"It appears that we need the First Law of Robotics NOW!" quips Slashdot reader Bruce66423.

Mint reports: During a tournament in Moscow, a chess-playing robot fractured a 7-year-old boy's finger when the youngster attempted a quick move without giving the device enough time to finish its task. On July 19, at the Moscow Chess Open competition, the incident took place. The youngster is fine, but one of his fingers has been broken, according to Sergey Smagin, vice president of the Russian Chess Federation, who spoke to state-run news organisation RIA Novosti.

The boy, Christopher, is one of the top 30 young chess players in Moscow, and he is just nine years old. In a nation where chess has essentially become a national obsession and source of pride, that makes him very good.
"The boy is all right," the VP of the Russian Chess Federation assured Russia's state-run news organization. "They put a plaster cast on the finger to heal faster."

"The robot broke the child's finger," Sergey Lazarev, Moscow Chess Federation President, told Tass news agency. "This is of course bad." The BBC reports: A video shared on social media shows the robot taking one of the boy's pieces. The boy then makes his own move, and the robot grabs his finger. Four adults rush to help the boy, who is eventually freed and ushered away.

Mr Lazarev said the machine had played many previous matches without incident.

The boy was able to finish the final days of the tournament in a cast, Tass reports.
From the Guardian: Sergey Smagin, vice-president of the Russian Chess Federation, told Baza the robot appeared to pounce after it took one of the boy's pieces. Rather than waiting for the machine to complete its move, the boy opted for a quick riposte, he said. "There are certain safety rules and the child, apparently, violated them. When he made his move, he did not realise he first had to wait," Smagin said. "This is an extremely rare case, the first I can recall," he added.

Lazarev had a different account, saying the child had "made a move, and after that we need to give time for the robot to answer, but the boy hurried and the robot grabbed him". Either way, he said, the robot's suppliers were "going to have to think again"....

According to one 2015 study, one person is killed each year by an industrial robot in the US alone. Indeed, according to the US occupational safety administration, most occupational accidents since 2000 involving robots have been fatalities.
Reportedly the boy's parents have now contacted the public prosecutor's office.

"A Russian grandmaster, Sergey Karjakin, said the incident was no doubt due to 'some kind of software error or something.'"

"A small space rock has proven to have a big effect on NASA's newly operational deep-space telescope," reports Space.com, causing "significant uncorrectable change" according to a new report from NASA engineers. But fortunately, "Seventeen mirror segments remain unblemished and engineers were able to realign Webb's segments to account for most of the damage." A micrometeoroid struck the James Webb Space Telescope between May 22 and 24, impacting one of the observatory's 18 hexagonal golden mirrors. NASA had disclosed the micrometeoroid strike in June and noted that the debris was more sizeable than pre-launch modeling had accounted for. Now, scientists on the mission have shared an image that drives home the severity of the blow in a report released July 12 describing what scientists on the mission learned about using the observatory during its first six months in space.

Happily, in this case the overall effect on Webb was small....

Based on fuel usage, the telescope should last 20 years in space. But scientists aren't sure how much of an effect micrometeroid strikes will have upon its operations, the report authors stated. Micrometeroids are a known danger of space operations, and facing them is by no means new to scientists; the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope are among long-running programs that are still operational despite occasional space rock strikes. However, Webb's orbit at Lagrange Point 2 about 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from the Earth may change the risk profile considerably....

In this case, however, the overall impact to the mission is small "because only a small portion of the telescope area was affected...." Engineers are still modeling how frequently such events will occur....

One remedy could be minimizing the amount of time Webb points directly into its orbital direction, "which statistically has higher micrometeoroid rates and energies," the team wrote.
Thanks to Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) for sharing the article!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A video started circulating on Twitter Thursday of a Boston Dynamics-style robot dog firing a submachine gun into targets amid a snowy backdrop. This type of robot dog (it doesn't seem like the robot in the video is a Boston Dynamics Spot, just looks a lot like it) is famous for dancing, but now appears to have fulfilled every warning given by journalists and analysts. It's got a gun and it's ready to kill. A lot of questions remain. First, the robot dog doesn't seem to be able to handle the recoil of the gun well. As it fires its rounds, the barrel trails up and the dog has to take a minute to get its balance back. We also don't know if the dog is firing on its own or if, and this is more likely, someone is off-camera pulling the trigger remotely.

