Lifeboat Foundation

SUMMARY: A soft robot with octopus-inspired sensory and motion capabilities represents significant progress in robotics, offering nimbleness and adaptability in uncertain environments.

Robotic engineers have made a leap forward with the development of a soft robot that closely resembles the dynamic movements and sensory prowess of an octopus. This groundbreaking innovation from an international collaboration involving Beihang University, Tsinghua University, and the National University of Singapore has the potential to redefine how robots interact with the world around them.

The blueprint for this highly adaptable robot draws upon the intelligent, soft-bodied mechanics of an octopus, enabling smooth movements across a variety of surfaces and environments with precision. The sensorized soft arm, lovingly named the electronics-integrated soft octopus arm mimic (E-SOAM), embodies advancements in soft robotics with its incorporation of elastic materials and sophisticated liquid metal circuits that remain resilient under extreme deformation.

Qi et al. used phage-assisted evolution to optimize SlugCas9, a compact Cas9 nuclease, for NNG PAM recognition and developed a SlugCas9-NNG based adenine base editor for single AAV delivery.

This blog post is tailored to capture the interest of a professional management and executive audience, combining theoretical insights with practical advice. It aims to provoke thought and encourage a proactive approach to the integration of AI in the business world.

Google’s new AI model Gemini launched today inside the Bard chatbot. It could go on to advance robotics and other projects, says Demis Hassabis, the AI executive leading the project.

2024 will see the arrival of the first AI PCs from hardware companies, and a new report indicates that they’re set to launch alongside Windows 12 in June.

Shared with Dropbox.

An international team led by researchers at the University of Toronto has uncovered over 100 genes that are common to primate brains but have undergone evolutionary divergence only in humans—and which could be a source of our unique cognitive ability.

The researchers, led by Associate Professor Jesse Gillis from the Donnelly Center for Cellular and Biomolecular Research and the department of physiology at U of T’s Temerty Faculty of Medicine, found the genes are expressed differently in the brains of humans compared to four of our relatives—chimpanzees, gorillas, macaques and marmosets.

The findings, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, suggest that reduced selective pressure, or tolerance to loss-of-function mutations, may have allowed the genes to take on higher-level cognitive capacity. The study is part of the Human Cell Atlas, a global initiative to map all human cells to better understand health and disease.

Some new concepts for me but interesting and a good step forward.

A team of researchers working on DARPA’s Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices (ONISQ) program has created the first-ever quantum circuit with logical quantum bits (qubits), a key discovery that could accelerate fault-tolerant quantum computing and revolutionize concepts for designing quantum computer processors.

The ONISQ program began in 2020 seeking to demonstrate a quantitative advantage of quantum information processing by leapfrogging the performance of classical-only supercomputers to solve a particularly challenging class of problem known as combinatorial optimization. The program pursued a hybrid concept to combine intermediate-sized “noisy”— or error-prone — quantum processors with classical systems focused specifically on solving optimization problems of interest to defense and commercial industry. Teams were selected to explore various types of physical, non-logical qubits including superconducting qubits, ion qubits, and Rydberg atomic qubits.

Continue reading “DARPA-Funded Research Leads to Quantum Computing Breakthrough” »

As Canadian politicians continue an intense debate over emissions policies, a new study has found that the country’s carbon pricing scheme in British Columbia has a health benefit: Air in the Pacific province is now cleaner to breathe.

British Columbia (BC) introduced a carbon tax in 2008.