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AI system inspects astronauts’ gloves for damage in real-time

Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HSE) are working with NASA scientists to develop an AI system for inspecting astronauts’ gloves.

Space is an unforgiving environment and equipment failures can be catastrophic. Gloves are particularly prone to wear and tear as they’re used for just about everything, including repairing equipment and installing new equipment.

Currently, astronauts will send back images of their gloves to Earth to be manually examined by NASA analysts.

Artificial intelligence is already upending geopolitics

The TechCrunch Global Affairs Project examines the increasingly intertwined relationship between the tech sector and global politics.

Geopolitical actors have always used technology to further their goals. Unlike other technologies, artificial intelligence (AI) is far more than a mere tool. We do not want to anthropomorphize AI or suggest that it has intentions of its own. It is not — yet — a moral agent. But it is fast becoming a primary determinant of our collective destiny. We believe that because of AI’s unique characteristics — and its impact on other fields, from biotechnologies to nanotechnologies — it is already threatening the foundations of global peace and security.

The rapid rate of AI technological development, paired with the breadth of new applications (the global AI market size is expected to grow more than ninefold from 2020 to 2028) means AI systems are being widely deployed without sufficient legal oversight or full consideration of their ethical impacts. This gap, often referred to as the pacing problem, has left legislatures and executive branches simply unable to cope.

A Cosmic Camera is Being Sent to the Moon’s South Pole

The International Lunar Observatory Association (ILOA) in Hawai’i is preparing to launch a dual-camera system attached to a Moon lander whose primary purpose will be to photograph the cosmos.

ILOA is preparing its precursor science education payload for integration on a pioneering commercial Moon lander later this year, while also continuing to advance more robust observatories for future long-term astronomy, science, and exploration missions.

The International Lunar Observatory (ILO) missions have been in development for the better part of a decade. In 2013, ILOA and the Moon Express corporation announced the private enterprise mission in 2013 that would have both scientific and commercial purposes with the goal of delivering the ILO to the Moon’s South Pole aboard a robotic lander. The hope is that it would establish permanent astrophysical observations and lunar commercial communications systems for professional and amateur researchers.

Researchers at MIT and IBM Propose an Efficient Machine Learning Method That Uses Graph Grammar to Generate New Molecules

Chemical engineers and materials scientists are continuously looking for the following groundbreaking material, chemical, or medication. The emergence of machine-learning technologies has accelerated the discovery process, which may typically take years. Ideally, the objective is to train a machine-learning model on a few known chemical samples and then let it build as many manufacturable molecules of the same class with predictable physical attributes as feasible. You can develop new molecules with ideal characteristics if you have all of these components and the know-how to synthesize them.

However, current approaches need large datasets for training models. Many class-specific chemical databases only contain a few example compounds, restricting their capacity to generalize and construct biological molecules that might be generated in the real world.

This issue was addressed by a team of researchers from MIT and IBM by employing a generative graph model to create new synthesizable compounds within the same training data’s chemical class. The research was presented in a research paper. They model the production of atoms and chemical bonds as a graph and create a graph grammar — a linguistic analog of systems and structures for word ordering — that provides a set of rules for constructing compounds like monomers and polymers.

A freeze-thaw molten salt battery for seasonal storage

It relies on a new “freeze-thaw” design. A recent study has just been published by U.S. scientists who have managed to develop an aluminum-nickel molten salt battery that can retain over 90% of its initial capacity over a period of up to 12 weeks. Having an energy density of 260 W/hour per kg, the new battery was built with an aluminum anode and a nickel cathode, immersed in a molten-salt electrolyte.


The breakthrough could have many applications in soft robotics including in the Metaverse.

New breakthrough 3D printed fingertip feels and acts like human skin

The researchers were inspired by actual skin. Researchers have been working on robot dexterity for several years now trying to give the machines human-like sensitivity. This has been no easy task as even the most advanced machines struggle with this concept.


Now the team is working on making the artificial fingertip as sensitive to fine detail as the real thing. Currently, the 3D-printed skin is thicker than real skin which may be hindering this process. As such, Lepora’s team is now working on 3D-printing structures on the microscopic scale of human skin.

“Our aim is to make artificial skin as good – or even better — than real skin,” concluded Professor Lepora. The end result could have many applications in soft robotics including in the Metaverse.