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Seventy-five people filed into a Washington State Convention Center meeting room Wednesday to hear about the latest advancements in artificial intelligence. In a pitching session reminiscent of a speed-dating event, about 10 Northwest startups hurriedly shared their accomplishments and aspirations with Japanese investors eager to stoke business relationships.

Master of ceremonies Tom Sato, co-founder of Kirkland-based investing firm Innovation Finders Capital, lightened the mood by cracking jokes as he translated the English-speaking founders’ business plans into Japanese, cautioning the attendees that he faced a challenge: “I have to understand what the hell they’re talking about.”

The A.I. Age | This 12-month series of stories explores the social and economic questions arising from the fast-spreading uses of artificial intelligence. The series is funded with the help of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative. Seattle Times editors and reporters operate independently of our funders and maintain editorial control over the coverage.

Three New Jersey teens brought home two international awards for their artificial intelligence robot, who competed at the International Robocup Junior Championship in Sydney, Australia earlier this month.

The team — made up of high school juniors Julian Lee of Livingston and Jeffrey Cheng from Bridgewater, and senior Alexander Lisenko, also of Bridgewater — won the third place World Title for Individual Team Tournament, and the Judge’s Award for Best Rescue Engineering Strategy in the Rescue Maze League.

The trio belongs to Storming Robots, a New Jersey-based Robotics Learning Lab, and competed against teams of 14- to 19-year-olds from around the world in the July 4–9 contest.

If your interest lies with robotics there are a multitude of different platforms for you to build. [Teemu Laurila] was frustrated with what was on offer, so designed his own with four-wheel double wishbone suspension and mecanum wheels for maximum flexibility.

It’s a design that has been through multiple revisions since its first iteration in 2015, and along the way it’s clear some thought has gone into it. That double wishbone suspension features an angle for a high ground clearance, and is fully sprung. Drive comes from small motor/gearboxes at each axle. The chassis meanwhile has plenty of space for a single-board computer, and has been specifically designed with the BeagleBone Black in mind.

This build isn’t fully DIY, as the mecanum wheels appear to be off-the-shelf items, but the rest of the project makes up for this. If you need to make your own, it’s hardly as though there aren’t any projects from which you can borrow components.

The Navy sent its expeditionary fast transport ship USNS Spearhead to sea to experiment with a number of cutting-edge technologies last week, including MartinUAV’s novel V-Bat drone. V-Bat is capable of infrastructure-independent vertical takeoff and landings while also retaining the high efficiency of a fixed-wing aircraft for long-endurance missions. Seeing as it can be launched and recovered in a nine square meter area and even in dense urban terrain, as well as on the tight decks of ships, the drone could have a lot of applications in the military, law enforcement/first responder, industrial, and environmental monitoring sectors.

France’s “Mastering Space” plan calls for an active defense against hostile satellites and new space-based surveillance capabilities to spot threats.

Gene editing is advancing at a faster pace than most of us can keep up with. One significant recent announcement was gene editing tool CRISPR’s application to non-genetic diseases thanks to a new ability to edit single letters in RNA.

Even as CRISPR reaches milestones like this, scientists continue to find new uses for it to treat genetic conditions. The next one that will hit clinics is a CRISPR treatment for a form of blindness called Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA).

Having been approved by the FDA in December, the treatment will be the first of its kind to be trialed in the US.

Think that robots need to be the size of a dog or even a full-grown person to be exciting? Not so, as the fast-developing field of micro-robotics demonstrates. As it turns out, in some cases the world’s most innovative robots may even be too small for many of us to see.

Scientists at work in laboratory. Photo: Public domain via Wikicommons.

CTech – When chemistry Nobel laureate Michael Levitt met his wife two years ago, he didn’t know it would lead to a wonderful friendship with a young Israeli scientist. When Israeli scientist Shahar Barbash decided to found a startup with the aim of cutting down the time needed to develop new medicine, he didn’t know that a friend’s wedding would help him score a meeting with a man many want to meet but few do. But Levitt’s wife is an old friend of Barbash’s parents, and the rest, as they say, is history.

One of the joys of being an old scientist is to encourage extraordinary young ones, Levitt, an American-British-Israeli biophysicist and a professor at Stanford University since 1987, said in a recent interview with Calcalist. He might have met Barbash because his wife knew his family, but that is not enough to make him go into business with someone, Levitt said. “I got on board because his vision excited me, even though I thought it would be very hard to realize.”

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Want to live a healthier, longer life? Try taking more prebiotics — also, don’t eat sometimes.

In this video, bestselling author Dave Asprey explains.