‘Poster Girl’ Explores the Surveillance State’s Allure
“Divergent” author Veronica Roth’s new novel is about a young women coming to terms with the authoritarian regime that manipulated her.
Beware the Distraction of the Twitter Mob Campaign
A kerfuffle over Bayonetta voice actor Hellena Taylor’s pay reveals the often hollow structure of social media activism.
How to Set Up Your New Android Phone (2022)
Welcome to your shiny new Google-powered smartphone. It will be up and ready in no time with these handy tips.
The ‘M3GAN’ Dance Meme: Vicious Dolls Could Dominate 2023
Fans have been recutting the film’s trailer to make its namesake robot do choreo to Beyoncé and Megan Thee Stallion. Chucky could never.
A broader definition of learning could help stimulate interdisciplinary research
By embracing a broader definition of learning that includes any behavioral adaption developed in response to regular features of an environment, researchers could better collaborate across the fields of psychology, computer science, sociology, and genetics, according to a new Perspectives on Psychological Science article.
What the Soup-Throwing Climate Activists Got Right
Plus: Pipeline vandals, ketchup on hot dogs, and a billion missing crabs.
Scared of injections? Try a wearable soft robot to ease aversion to needles
Researchers have shown that pain experienced by patients during medical treatments can be considerably alleviated by holding and experiencing the motions of a soft furry robot. Based on measures of pain, fear, and biomarker collection, the researchers believe that the robot can improve patient experience.
Tentacle robot can gently grasp fragile objects
If you’ve ever played the claw game at an arcade, you know how hard it is to grab and hold onto objects using robotics grippers. Imagine how much more nerve-wracking that game would be if, instead of plush stuffed animals, you were trying to grab a fragile piece of endangered coral or a priceless artifact …
Ensuring the Resettling and Safeguarding of Refugees Fleeing the War in Ukraine
An estimated 12 million people have fled their homes since Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine began, according to the United Nations — resulting in one of the largest humanitarian catastrophes since the Second World War. With countries in Europe and beyond stepping up to come to the assistance of Ukraine and those displaced, the UK government launched …
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PI-ARS: Accelerating Evolution-Learned Visual-Locomotion with Predictive Information Representations
Posted by Wenhao Yu, Research Scientist, Robotics at Google, and Kuang-Huei Lee, Research Engineer, Google Research, Brain team Evolution strategy (ES) is a family of optimization techniques inspired by the ideas of natural selection: a population of candidate solutions are usually evolved over generations to better adapt to an optimization objective. ES has been applied …