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A robot that can shift between solid and liquid states has been filmed escaping from a miniature jail cell with bars too close together to allow it to leave in solid form. The creators claim they were inspired by sea cucumbers’ capacity to alter their tissue stiffness – but the scene is just a little too similar to Robert Patrick liquifying his way through the mental hospital bars for us to believe them. We even see the famous reabsorption of the little bit left behind.

Hard-bodied robots are common, even if they have yet to reach the capacities of science fiction films. Their soft-bodied counterparts can get into tight spaces, but what they can do there is limited, and they are also difficult to control.

A team led by Dr Chengfeng Pan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has made a robot that can swap states to whichever is most needed, with a video that sums it up. The prison escape may trigger our fears, but robots like these could also provide lifesaving services others cannot.

Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance prototypes demonstrated ability to help people complete recipes as a proxy to unfamiliar tasks.


“Perceptually-enabled Task Guidance (PTG) teams demonstrated a recipe for success in early prototypes of super smart #AIassistants that can see what a user sees and hear what they hear to help them accomplish unfamiliar tasks. More: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2023-01-25

Controlling the trajectory of a basketball is relatively straightforward, as it only requires the application of mechanical force and human skill. However, controlling the movement of quantum systems like atoms and electrons poses a much greater challenge. These tiny particles are prone to perturbations that can cause them to deviate from their intended path in unexpected ways. Additionally, movement within the system degrades, known as damping, and noise from environmental factors like temperature further disrupts its trajectory.

To counteract the effects of damping and noise, researchers from Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) in Japan have found a way to use artificial intelligence to discover and apply stabilizing pulses of light or voltage with fluctuating intensity to quantum systems. This method was able to successfully cool a micro-mechanical object to its quantum state and control its motion in an optimized way. The research was recently published in the journal Physical Review Research.

Objects are also magnetic and can conduct electricity Researchers reveal person-shaped robot that can turn themselves into liquid Researchers have created humanoid, miniature robots that can shapeshift and turn into liquid. The breakthrough could allow for the creation of more robots that can shift between liquid and solid, allowing them to be used in a variety of situations.

‘This technology may be scaled to monitor the well-being of elderly people or just identify suspicious behaviours at home,’ scientists claim Scientists have figured out how to identify people in a building by using artificial intelligence to analyse WiFi signals. A team at Carnegie Mellon University developed a deep neural network to digitally map human bodies when in the presence of WiFi signals.

Researchers have claimed that artificial intelligence (AI) will reach the singularity within seven years, after attempting to quantify its progress.

Translation company Translated, presenting their work at an Association for Machine Translation in the Americas conference, explained that they first began testing machine translation technology in 2011. The team settled on a metric to measure AI progress, which they’ve called “Time to Edit” (TTE). Simply put, it is the time it takes a human translator to edit a translation produced by another human or an AI.

Over the years, the TTE for AI-translated texts has come down fairly consistently, leading Translated to predict the date when AI hits the singularity, when the time is equivalent to human translators.

A chatbot powered by reams of data from the internet has passed exams at a US law school after writing essays on topics ranging from constitutional law to taxation and torts.

ChatGPT from OpenAI, a US company that this week got a massive injection of cash from Microsoft, uses (AI) to generate streams of text from simple prompts.

The results have been so good that educators have warned it could lead to widespread cheating and even signal the end of traditional classroom teaching methods.

Inspired by sea cucumbers, engineers have designed miniature robots that rapidly and reversibly shift between liquid and solid states. On top of being able to shape-shift, the robots are magnetic and can conduct electricity. The researchers put the robots through an obstacle course of mobility and shape-morphing tests in a study publishing January 25 in the journal Matter.

Where traditional robots are hard-bodied and stiff, “soft” robots have the opposite problem; they are flexible but weak, and their movements are difficult to control. “Giving robots the ability to switch between liquid and solid states endows them with more functionality,” says Chengfeng Pan (@ChengfengPan), an engineer at The Chinese University of Hong Kong who led the study.

The team created the new phase-shifting material—dubbed a “magnetoactive solid-liquid phase transitional machine”—by embedding magnetic particles in gallium, a metal with a very low melting point (29.8 °C).