Lifeboat Foundation

Could robots with feelings be the next step in AI? A research paper discusses an interesting approach to robot design. It is titled “Homeostasis and soft robotics in the design of feeling machines” in Nature Machine Intelligence.

No need to see the robot as an enemy just because it takes on a robotic version of human feelings; the train of thought that the authors take is a distance away from fear and trembling by some futurists who ponder robots turning against their masters in an upside-down switch of master-servant roles.

Rather, Kingson Man and Antonio Damasio, the authors, choose to focus on machines acquiring homeostasis. Man and Damasio are with the Brain and Creativity Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

Walmart has transformed an ordinary grocery store into a 50,000-square-foot AI lab that tests new retail technologies in a real-world setting. The Intelligent Retail Lab is located in Levittown, New York, and is equipped with AI-powered sensors that keep track of the inventory and the freshness of the produce.

Next UpShows

Graphene, the super-strong, super-light and super-conductive material that was discovered in 2004 is often described as the material of the future. But it might be just the beginning.

Music: Glen Canyon

!!

Q beta prototype — with integrated power source. Silicon Crystal Graphite Powercells run this entire machine without external input.

Continue reading “WORLD’S FIRST — SELF POWERED Q Beta Prototype with Silicon Crystal Graphite Powercells” »

The specific type of TCP attack used in the recent spate of DDoS efforts were TCP SYN-ACK reflection attacks.

“The catastrophic weather conditions mean that things can change very quickly,” she told reporters in Sydney.

Catastrophic fire danger has been declared for Sydney and the Hunter Valley region to the north today with severe and extreme danger across vast tracts of the rest of the state.

The week-long declaration of a state of emergency gives the Rural Fire Service sweeping powers.

This week’s cover shows Nature’s publication record over 150 years. Explore the growing web of collaboration and science in an interactive graphic here: https://go.nature.com/32wf2SB

Every now and again, scientists discover fossils that are so bizarre they defy classification, their body plans unlike any other living animals or plants. Tullimonstrum (also known as the Tully Monster), a 300m-year-old fossil discovered in the Mazon Creek fossil beds in Illinois, US, is one such creature.

At first glance, Tully looks superficially slug-like. But where you would expect its mouth to be, the creature has a long thin appendage ending in what looks like a pair of grasping claws. Then there are its eyes, which protrude outward from its body on stalks.

Tully is so strange that scientists have even been unable to agree on whether it is a vertebrate (with a backbone, like mammals, birds, reptiles and fish) or an invertebrate (without a backbone, like insects, crustaceans, octopuses and all other animals). In 2016, a group of scientists claimed to have solved the mystery of Tully, providing the strongest evidence yet that it was a vertebrate. But my colleagues and I have conducted a new study that calls this conclusion into question, meaning this monster is as mysterious as ever.