Mars Incorporated has developed an autonomous robot that will follow shoppers around a grocery store to tempt them with candy before they checkout.
The company working on a militarized version of BD’s Spot. It looks like just a straight copy. Sadly, no FB page, and didn’t see any other robots on there besides this. I think some humanoid robot competition would be helpful.
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Privacy & Legal
Elon Musk is going to pay $100 million towards a prize to come up with the best carbon capture technology. (Or so he tweets. Details are scarce so far.)
The maverick tech CEO’s promise is not particularly notable for its generosity. With a net worth of over $200 billion, $100 million is 0.05% of Musk’s wealth.
But still, the richest person in the world’s tweet brings attention to an often-overlooked technology that has been around since the 1970s but has mostly been relegated to niche corners of the energy community.
30 Pieces of silver for the masses.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) just published a report titled Fossil Fuel Foolery, which identified 10 tactics that the fossil fuel industry used as excuses for not accepting accountability for its impacts on the environment and human health. DesmogBlog noted that the industry used a long list of deceptive tactics that concealed environmental destruction harming Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) as well as low-income communities. Not surprising — the fossil fuel industry only cares about money, and if the planet and human health stand in the way of that, so be it.
The article gave a snapshot of the report findings, and one of the most disturbing things I took notice of was the common tactic that the NAACP described as “co-opt community leaders and organizations and misrepresent the interests and opinions of communities,” sometimes with financial support, to “neutralize or weaken public opposition.”
Public can try pulling faces to trick the technology, while critics highlight human rights concerns.
Here’s my latest video (audio issues fixed!):
Papers referenced in the video:
Extract from a conversation that María Blasco, Director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO for its acronym in Spanish) had with Mario Alonso Puig during the celebration of the South Summit 2020.
In this segment María Blasco refers to aging, cancer, telomerase, and life extension. The conversation is in English and I added subtitles in Spanish.
While a Mars rover can explore where no person has gone before, a smaller robot at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia could climb to new heights by mimicking the movements of a lizard.
Simply named X-4, the university’s climbing robot has allowed a team of researchers to test and replicate how a lizard moves in the hope that their findings will inspire next-generation robotics design for disaster relief, remote surveillance and possibly even space exploration.
In a scientific paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the team states that lizards have optimized their movement across difficult terrain over many years of evolution.
Access to clean water is a huge issue across the globe. Even in areas with water resources, a lack of infrastructure or reliable energy means purifying that water is sometimes extremely difficult.
That’s why a water vapor condenser designed by University at Buffalo and University of Wisconsin-Madison engineers could be revolutionary. Unlike other radiative vapor condensers which can only operate at night, the new design works in direct sunlight and requires no energy input.
“We have worked on solar-driven water evaporation technologies in the past years,” says Qiaoqiang Gan, Ph.D., professor of electrical engineering at UB and a leading corresponding author. “We are now addressing the second half of the water cycle, condensation.”
Data affecting more than 500 million Facebook users that was originally leaked in 2019, including email addresses and phone numbers, has been posted on an online hackers forum, according to media reports and a cybercrime expert.
“All 533000, 000 Facebook records were just leaked for free,” Alon Gal, chief technology officer at the Hudson Rock cybercrime intelligence firm, said Saturday on Twitter.
He denounced what he called the “absolute negligence” of Facebook.
