Moravec‘s Paradox

Watch out, giant squids and anglerfish: There may be a new, artificial addition to Earth’s deep-sea ecosystems. A research team led by scientists from Zhejiang University in eastern China have designed a fish-like robot with a flexible, soft body to explore the greatest depths of the ocean. The battery-powered robot…

Guillermo Del Toro’s 2013 hit Pacific Rim was a case of two entertaining things that went well together—namely, enormous Godzilla-style monsters and equally gargantuan robot animé mechas. It was a hybrid concept predicated on scale, with titanic armored warriors dubbed Jaegers doing thunderous weaponized and hand-to-hand combat with creatures known…

Coffee tasting, otherwise known as coffee ‘cupping’, is the process by which the characteristics of a coffee bean are evaluated. Not dissimilar to a conventional sensory panel, when cupping, experts check a particular bean’s fragrance, aroma, acidity, body, flavour, and finish. However, according to ag and food tech start-up Demetria,…

The U.S., which once had a dominant head start in artificial intelligence, now has just a few years' lead on China and risks being overtaken unless government steps in, according to a new report to Congress and the White House. Why it matters: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who chaired…

Welcome to Bernard Keane's Side View, a curated guide to new and overlooked content on politics, policy, and public affairs. This week, I have mostly been reading about Texas power failures, Polish Holocaust denialism, the possibility of victory for the Taliban and, just for some light relief, putting guns on robot dogs.…

"Squadron, prepare for battle" by Damien McFerran 3 hours ago© Harmony Gold Anime fans will have very mixed feelings about the Robotech series; while it served as an introduction to Japanese animation for many during the '80s, it is also seen as a butchering of famous franchises (Macross being one)…

If you asked IT and business executives to name some of the items on their lists of priorities for this year, there's a good chance "add more automation" would be one of them. Automating processes to complete tasks more quickly and accurately and at the same time reduce costs, has…

Enlarge / Perseverance's two Mastcam-Z imagers (in the gray boxes) are part of the rover's remote sensing mast. The seven minutes of terror are over. The parachute deployed; the skycrane rockets fired. Robot truck goes ping! Perseverance, a rover built by humans to do science 128 million miles away, is…

(This article contains major spoilers for “Previously On,” the eighth episode of the Marvel series “WandaVision”) Well, that sure was a doozie. For the next-to-last episode of “WandaVision” on Disney+, we got a bit of a lore dump as Agatha (Kathryn Hahn) took a trip through Wanda Maximoff’s (Elizabeth Olsen)…

Intellectual property is the lifeblood of entertainment, and Hollywood badly needs a transfusion. Stuck recycling the same ideas and producing the same franchises, Hollywood is now looking to podcasts, news articles, and even songs and paintings to dredge up stories that could be hits with global audiences. Finding the right…