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Dyson Reveals Its Big BetRobotsJasper Jolly | The GuardianDyson has signaled it is placing a big bet on producing robots capable of household chores by 2030, as it looks to move beyond the vacuum cleaners, fans and dryers that made its founder one of the wealthiest British businessmen. The company, founded by billionaire Sir James Dyson, on Wednesday published photographs of robot arms being used in household settings, including cleaning furniture, a claw picking up plates, and a hand-like machine picking up a teddy bear.

The Big New Idea for Making Self-Driving Cars That Can Go AnywhereWill Douglas Heaven | MIT Technology ReviewWhen [the car veered to the side], Kendall grabbed the wheel for a few seconds to correct it. The car veered again; Kendall corrected it. It took less than 20 minutes for the car to learn to stay on the road by itself, he says. This was the first time that reinforcement learningan AI technique that trains a neural network to perform a task via trial and errorhad been used to teach a car to drive from scratch on a real road.

Quantum Internet Inches Closer With Advance in Data TeleportationCade Metz | The New York TimesWhen data travels this way, without actually traveling the distance between the nodes, it cannot be lost. Information can be fed into one side of the connection and then appear on the other, Dr. Hanson said. The information also cannot be intercepted. A future quantum internet, powered by quantum teleportation, could provide a new kind of encryption that is theoretically unbreakable.

Accused of Cheating by an Algorithm, and a Professor She Had Never MetKashmir Hill | The New York TimesSuddenly [during the pandemic], millions of people were forced to take bar exams, tests and quizzes alone at home on their laptops. To prevent the temptation to cheat, and catch those who did, remote proctoring companies offered web browser extensions that detect keystrokes and cursor movements, collect audio from a computers microphone, and record the screen and the feed from a computers camera, bringing surveillance methods used by law enforcement, employers and domestic abusers into an academic setting.

Walmart Is Expanding Its Drone Deliveries to Reach 4 Million HouseholdsMitchell Clark | The VergeIt sounds like Walmarts not just trying to expand the programs footprintthe company also wants to increase the number of packages its delivering via drone. In its press release, the company says its completed hundreds of deliveries within a matter of months. With the expansion, it says itll have the ability to do more than a million drone deliveries a year.

Tiny Robot Crab Doctors Could Roam the Human Body One DayMonisha Ravisetti | CNETNorthwestern University researchers announced on Wednesday their quite adorable prototype of a crab-shaped mini-robot. It can run. It can jump. Its tiny enough to fit inside the o in this sentence. And its record-breaking. The team calls it the smallest remote-controlled walking robot ever constructed.

The Hype Around DeepMinds New AI Model Misses Whats Actually Cool About ItMelissa Heikkil | MIT Technology ReviewUnsurprisingly, de Freitass announcement triggered breathlesspress coverage that DeepMind is on the verge of human-level artificial intelligence. This is not the first time hype has outstripped reality. Other exciting new AI models, such as OpenAIs text generator GPT-3 and image generator DALL-E, have generated similarly grand claims. For many in the field, this kind of feverish discourse overshadows other important research areas in AI.

Could Nuclear Clocks Drive a Technological Revolution?Ethan Siegel | Big ThinkToday, atomic clocks play an essential role in telecommunications, financial transactions, computers, GPS satellite navigation technologies as well as a variety of scientific applications. We can synchronize clocks around the globe with ~nanosecond precisions. But still, there are limits to what we can do, and those are set by the physical limits of atoms. Yet theres a tremendous hope for surpassing all current limits by more than an order of magnitude: nuclear clocks. Heres the science of how it all works.

Niantic Positions Itself as a Capable Rival to Apple, Meta in Coming AR WarsMark Sullivan | Fast CompanyiAbout once a decade for the last 70 years, a new computing platform arrives and changes the way we work, play, communicate with each other, and lead our lives, Niantic founder John Nanke said of AR during his keynote Tuesday in San Francisco. Were now at the beginning of another one of those shifts, and it could be the most consequential one yet. This transition will truly blend the real and the digital world.i

Scientists CRISPRd Tomatoes to Make Them Full of Vitamin DEd Cara | GizmodoThe tomatoes of the future could help boost your levels of the sunshine vitamin. Researchers in the UK say theyve developed genetically edited tomatoes that can produce high levels of vitamin D with just an hour of ultraviolet light exposure. These edited tomatoes would ideally help provide a rich and plant-based source of the essential nutrient, which is commonly lacking in much of the population.

World Builders Put Happy Face on Superintelligent AIEliza Strickland | IEEE SpectrumOne of the biggest challenges in aworld-building competitionthat asked teams to imagine apositive future with superintelligent AI: Make it plausible. Were not trying to push utopia, [the Future of Life Institutes Ann Yelizarova] says, noting that the worlds built for the contest are not perfect places with zero conflicts or struggles. Were just trying to show futures that are not dystopian, so people have something to work toward, she says.

Humans Could Go Extinct. Heres How and Whos Trying to Stop ItErin Carson | CNETiThe end of the world is such a great concept for giving shape to history, says [Oxfords] Anders Sandberg. We want to know how it ends. We want there to be a meaning or a tragedy or a comedy. Maybe a laugh track at the end of the universe. It turns out, scientists, scholars, policy experts and more are studying this question, trying to decipher how humanitys end could come about, and whether theres anything that can be done to prevent it.

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This Week's Awesome Tech Stories From Around the Web (Through May 28) - Singularity Hub