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Category: robotics/AI – Page 1,900

ARROW, a reconfigurable fiber optics network, aims to take on the end of Moore’s law

Wide Area Networks (WANs), the global backbones and workhorses of today’s internet that connect billions of computers over continents and oceans, are the foundation of modern online services. As COVID-19 has placed a vital reliance on online services, today’s networks are struggling to deliver high bandwidth and availability imposed by emerging workloads related to machine learning, video calls, and health care.

To connect WANs over hundreds of miles, fiber optic cables that transmit data using light are threaded throughout our neighborhoods, made of incredibly thin strands of glass or plastic known as optical fibers. While they’re extremely fast, they’re not always reliable: They can easily break from weather, thunderstorms, accidents, and even animals. These tears can cause severe and expensive damage, resulting in 911 service outages, lost connectivity to the internet, and inability to use smartphone apps.

Scientists from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and from Facebook recently came up with a way to preserve the network when the fiber is down, and to reduce cost. Their system, called ARROW, reconfigures the optical light from a damaged fiber to healthy ones, while using an online algorithm to proactively plan for potential fiber cuts ahead of time, based on real-time internet traffic demands.

Experts Fear Lab-Grown Brains Will Become Sentient, Which Is Upsetting

A thought-provoking new article poses some hugely important scientific questions: Could brain cells initiated and grown in a lab become sentient? What would that look like, and how could scientists test for it? And would a sentient, lab-grown brain “organoid” have some kind of rights? Buckle up for a quick and dirty history of the ethics of sentience. We associate the term with computing and artificial intelligence, but the question of who (or what) is or isn’t “sentient” and deserving of rights and moral consideration goes back to the very beginning of the human experience. The debate colors everything from ethical consumption of meat to many episodes of Black Mirror.

Well, we don’t want that… or do we?

Elon Musk Says SpaceX Will Catch Starship Booster With Giant “Robot Chopsticks”

According to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, the space company will attempt something very different to recover its massive Super Heavy booster after it launches.

“SpaceX will try to catch largest ever flying object with robot chopsticks,” Musk tweeted early Monday morning.

He was referring, of course, to the giant robotic tower SpaceX is building to catch the primary rocket stage after it gives the company’s Starship spacecraft a boost into orbit.

A baby shark born in all-female tank could be a rare case of a ‘virgin birth’

Scientists say a rare shark “virgin birth” may be the first of its kind after a baby shark was born in an all-female tank in an Italian aquarium.

The baby smoothhound shark, named Ispera, which means hope in Sardianian, was born at the Acquario di Cala Gonone in Sardinia, Italy, according to Italian outlet AGI.

Its mother had spent ten years living in a tank with one other female, the outlet said, and scientists suspect the newborn could be the first documented case of shark parthenogenesis in that species.

Elon Musk’s ‘Mars City’ Expects to Use MOXIE That Will Produce ‘Breathable’ Oxygen for Humans!!

NASA’s MOXIE could make breathing in Mars a reality. The space agency’s new invention can turn Martian air into oxygen, making it a game-changer for future Mars explorations.

According to Popular Mechanics’ latest report, it is impossible to breathe on Mars since its atmosphere is around 1% the density of Earth’s. Will this be beneficial for Elon Musk’s planned ‘Mars City?’. NASA’s MOXIE experiment will soon have an answer for us to thrive longer on the red planet. This weekend, the space agency hopes that the automated system could be the saving grace for humans to live on Mars if a time comes that the Earth becomes unsuitable for living.

The device called Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment could supply humans with oxygen through extracting from the atmosphere of the red planet which is composed of 96% of carbon dioxide. The process will be made possible through electrolysis which involves the device being run through an electrical current. Since the Perseverance rover’s touchdown in February, MOXIE will conduct the third oxygen-extraction procedure. Moreover, what it produces could supply enough oxygen for humans that is good for 10 to 15 minutes.

RNA Structures Predicted with Uncanny Accuracy

“The network learned to find fundamental concepts that are key to molecular structure formation, but without explicitly being told to,” Townshend added. “The exciting aspect is that the algorithm has clearly recovered things that we knew were important, but it has also recovered characteristics that we didn’t know about before.”

Having shown success with proteins, the researchers turned their attention to RNA molecules. The researchers tested their algorithm in a series of “RNA Puzzles” from a longstanding competition in their field, and in every case, the tool outperformed all the other puzzle participants and did so without being designed specifically for RNA structures.

“We introduce a machine learning approach that enables identification of accurate structural models without assumptions about their defining characteristics, despite being trained with only 18 known RNA structures,” the authors of the Science article wrote. “The resulting scoring function, the Atomic Rotationally Equivariant Scorer (ARES), substantially outperforms previous methods and consistently produces the best results in community-wide blind RNA structure prediction challenges.”

SpaceX launches ants, avocados, robotic arm to space station

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A SpaceX shipment of ants, avocados, and a human-sized robotic arm rocketed toward the International Space Station on Sunday.

The delivery — due to arrive Monday — is the company’s 23rd for NASA in just under a decade.

A recycled Falcon rocket blasted into the predawn sky from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. After hoisting the Dragon capsule, the first-stage booster landed upright on SpaceX’s newest ocean platform, named “A Shortfall of Gravitas.” SpaceX founder Elon Musk continued his tradition of naming the booster-recovery vessels in tribute to the late science fiction writer Iain Banks and his Culture series.

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