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The Air Force’s Skyborg team flew two General Atomics MQ-20 Avenger stealth drones on the “multi-hour” Oct. 26 flight over California. One of the Ave… See more.

Two stealth drones soared over Edwards Air Force Base in California last week, offering some encouraging evidence that the U.S. Air Force’s new drone “brain” not only works—it works with a bunch of different drone types.

The Air Force hopes to install the Skyborg autonomy core system in a wide array of unmanned aerial vehicles. The idea is for the ACS to steer armed drones with minimal human control—even in the heat of battle. That way the drones can fly as robotic wingmen for manned fighters without demanding too much of the busy human pilots.

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The value of attending major industry events like Nvidia’s GTC (GPU Technology Conference) is to see what companies are and are not focusing on going forward. Nvidia has transformed the agenda for GTC from gaming into one of the leading AI events. The agenda also includes HPC and data center networking topics, representing other areas Nvidia has been expanding into in the last few years. If the agenda for the upcoming GTC event is any indication, the company has greatly increased its focus on autonomous machines, which includes all forms of robotics.

In addition to autonomous vehicles, this GTC agenda includes more than ten sessions focused on autonomous machines. As the company has done with other market segments, the autonomous machines sessions will bring together experts from academia, the industry, and Nvidia to provide training, industry insights, and technical assistance in AI and robotics. Some of the experts attending include Brian Gerkey, Co-founder and CEO of Open Robotics, Patty Delafuente from the University of Maryland, Ajit Jaokar and Ayşe Mutlu form the University of Oxford, and Johan Barthelemy from the University of Wollongong. There will also be AI and robotics experts from Denso Wave, Digeiz, Hammerson, Integral AI, Milestone Systems, Nota, and SK Telecom presenting at the conference.

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American astrophysicists have used the Decadal Survey (DS)—also called Astro 2020 and produced by the National Academies of Science—to recommend a space telescope capable of photographing potentially habitable worlds.

The report recommends that a flagship space observatory will need a six-meter mirror to “provide an appropriate balance between scale and feasibility.”

An eight-meter aperture telescope of the scale of LUVOIR-B would be unlikely to launch before the late 2040… See more.

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And it could become a flying taxi service by 2025.

SkyDrive, the Tokyo-based startup developing an eVTOL flying car concept, revealed that it has been granted a safety certificate by Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism (MLIT), a press statement reveals.

SkyDrive first revealed its early flying car prototype to the world in 2,018 before it went on to successfully conduct its first piloted test flight last year.… See more.

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Many people develop Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia as they get older. However, others remain sharp well into old age, even if their brains show underlying signs of neurodegeneration.

Among these cognitively resilient people, researchers have identified and amount of time spent on intellectually stimulating activities as factors that help prevent dementia. A new study by MIT researchers shows that this kind of enrichment appears to activate a called MEF2, which controls a genetic program in the brain that promotes resistance to cognitive decline.

The researchers observed this link between MEF2 and cognitive resilience in both humans and mice. The findings suggest that enhancing the activity of MEF2 or its targets might protect against age-related dementia.

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It’s been a tumultuous 12 months for mainland China’s richest. Shifts in government policy covering the education and tech industries, along with worries about real estate debt, led to many of the country’s largest private-sector companies experiencing steep share declines. A government push to promote “common prosperity” saw tycoons and tech companies announce billions of dollars in donations to social causes.

Yet overall, China’s 100 Richest saw their collective net worth rise from last year’s list. Their total wealth increased to $1.48 trillion from $1.33 trillion a year earlier. Among the biggest gainers were those who benefited from increased sales at companies tied to green energy industries in which China is a global leader, such as lithium-ion batteries. China, the world’s largest auto market, also leads the world in EV sales. The minimum net worth to make the top 100 rose to $5.74 billion from $5.03 billion a year ago.

The second-biggest increase in wealth went to Robin Zeng, chairman of battery-maker Contemporary Amperex Technology, whose fortune increased to $50.8 billion from $20.1 billion last year. That earned him the No. 3 spot on this year’s list.

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Billionaire Elon Musk and his Twitter account have had some adventures.

In 2,018 Musk’s tweet that he was “considering taking Tesla private” invited charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission and a $20 million fine.

As the country was locked down in April 2020 amid the coronavirus pandemic, Musk tweeted: “FREE AMERICA NOW.”

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In 1,977 NASA sent out two Voyager probes to study Jupiter and Saturn. The spacecrafts were designed to last about five years, but they are still, to this day, collecting and sending back data from beyond the solar system. But the Voyager mission is living on borrowed time. Today NPR science correspondent Nell Greenfieldboyce talks about a proposal for an intentionally long mission — what it would take for NASA to actually plan for an interstellar voyage that would pass research and responsibility down through generations.

What would you put on a spacecraft bound for the stars? Email the show at [email protected]!

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DeepMind is mostly known for its work in deep reinforcement learning, especially in mastering complicated games and predicting protein structures. Now, it is taking its next step in robotics research.

According to a blog post on DeepMind’s website, the company has acquired the rigid-body physics simulator MuJoCo and has made it freely available to the research community. MuJoCo is now one of several open-source platforms for training artificial intelligence agents used in robotics applications. Its free availability will have a positive impact on the work of scientists who are struggling with the costs of robotics research. It can also be an important factor for DeepMind’s future, both as a science lab seeking artificial general intelligence and as a business unit of one of the largest tech companies in the world.

Simulation platforms are a big deal in robotics. Training and testing robots in the real world is expensive and slow. Simulated environments, on the other hand, allow researchers to train multiple AI agents in parallel and at speeds that are much faster than real life. Today, most robotics research teams carry out the bulk of training their AI models in simulated environments. The trained models are then tested and further fine-tuned on real physical robots.

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