A team of researchers in China recently figured out how to turn the E coli bacteria into a hybrid robot that smuggles drugs past the blood-brain barrier by pretending to be a white blood cell. These little robots in disguise represent a breakthrough in our ability to treat diseases such as cancer. Background: There’s a party going on in our […]
Robotic surgery systems are used in thousands of hospitals around the world. A decade ago they were clunky machines built to assist with routine procedures. Today, they’re capable of conducting end-to-end surgeries without human aid. Recent leaps in the field of deep learning have made difficult tasks such as surgery, electronics assembly, and piloting a fighter jet relatively simple. It […]
It’s no longer considered science fiction fodder to imagine a human-level machine intelligence in our lifetimes. Year after year we see the status quo in AI research shattered as yesterday’s algorithms bear way to today’s systems. One day, perhaps within a matter of decades, we might build machines with artificial neural networks that imitate our brains in every meaningful way. […]
There’s something cool and meta about interacting with, playing as, or fighting against an artificial intelligence in video games. AI has captured our imagination in print, film, and even song, but games give us the space to interact with and see fantastical worlds from otherwise impossible perspectives. To be absolutely clear, this isn’t about the games with the smartest “CPU […]
Greetings humanoids! I could not be more excited to introduce Neural’s new weekly newsletter. Every seventh day, the cyborgs who write for Neural will send you an email full of news, analysis, opinion, and “Gee Whiz!” moments galore. All you have to do is sign up and start clicking the refresh button on your inbox until your bony human fingers […]
What goes up must come down, but as any aerodynamics engineer will tell you: getting it up is the hard part. On Earth, where our atmosphere is rather dense compared to many planets, we’re able to send aloft objects that are massive enough to be anchored to the ground through gravity via engineering based on simple physical science principles. As […]
A team of scientists from Tel-Aviv University have successfully given a robot the ability to hear sounds through the use of a dead locust’s ear. What? Seriously. A university press release highlighting the team’s work had this to say: Researchers at Tel Aviv University report that they have successfully connected the ear of a dead locust to a robot that […]
