Lifeboat Foundation

People have been dreaming of robot butlers for decades, but one of the biggest barriers has been getting machines to understand our instructions. Google has started to close the gap by marrying the latest language AI with state-of-the-art robots.

Human language is often ambiguous. How we talk about things is highly context-dependent, and it typically requires an innate understanding of how the world works to decipher what we’re talking about. So while robots can be trained to carry out actions on our behalf, conveying our intentions to them can be tricky.

If they have any ability to understand language at all, robots are typically designed to respond to short, specific instructions. More opaque directions like “I need something to wash these chips down” are likely to go over their heads, as are complicated multi-step requests like “Can you put this apple back in the fridge and fetch the chocolate?”

The JWST provides an intriguing look at the early universe, but it’s not yet rewriting fundamental theories of the cosmos.

In today’s society, being happy and having an optimistic attitude are social expectations that weigh heavily on how we live and the choices we make.

Some psychologists have pointed out how happiness has evolved into an industry. In turn, this has created what I call a happiness imperative, the social expectation that we should all aspire to happiness.

But this can be an obstacle to happiness. This is why, as a researcher in philosophical pessimism, I argue that if we actually want to live better lives, pessimism is the philosophical system that can help us achieve it.

NASA has dropped a remix of what a black hole sounds like — and it’s exactly what you’d expect. The hole in question sits 200 million light-years away in the Perseus galaxy cluster — an 11 million-light-year-wide set of galaxies packed with hot gas. In the clip, you can hear rumbling and groaning which feels fit for an episode of Stranger Things, but it’s actually pressure waves rippling through the hot gas.

Tesla Autopilot is now enabling the car to perceive the space around it thanks to the development of its Occupancy Networks.

SpaceLink intends to put four data relay satellites in Medium Earth Orbit, to complement and backup the Space Development Agency’s Transport Layer.

“We took skin biopsies from patients living with Huntington’s disease and reprogrammed the skin biopsies into neurons. We then compared these neurons with reprogrammed neurons from healthy people. The results are very interesting. We have found several defects that explain some of the disease mechanisms in neurons from patients with Huntington’s disease. Among other things, we observed that neurons from patients with Huntington’s disease show problems in breaking down and recycling a particular kind of protein – which can lead to a lack of energy in these cells”, says Johan Jakobsson, professor of neuroscience at Lund University.

The researchers have also measured the biological age of the cells and observed that the reprogrammed neurons retain their biological age, which is significant if they are to be used for research in the new model system.

ADAM SLAVNEY

However, the irony is as the planet warms, the technology we seek refuge in can only contribute to climate change, making the climate hotter. Room air conditioners are expected to quadruple to 4.5 billion by 2050, according to Scientific American.

The James Webb Space Telescope team is still flexing its ability to capture detailed images close to home. Webb has snapped a pair of near-infrared photos showing Jupiter’s polar auroras. You can also see the planet’s extremely faint rings and two of its smaller moons, Amalthea (the bright spot to the far left) and Adrastea (the dot at the left edge of the central ring).

The pictures were taken using NIRCam’s widefield view on July 27th. As for the trippy visuals? Astronomers created composites using several images produced with filters mapped to multiple colors (particularly visible in the image below). The Great Red Spot and other cloud formations are white as they reflect large amounts of sunlight.

The James Webb crew didn’t just create these images for the sake of bragging rights. The observations should provide more insights into Jupiter’s “inner life,” according to the European Space Agency. That, in turn, could help scientists understand the behavior of gas giants beyond the Solar System. In other words, Webb’s data could soon prove useful on multiple levels.