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Flex Your Artificial Muscles: The New Low-Voltage Breakthrough

Scientists have created thin, elastic bottlebrush polymer films that can function as artificial muscles at significantly lower voltages than currently available materials, potentially enabling their use in safer medical devices and artificial organs.

Whether wriggling your toes or lifting groceries, muscles in your body smoothly expand and contract. Some polymers can do the same thing — acting like artificial muscles — but only when stimulated by dangerously high voltages. Now, researchers in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces report a series of thin, elastic films that respond to substantially lower electrical charges. The materials represent a step toward artificial muscles that could someday operate safely in medical devices.

Artificial muscles could become key components of movable soft robotic implants and functional artificial organs. Electroactive elastomers, such as bottlebrush polymers, are attractive materials for this purpose because they start soft but stiffen when stretched. And they can change shape when electrically charged. However, currently available bottlebrush polymer films only move at voltages over 4,000 V, which exceeds the 50 V maximum that the U.S. Occupational Safety & Health Administration states is safe. Reducing the thickness of these films to less than 100 µm could lower the required voltages, but this hasn’t been done successfully yet for bottlebrush polymers. So, Dorina Opris and colleagues wanted to find a simple way to produce thinner films.

Raspberry Pi will soon have AI capabilities, Sony announces

Sony has announced that it intends to integrate its Aitrios edge computing (on-chip) AI platform into future iterations of the Rasberry Pi.

The highly popular Rasberry Pi will soon get artificial intelligence (AI) functions, according to an announcement from Sony. In what it has called a “strategic investment,” Sony decided to bring its AI technology to a broader market.

This announcement comes hot off the heels of other news that Raspberry Pi Limited, the UK-based company and creators of the Raspberry Pi, secured an undisclosed investment from Sony Semiconductor Solutions, a subsidiary of Sony Corporation.


Jeesoen/iStock.

‘Faithful Unto Death’: Robotic dog set to make a comeback to NYPD task force

Along with ‘Spot’ the Digidog, the New York Police Department has revealed other new security technologies to improve safety in New York.

The New York Police Department (NYPD) is taking crime control, and public security to the next level by introducing a variety of crime-fighting robots to patrol subway stations throughout New York.

Along with Digidog, the NYPD has revealed a few other new security technologies to improve safety in New York.


NYC’s Mayor Office.

Two robotic dogs have joined the ranks of the New York Police Department (NYPD). They were unveiled at the Times Square on April 11.

Quantum Machine Learning over Infinite Dimensions

This could lead to chat gpt infinite ♾️ ✨️


Machine learning is a fascinating and exciting field within computer science. Recently, this excitement has been transferred to the quantum information realm. Currently, all proposals for the quantum version of machine learning utilize the finite-dimensional substrate of discrete variables. Here we generalize quantum machine learning to the more complex, but still remarkably practical, infinite-dimensional systems. We present the critical subroutines of quantum machine learning algorithms for an all-photonic continuous-variable quantum computer that can lead to exponential speedups in situations where classical algorithms scale polynomially. Finally, we also map out an experimental implementation which can be used as a blueprint for future photonic demonstrations.

A data scientist cloned his best friends’ group chat using AI

As data scientist Izzy Miller puts it, the group chat is “a hallowed thing” in today’s society. Whether located on iMessage, WhatsApp, or Discord, it’s the place where you and your best friends hang out, shoot the shit, and share updates about life, both trivial and momentous. In a world where we are increasingly bowling alone, we can, at least, complain to the group chat about how much bowling these days sucks ass.

“My group chat is a lifeline and a comfort and a point of connection,” Miller tells The Verge. “And I just thought it would be hilarious and sort of sinister to replace it.”

So he did.