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The first rover to explore the moon of another planet has started practicing for its landing, even though that historic touchdown is at least six years away.

The 55-lb. (25 kilograms) robot is part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission, which is scheduled to launch in 2024 and arrive at the Red Planet the following year.

Does the idea of miniature, insect-scale robots swarming toward their intended duties inside your body make your skin crawl?

Medical researchers led by Dr. Shen Yajing from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) don’t wish to alarm you but they’ve just devised a simple method of making millirobots which can be employed in various biomedical applications like targeted drug delivery and catheter navigation.

Special thanks to Lieuwe Vinkhuyzen for checking that this very simplified view on building neural nets did not stray too far from reality.

The inhabitants of the Tesla fanboy echo chamber have heard regularly about the Tesla Dojo supercomputer, with almost nobody knowing what it was. It was first mentioned, that I know of, at Tesla Autonomy Day on April 22, 2019. More recently a few comments from Georg Holtz, Tesmanian, and Elon Musk himself have shed some light on this project.

In the next few years, Mars will be visited by three new rovers, the Perseverance, Tianwen-1, and Rosalind Franklin missions. Like their predecessors – Pathfinder and Sojourner, Spirit and Opportunity, and Curiosity – these robotic missions will explore the surface, searching for evidence of past and present life. But even after years of exploring, an important question remains: where is the best place to look?

To date, all attempts to find evidence of life on the surface have yielded nothing, owing to the fact that the Martian environment is extremely cold, desiccated, and irradiated. According to a new study by an international team of researchers led by Cornell University and the Centro de Astrobiología in Madrid, the Atacama desert in the mountains of Chile could hold the answer.

Located in northern Chile and ranging in elevation from 2,400 meters (7,900 feet) to 4,800 m (15,700 ft), the Atacama plateau desert is the driest region on the planet. Because of its elevation and negligible cloud cover, this region is an ideal place for astronomical studies, which is why the European Southern Observatory (ESO) operates three major observatories there – La Silla, Paranal, and Llano de Chajnantor.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/11/20/this-2-…f7a547a57c to Nate Storey, the future of farms is vertical. It’s also indoors, can be placed anywhere on the planet, is heavily integrated with robots and AI, and produces better fruits and vegetables while using 95% less water and 99% less land.


95% less water. 99% less land. 400X more yield.

This year, Nature asked 480 researchers around the world who work in facial recognition, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI) for their views on thorny ethical questions about facial-recognition research. The results of this first-of-a-kind survey suggest that some scientists are concerned about the ethics of work in this field — but others still don’t see academic studies as problematic.


Journals and researchers are under fire for controversial studies using this technology. And a Nature survey reveals that many researchers in this field think there is a problem.