovery, and understanding genetic factors for disease. At a high level, biobanks can be classified by two categories¹:

As the AI research community forges ahead with robotic brains, many of those who actually build robots caution that the hardware also presents a challenge: robots are complicated and break a lot.

The melding of artificial intelligence and robotics could catapult both to new heights.

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