Boston Dynamics will start selling its dog-like SpotMini robot in 2019

TC Sessions: Robotics 2018

After 26 years, Boston Dynamics is finally getting ready to start selling some robots. Founder Marc Raibert says that the company’s dog-like SpotMini robot is in pre-production and preparing for commercial availability in 2019. The announcement came onstage at TechCrunch’s TC Sessions: Robotics event today at UC Berkeley.

“The SpotMini robot is one that was motivated by thinking about what could go in an office — in a space more accessible for business applications — and then, the home eventually,” Raibert said onstage.

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Scientists find way to bend, stretch diamond

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WASHINGTON, April 19 (Xinhua) — An international team of researchers has found that diamond, the strongest of all natural materials, can bend and stretch much like rubber and snap back to its original shape.

A study published on Thursday in the journal Science opened the door to a variety of diamond-based devices for applications such as sensing, data storage, biocompatible in vivo imaging, optoelectronics, and drug delivery.

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A Graphine roll out

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A new manufacturing process produces strips of graphene, at large scale, for use in membrane technologies and other applications.

MIT engineers have developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene.

The team’s results are the first demonstration of an industrial, scalable method for manufacturing high-quality graphene that is tailored for use in membranes that filter a variety of molecules, including salts, larger ions, proteins, or nanoparticles. Such membranes should be useful for desalination, biological separation, and other applications.

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Computer system transcribes words users “speak silently”

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MIT researchers have developed a computer interface that can transcribe words that the user verbalizes internally but does not actually speak aloud.

The system consists of a wearable device and an associated computing system. Electrodes in the device pick up neuromuscular signals in the jaw and face that are triggered by internal verbalizations — saying words “in your head” — but are undetectable to the human eye. The signals are fed to a machine-learning system that has been trained to correlate particular signals with particular words.

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As long as there are humans, there will be jobs

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By Deb Frey: Automation will dominate some fields. But people will want new things, and new industries will arise.

Predicting the course of technological progress is extremely difficult. Just because worries about human obsolescence ultimately turned out to be misplaced in the Industrial Revolution doesn’t mean that the same happy result must necessarily prevail this time around. So the persistent question about artificial intelligence — or “robots” in common parlance – is whether they will make human workers obsolete.

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The grim conclusions of the largest-ever study of fake news

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Falsehoods almost always beat out the truth on Twitter, penetrating further, faster, and deeper into the social network than accurate information.

A large megaphone projects lies, fake news, falsehoods, and images of Donald Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Hillary Clinton. A smaller megaphone projects truth.

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The top 10 breakthrough technologies and the key players leading the charge, according to MIT Technology Review

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Every fall, MIT Technology Review’s editors get together to begin the months-long process of reviewing their coverage. The goal? To create a list of the top ten technological advances from the last year that will have the greatest longterm global impact on consumers.

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