Lifeboat Foundation

Welcome to the first issue of Rushing Robotics with brief overviews of each section.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5BpjzCsYfk&t=3s

Not for public use; if you see this and you’re not supposed to, someone has been bad!

https://www.straight4.com/
[email protected]

A demo could come as soon as March.

In 2011, scientists found something unexpected hiding beneath the Amazon. There, 4,000 meters (13,100 feet) beneath the earth was an enormous body of water almost long enough to rival the Amazon and much wider.

River Hamza, as Brazil’s National Observatory unofficially named the beast, acts like drainage for the region and was discovered after Petrobras (an oil company) drilled hundreds of wells. They were drilled back in the 70s and 80s, but when scientists later took a look inside they discovered the monstrous waterway that was hiding underneath. It was after the leader of this team of researchers that the underground waterway was named.

It begins under the Andes in the Acre region and winds its way on through to the Solimões, Amazonas and Marajó basins before slipping out unseen into the Atlantic Ocean. The flowing river Amazon speeds along at around 5 meters (16 feet) per second. By comparison, the painfully slow-trickling Hamza moves along at a casual 1 millimeter (0.04 inches) per hour, writes The Guardian.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=EKCcLkKiDTQ

David Guetta is bringing the topic of artificial intelligence to the forefront after proving just how well the new technology works at replicating the voices of pop artists.

Last week, the French DJ and producer shared a video of him playing a song during one of his sets that used AI technology to add the “voice” of Eminem to one of his songs.

Continue reading “David Guetta Replicated Eminem’s Voice in a Song Using Artificial Intelligence” »

The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.

A new type of material can learn and improve its ability to deal with unexpected forces thanks to a unique lattice structure with connections of variable stiffness, as described in a new paper by my colleagues and me.

The new material is a type of architected material, which gets its properties mainly from the geometry and specific traits of its design rather than what it is made out of. Take hook-and-loop fabric closures like Velcro, for example. It doesn’t matter whether it is made from cotton, plastic or any other substance. As long as one side is a fabric with stiff hooks and the other side has fluffy loops, the material will have the sticky properties of Velcro.

A team of Stanford scientists claims to have tested a new brain-computer interface (BCI) that can decode speech at up to 62 words per minute, improving the previous record by 3.4 times.

That’d be a massive step towards real-time speech conversion at the pace of natural human conversation.

Max Hodak, who founded BCI company Neuralink alongside Elon Musk, but wasn’t involved in the study, called the research “a meaningful step change in the utility of implanted BCIs” in an email to Futurism.

A new chemical process developed by Danish company Vestas can ensure that wind turbine blades are recycled at the end of their life, instead of being abandoned or going to landfill sites.

Wind power is one of the best ways to decarbonise the world’s electricity. Recent years have seen explosive growth in capacity additions, as well as gigantic new turbine designs able to generate as much as 18 MW. The costs keep falling, while efficiencies continue to improve. The trend is now obvious: renewable energy is the future and will inevitably displace fossil fuels.

Borislav/iStock.

Researchers inserted the gene into the part of the catfish genome that codes for an essential reproductive hormone. The produced hybrids showed increased disease resistance and sterility.