The robot's feet, various ports, and its front are completely different from Boston Dynamics' Spot. There's dozens of knockoffs of the Boston Dynamics dog selling on the international market. The one in the video appears to be a UnitreeYusu "technology dog" selling on AliExpress for about $3,000. The feet, port placement, and joint coverings are all the same. The robot also has strips of Velcro on either of its flanks. The left flank bears a Russian flag and the other appears with a wolf's head. In another video on the channel, a man wears a similar patch on his arm. It appears to be a wolf's head insignia commonly associated with Russian Special Operations Forces or Spetsnaz. That doesn't mean that Spetsnaz is using armed robot dogs, as pretty much anyone can buy a similar patch online in various places.

The gun is also Russian. It appears to be a PP-19 Vityaz, a submachine gun based on the AK-74 design. As the dog wanders around and fires, it sometimes moves in front of an armored personnel carrier with a unique triangular door. That's a BDRM-2, a Russian armored car that's been spotted recently in Ukraine. Finally, there's the account the video originally appeared on. Before making its way to Twitter, the video of the dog was posted to the YouTube account of Alexander Atamov on March 22, 2022. Atamov is listed on his LinkedIn profile as the founder of "HOVERSURF" and his Facebook page lists him as living in Moscow. He posted a picture of the robot dog on March 21. According to Facebook's translation of his post, he called the dog "Skynet."

Bay Area startup Earthgrid says it's developing a plasma boring robot that can dig underground tunnels 100x faster and up to 98% cheaper than existing tech, and it plans to use it to start re-wiring America's energy, internet and utilities grids. New Atlas reports: Most tunnels dug today are made by massive, mechanical rotary boring machines, which scratch cutting wheels against rock and evacuate the debris behind them, lining the tunnel walls as they go. It's painstakingly slow, hugely expensive, and the cutting heads and drill bits often need changing or maintenance. But there's another way to get through the toughest rock -- as we outlined in our January article about Petra's thermal drilling robot. Blasting rock with high temperatures can fracture and vaporize the stone in a process called spallation, and blasting this damaged rock with high pressures causes it to flake, chip and blow away.

You can do this without touching the rock walls at all, so the equipment can do entire tunnels without stopping if necessary. It can run entirely on electrical power, opening up the possibility of entirely emissions-free drilling, and both Petra and Earthgrid claim it's much, much faster and cheaper than doing things mechanically â" to the point where previously unfeasible projects can become economically viable. Earthgrid doesn't seem to be as far along as Petra -- indeed, it's operating on pre-seed funding at the moment. But its intellectual property takes a spallation boring robot like Petra's to the next level, placing multiple 27,000C (48,600F) plasma torches onto large discs held out in front of a "Rapid Burrowing Robot (RBR)." The torches are arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, starting from the center and widening out until they cover the full diameter of the bore.

Where Petra's thermal drilling robot moves its head around to widen its hole, the RBR will fire on all torches at once, and rotate the torch-bearing discs to ensure full coverage, blasting the rock backward and collecting it into small pushcarts, each connected along the cable supplying electricity to the drill rig. That cable will need to handle some serious juice. In estimations submitted as part of a patent, Earthgrid founder Troy Helming describes a potential embodiment of the concept using 72 plasma torches to drill a 1-meter (3.3-ft) bore. In its low-power state, with each torch consuming 500 kW, Helming estimates a total power draw of 40 megawatts. If you need to get cracking, the high-power state would draw as much as a constant 120 MW. That's for a hole you can barely crawl through; to triple the diameter and create a utility-sized tunnel you can comfortably walk through on a flat floor, you'd need to attach a larger "mother rig" behind the front rig. And if you wanted to move to a 10-m (33-ft) tunnel you could put a couple of lanes of traffic through, you'd need to attach another, even bigger "father rig" behind that. The total power draw in a "stage 3" system like this could get as high as 1.38 gigawatts -- but that's by no means the limit; upgrading the torches to higher power units would get the job done considerably faster, if an even more epic amount of electricity becomes available. How fast can Earthgrid tunnel? The company says it can bore up to 1 km (0.62 miles) per day, which it says is up to 100 times faster than existing borers. They also estimate a low-cost configuration could come in at as little as $300 per meter (3.3 ft) of tunnel.

