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Many people love the Raspberry Pi (us included). Not only are the computing boards cheap, but you can do so much with them. Wild, wonderful projects spring up all the time with RPi boards as a central piece. The latest creation to catch our eye might just rank as one of the most astonishing: a truck transformed into a dot matrix printer.

As spotted by Tom’s Hardware, YouTuber Ryder Damen (who runs the channel Ryder Calm Down) uses a Raspberry Pi to control his homebrew “printer,” which involves a pickup truck, water, and a whole array of gear to spell out messages on the ground. Damen calls it “skywriting, but on the road.”

In the video, Damen explains how the idea came to be (watching trucks paint markers on the road), as well as the process of constructing the “printer” and the materials used. A plywood and a trailer hitch form the frame of the rig, with solenoids, valves, and hoses then mounted to the wood to serve as printer parts. The solenoids control the valves—when 12V current is applied to them, they open. Meanwhile, the hoses split the water flow from a central point (a pump and a bucket full of water) to each valve.

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The rapid development of wearable electronics requires its energy supply part to be flexible, wearable, integratable and sustainable. However, some of the energy supply units cannot meet these requirements at the same time, and there is also a capacity limitation of the energy storage units, and the development of sustainable wearable self-charging power supplies is crucial. Here, we report a wearable sustainable energy harvesting-storage hybrid self-charging power textile. The power textile consists of a coaxial fiber-shaped polylactic acid/reduced graphene oxide/polypyrrole (PLA-rGO-PPy) triboelectric nanogenerator (fiber-TENG) that can harvest low-frequency and irregular energy during human motion as a power generation unit, and a novel coaxial fiber-shaped supercapacitor (fiber-SC) prepared by functionalized loading of a wet-spinning graphene oxide fiber as an energy storage unit. The fiber-TENG is flexible, knittable, wearable and adaptable for integration with various portable electronics. The coaxial fiber-SC has high volumetric energy density and good cycling stability. The fiber-TENG and fiber-SC are flexible yarn structures for wearable continuous human movement energy harvesting and storage as on-body self-charging power systems, with light-weight, ease of preparation, great portability and wide applicability. The integrated power textile can provide an efficient route for sustainable working of wearable electronics.

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Launching today, AItopia will explore AI’s impact on design, architecture and humanity both today and in the future. Dezeen features editor Nat Barker introduces the series.

The future has arrived. Having been depicted countless times in sci-fi literature and cinema over the decades, machines that can think for themselves are becoming a reality.

Artificial intelligence (AI) – that is, computers or contraptions performing tasks that would usually require a human brain – is a concept that has captured the shared imagination in some form since ancient times. But it was the British polymath Alan Turing who first seriously addressed the matter in his seminal 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. “I propose to consider the question, ‘Can machines think?’” Turing wrote.

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Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11–12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn More

The age of generative AI is here: only six months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT burst onto the scene, as many as half the employees of some leading global companies are already using this type of technology in their workflows, and many other companies are rushing to offer new products with generative AI built in.

But, as those following the burgeoning industry and its underlying research know, the data used to train the large language models (LLMs) and other transformer models underpinning products such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney comes initially from human sources — books, articles, photographs and so on — that were created without the help of artificial intelligence.

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Summary: Researchers mapped neural activity in an octopus’s visual system, revealing striking similarities to humans.

The team observed neural responses to light and dark spots, thereby creating a map resembling the organization of the human brain. Interestingly, octopuses and humans last shared a common ancestor around 500 million years ago, suggesting independent evolution of such complex visual systems.

These findings contribute greatly to our understanding of cephalopod vision and brain structure.

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Humane, the top-secret tech startup founded by ex-Apple vets Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, just showed off the first demo for its projector-based wearable at a TED talk. Axios’ Ina Fried broke the news, and Inverse has seen a recording of the full TED talk given by Chaudhri.

Humane founder and ex-Apple designer Imran Chaudhri shared the first look at the company’s AI-powered wearable projector. Here’s an exclusive first glimpse of Humane’s screen-less iPhone killer in action and details on its many functions including making and receiving phone calls, summarizing notifications, and translating your voice in real-time.

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