Lifeboat Foundation

A rectangular robot as tiny as a few human hairs can travel throughout a colon by doing back flips, Purdue University engineers have demonstrated in live animal models.

Why the back flips? Because the goal is to use these robots to transport drugs in humans, whose colons and other organs have rough terrain. Side flips work, too.

Why a back-flipping robot to transport drugs? Getting a drug directly to its target site could remove side effects, such as hair loss or stomach bleeding, that the drug may otherwise cause by interacting with other organs along the way.

Article. This AI can learn on its own according to article.

A new version of AlphaGo needed no human instruction to figure out how to clobber the best Go player in the world — itself.

Over the past few decades, technological advances have enabled the development of increasingly sophisticated, immersive and realistic video games. One of the most noteworthy among these advances is virtual reality (VR), which allows users to experience games or other simulated environments as if they were actually navigating them, via the use of electronic wearable devices.

Most existing VR systems primarily focus on the sense of vision, using headsets that allow users to see what is happening in a game or in another simulated environment right before their eyes, rather than on a screen placed in front of them. While this can lead to highly engaging visual experiences, these experiences are not always matched by other types of sensory inputs.

Researchers at Nagoya University’s School of Informatics in Japan have recently created a new VR game that integrates immersive audiovisual experiences with tactile perception. This game, presented in a paper published in the Journal of Robotics, Networking and Artificial Life, uses a player’s biometric data to create a spherical object in the VR space that beats in alignment with his/her heart. The player can thus perceive the beating of his/her heart via this object visually, auditorily and tactually.

There’s rough terrain – then there are the craters and near-vertical cliffs on the Moon, Mars, and beyond. The DuAxel is a robot built for situations just like those. By creating two single-axle rovers that can combine into one with a central payload we could maximize versatility during future missions. See more details: go.nasa.gov/34QNo5T.

SpaceX is targeting this weekend for its next Falcon 9 rocket launch from Kennedy Space Center, this time with another batch of Starlink internet satellites.

If schedules hold, teams will give the go-ahead for the 230-foot rocket to launch from pad 39A at 8:27 a.m. Sunday, the opening of an instantaneous window. It must launch at that time or delay to another day.

About eight minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s 162-foot first stage will target an autonomous landing on the Of Course I Still Love You drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX’s fleet of ships and the booster should return to Port Canaveral a few days later.

Summary: New artificial intelligence technology will analyze clinical data, brain images, and genetic information from Alzheimer’s patients to look for new biomarkers associated with the neurodegenerative disease.

Source: University of Pennsylvania

As the search for successful Alzheimer’s disease drugs remains elusive, experts believe that identifying biomarkers — early biological signs of the disease — could be key to solving the treatment conundrum. However, the rapid collection of data from tens of thousands of Alzheimer’s patients far exceeds the scientific community’s ability to make sense of it.

Summary: Researchers have identified a novel neural network in fruit flies that converts external stimuli of varying intensity into decisions about whether to act.

Source: University of Michigan

Fruit flies may be able to teach researchers a thing or two about artificial intelligence.

“Less than one”-shot learning can teach a model to identify more objects than the number of examples it is trained on.

China’s Chang’e 4 moon mission received a prestigious international award just as the two spacecraft that make up the project awoke for their 23rd lunar day.