Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Both are AI-enabled, allowing them to take in their surroundings and learn and evolve over time. They know what time to start cooking a well-done burger so that it’s done at exactly the same time as a medium-rare burger for the same order, or could learn how to optimize oil use to minimize waste, for instance.

In a pre-pandemic time of restaurant labor shortages, Flippy kept kitchen productivity high and costs low, a giant deal in an industry known for tiny margins. Introducing Flippy into a kitchen can increase profit margins by a whopping 300%, not to mention significantly reduce the stress managers feel when trying to fill shifts.

But even if restaurants have an easier time finding workers as places reopen, Flippy and ROAR aren’t gunning for people’s jobs. They’re designed to be collaborative robots, or cobots, the cost-effective machines created to work with humans, not against them.

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Bioinspired research project a first step toward intrinsically translucent tissue.

Octopuses, squids and other sea creatures can perform a disappearing act by using specialized tissues in their bodies to manipulate the transmission and reflection of light, and now researchers at the University of California, Irvine have engineered human cells to have similar transparent abilities.

In a paper published today in Nature Communications, the scientists described how they drew inspiration from cephalopod skin to endow mammalian cells with tunable transparency and light-scattering characteristics.

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Rapid progress has been made in recent years to build these tiny machines, thanks to supramolecular chemists, chemical and biomolecular engineers, and nanotechnologists, among others, working closely together. But one area that still needs improvement is controlling the movements of swarms of molecular robots, so they can perform multiple tasks simultaneously.

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Flying automobiles have long been a staple of science fiction’s optimistic visions of tomorrow, right up there with rocket jetpacks, holidays on the moon, and robot butlers. And who wouldn’t want to climb into a vehicle capable of rising up into the air above the clogged arteries of traffic experienced on most major boulevards, highways, and freeways?

Now a lofty new air taxi being built by the Israeli startup firm Urban Aeronautics hopes to cash in on those promises with its new Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) car that unites technology with Jetsons-like futuristic dreams mostly only observed in films like Blade Runner, The Fifth Element, Back to the Future, and most recently on TV in Season 3 of HBO’s Westworld.

Cityhawk 2

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Every year, 2 million black hole mergers are missed — Australian scientists work out how to detect them, revealing a lost 8 billion light-years of Universe evolution.

Last year, the Advanced LIGO –VIRGO gravitational-wave detector network recorded data from 35 merging black holes and neutron stars. A great result — but what did they miss? According to Dr. Rory Smith from the ARC Centre of Excellence in Gravitational Wave Discovery at Monash University in Australia — it’s likely there are another 2 million gravitational wave events from merging black holes, “a pair of merging black holes every 200 seconds and a pair of merging neutron stars every 15 seconds” that scientists are not picking up.

Dr. Smith and his colleagues, also at Monash University, have developed a method to detect the presence of these weak or “background” events that to date have gone unnoticed, without having to detect each one individually. The method — which is currently being test driven by the LIGO community — “means that we may be able to look more than 8 billion light-years further than we are currently observing,” Dr. Smith said.

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Like many things about Elon Musk, Tesla’s approach to achieving autonomous driving is polarizing. Bucking the map-based trend set by industry veterans such as Waymo, Tesla opted to dedicate its resources in pursuing a vision-based approach to achieve full self-driving instead. This involves a lot of hard, tedious work on Tesla’s part, but today, there are indications that the company’s controversial strategy is finally paying off.

In a recent talk, Tesla AI Director Andrej Karpathy discussed the key differences between the map-based approach of Waymo and Tesla’s camera-based strategy. According to Karpathy, Waymo’s use of pre-mapped data and LiDAR make scaling difficult, since vehicles’ autonomous capabilities are practically tied to a geofenced area. Tesla’s vision-based approach, which uses cameras and artificial intelligence, is not. This means that Autopilot and FSD improvements can be rolled out to the fleet, and they would function anywhere.

This rather ambitious plan for Tesla’s full self-driving system has caught a lot of skepticism in the past, with critics pointing out that map-based FSD is the way to go. Tesla, in response, dug its heels in and doubled down on its vision-based initiative. This, in a way, resulted in Autopilot improvements and the rollout of FSD features taking a lot of time, particularly since training the neural networks, which recognize objects and driving behavior on the road, requires massive amounts of real-world data.

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By Valentina Lagomarsino figures by Sean Wilson

Nearly four months ago, Chinese researcher He Jiankui announced that he had edited the genes of twin babies with CRISPR. CRISPR, also known as CRISPR/Cas9, can be thought of as “genetic scissors” that can be programmed to edit DNA in any cell. Last year, scientists used CRISPR to cure dogs of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. This was a huge step forward for gene therapies, as the potential of CRISPR to treat otherwise incurable diseases seemed possible. However, a global community of scientists believe it is premature to use CRISPR in human babies because of inadequate scientific review and a lack of international consensus regarding the ethics of when and how this technology should be used.

Early regulation of gene-editing technology.

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