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Living organisms are capable of sensing and responding to their environment through reflex‐driven pathways. The grand challenge for mimicking such natural intelligence in miniature robots lies in achieving highly integrated body functionality, actuation, and sensing mechanisms. Here, somatosensory light‐driven robots (SLiRs) based on a smart thin‐film composite tightly integrating actuation and multisensing are presented. The SLiR subsumes pyro/piezoelectric responses and piezoresistive strain sensation under a photoactuator transducer, enabling simultaneous yet non‐interfering perception of its body temperature and actuation deformation states. The compact thin film, when combined with kirigami, facilitates rapid customization of low‐profile structures for morphable, mobile, and multiple robotic functionality. For example, an SLiR walker can move forward on different surfaces, while providing feedback on its detailed locomotive gaits and subtle terrain textures, and an SLiR anthropomorphic hand shows bodily senses arising from concerted mechanoreception, thermoreception, proprioception, and photoreception. Untethered operation with an SLiR centipede is also demonstrated, which can execute distinct, localized body functions from directional motility, multisensing, to wireless human and environment interactions. This SLiR, which is capable of integrated perception and motility, offers new opportunities for developing diverse intelligent behaviors in soft robots.

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Tom Cruise is going to film in space thanks to Elon Musk.

EXCLUSIVE: I’m hearing that Tom Cruise and Elon Musk’s Space X are working on a project with NASA that would be the first narrative feature film – an action adventure – to be shot in outer space. It’s not a Mission: Impossible film and no studio is in the mix at this stage but look for more news as I get it. But this is real, albeit in the early stages of liftoff.

Mission: Impossible Fallout took a break, literally when he broke his ankle in a leap from one rooftop to the other and he also hung from a helicopter; he hung from the side of a jet plane during takeoff in Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation, and in Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol he scaled the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai skyscraper, and executed stunts 123 floors up. He is meticulous in preparing these stunts he does, which are frightening just to watch.

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The triumph of Google’s AlphaGo in 2016 against Go world champion Lee Sedol by 4:1 caused quite the stir that reached far beyond the Go community, with over a hundred million people watching while the match was taking place. It was a milestone in the development of AI: Go had withstood the attempts of computer scientists to build algorithms that could play at a human level for a long time. And now an artificial mind had been built, dominating someone that had dedicated thousands of hours of practice to hone his craft with relative ease.

This was already quite the achievement, but then AlphaGoZero came along, and fed AlphaGo some of its own medicine: it won against AlphaGo with a margin of 100:0 only a year after Lee Sedol’s defeat. This was even more spectacular, and for more than the obvious reasons. AlphaGoZero was not only an improved version of AlphaGo. Where AlphaGo had trained with the help of expert games played by the best human Go players, AlphaGoZero had started literally from zero, working the intricacies of the game out without any supervision.

Given nothing more than the rules of the game and how to win, it had locked itself in its virtual room and played against itself for only 34 hours. It didn’t combine historically humanity’s built up an understanding of the principles and aesthetics of the game with the unquestionably superior numerical power of computers, but it emerged, just by itself, as the dominant Go force of the known universe.

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Eric klein.

If you followed the world of pop-culture or tech for some time now, then you know that advances in artificial intelligence are heating up. In reality, AI has been the talk of mainstream pop-culture and sci-fi since the first Terminator movie came out in 1984. These movies present an example of something called “Artificial General Intelligence.” So how close are we to that?

No, not how close are we to when the terminators take over, but how close are we to having an AI capable of navigating nearly any problem it’s presented with.

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What are some of ways that technology can be used to combat things like racism, bipartisan politics, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and extreme prejudice? Especially when these things are systemically embedded in certain cultures to the point that rationality seems to fly out the window? I see conversations on social media in peaceful international groups such as this one as a great potential stepping stone to mediate the tension between groups who seem to be devoted to blind hatred for one another. What are some other ways technology can advance social and political sciences?

“This article analyzes the narratives of Islamophobia in Hindu Nationalism (Hindutva). Specifically, it analyzes how Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, from the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), articulates Islamophobia in his speeches, interviews, and podcasts. In total, a discourse analysis of 35 such documents has been conducted. Conceptually, this article applies the notion of language-games to understand how Modi articulates Islamophobia. The article contends that while Modi’s Islamophobia is executed subtly, it is nonetheless a function of the way in which Hindutva conceives of Muslims as subordinate to Hindus. Two Islamophobic narratives in Modi’s political discourse have been mapped out: the erasure of Indian Muslim histories in Modi’s economic development agenda, and the characterization of Hinduism as having a taming effect on Islam in India. The article provides a conceptual overview of language-games and a review of how Hindutva defines Hindus and Muslims, before analyzing how Modi articulates Islamophobia. The article concludes by suggesting that a Hindutva-driven Islamophobia may have permeated into the Hindu mainstream.”

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John Horton Conway, a legendary mathematician who stood out for his love of games and for bringing mathematics to the masses, died on Saturday, April 11, in New Brunswick, New Jersey, from complications related to COVID-19. He was 82.

Known for his unbounded curiosity and enthusiasm for subjects far beyond mathematics, Conway was a beloved figure in the hallways of Princeton’s mathematics building and at the Small World coffee shop on Nassau Street, where he engaged with students, faculty and mathematical hobbyists with equal interest.

Conway, who joined the faculty in 1987, was the John von Neumann Professor in Applied and Computational Mathematics and a professor of mathematics until 2013 when he transferred to emeritus status.

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There’s an iconic scene in the original Star Wars movie where Luke Skywalker looks out over the desert landscape of Tatooine at the amazing spectacle of a double sunset.

Now, a new study out of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) suggests that such exotic exoplanet worlds orbiting multiple stars may exist in misaligned orbits, far out of the primary orbital plane.

The find has implications for planetary formation in complex multiple star systems. The study used ALMA (the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array) in Chile to look at 19 protoplanetary disks around binary stars with longer period orbits, versus a dozen binary stars known to host exoplanets with periods less than 40 days found in the Kepler space telescope observations.

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