Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
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Category: robotics/AI

A team of researchers from the University of Maryland has 3D printed a soft robotic hand that is agile enough to play Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros. — and win!

The feat, highlighted on the front cover of the latest issue of Science Advances, demonstrates a promising innovation in the field of soft robotics, which centers on creating new types of flexible, that are powered using water or air rather than electricity. The inherent safety and adaptability of soft robots has sparked interest in their use for applications like prosthetics and biomedical devices. Unfortunately, controlling the fluids that make these soft robots bend and move has been especially difficult—until now.

The key breakthrough by the team, led by University of Maryland assistant professor of mechanical engineering Ryan D. Sochol, was the ability to 3D print fully assembled soft robots with integrated fluidic circuits in a single step.

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Nick Saraev is 25 years old, far too young, it would seem, to be thinking about death. And yet, since he turned 21, he has taken steps to prevent the infirmities of old age. Every day, he takes 2000 mg of fish oil and 4000 IU of vitamin D to help prevent heart disease and other ailments. He steams or pressure-cooks most of his meals because, he says, charring meats creates chemicals that may increase the risk of cancer. And in the winter, he keeps the humidity of his home at 35 percent, because dry air chaps his skin and makes him cough, both of which he considers manifestations of chronic inflammation, which may be bad for longevity.

Based on the life expectancies of young men in North America, Saraev, a freelance software engineer based near Vancouver, believes he has about 55 years before he really has to think about aging. Given the exponential advances in microprocessors and smartphones in his lifetime, he insists the biotech industry will figure out a solution by then. For this reason, Saraev, like any number of young, optimistic, tech-associated men, believes that if he takes the correct preventative steps now, he might well live forever. Saraev’s plan is to keep his body in good enough shape to hit “Longevity Escape Velocity,” a term coined by English gerontologist Aubrey de Grey to denote slowing down your aging enough to reach each new medical advance as it arrives. If you delay your death by 10 years, for example, that’s 10 more years scientists have to come up with a drug, computer program, or robot assist that can make you live even longer. Keep up this game of reverse leapfrog, and eventually death can’t catch you. The term is reminiscent of “planetary escape velocity,” the speed an object needs to move in order to break free of gravity.

The science required to break free of death, unfortunately, is still at ground level. According to Nir Barzilai, M.D., director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City, scientists currently understand aging as a function of seven to nine biological hallmarks, factors that change as we grow older and seem to have an anti-aging effect when reversed. You can imagine these as knobs you can turn up or down to increase or decrease the likelihood of illness and frailty. Some of these you may have heard of, including how well cells remove waste, called proteostasis; how well cells create energy, or mitochondrial function; how well cells implement their genetic instructions, or epigenetics; and how well cells maintain their DNA’s integrity, called DNA repair or telomere erosion.

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Unlike DeepMind, the UW Medicine team’s method, which they dubbed RoseTTAFold, is freely available. Scientists from around the world are now using it to build protein models to accelerate their own research. Since July, the program has been downloaded from GitHub by over 140 independent research teams.

Accurate protein structure prediction now accessible to all.

Scientists have waited months for access to highly accurate protein structure prediction since DeepMind presented remarkable progress in this area at the 2020 Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction, or CASP14, conference. The wait is now over.

Researchers at the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle have largely recreated the performance achieved by DeepMind on this important task. These results were published online by the journal Science on July 15, 2021.

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The chip world’s most important machines are made near corn fields in the Netherlands. The U.S. is trying to block China from buying them.

The one-of-a-kind, 180-ton machines are used by companies including Intel Corp., South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co. and leading Apple Inc. supplier Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. to make the chips in everything from cutting-edge smartphones and 5G cellular equipment to computers used for artificial intelligence.

China wants the $150-million machines for domestic chip makers, so smartphone giant Huawei Technologies Co. and other Chinese tech companies can be less reliant on foreign suppliers. But ASML hasn’t sent a single one because the Netherlands—under pressure from the U.S.—is withholding an export license to China.

The Biden administration has asked the government to restrict sales because of national-security concerns, according to U.S. officials. The stance is a holdover from the Trump White House, which first identified the strategic value of the machine and reached out to Dutch officials.

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Machine learning and artificial intelligence (ML/AI) are rapidly becoming an indispensable part of physics research, with domain applications ranging from theory and materials prediction to high-throughput data analysis. In parallel, the recent successes in applying ML/AI methods for autonomous systems from robotics to self-driving cars to organic and inorganic synthesis are generating enthusiasm for the potential of these techniques to enable automated and autonomous experiments (AE) in imaging. Here, we aim to analyze the major pathways toward AE in imaging methods with sequential image formation mechanisms, focusing on scanning probe microscopy (SPM) and (scanning) transmission electron microscopy ((S)TEM).

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A New Yorker review of “Roadrunner,” a documentary about the deceased celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain by the Oscar-winning filmmaker Morgan Neville, reveals that a peculiar method was used to create a voice over of an email written by Bourdain. In addition to using clips of Bourdain’s voice from various media appearances, the filmmaker says he had an “A.I. model” of Bourdain’s voice created in order to complete the effect of Bourdain ‘reading’ from his own email in the film. “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Neville told the reviewer, Helen Rosner. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”

On Twitter, some media observers decided to start the panel right away.

“This is unsettling,” tweeted Mark Berman, a reporter at the Washington Post, while ProPublica reporter and media manipulation expert Craig Silverman tweeted “this is not okay, especially if you don’t disclose to viewers when the AI is talking.” Indeed, “The ‘ethics panel’ is supposed to happen BEFORE they release the project,” tweeted David Friend, Entertainment reporter at The Canadian Press.

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Argonne researchers across the laboratory complex are using AI to design better materials and processes, safeguard the nation’s power grid, accelerate medical treatments, automate traditional research, and drive discovery.

Armed with some of the world’s brightest minds and best computing resources, Argonne is at the forefront of AI research, playing an integral role in applying innovative AI methods to solve problems and change lives.

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The inventor of the first robot in Greece, Konstantinos Soukos, has pushed Greece into a new era by creating laser weapons that target drones.

When the inventor and businessman Konstantinos Soukos built the first robot in Greece in 1985, he did not imagine that 36 years later he would supply many military forces across the world.

One of the newest creations that stands out at the DEFEA 2021 Defence Exhibition in Athens is the High Energy Laser Weapon developed by the Soukos Robots company which promises to transfer energy at lightning speed.

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BlenderBot 2.0 is better at conducting more extended, more knowledgeable, and factually consistent conversations over multiple sessions than the existing state-of-the-art chatbot. BlenderBot’s improved conversational abilities have made it a serious contender for artificial intelligence research.

The AI model takes the information it gets from conversations and stores them in long-term memory. The knowledge is stored separately for each person they speak to, which ensures that new information learned in one conversation can’t be used against another.

This model can read and respond in real-time, making it an excellent tool for keeping up with current events. It can scan the internet for new information to have a more up-to-date conversation.

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