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Jun 9, 2022

Scientists have crafted living skin for robots, further blurring the line between human and machine

Posted by in categories: futurism, robotics/AI

Researchers developed skin tissue for robots, laying the groundwork for more advanced—and even more lifelike—machines in the future.


The M2 sets up Apple for another successful series of Macs and iPads, but isn’t a revolutionary change.

Jun 9, 2022

How Apple’s M2 chip builds on the M1 with small but meaningful upgrades

Posted by in categories: computing, mobile phones

How Apple’s M2 chip builds on the M1 to take on Intel and AMD.


The M1 is a great chip. Essentially an “X” variant of the A14 chip, it takes the iPhone and iPad processor and doubles the high-performance CPU cores, GPU cores, and memory bandwidth. The M1 chip is so good it’s equally amazing for tablets and thin-and-light laptops as it is for desktops, easily outperforming any competing chip with similar power draw and offering similar performance to processors that use at least twice as much energy.

Now a year and a half later, and after delivering three more powerful variants of the M1 (M1 Pro, M1 Max, and M1 Ultra), it’s time for the next generation. Announced at WWDC and appearing first in the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro, the M2 is essentially the system-on-chip we predicted it would be: what the M1 is to the A14, the M2 is to the A15. It’s made of 20 billion transistors, 25 percent more than M1, and while it’s still built using a 5nm manufacturing process, it’s a new enhanced “second-generation” 5nm process.

Continue reading “How Apple’s M2 chip builds on the M1 with small but meaningful upgrades” »

Jun 9, 2022

Energy Dome launches world’s first CO2 battery energy storage facility

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

Italian company Energy Dome has opened the first of its remarkable grid-level energy storage plants. These “CO2 batteries” can store renewable energy over long periods and release it quickly, at less than half the cost of big lithium batteries.

Large-scale energy storage is going to be required on an epic scale all round the world, as green energy begins to take over the world’s power supply. Renewable energy is often generated at times and places where it’s not needed, and a variety of grid-level storage technologies are jockeying for various energy market niches, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

We took a close look at Energy Dome’s CO2 battery technology last July, but here’s the guts of it: carbon dioxide expands dramatically when it moves to a gaseous state from a liquid state, which it’ll only settle in under pressures at least five times higher than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure. How much does it expand? Well, at room temperature, 2.5675 litres of liquid CO2 kept at 56 atmospheres of pressure will expand into 1,000 litres of gaseous CO2. That’s a factor of nearly 400.

Jun 9, 2022

Breast cancer drug drastically increased survival for patients with just months to live

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

A new drug therapy for breast cancer helped stop tumors from growing for twice as long as traditional chemotherapy, adding months to patients’ lives.

Jun 9, 2022

Redox flow battery based on ion-sieving sulfonated polymer membranes

Posted by in category: futurism

UK scientists have designed a new type of aqueous organic redox flow battery based on ion-exchange membranes made of a polymer of intrinsic microporosity. The battery showed a very low-capacity decay rate of 0.0335% per day for 2,100 charge-discharge cycles.

Jun 9, 2022

Biomimetic elastomeric robot skin has tactile sensing abilities

Posted by in categories: materials, robotics/AI

A team of researchers at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, working with one colleague from MIT and another from the University of Stuttgart, has developed a biomimetic elastomeric robot skin that has tactile sensing abilities. Their work has been published in the journal Science Robotics.

Roboticists continue to work on improving robot abilities and to make them more human-like. In this new effort, the researchers gave a the ability to detect such sensations as a pat, tickling, wind, or something stroking its surface. They accomplished this by partially imitating .

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Jun 9, 2022

When will I be able to upload my brain to a computer?

Posted by in categories: computing, neuroscience

To capture the information that a brain contains, you need to cut it into billions and billions of slices.

Jun 9, 2022

Chinese hacking group Aoqin Dragon quietly spied orgs for a decade

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, education, government, robotics/AI

Žilvinas DeveikaIt’s much sooner than that. My prediction (that is almost 10 years old now) of an “early” appearance of a strong AGI is 2029. I am completely sure that it will either emerge or will already be there in 2030s.

24 Replies.

Marc O MonfilsAnd what strategies do we have in place to guarantee humanity’s continued relevance in the era of super intelligent machines?

Continue reading “Chinese hacking group Aoqin Dragon quietly spied orgs for a decade” »

Jun 9, 2022

Elon Musk Alarmed

Posted by in category: Elon Musk

Elon Musk tells customers not to use Tesla’s recirculation mode because it spikes carbon dioxide levels in the car cabin.

Jun 9, 2022

Farm Robots Will Solve Many of Our Food Worries

Posted by in categories: food, robotics/AI, sustainability

Machines bristling with cameras and controlled by artificial intelligence are bringing supernatural precision to weeding, harvesting and fertilizing.