Sophisticated spacecraft often run on shockingly outdated computing systems: consider that the Perseverance rover runs on a PowerPC 750, the processor famous for running on iMacs in the late 1990s.
San Francisco-based Aethero is aiming to bring more powerful computing systems to orbit, and their first payload launches this month on SpaceX’s Transporter-11 rideshare mission. The computer, a small, stackable MVP called AetherNxN that’s built on an Nvidia Orin processor, will be getting extra protection from a new radiation shielding material that the product’s developers, Cosmic Shielding Corporation (CSC), say could help unlock a new era for computing in space.
Today, electronics in space are protected from harmful radiation in two ways. They’re physically shielded, using some combination of materials like aluminum and tantalum, and they’re radiation hardened, which generally means that they’re designed in ways that increase their tolerance to radiation exposure. The AetherNxN computer is rad-hardened, but adding CSC’s shielding “enables us to bring that AI-capable of hardware into space and have it operate under these very hostile conditions,” Aethero cofounder Edward Ge said in a recent interview.
It resembles a malevolent robot from 1980s sci-fi but West Japan Railway’s new humanoid employee was designed with nothing more sinister than a spot of painting and gardening in mind.
Starting this month, the machine with a crude head and coke-bottle eyes mounted on a truck—which can drive on rails—will be put to use for maintenance work on the firm’s network.
Its operator sits in a cockpit on the truck, “seeing” through the robot’s eyes via cameras and operating its powerful limbs and hands remotely.
Ways to interact with virtual versions of our deceased loved ones are now a possibility – but there’s a raft of ethical and emotional challenges involved.
NASA astronauts Mike Barratt, Matt Dominick, Tracy C. Dyson, Jeanette Epps, Butch Wilmore, and Suni Williams share a Fourth of July message and extend their best wishes to those back on Earth in a video recorded on June 28, 2024.
The crew members are currently living and working aboard the International Space Station. Their missions aim to advance scientific knowledge and test new technologies for future human and robotic missions to the Moon and Mars, including NASA’s Artemis lunar missions.
Speech recognition, weather forecasts, smart home applications: Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things are enhancing our everyday lives. Systems based on reservoir computing are a very promising new field.
The research group led by Prof Dr. Karin Everschor-Sitte at the University of Duisburg-Essen (UDE), is conducting research in this area. They are primarily investigating new possibilities for reservoir computing, for example using magnetic materials.
Now, together with specialists from the field of ferroelectric materials, the team has shown that these systems are also suitable for processing complex data faster and more efficiently. Their results have been published in Nature Reviews Physics.
In an ongoing game of cosmic hide and seek, scientists have a new tool that may give them an edge. Physicists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have developed a computer program incorporating machine learning that could help identify blobs of plasma in outer space known as plasmoids. In a novel twist, the program has been trained using simulated data.
The program will sift through reams of data gathered by spacecraft in the magnetosphere, the region of outer space strongly affected by Earth’s magnetic field, and flag telltale signs of the elusive blobs. Using this technique, scientists hope to learn more about the processes governing magnetic reconnection, a process that occurs in the magnetosphere and throughout the universe that can damage communications satellites and the electrical grid.
Scientists believe that machine learning could improve plasmoid-finding capability, aid the basic understanding of magnetic reconnection and allow researchers to better prepare for the aftermath of reconnection-caused disturbances.
#aliens #robots Welcome to an extraordinary exploration of artificial intelligence and its cosmic counterpart, the astro-chicken! Join me in this mind-blowing video where we delve into the captivating concept of interstellar colonization. You can find my book Gravity: From Falling Apples to Supermassive Black Holes here on Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gravity-Fall… The Cosmic Mystery Tour here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cosmic-Myste… Artificial intelligences offers the only way to explore the stars. Humans are very delicate and not at all suited to interstellar travel. After all, it is a long long way to the stars. The nearest star is 40 trillion kilometres away. The distance between the stars is too great for it to be feasible to travel so far within human lifespans. The limitations of our biology will prevent us from exploring deep space in person. Although we might like to fantasize about traveling from star system to star system with Captain Kirk, it is almost inconceivable that any humans will ever reach the stars. But maybe there is another way to colonize the galaxy. The British theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson certainly thought so. In the 1960s Dyson, who was one of the architects of quantum electrodynamics — our best theory of electromagnetism — speculated that any sufficiently advanced civilisation would explore the galaxy by launching fleets of autonomous self-replicating robots. There are, of course, many advantages to sending robots rather than humanoids. Robots are more robust than organic lifeforms, they never get bored, and they require far less in the way of maintenance and life support systems. They can survive in harsh environments, and they are adaptable — they can be upgraded. Robots equipped with artificial intelligence could operate autonomously and perform tasks that are impossible for humans, and they could survive indefinitely. Robots could also be miniaturized so they would require far less propulsion to send them on their way. Dyson’s robots would take a blueprint or template that would enable them to create more self-replicating robots. On arrival at a suitable asteroid or planet they would establish a base and set up a means of generating and storing energy. They would then extract and refine minerals and eventually build factories with assembly lines for creating more autonomous robots, each with its own copy of the blueprint, and a propulsion system for the colonization of other star systems. Dyson called these robots astro-chickens. They would travel between the stars as cosmic eggs, hatch on arrival at a suitable destination, then create and disperse the next generation of cosmic eggs. There is no reason, in principle, why super-advanced civilizations could not create such robot explorers. They could attain high speeds as cosmic eggs using some sort of nuclear fusion engine, perhaps. The diameter of our galaxy is about 100,000 light years. Traveling between stars at a significant fraction of the speed of light, the astro-chickens could colonize the entire galaxy in under one million years, which is not long by astronomical or evolutionary time-scales. So where are the astro-chickens? No artefact of an alien civilization has ever been discovered. But, if alien civilizations exist, it might be easier to find their robot descendants than the original aliens. Maybe they are closer than we think. In fact, I have already created my own design for an autonomous, self-replicating robot, which you can witness here on my laptop. Prepare to be enthralled!
