Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon is always on the frontier of technological advancements, and in a recent move, the e-commerce giant announced its plans to deepen its collaboration with Agility Robotics. As part of their ongoing partnership, Amazon will commence tests using the bipedal robot, Digit, in its operations. This exciting development comes after Amazon’s strategic investment in Agility Robotics through the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund.

For those unfamiliar with Digit, it’s a marvel of modern robotic engineering. Developed by Agility Robotics, Digit stands out with its unique bipedal design. It isn’t just any robot; it’s designed with two legs, allowing it to move and operate in human-like ways, making it exceptionally fit for environments crafted for humans. Equipped with advanced sensors like LIDAR, it perceives its surroundings and avoids obstacles with ease. Its arms are adept at maintaining balance, carrying objects, and interacting with various elements of its environment.

Continue reading “Amazon Field-Testing Awe-Inspiring Digit Bipedal Robot” »

IBM’s NorthPole processor sidesteps need to access external memory, boosting computing power and saving energy.

Eureka has also taught quadruped, dexterous hands, cobot arms and other robots to open drawers, use scissors, catch balls and nearly 30 different tasks. According to NVIDIA Research, the AI agent’s trial and error-based reward programs are 80 percent more effective than those written by human experts. This shift meant the robots’ performance also improved by over 50 percent. Eureka also self-evaluates based on training results, instructing changes in reward functions as it sees fit.

NVIDIA Research has published a library of its Eureka algorithms, encouraging others to try them out on NVIDIA Isaac Gym, the organization’s “physics simulation reference application for reinforcement learning research.”

The idea of robots teaching robots is seeing increased interest and success. A May 2023 paper published in the Transactions on Machine Learning Research journal presented a new system called SKILL (Shared Knowledge Lifelong Learning), which allowed AI systems to learn 102 different skills, including diagnosing diseases from chest X-rays and identifying species of flowers. The AIs shared their knowledge — acting as teachers in a way — with each other over a communication network and were able to master each of the 102 skills. Researchers at schools like MIT and the University of Bristol have also had success, specifically in using AI to teach robots how to manipulate objects.

NOAA scientists investigating the stratosphere have found that in addition to meteoric ‘space dust,’ the atmosphere more than seven miles above the surface is peppered with particles containing a variety of metals from satellites and spent rocket boosters vaporized by the intense heat of re-entry.

The discovery is one of the initial findings from analysis of data collected by a high-altitude research plane over the Arctic during a NOAA Chemical Science Laboratory mission called SABRE, short for Stratospheric Aerosol processes, Budget and Radiative Effects. It’s the agency’s most ambitious and intensive effort to date to investigate aerosol particles in the stratosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that moderates Earth’s climate and is home to the protective ozone layer.

Using an extraordinarily sensitive instrument custom-built at NOAA in Boulder, Colorado, and mounted in the nose of a NASA WB-57 research aircraft, scientists found aluminum and exotic metals embedded in about 10 percent of sulfuric acid particles, which comprise the large majority of particles in the stratosphere. They were also able to match the ratio of rare elements they measured to special alloys used in rockets and satellites, confirming their source as metal vaporized from spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere.

Oct. 21, 2023 9:00 am ET

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The parabrachial nuclear complex (PBN) is a nexus for aversion and for the sensory and affective components of pain perception. We have previously shown that during chronic pain PBN neurons in anesthetized rodents have amplified activity. We report a method to record from PBN neurons of behaving, head-restrained mice while applying reproducible noxious stimuli. We find that both spontaneous and evoked activity are higher in awake animals compared with urethane anesthetized mice. Fiber photometry of calcium responses from calcitonin-gene-related peptide–expressing PBN neurons demonstrates that these neurons respond to noxious stimuli. In both males and females with neuropathic or inflammatory pain, responses of PBN neurons remain amplified for at least 5 weeks, in parallel with increased pain metrics. We also show that PBN neurons can be rapidly conditioned to respond to innocuous stimuli after pairing with noxious stimuli. Finally, we demonstrate that changes in PBN neuronal activity are correlated with changes in arousal, measured as changes in pupil area.

SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT The parabrachial complex is a nexus of aversion, including pain. We report a method to record from parabrachial nucleus neurons of behaving mice while applying reproducible noxious stimuli. This allowed us to track parabrachial activity over time in animals with neuropathic or inflammatory pain. It also allowed us to show that the activity of these neurons correlates with arousal states and that these neurons can be conditioned to respond to innocuous stimuli.

The lightless deep sea is swirling with life.

New footage captured in the “twilight zone” — areas of the ocean starting at around 100 meters (330 feet) deep where sunlight can’t reach — reveals a world teeming with often otherworldly organisms: long chains of creatures, tentacled life, defensive ink blasted into the water, and beyond.

These creatures were filmed around the Geologist Seamounts just south of the Hawaiian islands. The expedition, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ocean exploration division, allowed scientists to drop a sleek deep sea exploration vehicle, called Mesobot, into these dark waters. These remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, can be intrusive to deep ocean life, but Mesobot, with a slim design and slow-moving propellers, is designed to avoid frightening wildlife away.

An international team of scientists headed by the University of Bonn has developed a novel type of nanomotor. It is driven by a clever mechanism and can perform pulsing movements. The researchers are now planning to fit it with a coupling and install it as a drive in complex machines.

The “law of increasing functional information” says that complex systems in nature evolve to become more complex.