Lifeboat Foundation

BOSTON, May 19 (UPI) — Engineers at MIT and Harvard have designed a tiny bee-like robot capable of pausing mid-flight to perch on a variety of objects before once again taking to the air. The robot uses static electricity to momentarily cling to the underside of objects.

Robots designed for aerial surveys and related observational tasks, like quadcopters, are currently limited by short flight times. They tend to run out of battery rather quickly. While perching won’t extend a drone’s actual time in the air, the technology could empower UAVs to employ their power more strategically — periodically taking a moment to rest their wings, or blades.

Researchers tested their technology on RoboBee, a bug-like flying robot no bigger than a quarter. A small jolt of static electricity emitted through a tiny foam patch on the bee’s head allows it to land on and adhere to the underside of a plant or to the ceiling.

Continue reading “MIT researchers unveil perching bee robot” »

Hmmm, no thanks.

The glue would be covered by an outer layer that peels away during an accident.

By reinventing the neural network, the company hopes to help computers make the leap from processing words and symbols to comprehending the real world.

In a blog post today, Uber showed off the self-driving car that’s been stealthily cruising around Pittsburgh. The car is a hybrid Ford Fusion and is currently in early stages of safety testing. This particular Uber test vehicle was first spotted almost a year ago by local Pittsburgh media, but this is Uber’s first acknowledgement of such tests.

Uber and Google (among others) have been racing to be the first to develop self-driving taxis for over a year now. Uber “cleaned out” Carnegie Mellon and the National Robotics Engineering Center to be part of its Advanced Technology Center in Pittsburgh, the research arm responsible for developing this “look ma, no hands” technology. This heavy hiring out of Carnegie Mellon could give Uber a big boost. The Pittsburgh-based university considers itself the birthplace of self-driving cars, and it probably is. CMU researchers were testing autonomous vehicles before Google even existed.

In March, Uber also joined a coalition, this time in partnership with Google, to advocate for self-driving adoption.

Continue reading “This Is Our First Good Look at Uber’s Self-Driving Car” »

This new SF Weekly story is one of the best long features on transhumanism I’ve ever read. It covers a myriad of futurist subjects. It’s out in print today too.

When John Lennon released “Imagine” in 1971, his lyrics about a brotherhood of man living life in peace struck many people as a simple, even anodyne, response to the Vietnam War. Although politically liberal, Lennon was no doctrinal Marxist — only three years earlier, his song “Revolution” had shrugged off people who “go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.” But the song struck many evangelical Christians as ghoulish, and for some, “Imagine” eventually came to be a sort of national anthem for the repressively secular, globalist state that was thought to be emerging: the anti-Christian New World Order that later became talk-radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ fever dream.

Left Behind, a series of 16 books written between 1995 and 2007 that details a possible end-of-the-world scenario, starting from when all good Christians go to heaven in an instant (the Rapture) until the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, specifically calls out “Imagine” as a weapon in Satan’s arsenal of seductive propaganda. The Antichrist in Left Behind is a suave, cosmopolitan Romanian named Nicolae Carpathia — the product of the fused sperm of two gay atheist academics, as it happens — who uses the global confusion in the aftermath of the Rapture to become Secretary General of the U.N. and eventually dictator of a world government that tattoos its citizens with the Mark of the Beast, damning them for eternity.

Continue reading “The Future Is Now for the Transhumanist Party” »

Posted by norm jouppi, distinguished hardware engineer, google.

Machine learning provides the underlying oomph to many of Google’s most-loved applications. In fact, more than 100 teams are currently using machine learning at Google today, from Street View, to Inbox Smart Reply, to voice search.

But one thing we know to be true at Google: great software shines brightest with great hardware underneath. That’s why we started a stealthy project at Google several years ago to see what we could accomplish with our own custom accelerators for machine learning applications.

Continue reading “Google supercharges machine learning tasks with TPU custom chip” »

Australian physicists’ team has developed a new research assistant to carry out experiments in quantum mechanics in an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm form, which quickly took control of the experiment, learned the job tasks and even innovated. In a statement, co-lead researcher Paul Wigley from the Australian National University (ANU) Research School of Physics and Engineering, said he didn’t expect that the machine would be able to conduct the experiment itself from scratch within an hour.

He added that in case a simple computer program had been used, it would have taken much more time than the age of the universe to go through all the combinations and work on it.

Scientists were looking forward to reconstruct an experiment that was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics, which included very cold gas trapped in a laser beam called a Bose-Einstein condensate.

Continue reading “AI Research Tool Runs Experiment that won 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics” »

US Navy paying D-Wave to train them on QC.

A division of the U.S. Navy intends to pay Canadian company D-Wave $11 million to learn how to use its quantum computing infrastructure, according to a federal filing posted online on Monday.

The unit seeking this training is the Navy’s Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center Pacific, known as SPAWAR or SSC-PAC for short, which is headquartered in San Diego and has previously researched amphibious throwable robots, unmanned aerial vehicles, virtual reality, and many other technologies. The filing does not actually cover the cost of quantum computing hardware. But NASA has been allowing SPAWAR scientists to learn how to use the D-Wave machine that it operates with Google at the NASA Ames Research Center, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported last month.

Continue reading “U.S. Navy’s SPAWAR will pay D-Wave $11 million for quantum computer training” »

Pressure is on DARPA by US Military to speed up on completing the soft Exosuit.

The clothing-like Soft Exosuit has been described as a “Wearable Robot” by the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) that’s commissioning universities and research institutions to advance this military technology. The DARPA Soft Exosuit is part of the agency’s Warrior Web program.

A prototype Soft Exosuit had a series of webbing straps around the lower half of the body with a low-power microprocessor and a network of flexible strain sensors. These electronics act as the “brain” and “nervous system” of the Soft Exosuit. They continuously monitor data signals, including suit tension, wearer position (walking, running, crouched) and more.

Continue reading “DARPA Speeds-up Work on ‘Soft Exosuit’ that will Strengthen US Soldiers” »