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Meet Orbit, the Interactive Robot That Looks to Help Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders Develop Social Skills

Orbit, an interactive robot, helps teach children on the autism spectrum to develop social appropriateness and emotion via storytelling, physical interaction, and visual communication.

The hand-sized robot smiles and encourages users to press a button on its back, reacting with a beaming smile if pressed gently, and with a sad face if the interaction is too hard.

Hey there. Allow me to introduce you to your new companion, Orbit, a robot you can play with and listen to.

Omiefe Africa’s First Humanoid Robot Built By Nigerians

Omiefe Africa’s first humanoid robot has been built by a Nigerian company, Uniccon.

As the world takes a U-turn in inventions ranging from smartphones, and drones, and now with the latest inventions of humanoid (robots).

The humanoid robot was unveiled at the world’s biggest technology event, Gitex, which took place at Dubai World Trade Centre, from October 10th to 14th.

Researchers reveal secret of ultra-slow motion of pine cones

In a study recently published in Nature Materials, Prof. Wang Shutao from the Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry (TICP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Prof. Liu Huan from Beihang University revealed the secret of ultra-slow motion of pine cones and developed mimicking actuators enabling unperceivable motion.

Responsive actuators have attracted extensive attention by virtue of their great potential applications in flexible robotics, sensors, energy conversion and other fields. Pine cones are a well-known bionic model for constructing artificial actuators.

However, little attention has been paid to the fact that the hygroscopic motion of pine cones is an ultra-slow process. Hygroscopic deformation has long been attributed to the uneven hygroscopic expansion of vascular bundles (VBs) and sclereids, controlled by their different microfibril orientations. The mechanism cannot explain the observation that VBs themselves are capable of reversible hygroscopic motion. Therefore, the mechanism of ultra-slow motion in pine cones has long been unclear.

Oakland Police Want to Arm Robots With Shotguns, Because We Live in a Dystopian Nightmare

Police in Oakland are hoping to arm robots with potentially lethal shotgun-like attachments. Why? Because that’s the reality we live in now.

As The Intercept reports, the Oakland police force made a “percussion actuated nonelectric disruptor,” or PAN disruptor, a top-priority item on their wish list last year.

In short, PAN is a shotgun-shaped accessory attachment for wheeled robots, which are often deployed in war zones and by bomb squads.

New Technologies that May be in the Cards

Visit our sponsor, Brilliant: https://brilliant.org/IsaacArthur/
Every day brings us new technological advances, today we’ll explore many of those of such as robotics, automation, rapid delivery, education, medical science, nanotechnology, and more.

Episodes referenced in the Episode:
Power Satellites: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBCbdThIJNE
Fusion Power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChTJHEdf6yM
Quiet Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvH-7XX6pkk.
The Santa Claus Machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmgYoryG_Ss.
Synthetic Meat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_NULFAItoBs.
Cyborgs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGYKCTFIZLI
Mind Augmentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQpYOVvU17Y
Mind-Machine Interfaces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCLLzI4R3bc.
Life Extension https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKmdc2AuXec.
The Science of Aging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDpjv2z3dyE
Happily Ever After: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ypfzvQ-Q2w.
Attack of the Drones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oZCUtgnQkE
Advanced Metamaterials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0UZ6-oeiIE
Portable Power: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffXqcf48D9Q
The Nuclear Option: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aBOhC1c6m8
Moon: Industrial Complex: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y47MMNqKGxE
Machine Rebellion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHd22kMa0_w.
The Paperclip Maximizer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mk7NVFz_88
Technological Stagnation: Coming Soon.
Non-Carbon Based Life: Coming Soon.

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Listen or Download the audio of this episode from Soundcloud: Episode’s Audio-only version: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/new-technologi…-the-cards.
Episode’s Narration-only version: https://soundcloud.com/isaac-arthur-148927746/new-technologi…ation-only.

Credits:

A New Brain Model Could Pave the Way for Conscious AI

A new study presents a new neurocomputational model of the human brain, which might shed light on how the brain develops complex cognitive skills and advance neural artificial intelligence research. An international team of scientists from the Institut Pasteur and Sorbonne University in Paris, the CHU Sainte-Justine, Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and the University of Montreal conducted the study.

AI grain assessment sows seeds for better returns

South Australian artificial intelligence (AI) company GoMicro is rolling out its new grain assessment technology in Australia, paving the way towards more consistent quality controls and stable grain and pulse prices.

Based at Flinders University’s high-tech New Venture Institute (NVI) at Tonsley Innovation District in Clovelly Park, Adelaide, GoMicro CEO Dr. Sivam Krish says the multi-grain assessor gives growers and domestic and export markets a quick and better way to grade crops, accurately testing more than 1,200 grains in one sample—compared to the existing scanner-based method which assesses about 200 well-separated grains at a time.

“GoMicro relies on the excellent quality of phone cameras and Amazon web services to deliver low-cost, high-precision quality grain and other produce assessments to farmers worldwide,” says Dr. Krish.

Unmanned, solar-powered US space plane back after 908 days

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla — An unmanned U.S. military space plane landed early Saturday after spending a record 908 days in orbit for its sixth mission and conducting science experiments.

The solar-powered vehicle, which looks like a miniature space shuttle, landed at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Its previous mission lasted 780 days.

“Since the X-37B’s first launch in 2010, it has shattered records and provided our nation with an unrivaled capability to rapidly test and integrate new space technologies,” said Jim Chilton, a senior vice president for Boeing, its developer.

Boston University and Google Researchers Introduce An Artificial Intelligence (AI) Based Method To Illustrate Articles With Visual Summarizes

Recent progress in generative models has paved the way to a manifold of tasks that some years ago were only imaginable. With the help of large-scale image-text datasets, generative models can learn powerful representations exploited in fields such as text-to-image or image-to-text translation.

The recent release of Stable Diffusion and the DALL-E API led to great excitement around text-to-image generative models capable of generating complex and stunning novel images from an input descriptive text, similar to performing a search on the internet.

With the rising interest in the reverse task, i.e., image-to-text translation, several studies tried to generate captions from input images. These methods often presume a one-to-one correspondence between pictures and their captions. However, multiple images can be connected to and paired with a long text narrative, such as photos in a news article. Therefore, the need for illustrative correspondences (e.g., “travel” or “vacation”) rather than literal one-to-one captions (e.g., “airplane flying”).

Fast burst of infrared light opens a way for 3D processing inside semiconductor chips

Researchers from LP3 Laboratory in France developed a light-based technique for local material processing anywhere in the three-dimensional space of semiconductor chips. The direct laser writing of new functionalities opens the possibility to exploit the sub-surface space for higher integration densities and extra functions.

Semiconductors remain the backbone material of the electronics integrated with modern devices such as cellphones, cars, robots and many other intelligent devices. Driven by the continuous need for miniaturized and powerful chips, the current semiconductor manufacturing technologies are facing increasing pressure.

The dominating manufacturing technology, lithography, has strong limitations when addressing these challenges, given its surface processing nature. For this reason, a solution to fabricating structures under the wafer surfaces would be highly desirable so that the full space inside the materials could be exploited.

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