A robotic chemist working autonomously in a lab has developed an oxygen-producing catalyst from minerals found in Martian meteorites. The same procedure could one day be used to provide oxygen for astronauts on Mars. Sending supplies to a future Martian colony by spacecraft would be extremely expensive, which makes producing materials with Mars's natural resources an appealing option. But this can be difficult because there are fewer available elements on Mars than on Earth. Yi Luo at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei and his colleagues have developed a fully automated robot chemist.

In this PWC study, 59% of leaders said they will invest in new technologies, and 46% say they will invest in generative AI specifically in the next 12 to 18 months. The most significant hurdle is adequate cloud bandwidth/computing power to accommodate usage and enable scalability. That means coming to terms with how much money can be spent on new generative AI systems and generative AI enablement. Try reading any tech or business article these days without finding a mention. However, the computing and infrastructure costs of running generative AI models in the cloud are a barrier for many businesses.

A robot crushed a man to death in South Korea after the machine apparently failed to differentiate him from the boxes of produce it was handling, the Yonhap news agency reported on Wednesday. The man, a robotics company worker in his 40s, was inspecting the robot's sensor operations at a distribution centre for agricultural produce in South Gyeongsang province. The industrial robot, which was lifting boxes filled with bell peppers and placing them on a pallet, appears to have malfunctioned and identified the man as a box, Yonhap reported, citing the police. The robotic arm pushed the man's upper body down against the conveyor belt, crushing his face and chest, according to Yonhap. He was transferred to the hospital but died later, the report said.

OpenAI, the company whose ChatGPT brought AI chatbots to mainstream awareness, said Monday that it'll let you build special-purpose AI apps using its technology. And with a new app store coming that'll let you find or share these GPTs, as the company is calling these customized artificial intelligence tools, OpenAI looks like it's hoping to have something an iPhone moment. You don't need to know how to program to make a new GPT. You have to give it plain-language instructions, upload some of your own knowledge in the form of PDFs, videos or other files, then steer the bot's purpose in a direction like creating images or searching the web. "GPTs are tailored versions of ChatGPT for a specific purpose," OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman said at the OpenAI DevDay conference in San Francisco.