Lifeboat Foundation

With generative AI models, researchers combined robotics data from different sources to help robots learn better. MIT researchers developed a technique to combine robotics training data across domains, modalities, and tasks using generative AI models. They create a combined strategy from several different datasets that enables a robot to learn to perform new tasks in unseen environments.

Let’s say you want to train a robot so it understands how to use tools and can then quickly learn to make repairs around your house with a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver. To do that, you would need an enormous amount of data demonstrating tool use.

Existing robotic datasets vary widely in modality — some include color images while others are composed of tactile imprints, for instance. Data could also be collected in different domains, like simulation or human demos. And each dataset may capture a unique task and environment.

The company will allow sellers to ship directly to customers from China in an effort to compete with Shein and Temu.

Researchers have described some of the best-preserved three-dimensional trilobite fossils ever discovered. The fossils, which are more than 500 million years old, were collected in the High Atlas of Morocco and are being referred to by scientists as “Pompeii” trilobites due to their remarkable preservation in ash.

The paper, “Rapid volcanic ash entombment reveals the 3D anatomy of Cambrian trilobites,” was published in the journal, Science.

Continue reading “Most pristine trilobite fossils ever found shake up scientific understanding of the long extinct group” »

The next update to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) could arrive this weekend, as the long-awaited v12.4.2 is scheduled to enter an internal testing phase tomorrow.

Tesla first released version 12 of FSD in March, and it was a significant release because it was the first version that relied on end-to-end neural nets, instead of over 300,000 lines of hand-written code. With the switch, CEO Elon Musk said that each revision should result in significant improvements, saying that v12.4 should see a 5 to 10 times improvement in miles per intervention.

However, v12.4 was only released to a limited number of testers earlier this month, more than four weeks after Musk initially said it would be available, and it received a luke-warm response, with a number of bugs and erratic driving behaviours reported. As a result, it has yet to go to a wide release.

Is this the beginning of the age of bionic humans?

Astronauts on board the International Space Station were instructed to shelter inside their respective spacecraft after reports indicated pieces of a broken-up satellite were headed their way.

Specifically, the remains of a derelict spacecraft called Resurs-P 1, a Russian commercial Earth observation satellite that launched in June 2013, were spotted by space junk monitor LeoLabs.

“Early indications are that a non-operational Russian spacecraft, Resurs P1 (SATNO 39186), released a number of fragments between 13:05 UTC 26 June and 00:51 UTC 27 June,” Leolabs tweeted late Wednesday evening.

With this measurement, the Large Hadron Collider again demonstrated its ability to provide very high-precision measurements and bring new insights into an old mystery.

The CMS collaboration revealed a groundbreaking measurement of the electroweak mixing angle, confirming Standard Model predictions and addressing previous discrepancies with the most precise collider-based measurement to date. This achievement highlights the potential for precision physics in hadron colliders and prepares for more advanced studies at the High-Luminosity LHC.

Electroweak Mixing Measurement

Specifically, the release says, carriers would simply have to provide unlocking services 60 days after activation. A welcome standard, but it may run afoul of today’s phone and wireless markets.

For instance, although the dreaded two-year contract is no longer forced on most consumers, many still opt for them to lock in the price and get other benefits. And perhaps more to the point, the phones themselves are often paid for in what amount to installment plans: You get a phone for “free” and then pay it off over the next few years.

The NPRM is the stage of FCC rulemaking where it has a draft rule but has not yet solicited public feedback. On July 18, the agency will publish the full document and open up commentary on the above issues. And you can be sure there will be some squawking from mobile providers!

But while medical research facilities are subject to privacy laws, private companies — that are amassing large caches of brain data — are not. Based on a study by The Neurorights Foundation, two-thirds of them are already sharing or selling the data with third parties. The vast majority of them also don’t disclose where the data is stored, how long they keep it, who has access to it, and what happens if there’s a security breach…

This is why Pauzauskie, Medical Director of The Neurorights Foundation, led the passage of a first-in-the-nation law in Colorado. It includes biological or brain data in the State Privacy Act, similar to fingerprints if the data is being used to identify people.

“This is a first step, but we still have a long way to go,” he says.