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Nvidia announced today that Isaac, its developer toolbox for supporting AI-powered robotics, will deepen support of the Robot Operating System (ROS). The announcement is being made this morning at ROS World 2,021 a conference for developers, engineers, and hobbyists who work on ROS, a popular open-source framework that helps developers build and reuse code used for robotics applications.

Nvidia, which is trying to assert its lead as a supplier of processors for AI applications, announced a host of “performance perception” technologies that would be part of what it will now call Isaac ROS. This includes computer vision and AI/ML functionality in ROS-based applications to support things like autonomous robots.

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A new control system, demonstrated using MIT’s robotic mini cheetah, enables four-legged robots to jump across uneven terrain in real-time. A loping cheetah dashes across a rolling field, bounding over sudden gaps in the rugged terrain. The movement may look effortless, but getting a robot to move this way is an altogether different prospect.

In recent years, four-legged robots inspired by the movement of cheetahs and other animals have made great leaps forward, yet they still lag behind their mammalian counterparts when it comes to traveling across a landscape with rapid elevation changes.

“In those settings, you need to use vision in order to avoid failure. For example, stepping in a gap is difficult to avoid if you can’t see it. Although there are some existing methods for incorporating vision into legged locomotion, most of them aren’t really suitable for use with emerging agile robotic systems,” says Gabriel Margolis, a PhD student in the lab of Pulkit Agrawal, professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT.

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Such planetary smashups are likely common in young solar systems, but they haven’t been directly observed.

Young planetary systems generally experience extreme growing pains, as infant bodies collide and fuse to form progressively larger planets. In our own solar system, the Earth and moon are thought to be products of this type of giant impact. Astronomers surmise that such smashups should be commonplace in early systems, but they have been difficult to observe around other stars.

Now astronomers at MIT, the National University of Ireland Galway, Cambridge University, and elsewhere have discovered evidence of a giant impact that occurred in a nearby star system, just 95 light years from Earth. The star, named HD 172,555 is about 23 million years old, and scientists have suspected that its dust bears traces of a recent collision.

The MIT-led team has observed further evidence of a giant impact around the star. They determined that the collision likely occurred between a roughly Earth-sized terrestrial planet and a smaller impactor at least 200,000 years ago, at speeds of 10 kilometers per second, or more than 22,000 miles per hour.

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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) sparked worldwide excitement in March as particle physicists reported tantalizing evidence for new physics – potentially a new force of nature.

Now, our new result, yet to be peer reviewed, from CERN’s gargantuan particle collider seems to be adding further support to the idea.

Our current best theory of particles and forces is known as the standard model, which describes everything we know about the physical stuff that makes up the world around us with unerring accuracy.

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Russia has registered the world’s first COVID-19 vaccine for animals, the country’s agricultural regulator said on Wednesday.

Clinical trials of the vaccine — called Carnivac-Cov — started last October and involved dogs, cats, Arctic foxes, minks, foxes and other animals, said Konstantin Savenkov, deputy head of Rosselkhoznadzor, according to a Reuters report.

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It’s Time to welcome our Space Brothers.

Is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe? It’s a question that has been debated for centuries, if not millenia. But it is only recently that we’ve had an actual chance of finding out, with initiatives such as Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) using radio telescopes to actively listen for radio messages from alien civilisations.

What should we expect to detect if these searches succeed? My suspicion is that it is very unlikely to be little green men—something I speculated about at a talk at a Breakthrough Listen (a Seti project) conference.

Suppose there are other planets where life began and that it followed something like a Darwinian evolution (which needen’t be the case). Even then, it’s highly unlikely that the progression of and technology would happen at exactly the same pace as on Earth. If it lagged significantly behind, then that planet would plainly reveal no evidence of extraterrestrial life to our . But around a star older than the Sun, life could have had a head start of a billion years or more.

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