"The company says it'll either sell drilling as a service, or build, own, operate and maintain tunnels for customers looking for a long-term lease or toll arrangement," adds New Atlas. "But it also hopes to put enough interlinking customer projects in place to create a subterranean network spanning the entire contiguous USA."

Hyundai Motor, factory robot builder ABB and Swedish fridge maker Electrolux see the semi-conductor chip shortage easing, executives said Thursday, in a boost for manufacturers after a long struggle for components. From a report: An increased supply of chips will reduce one burden facing an industry that is also battling raw material price inflation, a tight energy market and rising interest rates that are throwing a dampener on consumer demand. Hyundai turned in its best quarterly profit in eight years on Thursday as a weak won currency lifted the value of its earnings abroad and demand stayed strong for the South Korean automaker's high-margin sport utility vehicles (SUVs). The carmaker was also boosted by the easing of a global chip shortage, which helped it resume overtime and weekend shifts at domestic plants. It now plans to step up vehicle production in the second half to meet consumer demand.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Synchron, a brain-computer interface startup, reportedly implanted its first device in a US patient earlier this month. The startup implanted a 1.5-inch device into the brain of an ALS patient at Mount Sinai West medical center in New York on July 6, Bloomberg first reported. The purpose of the device is to allow the patient to communicate -- even after they have lost the ability to move -- by using their thoughts to send emails and texts. Bloomberg reported that Synchron has already implanted the device in four patients in Australia who have been able to use the brain implant to send messages on WhatsApp and shop online. Elon Musk's Neuralink has a similar mission, but is still waiting for FDA approval. "Neuralink and Synchron's products have several key differences: namely, size and installation," notes the report. "The Australian startup's product can be inserted into a human skull without cutting into it using a catheter that feeds the device through the jugular vein into a blood vessel in the brain. The process requires two separate surgeries."

"In contrast, Neuralink plans to make a much smaller and more powerful device that would require a portion of the individual's skull to be removed and would be performed using a robot." Neuralink also appears to be slightly more ambitious, with Musk referring to the device as "a Fitbit in your skull."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The robot dog is waving its legs in the air like an exasperated beetle. After 10 minutes of struggling, it manages to roll over to its front. Half an hour in, the robot is taking its first clumsy steps, like a newborn calf. But after one hour, the robot is strutting around the lab with confidence. What makes this four-legged robot special is that it learned to do all this by itself, without being shown what to do in a computer simulation.

Danijar Hafner and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, used an AI technique called reinforcement learning, which trains algorithms by rewarding them for desired actions, to train the robot to walk from scratch in the real world. The team used the same algorithm to successfully train three other robots, such as one that was able to pick up balls and move them from one tray to another. Traditionally, robots are trained in a computer simulator before they attempt to do anything in the real world. For example, a pair of robot legs called Cassie taught itself to walk using reinforcement learning, but only after it had done so in a simulation. "The problem is your simulator will never be as accurate as the real world. There'll always be aspects of the world you're missing," says Hafner, who worked with colleagues Alejandro Escontrela and Philipp Wu on the project and is now an intern at DeepMind. Adapting lessons from the simulator to the real world also requires extra engineering, he says.

The team's algorithm, called Dreamer, uses past experiences to build up a model of the surrounding world. Dreamer also allows the robot to conduct trial-and-error calculations in a computer program as opposed to the real world, by predicting potential future out comes of its potential actions. This allows it to learn faster than it could purely by doing. Once the robot had learned to walk, it kept learning to adapt to unexpected situations, such as resisting being toppled by a stick.[...] Jonathan Hurst, a professor of robotics at Oregon State University, says the findings, which have not yet been peer-reviewed, make it clear that "reinforcement learning will be a cornerstone tool in the future of robot control."

