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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).

Shutterstock is cooperating with OpenAI. Now the stock database is releasing a platform for the AI generation of images.

In October, Shutterstock and OpenAI partnered to integrate DALL-E 2 into the company’s creative tools. Today, Shutterstock released the AI image generation platform. It is available to all users and the images generated can be used under license.

According to Shutterstock, the tool was developed with an “ethical approach and uses a library of assets that authentically represent the world we live in. Shutterstock also recognizes the artists’ contributions to the generative content by paying royalties for the intellectual property used to develop the models and for the ongoing licensing of the content.”

A new technological development by Tel Aviv University has made it possible for a robot to smell using a biological sensor. The sensor sends electrical signals as a response to the presence of a nearby odor, which the robot can detect and interpret.

In this new study, the researchers successfully connected the to an electronic system and, using a machine learning algorithm, were able to identify odors with a level of sensitivity 10,000 times higher than that of a commonly used electronic device. The researchers believe that in light of the success of their research, this technology may also be used in the future to identify explosives, drugs, diseases, and more.

The biological and was led by doctoral student Neta Shvil of Tel Aviv University’s Sagol School of Neuroscience, Dr. Ben Maoz of the Fleischman Faculty of Engineering and the Sagol School of Neuroscience, and Prof. Yossi Yovel and Prof. Amir Ayali of the School of Zoology and the Sagol School of Neuroscience. The results of the study were published in Biosensors and Bioelectronics.

Year 2012 The dwave quantum computers could essentially host the entire internet with low cost and even photonic room temperature quantum computers could eventually host the internet for even cheaper even down to pennies. Also if starling had casimir energy generators and casimir propulsion systems it could be even free for satellite operation costs with full automation we could essentially have low cost of pennies for the full system operation. At least some ideas for future operation costs.


This question was originally answered by Greg Price on Quora.

The concept of emergence is controversial to some — for example Eliezer Yudkowski, who favors reductionism, wrote a critique at Less Wrong (see link below). Do reductionists often dismiss emergence?

Ben formalized emergence in his book ‘The Evolving Mind’ as patterns that appear when you put two or more things together that are not there in any of the individual parts.
Book — ‘The Evolving Mind’: http://www.goertzel.org/books/mind/contents.html http://www.amazon.com/Evolving-Futures-General-Evolution-Stu…atfound-20

Eliezer’s post on ‘The Futility of Emergence’ at Less Wrong: http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/

Talking points: EMERGENCE & REDUCTION, CONFUSION REGARDING EMERGENCE, LARGE SCALE NEUROSCIENCE PROJECTS, EMERGENCE AS A WAY OF EXPLAINING AWAY COMPLEXITY, IS CONSCIOUSNESS AN EMERGENT EFFECT? EMERGENCE & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Researchers have developed a robot that brings speed, agility and reproducibility to laboratory-scale coin cell batteries.

Until now, laboratories studying battery technology have had to choose between the freedom to iterate and optimise battery chemistry by manually assembling each individual cell, and the reproducibility and speed of large-scale production. AutoBass (Automated battery assembly system), the first laboratory-scale coin cell assembly robot of its kind, is designed to bridge this gap.

Developed by a team from Helmholtz Institute Ulm and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, AutoBass promises to improve characterisation of coin cell batteries and promote reproducibility by photographing each individual cell at key points in the assembly process. It produces batches of 64 cells a day.

Polymorphic malware could be easily made using ChatGPT. With relatively little effort or expenditure on the part of the attacker, this malware’s sophisticated capabilities can readily elude security tools and make mitigation difficult.

Malicious software called ‘Polymorphic Malware’ has the capacity to alter its source code in order to avoid detection by antivirus tools. It is a very potent threat because it may quickly change and propagate before security systems can catch it.

According to researchers, getting around the content filters that prevent the chatbot from developing dangerous software is the first step. The bot was instructed to complete the task while adhering to a number of constraints, and the researchers were given a working code as an outcome.