Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at Case Western Reserve University have combined tissues from a sea slug with flexible 3D printed components to build “biohybrid” robots that crawl like sea turtles on the beach.

A muscle from the slug’s mouth provides the movement, which is currently controlled by an external electrical field. However, future iterations of the device will include ganglia, bundles of neurons and nerves that normally conduct signals to the muscle as the slug feeds, as an organic controller.

The researchers also manipulated collagen from the slug’s skin to build an organic scaffold to be tested in new versions of the robot.

Continue reading “Crawling robot built from sea slug parts and a 3D printed body” »

DARPA’s newest Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) can travel on the high seas at speeds up to 27 knots for months on end without a single crew member.

The 39.62m ACTUV can be remote-controlled, but its primary use is as an autonomous vessel that can operate safely near manned ships and accommodate all weather conditions. No crew means greater safety for potentially dangerous missions like countermining and submarine tracking.

Continue reading “DARPA’s New Robot Is Ready To Go Submarine Hunting” »

SpaceX has successfully landed another Falcon 9 rocket after launching the vehicle into space this evening from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Shortly after takeoff, the vehicle touched down at SpaceX’s Landing Complex 1 — a ground-based landing site that the company leases at the Cape. It marks the second time SpaceX has pulled off this type of ground landing, and the fifth time SpaceX has recovered one of its rockets post-launch. The feat was accomplished a few minutes before the rocket’s second stage successfully put the company’s Dragon spacecraft into orbit, where it will rendezvous with the International Space Station later this week.

It’s also the first time this year SpaceX has attempted to land one of its rockets on land. For the past six launches, each rocket has tried landing on an autonomous drone ship floating in the ocean. That’s because drone ship landings require a lot less fuel to execute than ground landings (something we explain here). If a rocket has to accelerate super fast during launch — such as those going to high orbits or ones carrying heavy payloads — it uses up a lot of fuel during the initial takeoff. That leaves less fuel for the rocket to land back on Earth, which means a drone ship landing is sometimes the only option. But for this launch, the mission requirements allowed for a successful landing on ground.

This is one of those sites you’re going to want to try yourself. Take any black and white image, feed it to the algorithm, and watch as it spits out its best guess at a color version, which is often quite convincing.

Using a deep learning algorithm developed by Richard Zhang, Phillip Isola, and Alexei Efros of UC Berkeley, the process was trained on one million images. Though it currently fools humans only 20% of the time, that’s still a significantly higher rate than previous iterations and represents an exciting step forward, and further training should only increase that rate. Imagine a time when Photoshop can colorize a photo in one step, leaving the end-user to just tweak a few hues here and there. Such a capability would be huge for restoring old family photos and the like.

I played with it a bit today, and the results were rather interesting. It struggles a bit with skin tones, which may be due to dataset bias (meaning the team may have trained it more with landscape-style images), but often the results are fairly good and definitely close enough that they could be tweaked to believability without a lot of effort.

Continue reading “Deep Learning Algorithm Automatically Colorizes Photos” »

California’s space technology company Made In Space, currently preparing their second zero gravity 3D printer called the Additive Manufacturing Facility for the International Space Station, will be playing a key role in a NASA project that could completely revolutionize manufacturing in space. They will be partnering with Northrop Grumman and Oceaneering Space Systems on Archinaut, a 3D printer capable of working in the vacuum of space that will be equipped with a robotic arm. Archinaut is scheduled to be installed on an external space station pod and will be capable of in-orbit additive manufacturing, the fabrication and assembly of communications satellite reflectors or the repair on in-orbit structures and machinery.

Tesla, Google, Ford, and more are all investing heavily in driverless cars.

Transhuman Terminology.

