Payal Dhar

The dawn of the robot revolution is already here, and it is not the dystopian nightmare we imagined. Instead, it comes in the form of social robots: Autonomous robots in homes and schools, offices and public spaces, able to interact with humans and other robots in a socially acceptable, human-perceptible way to resolve tasks related to core human needs. To design social robots that “understand” humans, robotics scientists are delving into the psychology of human communication.

They say you always remember your first kill, but I struggle to do so. It might have been sniping Guiseppe “Don” Guillani from the hill across his mansion. Or perhaps it was garroting the delivery man and taking his place to infiltrate the Don’s domain.
Either way, it was in Hitman: Silent Assassin (2002) when I first stepped into the classic black suit of Agent 47, traveling the world, invading the worlds of the rich and famous, and picking them off silently. What is it about this game that brings me — a card-carrying pacifist — such glee?

The part that artificial intelligence plays in climate change has come under scrutiny, including from tech workers themselves who joined the global climate strike last year. Much can be done by developing tools to quantify the carbon cost of machine learning models and by switching to a sustainable artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Any successful implementation of artificial intelligence hinges on asking the right questions in the right way. That’s what the British AI company DeepMind (a subsidiary of Alphabet) accomplished when it used its neural network to tackle one of biology’s grand challenges, the protein-folding problem. Its neural net, known as AlphaFold, was able to predict the 3D structures of proteins based on their amino acid sequences with unprecedented accuracy.

What is popular fantasy today is inextricably linked to the idea of medievalism imagined in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with the social and cultural values of that time, where heroism was associated with masculinity and whiteness.

Space is a long way to go to learn about human tissues, yet researchers have their gazes trained at the stars. Earlier this year, a team of researchers from the University of Zurich (UZH) sent 250 test tubes of carefully prepped human stem cells to the U.S. National Laboratory on the International Space Station (ISS). They wanted to study how the near-weightless, microgravitational environment of the ISS affects these building-block cells in the hope of understanding some of their secrets.

Nintendo's blockbuster game is playing digital host to Australia's annual independent arts festival.

Active noise cancellation/control (ANC) headsets depend on passive sound attenuation from the padding and cups found in headphones and earphones. This makes ANC headphones effective noise control devices, although wearing these for extended periods of time can be uncomfortable and even cause injury. A group of researchers from the University of Technology Sydney have been working on a new kind of virtual noise cancellation system that moves the ANC components away from personal audio equipment and into the headrest of a chair.

Standing up a 4G/LTE network might seem well below the pay grade of a legendary innovation hub like Nokia Bell Labs. However, standing up that same network on the moon is another matter. Nokia and 13 other companies — including SpaceX and Lockheed-Martin — have won five-year contracts totaling over US$ 370 million from NASA to demonstrate key infrastructure technologies on the lunar surface. All of which is part of NASA’s Artemis program to return humans to the moon.

ulien Gelinas, 23, is really good at League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle arena game where players form teams of five “champions” and battle for control of an opposing team’s base. So good, in fact, that it earned him a full-ride scholarship to Maryville University, Missouri.

For India’s queer people, particularly younger people, the strict six-week nationwide lockdown between March and May meant not having access to affirming spaces.

What defines a real sport? Is it the physicality of straining muscles and pouring sweat, or the adrenaline-pumping high of competition? Perhaps it’s the discipline of following rules or a system of rankings and leagues and competitions. By any of these measures, competitive gaming — also known as esports — should easily qualify as a sport. Yet opinions remain divided.

So far, deep learning has comprised learning from static datasets, which makes AI really good at tasks related to correlations and associations. However, neural nets do not interpret cause-and effect, or why these associations and correlations exist. Nor are they particularly good at tasks that involve imagination, reasoning, and planning. This, in turn, limits AI from being able to generalize their learning and transfer their skills to another related environment.

When Shouzhong Zou and his team at the Department of Chemistry, American University, decided to try spinach as way to improve the performance of fuel cells, even they were a little surprised at how well it worked. In their proof-of-concept experiments, they used spinach—bought from local supermarkets—to make a carbon-rich catalyst that can be used in fuel cells and metal-air batteries.

Social distancing and travel are two things, much like Kipling’s East and West, that you'd imagine would never meet. Then the novel coronavirus made it clear that the tourism industry needed strategies to survive beyond the pandemic. Thus, we can now wander virtual galleries and museums, take off on digital safaris, and experience remote guided tours. But there is another way to be transported to new worlds and challenged in mind and, sometimes, body. We’re talking about gaming.