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Category: robotics/AI

Since January, construction has been underway on a huge Gundam robot—a popular fictional robot that appears in some 50 TV series and movies since 1979, not to mention a slew of video games and manga. Coming in at about 60 feet tall, the Gundam will be impossible to miss from the Port of Yokohama, just south of Tokyo, where it will call home for a full year.

Although the COVID-19 pandemic has halted progress on various construction projects, worldwide, the Gundam perseveres. You can check out the progress for yourself in this YouTube video, uploaded by Michael Overstreet.

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A Russian Soyuz rocket will launch a robotic cargo ship packed with tons of supplies to the International Space Station Thursday (July 29), and you can watch the launch live.

Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, will launch the uncrewed Progress 76 supply ship to the station at 10:26 a.m. EDT (1426 GMT) from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, where the local time will be 7:26 p.m. You can watch the launch live here and on the Space.com homepage, courtesy of NASA TV.

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Machine learning performed by neural networks is a popular approach to developing artificial intelligence, as researchers aim to replicate brain functionalities for a variety of applications.

A paper in the journal Applied Physics Reviews, by AIP Publishing, proposes a new approach to perform computations required by a , using light instead of electricity. In this approach, a photonic tensor core performs multiplications of matrices in parallel, improving speed and efficiency of current deep learning paradigms.

In , neural networks are trained to learn to perform unsupervised decision and classification on unseen data. Once a neural network is trained on data, it can produce an inference to recognize and classify objects and patterns and find a signature within the data.

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However, to dismiss the subject as fantastical or unnecessary would be akin to telling scientists 100 years ago that landing on the moon was also irrelevant.

This is because, for pioneers and champions of artificial intelligence, quantum computing is the holy grail. It’s not a make-believe fantasy; rather, it’s a tangible area of science that will take our probability-driven world into a whole new dimension.

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The core of GPT-3, which is a creation of OpenAI, an artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco, is a general language model designed to perform autofill. It is trained on uncategorized internet writings, and basically guesses what text ought to come next from any starting point. That may sound unglamorous, but a language model built for guessing with 175 billion parameters — 10 times more than previous competitors — is surprisingly powerful.

With attention focused on a pandemic and an election, AI has taken a major leap forward.

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Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars: Space, Exploration, and Life on Earth by Kate Greene St. Martin’s Press, 2020 hardcover, 240 pp. ISBN 978−1−250−15947−2 US$27.

While the robotic missions launching to Mars this year have a wide range of science goals, they are widely seen as precursors for eventual human missions to the Red Planet. NASA’s Mars 2020 mission includes an experiment called MOXIE that will demonstrate a way to produce oxygen from the carbon dioxide in the Martian atmosphere, a capability that will be essential for future human expeditions. NASA’s fiscal year 2021 budget proposal included a request to start work on a Mars Ice Mapper mission, an orbiter that would search for subsurface ice deposits that could be resources for future human expeditions.

Much of the planning for future Mars missions is focused on various capabilities needed to safely transport humans to the surface of Mars and bring them back. But beyond technologies like in situ resource utilization and supersonic retropropulsion are more mundane, but no less essential, matters: How will the crew eat? How will they deal with boredom on the long mission? How will they get along with one another in a confined space?

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