Lifeboat Foundation

Imagine you’re visiting a friend abroad, and you look inside their fridge to see what would make for a great breakfast. Many of the items initially appear foreign to you, with each one encased in unfamiliar packaging and containers. Despite these visual distinctions, you begin to understand what each one is used for and pick them up as needed.

Inspired by humans’ ability to handle unfamiliar objects, a group from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) designed Feature Fields for Robotic Manipulation (F3RM), a system that blends 2D images with foundation model features into 3D scenes to help robots identify and grasp nearby items. F3RM can interpret open-ended language prompts from humans, making the method helpful in real-world environments that contain thousands of objects, like warehouses and households.

F3RM offers robots the ability to interpret open-ended text prompts using natural language, helping the machines manipulate objects. As a result, the machines can understand less-specific requests from humans and still complete the desired task. For example, if a user asks the robot to “pick up a tall mug,” the robot can locate and grab the item that best fits that description.

New computational techniques, “HighLight” and “Tailors and Swiftiles,” could dramatically boost the speed and performance of high-performance computing applications like graph analytics or generative AI. The work, from MIT and NIVIDIA, aims to accelerate sparse tensors for AI models by introducing more efficient and flexible ways to take advantage of sparsity.

A tangle of silver nanowires may pave the way to low-energy real-time machine learning.

They look like storm clouds that could fit on the head of a pin: Organoids are three-dimensional cell cultures that play a key role in medical and clinical research. This is thanks to their ability to replicate tissue structures and organ functions in the petri dish. Scientists can use organoids to understand how diseases occur, how organs develop, and how drugs work.

Single-cell technologies allow researchers to drill down to the molecular level of the cells. With spatial transcriptomics, they can observe which genes in the organoids are active and where over time.

The miniature organs are usually derived from stem cells. These are cells that haven’t differentiated at all, or only minimally. They can become any kind of cell, such as heart or kidney cells, muscle cells, or neurons. To make stem cells differentiate, scientists “feed” them with growth factors and embed them in a nutrient solution.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered most of the confirmed exoplanets that we know of. But its successor, TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), is catching up. New research announces the validation of eight more TESS candidates, and they’re all Super-Earths.

TESS’s planet-hunting mission has a more refined goal than its predecessor, Kepler. TESS was specifically built to detect exoplanets transiting in front of bright stars in Earth’s neighbourhood. It’s found about 400 confirmed exoplanets, but there’s a list of exoplanets awaiting confirmation that contains almost 6,000 candidates. There are only two ways to confirm all these exoplanets-in-waiting: further observations and statistical methods.

What all those unconfirmed candidates amount to is data. They’re hiding in TESS’s data, waiting for clever scientists to validate them. Further observations can help uncover them, but not alone.

An AI chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI will be released to X Premium+ subscribers once it’s out of beta, the CEO tweeted. He also shared screenshots of conversations with the AI, and said it is designed to have humorous responses and has access to real-time information from X.

The Tesla Cybertruck has been spotted in a handful of unique colors and designs over the last several weeks, the latest of which includes a new matte black that hasn’t yet been seen before — as driven by one of the automaker’s top executives.

Tesla’s Head of Design, Franz von Holzhausen, was seen driving a matte black Cybertruck in Santa Monica on Saturday, as spotted by X user AtomAntEater. In the clip, the vehicle can be seen with von Holzhausen behind the wheel outside of Santa Monica Teslas and Coffee before driving away.

We saw Franz driving a matte black Cybertruck at today’s Santa Monica Teslas & Coffee. Franz said “nice shirt” when he noticed the man was wearing a CT t-shirt. Dope or nope? @DMC_Ryan @BLKMDL3 @TeslaOwnersSCV @TeslaClubSoCal @ChargeGoGroup pic.twitter.com/wl3TAR0hHP

The first product from Elon Musk-led xAI was announced on Friday, and the CEO has suggested that Tesla’s vehicles may natively run a smaller version of the AI assistant.

On Saturday, X user and Tesla enthusiast Chuck Cook spotted that Musk liked a post saying that a smaller, quantized version of the AI model Grōk would run natively on Tesla with local computing power. Following Cook’s mention, Musk noted that Teslas will likely come with the largest amount of usable inference compute in the world — as long as the vehicles’ AI computer can run the Grōk model.

Provided our vehicle AI computer is able to run the model, Tesla will probably have the most amount of true usable inference compute on Earth.

Japan’s JT-60SA tokamak will test technologies put to use in ITER.