ADHOCRACY
AEONOMICS
A-LIFE
AGORIC SYSTEM

AI-COMPLETE ALEPH ALGERNON AMORTALIST ARACHNIOGRAPHY ARCH-ANARCHY ARCOLOGY ARROW IMPOSSIBILITY THEOREM ARTILECT ASEX ASIMORT ASIMOV ASSEMBLER ATHANASIA ATHANOPHY ATHEOSIS AUGMENT AUTOEVOLUTIONIST AUTOMATED ENGINEERING AUTOMORPHISM AUTOPOTENT AUTOSCIENT BABY UNIVERSE BASEMENT UNIVERSE BEAN DIP CATASTROPHE BEANSTALK BEKENSTEIN BOUND BERSERKER BETELGEUSE-BRAIN BIG CRUNCH BINERATOR BIOCHAUVINISM BIOLOGICAL FUNDAMENTALISM BIONICS BIONOMICS BIOPHILIAC BIOSTASIS B-LIFE BLIGHT BLIND UPLOADING BLUE GOO BOGOSITY FILTER BORGANISM BREAKEVEN POINT BROADCATCHING BRUTE FORCE UPLOADING BUSH ROBOT CALCUTTA SYNDROME CALM TECHNOLOGY CALORIE RESTRICTION CASIMIR EFFECT CEREBROSTHESIS CHINESE ROOM CHRONONAUTS CHURCH-TURING THESIS COBOTS COMPUFORM COMPUTRONIUM CONCENTRATED INTELLIGENCE CONSILIENCE CONNECTIONISM CONTELLIGENCE CONTINUITY IDENTITY THEORY COSMYTHOLOGY CRYOBIOLOGY CRYOCRASTINATE CRYOGENICS CRYONICS CRYONIC SUSPENSION CRYPTO ANARCHY CRYPTOCOSMOLOGY CYBERCIDE CYBERFICTION CYBERGNOSTICISM CYBERIAN CYBERNATE/CYBERNIZE CYBERSPACE/CYBERMATRIX CYBRARIAN CYPHERPUNK DEANIMALIZE DEATH FORWARD DEATHISM DEEP ANARCHY DEFLESH DIGITAL PSEUDONYM DIAMONDOID DISASSEMBLER DISASTERBATION DISTRIBUTED INTELLIGENCE DIVERGENT TRACK HYPOTHESIS DIVERSITY IQ DIVIDUALS DOOMSDAY ARGUMENT DOWNLOAD DRYWARE DUBIFIER DYSON SPHERE ECOCALYPSE ECTOGENESIS

EMBRYOMEME
EMULATION
ENHANCED REALITY
ENVIROCAPITALISM
EPHEMERALISTS
E-PRIME
ESCALATORLOGY
THE ETERNAL LIFE POSTULATE
EUPSYCHIA
EUTHENICS
EVOLUTIONARILY STABLE STRATEGY (ESS)
EVOLUTURE
EXCONOMICS
EXES
EXFORMATION
EXISTENTIAL TECHNOLOGY
EXOPHOBIA
EXOSELF
EXTROPIAN
EXTROPIATE
EXTROPIC
EXTROPOLIS
EXTROPY
FACULTATIVE ANAGOROBE
FAR EDGE PARTY
THE FERMI PARADOX
FEMTOTECHNOLOGY
FLATLANDER
FLUIDENTITY
FOGLET
FORK
FREDKIN’S PARADOX
FUNCTIONAL SOUP
FUTIQUE
FUTURE SHOCK
GALAXY BRAIN
GAUSSIAN
GENEGENEERING
GENETIC ALGORITHM
GENIE
GREEN GOO
GÖDEL’S THEOREM
GOLDEN GOO
GREAT FILTER, THE
GREY GOO
GUY FAWKES SCENARIO
HALLUCINOMEMIC
HIVE COMPUTING
HOMORPH
HPLD
HYPERTEXT
HYPONEIRIA
HYPOTECH

Continue reading “Transhumanist Terminology” »

He may or may not be joking.

Do you remember that memorable scene in the Harry Potter books when a person seeking revenge on Ron turns out to be Dumbledore hiding behind a cream cake?

If you don’t, that’s probably because you read the version of Harry Potter written by J.K. Rowling instead of an LSTM recurrent neural network — trained to generate new Hogwarts-related stories using a data set consisting of the series’ first four books.

“I’ve been experimenting with deep learning over the past few weeks, and the Harry Potter story is the result of one of those experiments,” creator Max Deutsch tells Digital Trends. “Beyond just looking for a fun way to practice what I’ve been learning, the Harry Potter project was an attempt to make something enjoyable to read.”

Continue reading “A neural network tried to write a 9th Harry Potter book, and the results are hilarious” »