Robots equipped with the π0.5 AI model were tested in homes they had never seen before Physical Intelligence An AI enabling robots to do chores like making the bed or cleaning up spills in homes it has never seen before could allow many more robots to become generally useful, its creators say. Large language models…
A University of Nebraska-Lincoln engineering team is another step closer to developing soft robotics and wearable systems that mimic the ability of human and plant skin to detect and self-heal injuries. Engineer Eric Markvicka, along with graduate students Ethan Krings and Patrick McManigal, recently presented a paper at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and…
A protein that gives fleas their bounce has been used to boot out bacteria cells, with lab results demonstrating the material’s potential for preventing medical implant infection. The collaborative study led by researchers at RMIT University in Australia is the first reported use of antibacterial coatings made from resilin-mimetic proteins to fully block bacteria from…
AI models go head-to-head in Chatbot Arena Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images An industry-standard league table for ranking artificial intelligence models is being deliberately distorted by technology giants, researchers have claimed, leading to a misleading picture of which AIs are the best. Sara Hooker at Cohere Labs, a US non-profit, and her colleagues claim to have found…
The chirp of the cicada, the sound of many summers, has received an electronic upgrade that turns the insects into cyborg loudspeakers playing anything from Pachelbel’s Canon to the theme from Top Gun. The researchers behind the work say it could be used to spread warning messages during an emergency. Naoto Nishida and his colleagues…
From sundials to atomic clocks, our understanding of time has become a lot more accurate as technological developments allowed us to measure it more precisely. Much more than helping us arrive on time, clocks permit us to discern our location. Longitude, for example, is determined by measuring the difference in time from a set position,…
Many people have strong beliefs about whether abortion should be legal Michael Bihmayer/Imago/Alamy Does God exist? Should we legalise all drugs? Are the Harry Potter books any good? Your position on these thorny questions and more can now be predicted by an artificial intelligence model that was trained on the beliefs of more than 40,000…
Microsoft compared Liquid Glass to Windows Vista on its Instagram account It’s rather late to the party in drawing this kind of comparison Mind you, if anyone has a right to do so, it’s Microsoft, which brought in transparency with the Aero effect on the desktop of Vista Microsoft has joined the throng of those…
Illustration of a chip containing quantum bits, or qubits Pete Hansen/Shutterstock The effort to build truly useful quantum computers often comes down to making them bigger by adding qubits, the quantum bits that are the basic building blocks of these devices. But creating quantum chaos inside them could have the same effect – and let…
