Sophia smiles mischievously, bats her eyelids and tells a joke.
Without the mess of cables that make up the back of her head, you could almost mistake her for a human.
The humanoid robot, created by Hanson robotics, is the main attraction at a UN-hosted conference in Geneva this week on how artificial intelligence can be used to benefit humanity.
DARPA has unveiled a system that transforms its unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into warfare machines capable of conducting different missions without human intervention.
Prior to the announcement, the compact drones were only able to carry a single-function payload, which limited their abilities to one specific task in the field.
Now, a new effort, called Converged Collaborative Elements for RF Task Operations (CONCERTO), has provided the UAS with a flexible RF architecture that uses shared hardware – allowing the devices to swap missions mid-flight.
WASHINGTON — Approximately a dozen police, fire and emergency agencies surrounding Washington, D.C. are using drones to capture criminal suspects and fight fires, but the unmanned aircraft systems also are sparking privacy concerns and legislation.
At least 347 state and local police, sheriff, fire and emergency units in the United States have acquired drones, according to an April report by Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College.
“More and more departments in the public safety space, particularly in law enforcement, are acquiring drones for a range of operations,” says Dan Gettinger, co-director of the research group.
SEATTLE Boeing Co is looking ahead to a brave new world where jetliners fly without pilots and aims to test some of the technology next year, the world’s biggest plane maker said in a briefing ahead of the Paris Airshow.
The idea may seem far-fetched but with self-flying drones available for less than $1,000, “the basic building blocks of the technology clearly are available,” said Mike Sinnett, Boeing’s vice president of product development.
Jetliners can already take off, cruise and land using their onboard flight computers and the number of pilots on a standard passenger plane has dropped to two from three over the years.
Increasing autophagy in macrophages is a promising avenue of research aiming at heart disease and other age-related diseaeses.
Today we thought it was a good time to take a look at a new study that demonstrates that increasing autophagy is a good approach to slowing aging and could be the foundation for a variety of therapies to treat age-related diseases.
What is Autophagy?
Autophagy is an intracellular degradation system that delivers unwanted cell components to a type of cellular garbage disposal system, known as the lysosome. The lysosome uses powerful enzymes that break down the unwanted material for recycling. However, as we age the lysosomes become clogged up with materials that are so fused together not even the potent enzymes can destroy them and this causes the lysosomes to become dysfunctional and eventually the cell dies. This is a particular problem for long lived cells with a very low rate of replacement such as the heart, the back of the eye, nerve cells and other cells that rarely divide if at all. Ultimately as more and more cells become dysfunctional over time due to lysosome dysfunction, tissue function become impaired and age-related disease sets in.
NEW YORK (AP) — How long has our species been around? New fossils from Morocco push the evidence back by about 100,000 years.
The bones, about 300,000 years old, were unearthed thousands of miles from the previous record-holder, found in fossil-rich eastern Africa. The new discovery reveals people from an early stage of our species’ evolution, with a mix of modern and more primitive traits.
“They are not just like us,” said Jean-Jacques Hublin, one of the scientists reporting the find. But they had “basically the face you could meet on the train in New York.”
The Poás Volcano in Costa Rica is home to two crater lakes, and they could not be more different. The first fills an inactive crater, its water is clear blue and its rim lush with vegetation. The other could be accurately described as a hell hole.
Laguna Caliente—literally hot lagoon in Spanish—derives its hellish qualities from the churning of magma underneath the active crater. Sulfur-rich vapor rises out of the lake, gagging anyone unlucky enough to get a whiff and poisoning anyone unlucky enough to get too many whiffs. The water itself is three times as acidic as battery acid. And every once in awhile, a rumbling below shoots a jet of hot, acidic water into the sky. It’s not the kind of place where you want to paddle a boat.
So Guy van Rentergem decided to build a drone boat. Van Rentergem visited Laguna Caliente in 2015 with friends and volcanologists, but he is not a volcanologist himself. However he is a chemist, a constant tinkerer, and a long-time caver who’s worked with geologists in the past. Next year, he told his colleagues, he’s coming back with an autonomous boat so they can map the bottom of the lake.
Posted in space
It might seem like an idea taken straight out of science fiction, but a ‘space nation’ could soon become a reality.
The ambitious plans, first announced last year, were hatched by an international group of scientists and are backed by a Russian billionaire.
The floating nation, dubbed ‘Asgardia’, is set to take its first step into space later this year with the launch of its maiden data satellite.
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