From bits to atoms.
Category: robotics/AI – Page 63
Creator behind AI actress responds to backlash: ‘She is not a replacement for a human being’
Artificial people may put a lot of actors out of work.
Tilly Norwood looks and sounds real, but she’s not real at all.
Created by Eline Van Der Velden, the CEO of the AI production company Particle6, the “actress” has garnered interest from studios with talent agents eyeing to sign her.
Variety reports, Van Der Velden explained at the Zurich Summit that studio interest has spiked since Tilly’s launch with agency representation expected soon. If signed, she would be one of the first AI-generated actresses to have talent representation.
Gaia solves mystery of tumbling asteroids and finds new way to probe their interiors
Whether an asteroid is spinning neatly on its axis or tumbling chaotically, and how fast it is doing so, has been shown to be dependent on how frequently it has experienced collisions. The findings, presented at the recent EPSC-DPS2025 Joint Meeting in Helsinki, are based on data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission and provide a means of determining an asteroid’s physical properties—information that is vital for successfully deflecting asteroids on a collision course with Earth.
“By leveraging Gaia’s unique dataset, advanced modeling and A.I. tools, we’ve revealed the hidden physics shaping asteroid rotation, and opened a new window into the interiors of these ancient worlds,” said Dr. Wen-Han Zhou of the University of Tokyo, who presented the results at EPSC-DPS2025.
During its survey of the entire sky, the Gaia mission produced a huge dataset of asteroid rotations based on their light curves, which describe how the light reflected by an asteroid changes over time as it rotates. When the asteroid data is plotted on a graph of the rotation period versus diameter, something startling stands out—there’s a gap, or dividing line that appears to split two distinct populations.
Engineers create first artificial neurons that could directly communicate with living cells
A team of engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has announced the creation of an artificial neuron with electrical functions that closely mirror those of biological ones. Building on their previous work using protein nanowires synthesized from electricity-generating bacteria, the team’s discovery means that we could see immensely efficient computers built on biological principles which could interface directly with living cells.
“Our brain processes an enormous amount of data,” says Shuai Fu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering at UMass Amherst and lead author of the study published in Nature Communications. “But its power usage is very, very low, especially compared to the amount of electricity it takes to run a Large Language Model, like ChatGPT.”
The human body is over 100 times more electrically efficient than a computer’s electrical circuit. The human brain is composed of billions of neurons, specialized cells that send and receive electrical impulses all over the body. While it takes only about 20 watts for your brain to, say, write a story, an LLM might consume well over a megawatt of electricity to do the same task.
The Dark Side of AI Hacking — Could Online Images Hijack Your Computer?
Explore how malicious images and pixel manipulation can hack AI agents, hijack systems, and bypass security. Learn risks, real-world cases, and protection strategies. AI hacking, malicious images, pixel manipulation attack, AI security, Trojan images, adversarial AI attacks, AI vulnerabilities, AI cybersecurity, image-based hacking, hijacking AI agents
51% of Japanese game makers use generative AI
51% of Japanese developers use generative AI in game development.
In new research from Tokyo Game Show organizer Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association (CESA), as reported by The Nikkei, of the 54 Japanese companies polled between June and July 2025, over half used genAI. Primarily, it’s used to assist with generating visual assets, images, and character art, as well as story generation, in-game text, and support with programming.
The 2025 CESA Video Game Industry Report also revealed that 32% of respondents were also using AI to develop in-house development engines.
Building better batteries with amorphous materials and machine learning
Lithium-ion batteries power most electronics, but they have limited energy density—they can store only a certain amount of energy per mass or volume of the battery.
“In order to store even more energy with the same mass or volume, you will have to explore alternative energy storage technologies,” says Sai Gautam Gopalakrishnan, Assistant Professor at the Department of Materials Engineering, IISc.
Gopalakrishnan and his team have studied how to boost the movement of ions in magnesium batteries, which can have a higher energy density.
Is violent AI-human conflict inevitable?
Are you worried that artificial intelligence and humans will go to war? AI experts are. In 2023, a group of elite thinkers signed onto the Center for AI Safety’s statement that “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”
In a survey published in 2024, 38% to 51% of top-tier AI researchers assigned a probability of at least 10% to the statement “advanced AI leading to outcomes as bad as human extinction.”
The worry is not about the Large Language Models (LLMs) of today, which are essentially huge autocomplete machines, but about Advanced General Intelligence (AGI)—still hypothetical long-term planning agents that can substitute for human labor across a wide range of society’s economic systems.
