Lifeboat Foundation

The US space agency said Friday it plans to launch the first-ever helicopter to Mars in 2020, a miniature, unmanned drone-like chopper that could boost our understanding of the Red Planet.

Known simply as “The Mars Helicopter,” the device weighs less than four pounds (1.8 kilograms), and its main body section, or fuselage, is about the size of a softball.

It will be attached to the belly pan of the Mars 2020 rover, a wheeled robot that aims to determine the habitability of the Martian environment, search for signs of ancient life, and assess natural resources and hazards for future human explorers.

Continue reading “NASA plans to send mini-helicopter to Mars” »

TEMPE, Ariz. — A Tempe woman could not believe it when she got the phone call.

NASA was on the other end of the line. Lindy Elkins-Tanton, a planetary scientist with the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, learned she would be leading a deep-space mission–the Psyche Mission.

Her objective is to send a robotic probe to a metal asteroid called Psyche.

Continue reading “Tempe scientist 2nd woman in the world to lead deep-space mission” »

At Collision, start-ups showcased technologies to hire and motivate employees and build better teams. From recruiting to retention, apps are adding automation to the HR function.

Boston Dynamics’ robots look more natural and more amazing with each video, and today the company posted two more clips to its YouTube channel showing the latest progress of its Atlas and SpotMini robots.

When you take a picture of a cat and Google’s algorithms place it in a folder called “pets,” with no direction from you, you’re seeing the benefit of image recognition AI. The exact same technology is used by doctors to diagnose diseases on a scale never before possible by humans.

Diabetic retinopathy, caused by type two diabetes, is the fastest-growing cause of preventable blindness. Each of the more than 415 million people living with the disease risks losing their eyesight unless they have regular access to doctors.

In countries like India there are simply too many patients for doctors to treat. There are 4,000 diabetic patients for every ophthalmologist in India, where the US has one for every 1,500 patients.

Continue reading “Seeing is believing: How AI could prevent blindness for 415 million people (right now)” »

Drones that monitor crops, control mosquito populations and deliver defibrillators are to be tested in US airspace.

Ten commercial drone projects have been selected to try out new ways for unmanned aircraft to be integrated into the skies.

They include Zipline, which currently offers a blood-delivery service in Rwanda, and Apple.

Continue reading “US commercial drones given green light” »

Researchers can now send secret audio instructions undetectable to the human ear to Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant.

Credit Lynn Scurfield

A computer programme modelled on the human brain learnt to navigate a virtual maze and take shortcuts, outperforming a flesh-and-blood expert, its developers said Wednesday.

While artificial intelligence (AI) programmes have recently made great strides in imitating human brain processing—everything from recognising objects to playing complicated board games—spatial navigation has remained a challenge.

Continue reading “Self-navigating AI learns to take shortcuts: study” »

Many people in tech point out that artificial narrow intelligence, or A.N.I., has grown ever safer and more reliable—certainly safer and more reliable than we are. (Self-driving cars and trucks might save hundreds of thousands of lives every year.) For them, the question is whether the risks of creating an omnicompetent Jeeves would exceed the combined risks of the myriad nightmares—pandemics, asteroid strikes, global nuclear war, etc.—that an A.G.I. could sweep aside for us.

Thinking about artificial intelligence can help clarify what makes us human—for better and for worse.