Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog – Page 2

Get the latest international news and world events from around the world.

Log in for authorized contributors

Meet ‘Gabi,’ the Robot That Just Became a Monk at a Buddhist Temple in South Korea. It’s the Latest Robot to Take Up Religious Practice

During the ceremony, Gabi agreed to five vows usually recited by human monks and slightly altered for the humanoid. The robot pledged to respect life, act with peace toward other robots and objects, listen to humans, refrain from acting or speaking in a deceptive manner and save energy.

Gabi participated in a modified yeonbi purification ritual. While a human monk normally receives a small incense burn on the arm, instead Gabi received a lotus lantern festival sticker and a prayer bead necklace.

The landmark event aligns with the promise made during a New Year’s address by the Venerable Jinwoo, president of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, to incorporate artificial intelligence into the Buddhist tradition.

‘We aim to fearlessly lead the A.I. era and redirect its achievements toward the path of attaining peace of mind and enlightenment,’ he said, per a statement.

The humanoid promised to obey humans, save energy and treat other robots peacefully. South Korean Buddhist leaders have recently started to embrace artificial intelligence.

Continue reading “Meet ‘Gabi,’ the Robot That Just Became a Monk at a Buddhist Temple in South Korea. It’s the Latest Robot to Take Up Religious Practice” | >

Meet The AI Robot That Can Cook Meals, Solve Rubik’s Cubes And Play Piano

Most robots today are excellent at repetitive factory work. They can move boxes, weld metal parts or follow pre-programmed routines without getting tired. But ask them to crack an egg without crushing it or cut vegetables evenly and things usually fall apart pretty quickly. That is exactly the challenge Genesis AI claims it is trying to solve. The robotics company has introduced a new robotic foundation model system called ‘GENE-26.5’, which it says can help robots perform highly delicate, human-like tasks with impressive precision.

According to Genesis AI, its robotic system can handle surprisingly complex activities including cooking meals, solving Rubik’s cubes, wiring cables, lab pipetting and even playing the piano in real time. The company showcased these capabilities using a robotic hand called ‘Genesis Hand 1.0’, which has been designed to mimic the movement and flexibility of a human hand. It reportedly features 20 degrees of freedom along with soft-contact surfaces to improve grip and precision…

…These gloves reportedly capture how human hands move, grip objects and apply pressure during everyday tasks. That data is then used to train the robot so it can imitate those same actions more naturally. According to a Business Insider interview, Genesis AI CEO Zhou Xian claimed his team managed to teach the robot a new piano song in roughly one hour. He also explained that a ‘30-second complex skill,’ like certain cooking tasks shown in demos, can be learned using a few hours of human data combined with less than 30 minutes of robot training data. ‘I think these are probably the most complex tasks ever being performed by a robot in a very human-like way at the efficiency, speed, and performance similar to a human,’ Xian said. He added that the robot currently performs at roughly 60 to 70 percent of human speed.

Genesis AI has introduced a new robotic foundation model, “GENE-26.5,” designed to enable robots to perform intricate tasks akin to human actions with precision., Technology & Science, Times Now.

You can put a data center at your house—but who really pays?

“The idea, put forward by a California smart utility box company called Span, is to put the GPUs where the power has already been allocated—at the home. Span says the average household uses only about 42% of the electricity allotted to it, and rarely reaches peak usage. Span’s smart utility boxes detect that, and steer the extra available power over to the GPUs, which live inside a ”node” that sits beside the house and looks something like an HVAC unit. The boxes contain 16 Nvidia GPUs, 4 AMD CPUs, 4 terabytes of memory, and a cooling system. When a large number of homes have these, the servers could be connected together in a network and work together on distributed computing jobs (workloads), Span says.

In exchange for hosting a node, Span pays a big chunk of the homeowner’s electricity and broadband internet bills.

And there may even be advantages for putting the compute power closer to the end users that are using the chatbots or AI services, Span says.