On June 2nd California approved General Motors' Cruise robotaxi service. The Drive describes an accident that happened the next day: The autonomous car made an unprotected left turn and was hit by a Toyota Prius on June 3, though the accident wasn't reported until Wednesday. When reached for comment by The Drive, the San Francisco Police Department explained that the Cruise vehicle had three passengers, all in the backseat, while the Prius had two occupants in total.... According to the incident report Cruise filed with the California DMV, the Cruise taxi was making a green light left turn from Geary Boulevard onto Spruce Street in downtown San Francisco. It began the turn and stopped in the middle of the intersection, presumably noticing the Toyota headed for it. The Prius then hit the right rear of the Chevy Bolt.

Cruise explained that afterward, "occupants of both vehicles received medical treatment for allegedly minor injuries." GM's incident report points out the Prius was speeding at the time of the accident, and was in the right turn lane before heading straight and hitting the Bolt. SFPD told The Drive that "no arrest or citation was issued at the time of the initial investigation," which is still ongoing. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened up a special crash investigation into the accident, but there are no public results yet.
Wired reports: In response to that crash, Cruise temporarily reprogrammed its vehicles to make fewer unprotected left turns, according to internal messages seen by WIRED. At an internal meeting Jeff Bleich, Cruise's chief legal officer, said the company was investigating the incident, according to a recording reviewed by WIRED. He also warned employees not working on that investigation to try and tune out crashes or related news reports, saying they were unavoidable and would increase in frequency as the company scaled up its operations. "We just have to understand that at some point this is now going to be a part of the work that we do, and that means staying focused on the work ahead," he said.
Wikipedia's entry for Cruise notes a few other incidents: In April 2022, the San Francisco Police Department stopped an empty (operating without any human safety attendants) Cruise AV for driving at night without its headlights on.... Also in April 2022, an empty Cruise AV blocked the path of a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire.
But Wired also reports on a more troubling incident that happened "around midnight" on June 28th: Internal messages seen by WIRED show that nearly 60 vehicles were disabled across the city over a 90-minute period after they lost touch with a Cruise server. As many as 20 cars, some of them halted in crosswalks, created a jam in the city's downtown in an incident first reported by the San Francisco Examiner and detailed in photos posted to Reddit....

The June 28 outage wasn't Cruise's first. On the evening of May 18, the company lost touch with its entire fleet for 20 minutes as its cars sat stopped in the street, according to internal documentation viewed by WIRED. Company staff were unable to see where the vehicles were located or communicate with riders inside. Worst of all, the company was unable to access its system which allows remote operators to safely steer stopped vehicles to the side of the road.

A letter sent anonymously by a Cruise employee to the California Public Utilities Commission that month, which was reviewed by WIRED, alleged that the company loses contact with its driverless vehicles "with regularity," blocking traffic and potentially hindering emergency vehicles. The vehicles can sometimes only be recovered by tow truck, the letter said. Images and video posted on social media in May and June show Cruise vehicles stopped in San Francisco traffic lanes seemingly inexplicably, as the city's pedestrians and motorists navigate around them.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Researchers have created cloned mice from freeze dried skin cells in a world first that aims to help conservationists revive populations of endangered species. The breakthrough paves the way for countries to store skin cells from animals as an insurance policy, as the cells can be used to create clones that boost the species' genetic diversity if they become threatened with extinction in the future. While scientists have used frozen cells to produce clones for conservation projects, the cells are kept in liquid nitrogen which is expensive and risky: if there are power outages or the liquid nitrogen is not regularly topped up, the cells melt and become unusable. Freeze dried sperm can also be used to create clones, but cannot be obtained from all animals.

In the latest work, researchers froze dried skin cells from mouse tails and stored them for up to nine months before trying to create clones from them. The freeze-drying processes killed the cells, but the scientists found they could still create early stage cloned embryos by inserting the dead cells into mouse eggs that had their own nuclei removed. These early stage mouse embryos, known as blastocysts, were used to create stocks of stem cells that were put through another round of cloning. The stem cells were inserted into mouse eggs emptied of their own nuclei, leading to embryos that surrogate mice carried to term. The first cloned mouse, named Dorami after a melon bread-loving robot in the Doraemon Manga series, was followed by 74 more. To check whether the clones had healthy fertility, nine females and three males were bred with normal mice. All the females went on to have litters.

