Lifeboat Foundation

Could autonomous CubeSats someday be used for deep space exploration? This is what a recent demonstration by SpaceX’s Starling swarm of four CubeSats hopes to address as NASA announced the 10-month primary mission of the swarm successfully completed its primary mission objectives as part of multiple experiments. This demonstration holds the potential to help develop CubeSats capable of conducting deep space exploration missions without the need for constant communication with Earth as they could communicate with each other.

“The success of Starling’s initial mission represents a landmark achievement in the development of autonomous networks of small spacecraft,” said Roger Hunter, who is the Program Manager for NASA’s Small Spacecraft Technology Program (STTP) at NASA’s Ames Research Center. “The team has been very successful in achieving our objectives and adapting in the face of challenges.”

For the demonstration, the four CubeSats successfully studied the Earth’s ionosphere while communicating with each other regarding next steps for continued analysis. This provided the opportunity for each spacecraft to equally contribute to the mission while decreasing human involvement.

Humans can innately perform a wide range of movements, as this allows them to best tackle various tasks in their day-to-day life. Automatically reproducing these motions in virtual avatars and 3D animated human-like characters could be highly advantageous for many applications, ranging from metaverse spaces to digital entertainment, AI interfaces and robotics.

Researchers at Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems and ETH Zurich recently developed WANDR, a new model that can generate natural human motions for avatars. This model, to be introduced in a paper presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2024) in June, unifies different data sources under a single model to attain more realistic motions in 3D humanoid characters. The paper is also posted to the arXiv preprint server.

“At a high-level, our research aims at figuring out what it takes to create virtual humans able to behave like us,” Markos Diomataris, first author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “This essentially means learning to reason about the world, how to move in it, setting goals and trying to achieve them.

With advances in genomics research, personalized medicine, and sequencing-based technologies, there is a necessity for purification of high-quality genomic DNA from large volumes of blood. The rapidly growing landscape of biorepositories that store large amounts of DNA from an enormous number of biospecimens further fuels this need to find optimized solutions for reliable purification of DNA. The information derived from the purified DNA is crucial to health science research and facilitates drug discovery, biomarker discovery, clinical implementation projects, etc. For the success of these analyses and to derive relevant information, DNA extraction is the most critical step and must meet the criteria of extraction speed, yield and quality, as well as reproducibility. Many nucleic acid purification kits and automation workflows for processing blood samples in the volume range of 100–250 μL exist, but not many convenient, automated options exist for volumes as high as 2 mL without sample splitting. To fill this opening, Omega Bio-tek has developed a semi-automated solution on the MagBinder^® Fit²⁴ to extract DNA from large volumes of fresh or frozen blood. Here, we provide background information on biobanks, as well as present the solution Omega Bio-tek has developed for DNA extraction from large volumes of whole blood.

A biobank is a specialized repository that systematically collects, processes, stores, and manages biological samples for use in medical research and treatments. The primary purpose of a biobank is to provide a centralized and organized resource of high-quality biological materials, such as blood or tissue, along with relevant clinical and demographic data¹. These invaluable assets are at the center of advancements in cancer treatments, biomarker discovery, and understanding genetic factors for disease. At a high level, biobanks can be classified by two categories¹:

As the AI research community forges ahead with robotic brains, many of those who actually build robots caution that the hardware also presents a challenge: robots are complicated and break a lot.

The melding of artificial intelligence and robotics could catapult both to new heights.

Continue reading “The AI revolution is coming to robots: how will it change them?” »

Awkward.

“The prevalence and harms of online misinformation is a perennial concern for internet platforms, institutions and society at large,” reads the paper. “The rise of generative AI-based tools, which provide widely-accessible methods for synthesizing realistic audio, images, video and human-like text, have amplified these concerns.”

The study, first caught by former Googler Alexios Mantzarlis and flagged in the newsletter Faked Up, focused on media-based misinformation, or bad information propagated through visual mediums like images and videos. To narrow the scope of the research, the study focused on media that was fact-checked by the service ClaimReview, ultimately examining a total of 135,838 fact-check-tagged pieces of online media.

Continue reading “Even Google’s Own Researchers Admit AI Is Top Source of Misinformation Online” »

Do you worry that you’ll get to the end of a good list and have nothing more, leaving you sad and starved of data? Worry no more! — ianb/infinite-ai-array.

Want to go on an unforgettable trip? Abstract Submission closing soon! Exciting news from SnT, Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust, University of Luxembourg! We are thrilled to announce the 1st European Interstellar Symposium in collaboration with esteemed partners like the Interstellar Research Group, Initiative & Institute for Interstellar Studies, Breakthrough Prize Foundation, and Luxembourg Space Agency. This interdisciplinary symposium will delve into the profound questions surrounding interstellar travel, exploring topics such as human and robotic exploration, propulsion, exoplanet research, life support systems, and ethics. Join us to discuss how these insights will impact near-term applications on Earth and in space, covering technologies like optical communications, ultra-lightweight materials, and artificial intelligence. Don’t miss this opportunity to connect with a community of experts and enthusiasts, all united in a common goal. Check out the “Call for Papers” link in the comment section to secure your spot! Image credit: Maciej Rębisz, Science Now Studio #interstellar #conference #Luxembourg #exoplanet

1947 was an interesting year. Not that I was there myself, you understand, but I’ve heard stories. For example, 1947 was the year the Hungarian-British electrical engineer and physicist Dennis Gabor invented holography. 1947 was also the year William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain demonstrated the first transistor at Bell Labs. Also in 1947, Alan Turing gave what the Encyclopedia Britannica describes as “Quite possibly the earliest public lecture to mention computer intelligence.” Now, a mere 77 years later, these three fields are coming together in awesome ways.

Dr. Deepan Balakrishnan, the first author, said, “Our work shows the theoretical framework for single-shot 3D imaging with TEMs. We are developing a generalized method using physics-based machine learning models that learn material priors and provide 3D relief for any 2D projection.”

The team also envisions further generalizing the formulation of pop-out metrology beyond TEMs to any coherent imaging system for optically thick samples (i.e., X-rays, electrons, visible light photons, etc.).

Prof Loh added, “Like human vision, inferring 3D information from a 2D image requires context. Pop-out is similar, but the context comes from the material we focus on and our understanding of how photons and electrons interact with them.”