Lifeboat Foundation

How a Swedish skier was basically frozen—but lived.

A three-member team spent four years building the low-latency bot which responds faster than the time it takes for an eye to blink.

Shandong, China-based Qibot Robot Company claims to have built the world’s fastest boxer bot. Standing over six feet (1.9 m) tall, the bot is a single-handed robot that can be teleoperated and has a response delay time of just 12 milliseconds, which according to the company, makes it the world’s fastest, the South China Morning Post.

Continue reading “Meet Qibbot: World’s fastest human-controlled fighting bot” »

Matthias G. Fischer et al., 2023/bioRxiv.

A report suggests that our planet is home to 10³¹ viruses, and they are probably the most powerful beings in terms of population. They come in all kinds of shapes and forms, however, some are more bizarre than others.

Scientists have discovered a new way to accomplish fast data transmissions through light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs.

While research has progressed in significantly optimizing light-emitting diodes (LEDs), the modulation characteristics of perovskite LEDs remain unclear.

In recent developments, scientists have discovered a new way to transmit data quickly through LEDs. This could allow homes and offices to use the fast internet through lights instead of setting up a wifi router.

An AI-powered brain implant helps a quadriplegia patient regain sensations and movement for the first time after a diving accident in 2020. Can this implant work for other paralysis patients?

Scientists at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research have re-established the connection between the brain, body, and spinal cord of a person living with quadriplegia (paralysis of all four limbs and trunk) due to a diving accident in 2020.

Continue reading “AI-powered brain implant restores a paralyzed man’s ability to feel and move” »

The day is fast approaching when generative AI won’t only write and create images in a convincingly human-like style, but compose music and sounds that pass for a professional’s work, too. This morning, Meta announced AudioCraft, a framework to generate what it describes as “high-quality,” “realistic” audio and music from short text descriptions, or prompts. It’s not Meta’s first foray into audio generation — the tech giant open sourced an AI-powered music generator, MusicGen, in June — but Meta claims that it’s made advances that vastly improve the quality of AI-generated sounds, such as dogs barking, cars honking and footsteps on a wooden floor.

In a blog post shared with TechCrunch, Meta… More.

For a recovering gamer like me, one of the most exciting applications of generative AI is dynamic dialogue. I’m not suggesting AI replace writers — goodness forbid. But as anyone who’s sunk hundreds of hours into an RPG can tell you, scripted NPC interactions get old fast.

There are a few startups prototyping AI tech to dynamically generate dialogue. But one of the more promising is Inworld, launched in 2021 by the founding team of API.AI, which developed tools for speech recognition and natural language understanding until its acquisition by Google in 2016. (API.AI later became Dialogflow, Google’s flagship conversational AI design platform.)

Inworld claims to use “multiple” machine learning models to “mimic the full range of human communication.” That’s promising a lot in the context of games, but the startup makes the case that, by allowing developers to link its dialog-and voice-generating tools to animation and rigging systems within popular game engines, including 3D environments, it can help deliver more lifelike and immersive gaming experiences.

A study in the Lancet Oncology journal found that AI-supported breast cancer screenings saved radiologists time that could be used for more complex diagnoses.

The animals were thought to have gone extinct before the dinosaurs arrived on the scene.

Brian Kennedy, one of the lead scientists of NOAA’s deep sea expedition, said the stalked crinoid “are these big beautiful flower looking animals, but they grow on this long stalk. They’re called sea lilies, and that’s really what they look like a lot of times.”

Continue reading “PODCAST: In the Pacific’s depths, they found animals thought extinct since before the dinosaurs” »