Despite the achievement, the process is inefficient -- freeze drying damaged DNA in the skin cells -- and the success rate for creating healthy female and male mouse pups was only 0.2 to 5.4%. In some of the cells, the Y chromosome was lost, leading to female mice being born from cells obtained from male animals. "If the same treatment could be performed in endangered species where only males survived, it would be possible to produce females and naturally preserve the species, the authors write in Nature Communications.

CNN reports that a professor and his students at Stanford's Autonomous Systems Lab have received "phase II" funding from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program (which supports space robotics research) after proving the feasibility of their plan for robots to crawl through space caves. "The team will use the next two years to work on 3D simulations, a robot prototype, develop strategies that help the robot avoid risk, and test out [their cave robot] in a realistic mission environment — likely a cave site in New Mexico or California."

One of the students explains to CNN that "Caves are risky environments, but they're scientifically interesting. Our idea for this robot is to go far before people would get there to do interesting science and scope out the area."

CNN explains why space caves are so crucial: New research suggests that the best chance of finding past or present evidence of life on Mars requires going below its surface — at least 6.6 feet (2 meters) below. Mars has an incredibly thin atmosphere, which means that the surface of the red planet is bombarded by high energy radiation from space, and that could quickly degrade substances like amino acids that provide fragile evidence of life. Those harsh surface conditions also present a challenge for astronauts, which is one reason scientists have suggested that caves on other planets could be the key to future exploration. Vast cave systems on the moon and Mars could act as shelters for future space travelers.

Caves could also contain resources like water, reveal more about the history of a planet — and be havens for evidence of microbial life. On Earth, there are a varied range of cave systems, many of which remain unexplored, and they support diverse groups of microorganisms. But caves are dangerous — and since we've never peered inside a Martian cave, it's difficult to know what to expect.
The cave robot would presumably to be equipped with cameras, microscopes and LIDAR remote sensing, and the team envisions it will be tethered to a power-supplying rover on the surface.

One team member even told CNN the robots could be adapted to perform maintenance and upkeep on the planned "Gateway" lunar outpost between Earth and the moon.

Major League Baseball plans to introduce robot umpires in the 2024 season, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN this week. The Verge reports: He framed the change as a way to speed up games, but anyone who's watched baseball the last few years will tell you that a machine would almost certainly call balls and strikes better than the humans do. There are two ways the "Automated Ball-Strike System," which is the technical term for these robot umpires, might be implemented. One is the fully automated version, in which the AI-powered system calls every pitch a ball or a strike and relays the call to the umpire. Or the MLB could decide to use the AI as a review system, like VAR in soccer or the Hawk-Eye system used in professional tennis: each side gets a certain number of challenges, which are then adjudicated by the automated system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Johns Hopkins University-led researchers have developed a new technique that let a partially paralyzed man feed himself using robotic arms connected through a brain-machine interface. He only had to make small movements with his fists at certain prompts (such as "select cut location") to have the fork- and knife-equipped arms cut food and bring it to his mouth. He could have dessert within 90 seconds, according to the researchers. The new method centers on a shared control system that minimizes the amount of mental input required to complete a task. He could map his four-degree freedom of movement (two for each hand) to as many as 12 degrees of freedom for controlling the robot arms. The limbs' prompt-based intelligent responses also reduced the workload. The researchers "want to add touch-like sensor feedback instead of relying exclusively on visuals," the report says. "They also hope to improve the accuracy and efficiency while reducing the need for visual confirmation."

Today I learned Turkey's Scientific and Technological Research Council has a subsidiary developing a GNU/Linux distro called Pardus, "redesigned to be used in accordance with the practices and habits of users in Turkey."

And this week the Free Software Foundation published a post from the proud project leader of Pardus, explaining exactly why open source was chosen in the district of Eyüpsultan (on the European side of Istanbul) and how they got it implemented: After the municipal elections held in 2014, the new administration realized (through internal financial analysis reports) that a large amount of money was being spent on licensing proprietary software. Looking to cut costs, management asked for a study to be carried out for solutions. As the Eyüpsultan municipality's IT department, we recommended to replace Microsoft Windows with Pardus GNU/Linux instead. We described our preference to transition to free software as "the desire to be independent from a company as well as the savings to be gained from cutting hefty license fees."

