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Tesla has released a new video of a prototype of Optimus, its humanoid robot, and it created some controversy as some disagree about how impressive it is.

Last month, Elon Musk gave an update on the timing for the rollout of Optimus. The CEO says that Optimus is already performing factory tasks inside its lab. He believes that Optimus will be used to perform real tasks inside actual Tesla factories by the end of the year.

Furthermore, Musk said that he believes Tesla could start selling its Optimus humanoid robot to customers outside of the company by the end of 2025.

Chemistry, with its intricate processes and vast potential for innovation, has always been a challenge for automation. Traditional computational tools, despite their advanced capabilities, often remain underutilized due to their complexity and the specialized knowledge required to operate them.

Now, researchers with the group of Philippe Schwaller at EPFL have developed ChemCrow, an AI that integrates 18 expertly designed tools, enabling it to navigate and perform tasks within chemical research with unprecedented efficiency. Their research is published in Nature Machine Intelligence.

“You might wonder why a crow?” asks Schwaller. “Because crows are known to use tools well.”

A research team led by Dr. Serge Krasnokutski from the Astrophysics Laboratory at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy at the University of Jena had already demonstrated that simple peptides can form on cosmic dust particles. However, it was previously assumed that this would not be possible if molecular ice, which covers the dust particle, contains water—which is usually the case.

Now the team, in collaboration with the University of Poitiers, France, has discovered that the presence of water molecules is not a major obstacle for the formation of peptides on such dust particles. The researchers report on their finding in the journal Science Advances.

Chemistry in the icy vacuum “We have replicated conditions similar to those in outer space in a vacuum chamber, also adding substances that occur in so-called molecular clouds,” explains Krasnokutski. These substances include ammonia, atomic carbon, and carbon monoxide. “Thus, all the chemical elements needed for simple peptides are present,” adds the physicist.