A crippling fuel leak forced a U.S. company on Tuesday to give up on landing a spacecraft on the moon.
Astrobotic Technology’s lander began losing fuel soon after Monday’s launch. The spacecraft also encountered problems keeping its solar panel pointed towards the sun and generating solar power.
“Given the propellant leak, there is, unfortunately, no chance of a soft landing on the moon,” Astrobotic said in a statement.
A study led by the University of Oxford has used the power of machine learning to overcome a key challenge affecting quantum devices. For the first time, the findings reveal a way to close the “reality gap”: the difference between predicted and observed behavior from quantum devices. The results have been published in Physical Review X.
Quantum computing could supercharge a wealth of applications, from climate modeling and financial forecasting to drug discovery and artificial intelligence. But this will require effective ways to scale and combine individual quantum devices (also called qubits). A major barrier against this is inherent variability, where even apparently identical units exhibit different behaviors.
Functional variability is presumed to be caused by nanoscale imperfections in the materials from which quantum devices are made. Since there is no way to measure these directly, this internal disorder cannot be captured in simulations, leading to the gap in predicted and observed outcomes.
In recent years, engineers have developed a wide range of robotic systems that could soon assist humans with various everyday tasks. Rather than assisting with chores or other manual jobs, some of these robots could merely act as companions, helping older adults or individuals with different disabilities to practice skills that typically entail interacting with another human.
Researchers at Nara Institute of Science and Technology in Japan recently developed a new robot that can play video games with a human user. This robot, introduced in a paper presented at the 11th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, can play games with users while communicating with them.
“We have been developing robots that can chat while watching TV together, and interaction technology that creates empathy, in order to realize a partner robot that can live together with people in their daily life,” Masayuki Kanbara, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “In this paper, we developed a robot that plays TV games together to provide opportunities for people to interact with the robot in their daily lives.”
Jan 9 (Reuters) — Microsoft (MSFT.O) has worked with a U.S. national laboratory to use artificial intelligence to rapidly identify a material that could mean producing batteries that require 70% less lithium than now, the company said on Tuesday.
The replacement of much of the lithium with sodium, a common element found in table salt, still needs extensive evaluation by scientists at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington to determine whether it will be suitable for mass production.
“Something that could have taken years, we did in two weeks,” Jason Zander, an executive vice president at Microsoft, told Reuters. “That’s the part we’re most excited about. … We just picked one problem. There are thousands of problems to go solve, and it’s applicable to all of them.”
Posted in robotics/AI
In the course of changing the world, people leave things behind.
MIT Curator Reveals the ‘Secrets of the Pyramids’
The Utah-based pharmaceutical company has trained a large language model to enable scientists to tap into dozens of machine learning models at once, saving them time during drug development.
The biggest buzz in ground-based astronomy these days is the soon to be completed Rubin Observatory and its forthcoming wide field Large Synoptic Sky Survey.
When the widefield optical Rubin Observatory comes online later this year, it will not only revolutionize astronomy, but the art of science data management as well.
Singular alleges Google copied tech for AI in major products.
Google is set to go before a federal jury in Boston on Tuesday in a trial over accusations that processors it uses to power artificial intelligence technology in key products infringe a computer scientist’s patents, reports Reuters.
This comes after the New York Times slapped copyright infringement charges on OpenAI and investor Microsoft.
OpenAI, in a blog post, has called the New York Times’ lawsuit against them ‘wihout merit.’ The news organizations alleges copyright infringement on the part of OpenAI and Microsoft.
Figure 101’s skills were developed through a 10-hour training period, with it gaining the knowledge simply by observing humans perform the task.
Significant progress
Figure first unveiled its initial humanoid creation in March 2023, the development of which took place in 12 months. This innovative robot, dubbed as the ‘world’s first commercially-viable autonomous humanoid robot’, integrates the agility of the human form with advanced AI, enabling it to execute a diverse array of tasks across multiple sectors, including manufacturing, logistics, warehousing, and retail, according to the firm.