Additionally, we spoke about how the four freedoms would improve things outside of the budget. For example, we told the administration that users, when using free software, can fully benefit from the rights they have over the programs running on their computers. We also informed everyone that, when the software they run is proprietary, it means that a company claims rights over the user, and that such a claim of ownership can place restrictions on users in how they may or may not use the software. We told them that this is unacceptable. Arguments such as these were among the deciding factors that influenced our transition to free software.

The plan was presented to the municipal administration and widely accepted.

The municipal administration approved the project, and in January, 2015, the Eyüpsultan municipality started using free software applications such as LibreOffice (e.g. Writer, Calc, Impress, etc.). Prior to the implementations, basic user training on LibreOffice software was provided to the personnel of the institution. Over time, users were gradually and steadily directed to free systems, and, notably, without receiving backlash from users.... Training was an important item in the transition to Pardus GNU/Linux.
Besides an online support forum, they've also set up a live call center to answer questions. "I think we may be the only distribution that helps with issues via a call center."

So how do they feel now about that transition, eight years later? Free software has many advantages, including flexibility, high performance, major cost savings from licensing fees, independence from any particular company, and compliance with interoperability standards. Therefore, the transition of Eyüpsultan municipality to free software has resulted in benefits that were both strategic and practical. We believe, in the near future, more organizations will need to understand the philosophy of free software and the opportunities that free software provides.

The municipal budget has freed up money as a result of the moving from proprietary software to free software. The savings from the "proprietary software licenses" line of the budget was applied to the district in the form of new projects. The money goes now to, among other things, increasing the number of new parks and gardens, bicycle paths, and security cameras in the parks. Additionally, by increasing the number of classes we provide technical training, we started to provide classes in robotics and computation to young people. The Eyüpsultan municipality is now increasing the opportunities for students to further develop their personalities, abilities, goals, and self-discovery. It introduces young people to technology and encourages them to produce new technologies.
One final effect of using free software? It encourages others to do the same: As a result of this brave decision, many of the Istanbul district municipalities have started working to switch or have already made the switch to the Pardus GNU/Linux operating system. Institutions in other cities of the country have also expressed growing interest by asking questions about the Pardus operating system and free software.

"China's Mars sample return mission aims to collect samples from the Red Planet and deliver them to Earth in 2031, or two years ahead of a NASA and ESA joint mission," reports SpaceNews: Lifting off in late 2028... the complex, multi-launch mission will have simpler architecture in comparison with the joint NASA-ESA project, with a single Mars landing and no rovers sampling different sites. However, if successful, it would deliver to Earth the first collected Martian samples; an objective widely noted as one of the major scientific goals of space exploration....

The mission will build on the Mars entry, descent and landing technologies and techniques demonstrated by Tianwen-1 in May 2021, as well as the regolith sampling, automated lunar orbit rendezvous and docking, and high velocity atmospheric reentry success achieved by the 2020 Chang'e-5 lunar sample return mission.... Landing on Mars would take place around September 2029. Sampling techniques will include surface sampling, drilling and mobile intelligent sampling, potentially using a four-legged robot.

The ascent vehicle will consist of two stages, using either solid or liquid propulsion, and will be required to reach a speed of 4.5 kilometers per second, according to the presentation. After rendezvous and docking with the waiting orbiter, the spacecraft will depart Mars orbit in late October 2030 for a return to Earth in July 2031.

Sun Zezhou [chief designer of the Tianwen-1 Mars orbiter and rover mission], added that the Tianwen-1 orbiter will conduct an aerobraking test in Mars orbit later this year as part of the sample return mission preparation.
Thanks to Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm for sharing the story!

Scientists have designed a tiny robot-fish that is programmed to remove microplastics from seas and oceans by swimming around and adsorbing them on its soft, flexible, self-healing body. From a report: Microplastics are the billions of tiny plastic particles which fragment from the bigger plastic things used every day such as water bottles, car tyres and synthetic T-shirts. They are one of the 21st century's biggest environmental problems because once they are dispersed into the environment through the breakdown of larger plastics they are very hard to get rid of, making their way into drinking water, produce, and food, harming the environment and animal and human health.

