A small robot that can shape-shift and produce heat could incinerate cancer cells or stop bleeding from inside the body. It could also be used to ferry drugs directly to tumours or hard-to-reach places like arteries. Tiny robots with soft bodies have shown promise for delivering drugs without causing damage – but adding hard elements could make them more useful. Ren Hao Soon at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues designed the centimetre-sized robot to have overlapping aluminium plates inspired by pangolins, the only mammal with scales. They layered rectangular "scales" over softer, magnetic material, which let the robot change its shape.

While advances in wearable robotics have helped restore mobility for people with lower limb impairments, current control methods for exoskeletons are limited in their ability to provide natural and intuitive movements for users. This can compromise balance and contribute to user fatigue and discomfort. Few studies have focused on the development of robust controllers that can optimize the user's experience in terms of safety and independence. Existing exoskeletons for lower limb rehabilitation employ a variety of technologies to help the user maintain balance, including special crutches and sensors, according to co-author Ghaith Androwis, PhD, senior research scientist in the Center for Mobility and Rehabilitation Engineering Research at Kessler Foundation and director of the Center's Rehabilitation Robotics and Research Laboratory. Exoskeletons that operate without such helpers allow more independent walking, but at the cost of added weight and slow walking speed.

Neil Thomas wished he could have been awake during the operation to remove a 6cm cancerous tumour from his colon. He was one of the first people to go under the scalpel of University Hospital of Wales's new robotic systems in June 2022. Thomas's surgeon, James Ansell, would once have stooped over his patient's body to perform the operation. Instead, he stood behind a console on another side of the theatre wearing 3D glasses. His hands grasped two joysticks, which controlled the four robotic arms that huddled around Thomas's unconscious body.

Other industry leaders are taking a different tact, blitzing Congress with their vision for how Washington should regulate their companies. Altman in May had private meetings and a dinner with lawmakers, where he demonstrated -- to their amusement -- how ChatGPT could write a speech for them to deliver on the chamber floor. Smith has given legislators a lesson on the technical stack that underpins generative AI models like ChatGPT, including computing infrastructure and applications. And Smith recently unveiled his blueprint for AI regulation at a speech in Washington attended by half a dozen lawmakers.

Male fruit flies reared in a lab are more successful at mating after an encounter with a robotic dummy designed to look like a rival male. The finding could boost efforts to control populations of the flies, which are a major crop pest. The Mediterranean fruit fly (Ceratitis capitata) is one of the most destructive fruit pests in the world, found on every continent except Antarctica.

Generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT and Google's Bard generates certain text in response to a query using natural language processing and machine learning. Meta's new generative AI, Voicebox, does things a little differently -- by producing audio clips. Voicebox, announced Friday by Facebook's parent company Meta, can synthesize speech using a 2-second audio sample. With that clip, it can match the audio style as well as do text-to-speech generation or re-create a portion of the speech that may have been interrupted by some external noise. Voicebox can also take that sample and have it read English text in other languages such as French, German, Spanish, Polish or Portuguese. Meta says Voicebox can be used to give a natural-sounding voice to virtual assistants or nonplayer characters in the metaverse, which are digital worlds in which people will gather to work, play and hang out.

Asset Entities is a publicly listed set of social media accounts and Discord servers that churn out get-rich-quick tips for Gen Z. It reported a net loss of $413,000 last year. But give Texas-based vice president Kyle Fairbanks just 21 49 seconds and he'll tell you how to (maybe) make $20,000 a month arbitraging AirBnbs up and down the East Coast. He has an extensive corpus. For a few wondrous hours on Monday it was the Nasdaq's best-performing stock.

The EU has taken a major step towards passing one of the world's first laws governing artificial intelligence after its main legislative branch approved the text of draft legislation that includes a blanket ban on police use of live facial recognition technology in public places. The European parliament approved rules aimed at setting a global standard for the technology, which encompasses everything from automated medical diagnoses to some types of drone, AI-generated videos known as deepfakes, and bots such as ChatGPT. MEPs will now thrash out details with EU countries before the draft rules – known as the AI act – become legislation. "AI raises a lot of questions socially, ethically, economically. But now is not the time to hit any'pause button'. On the contrary, it is about acting fast and taking responsibility," said Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market.

The European Union's flagship artificial intelligence regulation took a major step toward becoming law on Wednesday, after lawmakers voted to approve the text of the law that would ban real-time facial recognition, and place new transparency requirements on generative AI tools like ChatGPT. AI Act--will now progress to the final "trilogue" stage of the E.U.'s regulatory process. There, officials will attempt to reach a compromise between the draft of the law just approved by the E.U. Parliament, a different version preferred by the bloc's executive branch, and the desires of member states. That process will begin on Wednesday night and must be completed by January if the law is to come into force before E.U. elections next year.

A robot manipulating objects while, say, working in a kitchen, will benefit from understanding which items are composed of the same materials. With this knowledge, the robot would know to exert a similar amount of force whether it picks up a small pat of butter from a shadowy corner of the counter or an entire stick from inside the brightly lit fridge. Identifying objects in a scene that are composed of the same material, known as material selection, is an especially challenging problem for machines because a material's appearance can vary drastically based on the shape of the object or lighting conditions. Scientists at MIT and Adobe Research have taken a step toward solving this challenge. They developed a technique that can identify all pixels in an image representing a given material, which is shown in a pixel selected by the user. The method is accurate even when objects have varying shapes and sizes, and the machine-learning model they developed isn't tricked by shadows or lighting conditions that can make the same material appear different.