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Tesla has released a demo of their Gen 2 Tesla Bot with impressive advancements in design and capabilities, sparking discussion about its potential impact on manufacturing and the company’s success.

Questions to inspire discussion.

What are the improvements in the Gen 2 Tesla Bot?
—The Gen 2 Tesla Bot has updated design, actuated neck, improved hand and finger control, and a new tactile sensing system.

Headquartered in Oxford, UK, MitoRx is working on orally delivered mitochondrial protective therapeutics targeting mitochondrial dysfunction linked to the progression of conditions such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy and Huntington’s disease, along with other neurodegenerative diseases. The company says the new funding will be allocated towards its preclinical work in Huntington’s disease, activating its first neurodegenerative disease program, and exploring research collaborations and partnerships.

MitoRx anticipates delivering preclinical results in Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Huntington’s disease, and COPD next year.

“Interim results in our Duchenne program demonstrate that our muscle-penetrative lead asset preserves strength in oxidative muscle, and confirms mitochondrial modulation,” said Dr Christine Charman, Chief Development Officer at MitoRx. “These results will be presented at the Muscular Dystrophy Association Clinical and Scientific Conference in Orlando during March 2024.”

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Nowadays, many malicious elements online use AI to digitally expand their operations, and experts claim that such AI-generated fraud is only expected to worsen.

This increasing criminal use of AI challenges security agencies as they look to capture and convict criminals. Unfortunately, most agencies do not have the resources to handle the increased volume of cases, and those that do struggle immensely with differing regulations across jurisdictions. Furthermore, the lack of federal legislation on AI leaves agencies largely on their own to navigate these evolving challenges.

According to a notice the agency posted on the government contracting portal SAM.gov on Thursday (Dec. 7), the technology was developed by researchers at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Virginia and has been studied for use in a simulated entry into Neptune’s atmosphere. A separate 2021 study of the same technology studied it for use in the atmosphere of Mars.

Related: Space Force wants ‘Foo Fighter’ satellites to track hypersonic missiles

The agency claims its MHD system is “simpler than conventional methods for control of hypersonic craft (e.g., chemical propulsion, shifting flight center of gravity, or trim tabs) and enables new entry, descent, and landing mission architectures.”

If successful, the experiments would not only affirm some of the theories proposing the quantum nature of gravity but could also finally unify general relativity with theories of quantum mechanics.

Unifying General Relativity with Quantum Mechanics Has Proven Elusive

“General relativity and quantum mechanics are the two most fundamental descriptions of nature we have,” explains the press release announcing the new experiments. “General relativity explains gravity on large scales while quantum mechanics explains the behaviour of atoms and molecules.”

Artificial intelligence tools hold promise for applications ranging from autonomous vehicles to the interpretation of medical images. However, a new study finds these AI tools are more vulnerable than previously thought to targeted attacks that effectively force AI systems to make bad decisions.

At issue are so-called “adversarial attacks,” in which someone manipulates the data being fed into an AI system in order to confuse it. For example, someone might know that putting a specific type of sticker at a specific spot on a stop sign could effectively make the stop sign invisible to an AI system. Or a hacker could install code on an X-ray machine that alters the image data in a way that causes an AI system to make inaccurate diagnoses.

“For the most part, you can make all sorts of changes to a stop sign, and an AI that has been trained to identify stop signs will still know it’s a stop sign,” says Tianfu Wu, co-author of a paper on the new work and an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University. “However, if the AI has a vulnerability, and an attacker knows the vulnerability, the attacker could take advantage of the vulnerability and cause an accident.”

Worldwide, more than one billion people are obese. Obesity is a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers. But permanently losing weight isn’t easy: complex interactions between body systems such as gut physiology, hormones, and the brain are known to work against it. One method for weight loss is intermittent energy restriction (IER), where days of relative fasting alternate with days of eating normally.

“Here we show that an IER diet changes the human brain-gut-microbiome axis. The observed changes in the gut microbiome and in the activity in addition-related brain regions during and after weight loss are highly dynamic and coupled over time,” said last author Dr. Qiang Zeng, a researcher at the Health Management Institute of the PLA General Hospital in Beijing. The study has been published in Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology.

The authors used metagenomics on stool samples, blood measurements, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study changes in the composition of the gut microbiome, physiological parameters and serum composition, and brain activity in 25 obese Chinese women and men on an IER diet. Participants were on average 27 years old, with a BMI between 28 and 45.