"It is of great significance to develop a robot to accurately collect and sample detrimental microplastic pollutants from the aquatic environment," said Yuyan Wang, a researcher at the Polymer Research Institute of Sichuan University and one of the lead authors on the study. Her team's novel invention is described in a research paper in the journal Nano Letters. "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first example of such soft robots." Researchers at Sichuan University have revealed an innovative solution to track down these pollutants when it comes to water contamination: designing a tiny self-propelled robo-fish that can swim around, latch on to free-floating microplastics, and fix itself if it gets cut or damaged while on its expedition.

The Israeli Ministry of Defense plans to begin testing of a Medium Robotic Combat Vehicle (M-RCV) next year. New Atlas reports: Developed by the Ministry of Defense's Directorate of Defense Research and Development (DDR&D), the Tank and APC Directorate, and Israeli security industries, the robotic tank is based on a new robotic platform type BLR-2 made by Israeli firm BL. It features a 30-mm autonomous turret originally developed by the Tank and APC Directorate for the Eitan armored personnel carrier; the Elbit Iron Fist Active Protection System, which is a smaller, mountable version of the Iron Dome anti-projectile defense system; fire control and mission management systems; a robotic autonomous operations kit; and active and passive sensors for situational awareness.

In addition, the robotic vehicle carries a capsuled drone that it can deploy and retrieve for forward reconnaissance missions. It can also carry a variety of heavy loads, as well as an Israeli Aerospace Industries missile launcher and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Spike missiles. According to Elbit, the robot can operate in all weathers in a largely autonomous mode and can integrate with uncrewed battlefield arrays. Field tests in representative scenarios are scheduled to start in 2023. You can view the M-RCV in action here.

In 2019 SEO toolset provider Ahrefs announced it would build it's own search engine, remembers Search Engine Land. After investing $60 million of its own money, this month that search engine has finally launched with the name of "Yep", and Ahrefs "is positioning it as a Googe competitor.

"However, we've seen plenty of Google competitors and Google "killers" come and go over the past two decades. So for now, let's just call it a Google alternative... Yep will not collect personal information (e.g., geolocation, name, age, gender) by default. Your Yep search history will not be stored anywhere.

What Yep will rely on is aggregated search statistics to improve algorithms, spelling corrections, and search suggestions, the company said. "In other words, we do save certain data on searches, but never in a personally identifiable way," said Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko.... What Yep will use is a searcher's:

- Entered keywords.
- Language preference received from the browser.
- Approximate geographical area at the origin of the search at the scale of a region or a city (deduced from the IP address)....

AhrefsBot visits more than 8 billion webpages every 24 hours, which makes it the second most active crawler on the web, behind only Google, Ahrefs said. For 12 years, AhrefsBot has been crawling the web. They had just been using the AhrefsBot data to power its link database and SEO insights. The Yep search index is updated every 15 to 30 minutes. Daily, the company adds 30 million webpages and drops 20 million.

Ahrefs said its Singapore data center is powered by around 1,000 servers that store and process 100 petabytes of web data (webpages, links between them, and the search index). Each server uses at least 2x 100GB connections... Before the end of the year, Ahrefs plans to open a U.S.-based data center.
"It's a unique proposition," reports TechCrunch, "running its own search index, rather than relying on APIs from Google or Bing.

"As for the name? I dunno; Yep seems pretty daft to me, but I guess at least the name is one character shorter than Bing, the other major search engine I'll only ever use by accident." Name aside, Yep is taking a fresh new path through the world of internet advertising, claiming that it's giving 90% of its ad revenues to content creators. The pitch is pretty elegant:

"Let's say that the biggest search engine in the world makes $100B a year. Now, imagine if they gave $90B to content creators and publishers," the company paints a picture of the future it wants to live in. "Wikipedia would probably earn a few billion dollars a year from its content. They'd be able to stop asking for donations and start paying the people who polish their articles a decent salary."

It's an impressively quixotic windmill to fight for the bootstrapped company Ahrefs. Its CEO sheds some light on why this makes sense to him:

"Creators who make search results possible deserve to receive payments for their work...."

