Lifeboat Foundation

Elon Musk teased the next iteration of Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus 2.0 on X recently.

“The new Optimus design, which will be complete later this year, is something special,” Musk replied to an X post.

In June, Tesla shared a few updates about Optimus and the milestones the humanoid robot has reached over the past year. According to Tesla, Optimus has already undergone three major design revisions. The humanoid robot’s hand were revised four times in the last two years.

There’s $1 million at stake.

AMD is reportedly planning to develop Glass Substrate chips as early as 2025 as Intel & Samsung eye mass production for post-2025.

Glass Substrates Are Expected To Be The Next Big Thing For The Tech Industry, Intel & Samsung Eye Towards Establishing Their Production While AMD Aims Chip Development As Early As 2025

Glass substrates are used in packaging solutions to replace organic materials. They have numerous benefits, such as higher packaging strength, which ensures more extended durability & reliability, and a higher interconnected density since glass is usually much thinner than organic material. This allows the integration of multiple transistors into a single pack. It is said to overcome flaws associated with traditional methods and open a new wave of innovation for computing chips employing glass substrates.

Apple is developing technology that would allow any number of willing people in close proximity to start an audio chat, using only an iPhone and a headset like AirPods, with no WiFi or cell service needed.

Instantaneous communication like the Walkie-Talkie feature on the Apple Watch would be possible but with groups of people instead of individuals.

Unlike the Walkie-Talkie feature, this new technology would eliminate the roundtrip to Apple’s cloud servers, a step that makes Walkie-Talkie unreliable at times. Also, unlike Walkie-Talkie, this would allow groups of willing people to talk to each other simultaneously.

Musk seemed to acknowledge the issue, though he also hinted at upcoming improvements to FSD’s highway performance. “12.5.x will finally combine the city and highway software stacks,” Musk wrote.

This is not the first time that Elon Musk mentioned a single FSD stack for both inner city and highway driving. Back in May, Musk estimated that FSD V12.5 should be out in late June, and the update should see some notable improvements.

NASA has invested $725,000 in a new rocket system that could solve one of the major obstacles standing in our way of sending humans to Mars: travel time.

With current technology, a round-trip to the red planet would take almost two years. For astronauts, spending that much time in spaceflight comes with big health risks.

They’d be exposed to high levels of solar and cosmic radiation, the harmful effects of zero-gravity, and a long period of isolation.

In 2021, NASA’s Perseverance rover landed in the Jezero Crater on Mars. For the next three years, this astrobiology mission collected soil and rock samples from the crater floor for eventual return to Earth. The analysis of these samples is expected to reveal much about Mars’ past and how it transitioned from being a warmer, wetter place to the frigid and desiccated place we know today. Unfortunately, budget cuts have placed the future of the proposed NASA-ESA Mars Sample Return (MSR) mission in doubt.

As a result, NASA recently announced that it was seeking proposals for more cost-effective and rapid methods of bringing the samples home. This will consist of three studies by NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL).

In addition, NASA has selected seven commercial partners for firm-fixed-price contracts for up to $1.5 million to conduct their own 90-day studies. Once complete, NASA will consider which proposals to integrate into the MSR mission architecture.

The performance of artificial intelligence (AI) tools, including large computational models for natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision algorithms, has been rapidly improving over the past decades. One reason for this is that datasets to train these algorithms have exponentially grown, collecting hundreds of thousands of images and texts often collected from the internet.

Training data for robot control and planning algorithms, on the other hand, remains far less abundant, in part because acquiring it is not as straightforward. Some computer scientists have thus been trying to create larger datasets and platforms that could be used to train computational models for a wide range of robotics applications.

In a recent paper, pre-published on the server arXiv and set to be presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems 2024 conference, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and NVIDIA Research introduced one of these platforms, called RoboCasa.

Toddlers engage more regions of their brains around 16-months to help them develop important cognitive skills enabling them to follow simple instructions and control impulses. Findings from the study, led by the Universities of Bristol and Oxford, and published in Imaging Neuroscience, suggests 16 months is a critical period for brain development.

A child’s first two years of life are crucial for developing cognitive skills, particularly executive functions that help adjust thoughts, actions, and behaviours for everyday life.

Inhibitory control is one important executive function. This particular skills allows individuals to stop themselves from doing something out of impulse, habit or temptation. It’s already known that inhibitory control begins to develop in infancy and grows into early childhood. However, until now, the brain mechanisms involved in its development were unclear.