Robots are going to be employed to crawl over nuclear missile silos in the US, automating maintenance that has previously been done manually. Some 400 steel and concrete silos housing Minuteman III intercontinental missiles are spread across Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota. Constructed in the early 1960s for an earlier generation of missiles, the silos were designed to withstand megaton-level nuclear strikes. Each is 30 metres deep and 5 metres across, with a missile inside.

During the early years of the Cold War, an array of underwater microphones monitoring for sounds of Russian submarines captured something otherworldly in the depths of the North Atlantic. The haunting sounds came not from enemy craft, nor aliens, but humpback whales, a species that, at the time, humans had hunted almost to the brink of extinction. Years later, when environmentalist Roger Payne obtained the recordings from U.S. Navy storage and listened to them, he was deeply moved. The whale songs seemed to reveal majestic creatures that could communicate with one another in complex ways. If only the world could hear these sounds, Payne reasoned, the humpback whale might just be saved from extinction. When Payne released the recordings in 1970 as the album Songs of the Humpback Whale, he was proved right. It was played at the U.N. general assembly, and it inspired Congress to pass the 1973 endangered species act. By 1986, commercial whaling was banned under international law.

Last month, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted in favor of allowing that city's police department to deploy robots equipped with a potential to kill, should a situation--in the estimation of police officers--call for lethal force. With that decision, the board appeared to have delivered the city to a dystopian future. The vote garnered a loudly negative response from the public, and this week the supervisors reversed course and sent the policy back to committee. But the fact that the decision initially passed--and may yet pass in some form--should not have been surprising. Police departments around the country have been acquiring robotic devices for decades.

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. Google's had an awkward week. After years of preaching that conversational search was its future, it's stood by as the world discovered ChatGPT. The powerful chatbot from OpenAI takes queries--some meant for the search bar--and answers with astonishing conversational replies. It's shared recipes, reviewed code, and argued politics so adeptly that screenshots of its answers now fill social media.

A medical robot can guide a flexible needle through the lungs of living pigs without requiring human surgeons to directly control the robot's actions. Over several additional tests on lungs removed from the pigs, the robot placed the needle more precisely than human doctors using a standard straight needle procedure. "There are many procedures, including biopsy or directed drug delivery or localised radiation cancer treatment, that involve using a needle to get to a specific target to perform the procedure where you're manoeuvring that needle inside …

Teenagers have always found ways around doing the hard work of actual learning. CliffsNotes date back to the 1950s, "No Fear Shakespeare" puts the playwright into modern English, YouTube offers literary analysis and historical explication from numerous amateurs and professionals, and so on. For as long as those shortcuts have existed, however, one big part of education has remained inescapable: writing. Barring outright plagiarism, students have always arrived at that moment when they're on their own with a blank page, staring down a blinking cursor, the essay waiting to be written. Now that might be about to change.

Tesla's Full Self-Driving technology may be a failure, Tesla lawyers admit -- but it's not a fraud. The electric car company is facing a class-action lawsuit from Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) technology customers. They claim they were ripped off, duped by statements from co-founder and CEO Elon Musk and marketing materials from Tesla over the past six years suggesting full-fledged autonomous driving was imminent. No Tesla on the road today is capable of full self driving, and yet Tesla sells what it calls a Full Self-Driving Capability for $15,000. In its defense, Tesla lawyers said that "mere failure to realize a long-term, aspirational goal is not fraud."

A flexible quadruped robot can sense when it is damaged and stop moving until it heals. Robots made of soft and deformable materials can change their body shape and imitate biological tissues like muscles for prosthetics. But because they are soft, they can be susceptible to damage. Hedan Bai at Northwestern University in Illinois and her colleagues made a simple soft robot that can detect when it is harmed and then mend itself before continuing to move. The robot is about 12 centimetres long and shaped like the letter X. It moves using compressed air that is pushed through its body, making it undulate and lift its four legs.

A new advanced AI chatbot has emerged, taking over Twitter and presenting a new era of technology to the public. ChatGPT is a new advanced artificial intelligence chatbot created by the tech company OpenAI. The software was opened for testing last week with over one million users testing the site, according to OpenAI's co-founder Sam Altman. ChatGPT stands for "generative pre-trained transformer" and is the next iteration of OpenAI's GPT-3 chatbot. It is one of the first consumer-based AI of its kind to have a free, easy-to-use interface.

A woman holds up a sign while taking part in a demonstration about the use of robots by the San Francisco Police Department outside of City Hall in San Francisco on Monday. A woman holds up a sign while taking part in a demonstration about the use of robots by the San Francisco Police Department outside of City Hall in San Francisco on Monday. SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco supervisors voted Tuesday to put the brakes on a controversial policy that would let police use robots for deadly force. The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to explicitly ban the use of robots in such fashion for now. But they sent the issue back to a committee for further discussion and could allow it in limited cases at another time.