Along with the first private-sector spacewalk, the SpaceX Polaris Dawn crew also will set a new Earth-orbit altitude record.
Picking up a box and placing it in a neat pile is not an impressive action in itself for a robot; understanding an enigmatic human command and correctly deciphering and explaining the decision-making process, are definitely innovations. Digit owes parts of its progress to the generative artificial intelligence revolution that also reached the field of robotics and turned expectations from it on its head. “I’ve been asked what’s the biggest thing in 2024 besides language modeling — it’s robotics. Period,” Nvidia’s senior AI scientist Jim Fan wrote in December. “We’re about three years away from a ChatGPT moment for physical AI agents,” he explained.
Ever since Fan made this statement, it seems that everyone is talking about the “ChatGPT moment of robotics”, or the hope of a technological breakthrough that will push the field forward and finally fill our homes with intelligent humanoid robots to help us with household chores, wash the floor, set the table or do the laundry (but not fold it). “What has been happening in recent months is dramatic,” explains Amir Bousani, CEO of R-Go Robotics, which recently entered into a partnership with Nvidia to equip the robot it is developing with its spatial perception capabilities. “The physical world is more difficult than the internet,” notes Dr. Oren Etzioni, founding CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, “but the field of robots that have the ability to behave in general is running much faster today.”
The huge interest in humanoid robots, or humanoids, which Fan is talking about, is evident in the constant announcements in the field: in February, the startup Figure raised $675 million from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and OpenAI for the development of the humanoid. In March, Nvidia’s CEO stood on the stage of the company’s developer conference alongside nine humanoids from different companies and announced that building models for robots is “one of the most exciting problems to solve in artificial intelligence”; in April, Elon Musk promised that he would launch the humanoid robot he is developing — Optimus — next year and predicted that by 2040 there will be a billion humanoids among us. A short time later, the activities of Mentee Robotics, Amnon Shashua’s company that was founded two years ago and also develops the humanoid, went public.
“My main life work, along with basic science, has been building our Wolfram language computational language for the purpose of having a way to express things computationally that’s useful to both humans and computers,” Wolfram told TechCrunch.
As AI developers and others start to think more deeply about how computers and people intersect, Wolfram says it is becoming much more of a philosophical exercise, involving thinking in the pure sense about the implications this kind of technology may have on humanity. That kind of complex thinking is linked to classical philosophy.
Continue reading “Stephen Wolfram thinks we need philosophers working on big questions around AI” »
Thorium may sound like something out of a Marvel comic book, but the radioactive metal could provide a very real, renewable energy source.
Chinese scientists have been working on a molten salt nuclear power plant using thorium for years. They even created a prototype reactor in 2021, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Like a supersonic jet being blasted with high-speed winds, Earth is constantly being bombarded by a stream of charged particles from the sun known as solar wind.
Just like wind around a jet or water around a boat, these solar wind streams curve around Earth’s magnetic field, or magnetosphere, forming on the sunward side of the magnetosphere a front called a bow shock and stretching it into a wind sock shape with a long tail on the nightside.
Dramatic changes to the solar wind alter the structure and dynamics of the magnetosphere. An example of such changes provides a glimpse into the behavior of other bodies in space, such as Jupiter’s moons and extrasolar planets.
The wing dynamics of flying animal species have been the inspiration for numerous flying robotic systems. While birds and bats typically flap their wings using the force produced by their pectoral and wing muscles, the processes underlying the wing movements of many insects remain poorly understood.
Researchers at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland) and Konkuk University (South Korea) recently set out to explore how herbivorous insects known as rhinoceros beetles deploy and retract their wings. The insight they gathered, outlined in a paper published in Nature, was then used to develop a new flapping microrobot that can passively deploy and retract its wings, without the need for extensive actuators.
“Insects, including beetles, are theoretically believed to use thoracic muscles to actively deploy and retract their wings at the wing bases, similarly to birds and bats,” Hoang-Vu Phan, the lead author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “However, methods of recording or monitoring muscular activity still cannot determine which muscles beetles use to deploy and retract their wings nor explain how they do so.”
A novel, water-resistant patch-wearable cardioverter-defibrillator (P-WCD) is safe and effective for patients at risk for sudden cardiac arrest, according to a study published in the Aug. 6 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
John Hummel, M.D., from The Ohio State University in Columbus, and colleagues assessed the safety and clinical effectiveness of a novel P-WCD. The analysis included 290 patients at risk for sudden cardiac arrest due to ventricular tachycardia/ventricular fibrillation who were not candidates for or refused an implantable defibrillator.
The researchers found that the clinically significant cutaneous adverse device effect rate was 2.30 percent, with no severe adverse effects. There were no device-related deaths or serious adverse events reported. The inappropriate shock rate was 0.36 per 100 patient-months. Nine patients received 11 shocks, of which nine shocks were adjudicated to be appropriate. Eight of nine appropriate shocks were successful with a single shock. Median wear time compliance was 23.5 hours per day.
First patient in UK gets dose of jab designed to kill most common form of lung cancer – and stop it coming back.
Brain-machine interfaces (BMIs) have emerged as a promising solution for restoring communication and control to individuals with severe motor impairments. Traditionally, these systems have been bulky, power-intensive, and limited in their practical applications. Researchers at EPFL have developed the first high-performance, Miniaturized Brain-Machine Interface (MiBMI), offering an extremely small, low-power, highly accurate, and versatile solution.
Published in the latest issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits (“MiBMI: A 192/512-Channel 2.46mm 2 Miniaturized Brain-Machine Interface Chipset Enabling 31-Class Brain-to-Text Conversion Through Distinctive Neural Codes”) and presented at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, the MiBMI not only enhances the efficiency and scalability of brain-machine interfaces but also paves the way for practical, fully implantable devices. This technology holds the potential to significantly improve the quality of life for patients with conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and spinal cord injuries.
An image of the chip. (Image: EPFL)
When Sam Payne reviewed a paper in March for Elsevier’s BioSystems, he didn’t expect to come across a figure he had created in his research. He quickly scrolled through the rest of the paper to find more figures, all copied from his work.
“It’s so blatant,” Payne, an associate professor of biology at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, posted on X.
Although the journal rejected the paper at Payne’s recommendation, he worried the authors would try to publish elsewhere.
