Moravec‘s Paradox

This is a season absolutely spoiled for mecha series, which makes this entire cour a unicorn in the modern landscape. While the discourse around the “death” of the subgenre itself is tiresome and myopic, it's undeniable that the options for cool robot fighting have been pretty limited in the last…

A team of U.S. researchers has developed a reconfigurable swarm of identical low-cost four-legged robots — with directionally flexible legs and tail — that can be linked on demand and autonomously. Ozkan-Aydin & Goldman showed through a series of experiments that a swarm of chainable legged robots is capable of…

From new Artificial Intelligence-enabled software to track movements of Chinese patrols to integrating a range of ground and air-based sensors that look deep across the Line of Actual Control, the Army is stepping up surveillance capabilities in the Eastern Sector in the face of an increasingly aggressive PLA. As part…

Under Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the Federal Communications Commission is seeking to create new rules targeting spam text messages. Like another recent proposed rulemaking from the agency, the policy would push wireless carriers and telephone companies to block the spam before it ever gets to your phone. “We’ve seen a…

Facebook vice president of integrity Guy Rosen wrote in blog post Sunday that the prevalence of hate speech on the platform had dropped by 50 percent over the past three years, and that “a narrative that the technology we use to fight hate speech is inadequate and that we deliberately…

Joint media release Sen the Hon Amanda StokerThe Morrison Government has awarded a $3.3 million contract to a Brisbane robotics and AI company to develop an unmanned combat vehicle the likes of which has never been made in Australia. Minister for Defence Industry Melissa Price welcomed the investment in Cyborg…

RNA is a single-stranded molecule composed of nucleobases. It's more prone to mutations than DNA, in which nucleobases pair up to create a double-stranded molecule. Gunilla Elam/Science Source The fields of NLP (also known as computational linguistics) and computational biology may seem very different, but mathematically speaking, they're quite similar.…

Scientists have worked out how to best get DNA to communicate with membranes in our body, paving the way for the creation of 'mini biological computers' in droplets that have potential uses in biosensing and mRNA vaccines. UNSW's Dr Matthew Baker and the University of Sydney's Dr Shelley Wickham co-led…

Teresa Carey: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science. I'm Teresa Carey. Every morning at five o’clock, composer Walter Werzowa would sit down at his computer to anticipate a particular daily e-mail. It came from six time zones away, where a team had been working all night (or day, rather) to…

A look back at the decades since that meeting shows how often AI researchers' hopes have been crushed—and how little those setbacks have deterred them. Today, even as AI is revolutionizing industries and threatening to upend the global labor market, many experts are wondering if today's AI is reaching its…