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NASA astronaut controls Earth robots while flying 17,150 mph aboard ISS

The test is part of NASA and ESA’s future plans for controlling robots on the Moon’s surface from the lunar Gateway station.

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio recently controlled a small team of robots on Earth while flying aboard the International Space Station (ISS), a blog post from the European Space Agency (ESA) reveals.

The test was carried out in order to demonstrate and investigate the capacity for using remote-controlled robots for future lunar exploration.

Scientists invent accurate AI-powered heat vision for driving at night

The technology can also be used in fog and smoke, aiding firefighters.

This is according to a report by PopSci published on Wednesday.


Researchers at Purdue University and Los Alamos National Laboratory have joined forces to engineer something they call “heat-assisted detection and ranging,” or HADAR, which consists of a completely new camera imaging system based on AI interpretations of heat signatures. The technology could soon allow vehicles and robots to see at night time.

A once muddy, unclear tech

We have all seen movies where agents use thermal imaging to see their surroundings in the dark, but in reality, this technology is far from practical because thermal radiation particles diffuse into their nearby environments. This means that trying to image them becomes a complicated, muddy, and unclear process.

Tiny Robots Detect and Treat Cancer by Traveling Deep into the Lungs

A tiny robot which can travel deep into the lungs to detect and treat the first signs of cancer has been developed by researchers at the University of Leeds. The ultra-soft tentacle, which measures just two millimeters in diameter, and is controlled by magnets, can reach some of the smallest bronchial tubes and could transform the treatment of lung cancer. The researchers tested the magnetic tentacle robot on the lungs of a cadaver and found that it can travel 37 percent deeper than the standard equipment and leads to less tissue damage. It paves the way for a more accurate, tailored, and far less invasive approach to treatment.

The work is published in Nature Engineering Communications in the paper, “Magnetic personalized tentacles for targeted photothermal cancer therapy in peripheral lungs.

“This new approach has the advantage of being specific to the anatomy, softer than the anatomy and fully-shape controllable via magnetics,” notes Pietro Valdastri, PhD, director of the Science and Technologies Of Robotics in Medicine (STORM) Lab at the University of Leeds. “These three main features have the potential to revolutionize navigation inside the body.”

Substance Dualism (Part 1 of 2) [HD]

Examining the view that mind and body are separate substances.

Note at 7:08 A reductio ad absurdum argument (one which attributes a machine with thought purely for the sake of argument, to demonstrate that genuinely absurd / contradictory consequences follow) would be valid. We can see immediately that Plantinga’s thought experiment doesn’t achieve this: failure to discern how a thinking machine is thinking indicates only lack of comprehension, not a genuine absurdity / contradiction.

But his use of Leibniz’ scenario isn’t valid. Leibniz doesn’t just propose a thinking machine, but one we can enter and inspect. If physical thinking things are impossible — as Plantinga claims — then whatever machine we conjure up in our imagination to enter and inspect, it can’t be a genuine physical thinking thing, just as it would be impossible to inspect a machine that prints square circles. (Besides, if there’s truly nothing we could be faced with inside the machine that would signal thought, it makes no sense to ask us to inspect it, since no inspection could help us discern thinking machines from non-thinking ones anyway.) It is this sense in which Plantinga cannot use thinking machines to show machines can’t think. His argument is incoherent. It is certainly not a valid reductio ad absurdum.

Selected Resources:

Humanoid robot Asimo demonstration:

Descartes, R — Discourse on the Method (1637)

Machine learning enables discovery of DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters

DNA can do more than pass genetic code from one generation to the next. For nearly 20 years, scientists have known of the molecule’s ability to stabilize nanometer-sized clusters of silver atoms. Some of these structures glow visibly in red and green, making them useful in a variety of chemical and biosensing applications.

Stacy Copp, UCI assistant professor of materials science and engineering, wanted to see if the capabilities of these tiny fluorescent markers could be stretched even further—into the near-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum—to give bioscience researchers the power to see through living cells and even centimeters of biological tissue, opening doors to enhanced methods of disease detection and treatment.

“There is untapped potential to extend fluorescence by DNA-stabilized silver nanoclusters into the near-infrared region,” she says. “The reason that’s so interesting is because our biological tissues and fluids are much more transparent to near-infrared light than to visible light.”

This new tool could protect your pictures from AI manipulation

PhotoGuard, created by researchers at MIT, alters photos in ways that are imperceptible to us but stops AI systems from tinkering with them.

Remember that selfie you posted last week? There’s currently nothing stopping someone taking it and editing it using powerful generative AI systems. Even worse, thanks to the sophistication of these systems, it might be impossible to prove that the resulting image is fake.

The good news is that a new tool, created by researchers at MIT, could prevent this.

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