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Category: robotics/AI – Page 147

On December 5, 2024, the European Space Agency (ESA) achieved a milestone in space exploration with the successful launch of its Proba-3 mission, which aims to create artificial solar eclipses. This revolutionary mission could provide groundbreaking insights into the Sun’s mysterious atmosphere, the corona. By creating artificial eclipses, the two Proba-3 spacecraft will work together to block the Sun’s light, allowing scientists to observe its outer layers like never before. These solar eclipses will provide a close-up view of the corona for the first time, unlocking secrets that were previously beyond our reach.

The Proba-3 mission is built around a remarkable concept: two satellites, the Occulter and the Coronagraph, will fly in precise formation, separated by a distance of 500 feet. This configuration will allow the Occulter to block the Sun’s light and cast a shadow onto the Coronagraph, creating an artificial eclipse in orbit. By mimicking the conditions of a natural solar eclipse, scientists will be able to observe the Sun’s corona for extended periods, up to six hours at a time, far surpassing the fleeting moments provided by natural eclipses on Earth.

This level of precision, described by ESA as “down to the thickness of a fingernail,” is unprecedented in space exploration. The spacecraft rely on a suite of advanced technologies, including GPS, star trackers, lasers, and radio links, to maintain their exact positioning autonomously. This capability allows the spacecraft to operate as though they were a single, integrated observatory, delivering the optical performance required for such ambitious science objectives.

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Chinese rivals, including Alibaba and DeepSeek, have released reasoning models like Marco-o1 and R1-Lite-Preview, are encroaching fast, challenging OpenAI’s dominance with open-source solutions and eclipsing o1-preview on certain third-party benchmarks.

These developments reflect the growing demand for large reasoning models (LRMs) capable of handling complex problem-solving tasks.

As OpenAI continues to refine its offerings, the rollout of o1 and ChatGPT Pro marks a milestone in its quest to provide accessible, high-performance AI tools. Whether these developments can maintain OpenAI’s leadership in an increasingly crowded market remains to be seen.

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The BBC speaks to residents and travellers in some of the top-ranked countries on the 2024 Global Innovation Index to find out how cutting-edge technology benefits day-to-day life.

With the rise of AI, self-driving cars and wi-fi connected appliances, it can feel like innovation is everywhere these days. But certain countries are known for developing cutting-edge technologies that benefit residents and visitors alike.

To dive into those countries making the most impact in these areas, the World Intellectual Property Organisation recently released its 2024 Global Innovation Index, ranking 130 economies based on measures like their education system, technology infrastructure and knowledge creation (like patents filed or mobile apps created).

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MIT engineers have released DrivAerNet++, an open-source dataset of over 8,000 car designs, to accelerate automotive innovation using AI. This dataset, featuring detailed aerodynamic data, aims to enhance fuel efficiency and electric vehicle range, promoting sustainable car design advancements.

Car design is an iterative and proprietary process. Carmakers can spend several years on the design phase for a car, tweaking 3D forms in simulations before building out the most promising designs for physical testing. The details and specs of these tests, including the aerodynamics of a given car design, are typically not made public. Significant advances in performance, such as in fuel efficiency or electric vehicle range, can therefore be slow and siloed from company to company.

MIT engineers say that the search for better car designs can speed up exponentially with the use of generative artificial intelligence tools that can plow through huge amounts of data in seconds and find connections to generate a . While such AI tools exist, the data they would need to learn from have not been available, at least in any sort of accessible, centralized form.

But now, the engineers have made just such a dataset available to the public for the first time. Dubbed DrivAerNet++, the dataset encompasses more than 8,000 car designs, which the engineers generated based on the most common types of cars in the world today. The study is published on the arXiv preprint server.

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A team of roboticists at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, working with a colleague from the University of California, has designed, built and demonstrated a bird-like robot that can launch itself into flight using spring-like legs.

The group describes their in a paper published in the journal Nature. Aimy Wissa, an at Princeton University, has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue suggesting possible ways the innovation could be used in real-world applications.

Some types of drones, such as those with rotors, can rise straight up off the ground—others that are powered with forward-facing or engines that push exhaust out the back must either race along a runway or catapult to get airborne. For this new project, the research team developed a new for getting such craft into the air—jumping using spring-like legs.

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Fitzgerald says cyborg search and rescue beetles or cockroaches might be able to help in disaster situations by finding and reporting the location of survivors and delivering lifesaving drugs to them before human rescuers can get there.

But first, the Australian researchers must master the ability to direct the movements of the insects, which could take a while. Fitzgerald says that although the work might seem futuristic now, in a few decades, cyborg insects could be saving lives.

He’s not the only roboticist creating robots from living organisms. Academics at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for example, are implanting electronic pacemakers into jellyfish to control their swimming speed. They hope the bionic jellies could help collect data about the ocean far below the surface.

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Summary: A new study highlights how brain age models can track healthy infant development and reveal environmental influences. Using MRI data from over 600 term and preterm infants, researchers trained machine learning models to predict brain age and identify gaps between predicted and actual ages.

These brain age gaps can indicate whether an infant’s development is faster or slower than expected, with maternal age emerging as a significant influencing factor. Advanced brain development was linked to better cognitive abilities but poorer emotional regulation, suggesting that following normative developmental trajectories may be ideal.

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Chinese researchers have created the BHMbot-B, a 15 mm long microrobot with quick forward and backward movements, which is ideal for navigating small places.

The robot effectively switches between forward and backward movement by aligning the vibratory motions of its magnet, cantilever, and linkages using vibration mode transition control.

The Beihnag University team claims that the device combines a battery, a control circuit for wireless operation, and two electromagnetic actuators for a high load capacity.

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