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The intelligent robot ‘evolves’ inside the pipe, without stopping water distribution.

At a time when a significant proportion of people face scarcity of drinking water, a staggering 32 billion m3 of clean water is lost a year due to faulty distribution networks around the world. This is where technologies like ACWA Robotics’ Pathfinder autonomous robot become a much-relevant product for utilities. The system can navigate at the heart of the water supply network without disrupting water distribution to users to provide actionable data.

ACWA

According to a UN report, worldwide water demand is expected to exceed supply by 40 per cent by 2030, and waste of water in the supply chain is something that cities cannot afford anymore.

Continue reading “CES 2023: Engineers create a snake-like robot that can move inside water pipes” | >

The study aims to induce hibernation in monkeys and, eventually, in humans.

In a new study, researchers reduced the core body temperature of crab-eating macaques purely by controlling their brains. The study aims to find a way to induce hibernation in monkeys and, eventually, in humans.

Gremlin/iStock.

Hibernation enables mammals such as bears and rodents to survive adverse weather conditions or a lack of food. During this deep sleep state, they enter a kind of energy-saving mode. Breathing, heart rate, and energy consumption are all drastically reduced; their body temperature plummets, and their metabolism and the chemical reactions that keep them alive slow. Scientists call this condition’ torpor.’ Animals hibernate by alternating between long periods of torpor and brief periods of arousal, during which they wake up to feed.

Continue reading “Neural control of monkeys’ body temperatures could be useful for space travel” | >

The FTX collapse has far-reaching consequences.

Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss have been sued alongside Gemini, the crypto exchange they founded, over charges of fraud by investors in the company, Markets Insider.

Tyler and Cameron, popularly known as Winklevoss twins, have a long history in the technology sector and first made headlines when they sued Mark Zuckerberg, alleging that they had stolen their idea of a social networking site, when he churned out The Facebook, as it was then known.

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This must count toward daily workout goals for his best friend.

Chinese robotics manufacturer, Unitree, has a four-legged robotic dog offering. What makes the dog super special is that it can do push-ups. Robotic dogs are the hottest new thing available in the market, and just like their natural counterparts, this quadruped buddy also wants to be man’s best friend. For this, the dog, or its manufacturer, will make sure it does everything to help you out, and if doing push-ups is what it takes, then that’s what it will be trained to do.

Unitree’s robotic dog, Go1, does not boast bright colors and only has a silvery metallic appearance.

Continue reading “China-designed robotic dogs do push-ups with ease” | >

Zuckerberg has stated that he expects it to take up to a decade for the metaverse to go mainstream.

Virtual reality (VR) technology, once hailed as the next big thing in the tech industry, has yet to live up to its hype. According to data acquired by CNBC.

Wildpixel/iStock.

What does the future hold for VR?

Continue reading “Metaverse fails to meet expectations as VR headset sales shrink in 2022” | >

Chinese tech companies rush to match Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, but roadblocks lie ahead.

The gigantic technological.

The gigantic technological leap that machine learning models have shown in the last few months is getting everyone excited about the future of AI — but also nervous about its uncomfortable consequences. After text-to-image tools from Stability AI and OpenAI became the talk of the town, ChatGPT’s ability to hold intelligent conversations is the new obsession in sectors across the board.

Continue reading “How China is building a parallel generative AI universe” | >

It’s a demonstration of what’s possible with today’s AI — and the outstanding challenges.

Generative AI is coming.

Generative AI is coming for videos. A new website, QuickVid, combines several generative AI systems into a single tool for automatically creating short-form YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat videos.

Given as little as a single word, QuickVid chooses a background video from a library, writes a script and keywords, overlays images generated by DALL-E 2 and adds a synthetic voiceover and background music from YouTube’s royalty-free music library. QuickVid’s creator, Daniel Habib, says that he’s building the service to help creators meet the “ever-growing” demand from their fans.

Continue reading “QuickVid uses AI to generate short-form videos, complete with voiceovers” | >

The first open source equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has arrived, but good luck running it on your laptop — or at all.

This week, Philip Wang, the developer responsible for reverse-engineering closed-sourced AI systems including Meta’s Make-A-Video, released PaLM + RLHF, a text-generating model that behaves similarly to ChatGPT. The system combines PaLM, a large language model from Google, and a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback — RLHF, for short — to create a system that can accomplish pretty much any task that ChatGPT can, including drafting emails and suggesting computer code.

But PaLM + RLHF isn’t pre-trained. That is to say, the system hasn’t been trained on the example data from the web necessary for it to actually work. Downloading PaLM + RLHF won’t magically install a ChatGPT-like experience — that would require compiling gigabytes of text from which the model can learn and finding hardware beefy enough to handle the training workload.

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As Meta faces antitrust scrutiny over its acquisition of VR fitness developers Within, the tech giant is making another acquisition. Meta confirmed to TechCrunch that it is purchasing Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company headquartered in the Netherlands. The terms of the deal, which was first reported in the Belgian paper De Tijd, have not been disclosed.

Founded in 2009, Luxexcel uses 3D printing to make prescription lenses for glasses. More recently, the company has focused its efforts on smart lenses, which can be printed with integrated technology like LCD displays and holographic film.

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