Lifeboat Foundation

West Japan Railways (West JR), one of six companies that make up Japan Railways Group, has unveiled a giant “humanoid robot” to work on heavy machinery on its lines.

The as yet unnamed tool is described as “multifunctional railway heavy machinery for railway equipment maintenance” and is based off a prototype used by West JR to prove the concept of the odd-looking machine.

Lovely essay by Sara Walker on how tech is biology. She closely mirrors my own thinking on this. “The technologies we are and that we produce are part of the same ancient strand of information propagating through and structuring matter on our planet.”

Our best estimates place the origin of life on this planet at approximately 3.8 billion years ago. Biological beings alive today are part of a lineage of information that can be traced backward in time through genomes to the earliest life. But evolution produced information that is not just genomic. Evolution produced everything around us, including things not traditionally considered “life.” Human technology would not exist without humans, so it is therefore part of the same ancient lineage of information that emerged with the origin of life.

Technology, like biology, does not exist in the absence of evolution. Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.

Continue reading “AI Is Life” »

AI training costs are growing exponentially year after year.

Scientists spent ages mocking panpsychism. Now, some are warming to the idea that plants, cells, and even atoms are conscious.

Researchers at Nano Life Science Institute (WPI-NanoLSI), Kanazawa University report the 3D imaging of a suspended nanostructure. The technique used is an extension of atomic force microscopy and is a promising approach for visualizing various 3D biological systems.

Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was originally invented for visualizing surfaces with nanoscale resolution. Its basic working principle is to move an ultrathin tip over a sample’s surface. During this xy-scanning motion, the tip’s position in the direction perpendicular to the xy-plane follows the sample’s height profile, resulting in a height map of the surface.

In recent years, ways to extend the method to 3D imaging have been explored, with researchers from Nano Life Science Institute (WPI-NanoLSI), Kanazawa University reporting pioneering experiments on living cells. However, for 3D-AFM to evolve into a widely applicable technique for visualizing flexible molecular structures, a thorough understanding of the imaging mechanisms at play is necessary.

As predicted by the theory of general relativity, the passage of gravitational waves can leave a measurable change in the relative positions of objects. This physical phenomenon, known as gravitational wave memory, could potentially be leveraged to study both gravitational waves and spacetime.

Researchers at Gran Sasso Science Institute (GSSI) and the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) recently carried out a study exploring the possibility of using gravitational wave memory to measure spacetime symmetries, fundamental properties of spacetime that remain the same following specific transformations. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, suggests that these symmetries could be probed via the observation of displacement and spin memory.

“For a long time, I was curious about the phenomenon of gravitational wave memory and the connection of the associated low energy physics with quantum mechanics,” Boris Goncharov, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. “I first heard about Weinberg’s soft graviton theorem from Prof. Paul Lasky at Monash University in Australia, during my Ph.D, when discussing gravitational wave memory. Then I learned about the so-called ” Infrared Triangle’ that connects the soft theorem with gravitational wave memory and symmetries of spacetime at infinity from gravitational wave sources.”

Police handled 13,097 online fraud reports between January and May, an increase of 113 cases compared with the 12,984 logged in the same period last year.

But the amount lost was up from the HK$1.61 billion in the same period last year.

Makers of humanoid robots should guarantee that their products “do not threaten human security” and “effectively safeguard human dignity”, according to a new set of guidelines published in Shanghai during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) on Saturday.

They should also take measures that include setting up risk warning procedures and emergency response systems, as well as give users training on the ethical and lawful use of these machines, according to the guidelines.

A new class of materials known as “glassy gels” could find use in areas ranging from batteries to adhesives, thanks to their unique set of physical properties.

Meixiang Wang, a post-doctoral fellow from Michael Dickey’s group at North Carolina State University, discovered these new materials while trying out different mixtures for making gels that she hoped would be useful ionic conductors.

Standard gels, such as those used to make contact lenses, are polymers with an added liquid solvent. The liquid weakens the interactions between the chains of molecules forming the polymer, allowing the gel to extend easily but leaving it soft and weak mechanically. In contrast, glassy polymers, like those suitable for airplane windows, contain no liquid and have strong interactions between their constituent polymer chains. This renders them stiff and strong but, in some cases, brittle.