Hours spent toiling away under the beating sun to harvest berries and fruit may soon be a thing of the past as robots look set to replace humans in the field.
A £700,000 machine built by the University of Plymouth has succeeded in plucking a raspberry from a plant and carefully placing it in a punnet.
The painstaking process takes a whole minute to get one berry because it requires a combination of soft robotics, clever AI and ‘deep learning’.
Scientist have just discovered that, at an atomic level, these elements have both liquid and solid states, giving context to what may be hidden in the cores of celestial bodies.
A New State of Water Reveals a Hidden Ocean in Earth’s Mantle — https://youtu.be/pgm4z8vJVVk
On the chain-melted phase of matter
https://www.pnas.org/content/116/21/10297
“We develop here a classical interatomic forcefield for the element potassium using machine-learning techniques and simulate the chain-melted state with up to 20,000 atoms. We show that in the chain-melted state, guest-atom correlations are lost in three dimensions, providing the entropy necessary for its thermodynamic stability.”
Elements can be solid and liquid at same time
https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/2019/elements-can-be-solid-and-liquid-at-same-time
“A team led by scientists from the University of Edinburgh used powerful computer simulations to study the existence of the state – known as the chain-melted state. Simulating how up to 20,000 potassium atoms behave under extreme conditions revealed that the structures formed represent the new, stable state of matter. Applying pressure to the atoms leads to the formation of two interlinked solid lattice structures, the team says.”
Information on Alkali Metals
“Alkali metals react with water to produce heat, hydrogen gas, and the corresponding metal hydroxide. The heat produced by this reaction may ignite the hydrogen or the metal itself, resulting in a fire or an explosion. The heavier alkali metals will react more violently with water.“
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Imagine the possibility of integrating mixed reality (XR) tech with that of this AImagine having a long, open conversation about philosophy with either Immanuel Kant or David Hume. Imagine being given a private lesson in economics by either Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, or Karl Marx. The possibilities are seemingly abundant. But then so are the risks.
A lot of coverage has been done on the emergence of what are known as “deepfakes” here on Serious Wonder the last few years. They’ve captivated us at times and then frightened us. The implications of this growing technology are practically limitless, especially as our ability to tell the difference between what is real and what is fake diminishes even further.
And just when you thought you could take a breather, Samsung decided to develop a new artificial intelligence system that makes generating deepfakes that much easier. Using nothing more than a single image, the AI system, known as “few-shot adversarial learning,” is able to create a fake clip that seemingly allows that image to burst to life.
‘It’s not always convenient for people to leave their homes to retrieve deliveries or for businesses to run their own delivery services,’ Ken Washington, chief technology officer at Ford, wrote in a blog post.
‘If we can free people up to focus less on the logistics of making deliveries, they can turn their time and effort to things that really need their attention.
‘Enter Digit, a two-legged robot designed and built by Agility Robotics to not only approximate the look of a human, but to walk like one, too,’ Washington added.
A nimble robot inspired by bush babies can now bounce three times its own height in a single leap.
SALTO (saltatorial locomotion terrain obstacles) was fist designed to jump at 4mph (1.75 m/s) but a host of new features have now been added to the nifty machine.
A single leg, inspired by those of the galago, or Senegalese bush baby, propels the robot across a range of terrain and over various obstacles.
Quantum computing’s processing power could begin to improve artificial-intelligence systems within about five years, experts and business leaders said.
For example, a quantum computer could develop AI-based digital assistants with true contextual awareness and the ability to fully understand interactions with customers, said Peter Chapman, chief executive of quantum-computing startup IonQ Inc.
“Today, people are frustrated when a digital assistant says, ‘Sorry, I couldn’t understand that,’” said Mr. Chapman, who was named CEO of the venture-capital-backed startup this week after about five years as director of engineering for Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Prime. Quantum computers “could alleviate those problems,” he said.
Researchers have developed a brain-computer interface the size of a baby aspirin that can restore mobility to people with paralysis or amputated limbs.
How does it work? It rewires neural messages from the brain’s motor cortex to a robotic arm, or reroutes it to the person’s own muscles. In this video, Big Think contributor Susan Hockfield, president emerita of MIT, explains further.