Lifeboat Foundation

Yesterday, Boston Dynamics announced it was retiring its hydraulic Atlas robot. Atlas has long been the standard bearer of advanced humanoid robots. Over the years, the company was known as much for its research robots as it was for slick viral videos of them working out in military fatigues, forming dance mobs, and doing parkour. Fittingly, the company put together a send-off video of Atlas’s greatest hits and blunders.

But there were clues this wasn’t really the end, not least of which was the specific inclusion of the word “hydraulic” and the last line of the video, “‘Til we meet again, Atlas.” It wasn’t a long hiatus. Today, the company released hydraulic Atlas’s successor—electric Atlas.

The main cost of an electric vehicle (EV) is its battery. The high cost of energy-dense batteries has meant EVs have long been more expensive than their fossil fuel equivalents.

But this could change faster than we thought. The world’s largest maker of batteries for electric cars, China’s CATL, claims it will slash the cost of its batteries by up to 50% this year, as a price war kicks off with the second largest maker in China, BYD subsidiary FinDreams.

What’s behind this? After the electric vehicle industry experienced a huge surge in 2022, it has hit headwinds. It ramped up faster than demand, triggering efforts to cut costs.

Summary: Researchers leveraged deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to enable a robot to adaptively switch gaits, mimicking animal movements like trotting and pronking, to traverse complex terrains effectively. Their study explores the concept of viability—or fall prevention—as a primary motivator for such gait transitions, challenging previous beliefs that energy efficiency is the key driver.

This novel approach not only enhances the robot’s ability to handle challenging terrains but also provides deeper insights into animal locomotion. The team’s findings suggest that prioritizing fall prevention may lead to more agile and efficient robotic and biological movement across uneven surfaces.

Try Opera browser FOR FREE here https://opr.as/eiiu-sabine-hossenfelder Last week I saw a lot of headlines about a space propulsion system that uses nuclear fusion. The news comes from a company by name RocketStar Inc. which announced in a press release that they have “reinvented” spacecraft by releasing the “world’s first fusion-enhanced space thruster, the FireStar™ Fusion Drive. They claim that the FireStar TM Fusion Drive improves their water powered pulsed plasma thruster by harnessing aneutronic nuclear fusion by 50%. In this video I explain what this all means. 🤓 Check out my new quiz app ➜ http://quizwithit.com/ 💌 Support me on Donorbox ➜ https://donorbox.org/swtg 📝 Transcripts and written news on Substack ➜ https://sciencewtg.substack.com/ 👉 Transcript with links to references on Patreon ➜ / sabine 📩 Free weekly science newsletter ➜ https://sabinehossenfelder.com/newsle… Audio only podcast ➜ https://open.spotify.com/show/0MkNfXl… 🔗 Join this channel to get access to perks ➜ / @sabinehossenfelder 🖼️ On instagram ➜ / sciencewtg #science #sciencenews #technews #technews #space #nuclear

Galactic settlement of low mass stars as a resolution to the fermi paradox.

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Bartosz Regula from the RIKEN Center for Quantum Computing and Ludovico Lami from the University of Amsterdam have shown, through probabilistic calculations, that there is indeed, as had been hypothesized, a rule of “entropy” for the phenomenon of quantum entanglement. This finding could help drive a better understanding of quantum entanglement, which is a key resource that underlies much of the power of future quantum computers. Little is currently understood about the optimal ways to make an effective use of it, despite it being the focus of research in quantum information science for decades.

The second law of thermodynamics, which says that a system can never move to a state with lower “entropy”, or order, is one of the most fundamental laws of nature, and lies at the very heart of physics. It is what creates the “arrow of time,” and tells us the remarkable fact that the dynamics of general physical systems, even extremely complex ones such as gases or black holes, are encapsulated by a single function, its “entropy.”

There is a complication, however. The principle of entropy is known to apply to all classical systems, but today we are increasingly exploring the quantum world. We are now going through a quantum revolution, and it becomes crucially important to understand how we can extract and transform the expensive and fragile quantum resources.

Buyer is responsible for relocation of 26,000 pounds of equipment.

According to files accessed by journalist Jack Poulson, Microsoft presented OpenAI’s DALL-E as a tool to conduct Advanced Computer Vision Training of Battle Management Systems (BMS).

A BMS is a software suite that provides military leaders with an overview of a combat situation and helps them plan troop movements, artillery fire, and air strike targets. According to Microsoft’s presentation, the DALL-E tool could generate artificial images and train BMS to visualize the ground situation better and identify appropriate strike targets.

When astronomers looked at a stellar pair at the heart of a stunning cloud of gas and dust, they were in for a surprise. Star pairs are typically very similar, like twins, but in HD 148,937, one star appears younger and, unlike the other, is magnetic.

New data from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) suggest there were originally three stars in the system, until two of them clashed and merged. This violent event created the surrounding cloud and forever altered the system’s fate.

“When doing background reading, I was struck by how special this system seemed,” says Abigail Frost, an astronomer at ESO in Chile and lead author of the study, “A magnetic massive star has experienced a stellar merger,” published in Science.