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Google’s new lab is indicative of a broader effort to bring so-called machine learning to robotics. Researchers are exploring similar techniques at places like the University of California, Berkeley, and OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab founded by the Silicon Valley kingpins Elon Musk and Sam Altman. In recent months, both places have spawned start-ups trying to commercialize their work.


In 2013, the company started an ambitious, flashy effort to create robots. Now, its goals are more modest, but the technology is subtly more advanced.

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We interviewed Andrew Yang, a Democratic candidate for president of the United States who has made an answer to automation one of the central issues of his campaign. The tech-minded candidate shares his thoughts on drones, geo-engineering, asteroid detection, space force and more!

#AndrewYang #Yang2020 #WhatTheFuture

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Rocket Lab has successfully launched its first rocket of 2019, a mission for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that will test a novel method to deploy a satellite antenna in orbit.

The Electron rocket carrying the single satellite lifted off today, Thursday, March 28 from the company’s Launch Complex 1 on the Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand, where all of the company’s previous four rockets have also launched from. As per tradition, the rocket was given a nickname, this time being “Two Thumbs Up” – in honor of a team member who tragically died in a motorbike accident recently.

Inside the rocket is DARPA’s Radio Frequency Risk Reduction Deployment Demonstration (R3D2) satellite. Weighing in at 150 kilograms (330 pounds), it is the largest single satellite Rocket Lab has ever launched. Indeed, 150 kilograms is the upper limit of what the Electron can lift.

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In the future, some commonly prescribed medication may have tiny trackers built into each capsule that monitor patients who take them. The technology is part of the ID-Cap system created by etectRx, a Florida company. The system has been submitted to the FDA for review and will undergo a 90-day study with Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Fenway Institute.

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Pain is something that the vast majority of us just have to deal with, and sometimes on a daily basis. Not being able to feel pain is almost unimaginable, but that’s the life one woman in Scotland has been living for 66 years. She doesn’t feel cuts, burns, and even surgery doesn’t register with her, and she’s lived her entire life thinking that was perfectly normal.

Her case, which was published in the British Journal of Anaesthesia, only caught the attention of doctors after she recovered from orthopedic hand surgery with no reported pain. As with all patients, she was given a suite of pain-numbing meds while the operation was carried out, but even after the drugs wore off she reported absolutely no pain whatsoever. That’s when doctors realized something was amiss.

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