It’s a cool idea on paper, but it’s almost completely unproven in real-world use. Span has been prototyping the units but has yet to install any of them beside real homes. I asked Span VP Chris Lander if his company has done technical studies showing that its brand of distributed computing will be fast and robust enough to handle real AI workloads. ‘We’ve done a bunch of technical studies internally [and] a bunch of modeling for different kinds of workloads, both from the business point of view [and] the product point of view and from the technical architecture point of view,’ he replies.

The idea of asking homeowners to host boxes full of GPUs is a symptom of the woeful dearth of data center space needed for AI computing.

Boston Dynamics’ Atlas Masters Every Shift in a Demanding Balance Routine

Boston Dynamics engineers just released new footage of their Atlas robot being tested. The machine is shown lurching from two feet to all sorts of weird positions, challenging its balance with each stride. It is not uncommon to watch it shift its weight from both legs onto one while the other extends outward like a spear, arms waving in sync to keep its center of mass stable as it totters about. Atlas quickly puts both hands on the floor and throws its entire body into a handstand, smooth as silk. Then, just as you get comfy, the legs fly straight

Physicists find evidence that the universe isn’t perfectly uniform — potentially unraveling a 100-year-old model of cosmology

The universe may not be perfectly uniform after all, a new series of papers hints. If confirmed, this could upend a nearly 100-year-old model of cosmology.

Kupffer cells in liver homeostasis and disease: from immune sentinels to metabolic gatekeepers

This Review provides an integrated overview of Kupffer cell biology, from their embryonic origin and spatial organization to their functional specialization within the liver. It emphasizes how Kupffer cells act as immune sentinels while also shaping metabolic regulation, tissue repair, infection and cancer and discusses how emerging technologies are refining our understanding of their context-dependent roles across physiological and pathological settings.

Engineered exosomes reverse sleep deprivation brain damage in mice

Sleep is a vital physiological process that allows humans and other animals to restore both the mind and body, while also consolidating memories, clearing out toxins and regulating their metabolism. Several past studies showed that getting insufficient sleep for prolonged periods of time can trigger inflammatory responses and can negatively impact people’s memory, mood, attention and decision-making.

Researchers at Quanzhou First Hospital, affiliated with Fujian Medical University, recently carried out a mouse study aimed at assessing the potential of a new treatment based on exosomes, tiny membrane-covered vesicles that transport biological material between cells, for reversing some of the adverse effects of chronic sleep deprivation. Their findings, published in Translational Psychiatry, suggest that the delivery of the heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) via exosomes could prevent cells in the mouse brain from becoming damaged following prolonged periods of stress and lack of sleep.

“Chronic sleep deprivation impairs cognition and triggers neuroinflammation, but effective molecular therapies are lacking,” wrote Zhenming Kang, Guoshao Zhu and their colleagues in their paper. “Heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) offers neuroprotection, though its delivery across the blood–brain barrier remains a challenge. This study investigates exosomes as a vehicle to enhance brain delivery of HSP70 for treating chronic sleep deprivation.”

Glymphatic influx is negatively correlated with cerebral blood volume in male mice

Li et al. use multimodal MRI to show that cerebral blood volume is inversely correlated with glymphatic influx across six brain states. Lower CBV is associated with expanded extra-ventricular CSF space, and caffeine produces a similar pattern in awake mice, suggesting CBV as a tonic vascular factor complementing pulsation and vasomotion.

Quantum circuit test finally exposes what has been warping performance

Quantum computers could someday solve pressing problems that are too convoluted for classical computers, such as modeling complex molecular interactions to streamline drug discovery and materials development.

But to build a superconducting quantum computer that is large and resilient enough for real-world applications, scientists must precisely engineer thousands of quantum circuits so they perform operations with the lowest possible error rate.

To help scientists design more predictable circuits, researchers from MIT and Lincoln Laboratory developed a technique to measure a property that can unexpectedly cause a superconducting quantum circuit to deviate from its expected behavior. Their analysis revealed the source of these distortions, known as second-order harmonic corrections, leading to underperforming circuit architectures.

/* */