Perhaps it sounds a little idealistic, but damn it, that's what made me excited about Yep in the first place. It represents the faintest of echoes from a web more innocent and more hopeful than the social-media poisoned cesspool of chaos and fake news we often find ourselves in today.
Search Engine Land points out that DuckDuckGo, which launched in 2008, "gets as many searches per year (~15.7 billion) as Google gets in about two or three days. Even Microsoft Bing — which is owned by Microsoft, the third-largest company on the planet by market cap — has failed to make a significant dent in Google's search market share since 2009."

But they also quote Ahrefs CEO Dmytro Gerasymenko as saying in 2019, "If we succeed in our endeavors, Google will finally get some long overdue competition for search."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Robots can now be covered in living skin grown from real human cells to make them look more like us. As robots increasingly take on roles as nurses, care workers, teachers and other jobs that involve close personal contact, it is important to make them look more human so we feel comfortable interacting with them, says Shoji Takeuchi at the University of Tokyo in Japan. At the moment, robots are sometimes coated in silicone rubber to give them a fleshy appearance, but the rubber lacks the texture of human skin, he says.

To make more realistic-looking skin, Takeuchi and his colleagues bathed a plastic robot finger in a soup of collagen and human skin cells called fibroblasts for three days. The collagen and fibroblasts adhered to the finger and formed a layer similar to the dermis, which is the second-from-top layer of human skin. Next, they gently poured other human skin cells called keratinocytes onto the finger to recreate the upper layer of human skin, called the epidermis. The resulting 1.5-millimeter-thick skin was able to stretch and contract as the finger bent backwards and forwards. As it did this, it wrinkled like normal skin, says Takeuchi. "It is much more realistic than silicone."

The robot skin could also be healed when it was cut by grafting a collagen sheet onto the wound. However, the skin began to dry out after a while since it didn't have blood vessels to replenish it with moisture. In the future, it may be possible to incorporate artificial blood vessels into the skin to keep it hydrated, as well as sweat glands and hair follicles to make it more realistic, says Takeuchi. It should also be possible to make different skin colors by adding melanocytes, he says. The researchers now plan to try coating a whole robot in the living skin. The research has been published in the journal Matter.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Kim Yong-rae is the CEO of Speefox, South Korea's biggest manufacturer of capacitors, and he thinks robots are key to the company's survival. On his factory floor, free-standing machines squeal as they spit out gleaming sheets of aluminum that roll into coils. The air is filled with the rhythmic thud of stamping and the buzzing of machinery moving continuously, on the ground and overhead. Capacitors are essential to almost every electronic device, and these will end up in thousands of smartphones, cameras, and home appliances. "Throughout our history, we've always had to find ways to stay ahead," Kim told Rest of World. "Automation is the next step in that process." Speefox's factory is 75% automated, representing South Korea's continued push away from human labor. Part of that drive is labor costs: South Korea's minimum wage has climbed, rising 5% just this year.

But the most recent impetus is legal liability for worker death or injury. In January, a law came into effect called the Serious Disasters Punishment Act, which says, effectively, that if workers die or sustain serious injuries on the job, and courts determine that the company neglected safety standards, the CEO or high-ranking managers could be fined or go to prison. Experts and local media say that the law has shaken the heavy industry and construction sectors. Along with pushing the companies to invest to make workplaces safer, they point out, it's triggered a ramp-up of automation in order to require fewer workers -- or, ideally, none at all.

According to the Wall Street Journal, workplace robot orders increased 40% in the first quarter of 2022, and were up 21% overall in 2021. The robot industry is now valued at $1.6 billion. Business Insider reports: Robots are providing at least a temporary solution for businesses confronted by difficulty hiring in the tightest job market since World War II, marred by the pandemic, record-high quitting rates, and vast economic turmoil. [...] Advanced technology, however, is allowing machines to assist a growing number of industry sectors, while at the same time becoming more accessible.

But as robot usage climbs, some have expressed concern about the machines displacing human workers as the labor crisis eventually eases. "Automation, if it goes very fast, can destroy a lot of jobs," Daron Acemoglu, an economics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told the Journal. "The labor shortage is not going to last. This is temporary."