New artificial neurons fire so realistically they can activate living brain cells in mouse tissue.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 91
Moisture-driven tech can power green batteries—and destroy spy gear
Researchers from North Carolina State University and Rice University have created a nontoxic, stretchable battery that operates by extracting moisture from the ambient environment—even in climates as dry as the desert. The batteries could be useful in Internet of Things (IoT) applications ranging from wearables to advanced surveillance monitors with built-in kill switches. The study is published in the journal Science Advances.
Emerging technologies like wearable monitors, miniature robotics and other IoT devices require lightweight, flexible power sources. Conventional batteries, which represent the best power source options, are often too rigid and heavy to be useful, and they contain toxic materials that can leak. Energy harvesters, so called because they capture energy from the surrounding environment and convert it into electrical power, are lighter, but their performance is limited.
Running on moisture and salt The new moisture-activated battery (MAB) includes a magnesium anode and a silver/silver chloride cathode, with a cellulose membrane loaded with lithium chloride salts that serves as a separator. The separator harvests moisture from ambient air, which dissolves the salts and creates the electrolyte, allowing charge to flow through the battery.
Identity, Privacy, and Cybersecurity Are Pillars of the Agentic Future (Part 2)
It is evident everywhere that artificial intelligence is certainly evolving. We are rapidly moving from chatbots and copilots to AI agents that can make decisions, execute transactions, generate software, analyze intelligence, negotiate with other systems, and perform tasks that previously required human discernment.
This development is one of the biggest computing advances since the Internet. It’s also one of the biggest cybersecurity challenges for businesses. As I have stressed in my writings and speeches for years that each technology advance expands opportunity and attacks the surface. AI agents demonstrate this.
Unlike traditional software, AI agents are autonomous. They remember, reason, use apps, access secret data, perform APIs, and adapt to changing conditions. They are now active enterprise participants. That changes all cybersecurity. AI Agents Are New Digital Identities. The cybersecurity industry has protected people, devices, apps, and networks for decades. Now we must protect digital workers.
Scientists discovered the brain doesn’t make decisions the way we thought
A new study suggests the brain begins making decisions much earlier than scientists previously thought. Researchers found that even primary sensory regions are influenced by higher brain areas through rapid feedback loops, rather than simply passing information forward. This more dynamic view of brain function could help engineers design future AI systems that think more like biological brains while using far less power.
Karl Schroeder: The Singularity is an Old Idea. Keep Moving Forward!
Fourteen years ago, a science fiction author looked me in the eye and told me the singularity was already old news.
This was 2012. Almost nobody outside a small circle was talking about it. And Karl Schroeder, one of Canada’s sharpest minds in #ScienceFiction and foresight, was telling me to stop staring at it.
His words stuck with me: take the singularity, use it, it’s a lens. Then develop other lenses. Keep hunting for blind spots.
At the time, I thought he was just being contrarian. Today, with #AI swallowing every headline and every boardroom, I think he saw something most of us are still missing.
Schroeder doesn’t hand you easy answers. We got into the technological maximum, the Rewilding, why he believes “technology is legislation,” and why he rates the singularity as possible but not probable. He picked apart almost every assumption I walked in with.
Here is what keeps nagging me. The blind spot he warned me about in 2012 might be the exact thing everyone is fixated on in 2026.
Physicists confirm 20-year-old theory that could boost quantum technology
Future quantum computing will require correlations between distant modules—a feature known as distributed entanglement. Traditionally, such entanglement has relied on active control and repeated measurements. Now, physicists at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) have realized a fully autonomous method for distributed entanglement using a “quantum bath” of correlated light particles. Published in Physical Review X, their work experimentally confirms a 20-year-old prediction and could provide a new platform for applied quantum technologies.
Entanglement is a central feature of quantum physics in which shared correlations exceed what classical theories can explain. Achieving distributed entanglement between physically separated qubits (quantum bits) could enable future advances, such as scalable quantum computers and quantum networks.
To entangle distant qubits, earlier attempts have relied on two protocols. In one approach, a single, actively controlled photon is sent from one qubit to the other. In the second approach, each qubit emits a photon that must be matched to produce entanglement. While the second method earned the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, it requires many repeated measurements and post-selection and still does not always yield entanglement.
Mission · Oak Lab
Before starting Oak Lab, both Sutton and Javed were working at Keen Technologies—an AGI startup founded by legendary game developer John Carmack. They chose to break away to pursue a fundamentally different path toward understanding intelligence. Sutton bluntly describes current deep learning methods as “weak and inefficient,” arguing that today’s AI models are hitting a wall because of how they learn.
Today’s frontier models (like ChatGPT or Claude) are trained on massive, static, pre-collected internet datasets. Sutton argues this is “learning from someone else’s experience.” Because these datasets are frozen, the models cannot independently discover truly new knowledge, adapt in real time, or evaluate their own outputs.
Sutton’s model explicitly shifts away from the “turn-based” prompt-and-response loop of modern LLMs. By running the FC-STOMP cycle continuously on streaming data, Oak Lab expects to build agents that discover optimal, creative survival and problem-solving strategies that completely bypass the limits of human intuition.
OaK architecture discovers temporal abstractions grounded in experience that are both self-verifiable and useful for planning.
Ray Kurzweil on Why We’re Living in the Singularity | EP #261
In this episode, the mates and Steven Kotler sit down with Ray Kurzweil to discuss AGI, the future, and more.
Get access to metatrends 10+ years before anyone else — https://qr.diamandis.com/metatrends.
Ray Kurzweil is an American inventor and futurist best known for his pioneering work in optical character recognition and his predictions regarding the technological singularity.
Peter H. Diamandis, MD, is the Founder of XPRIZE, Singularity University, ZeroG, and A360.
Salim Ismail is the founder of Open ExO, a GP at Exponential Venture Capital/The Organizational Singularity Fund and a sought after global speaker and thought leader.
Dave Blundin is the founder \& GP of Link Ventures.