Google has announced it will no longer build custom AI or machine learning tools for oil and gas companies. The move comes in response to a report from Greenpeace called'Oil in the Cloud,' which identified the tech giant as one of three main tech companies helping fossil fuel companies expand their extraction projects. While Google still has a number of current contracts it says it will honor, a company spokesperson said that moving forward it will no longer build custom AI or machine learning algorithms'to facilitate upstream extraction in the oil and gas industry.' The spokesperson pointed out that the company receives just $65million in annual revenue through Google Cloud from oil and gas companies, less than one percent of the total revenue from cloud services. Greenpeace was encouraged by Google's response and called on other major tech companies to follow suit, saying it has already had'productive conversations' with many.

This is the moment a robotic dog tries its metal paws at herding unruly sheep on a farm in New Zealand. Spot gathered together the animals before pushing them through the field, with the help of two biological sheepdogs. Developed by Boston Dynamics, it can reach speeds of up to 3mph and costs less than a car, which average £30,000, to lease, according to reports. It has been heralded as the future of farming. The robot was seen helping the dogs to keep the sheep together.

Sphero, the company behind robotic toys like the BB-8 robot and educational robotics kits, announced today that it's spinning its public safety division into a new company, dubbed Company Six. It plans to commercialize robots and AI software for first responders, government, defense and "those who work in dangerous situations." While Sphero didn't say that Company Six will make robots for police, it sounds like the new company could be headed in that direction. "Our team is excited to build critically-needed robotic hardware and advanced software solutions that help first responders and people with dangerous jobs," said Company Six CEO Jim Booth, formerly Sphero's COO. Sphero has brought four million robots to market, including programmable tank robots, and it's experience in mobility could come in handy.

UK prime minister Boris Johnson told MPs today that he is confident that the government will have recruited 25,000 coronavirus contact tracers by the start of June, which he says will provide the capacity to trace the contacts of 10,000 new coronavirus cases per day. Johnson said 24,000 contact tracers have already been recruited. In April, health secretary Matt Hancock said the government hoped to recruit 18,000 contact tracers by mid-May, to coincide with the planned release of the NHS covid-19 contact tracing app. But the widespread release of the app, currently being trialled on the Isle of Wight, has now been delayed until June. There are also ongoing concerns about privacy. In a recent report, security researchers wrote that there should be a legal requirement that all data collected by the app is deleted at the end of the coronavirus crisis, rather than being anonymised or repurposed.

Tiny drug-carrying robots that can move against the direction of blood flow could one day be used to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to cancer cells. Metin Sitti at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany and his colleagues have developed tiny robots called "microrollers" that can carry cancer drugs and selectively target human breast cancer cells. The team drew inspiration for design of the robots from white blood cells in the human body, which can move along the walls of blood vessels against the direction of blood flow. The microrollers are made from glass microparticles and are spherical in shape. One half of the robot was coated with a thin magnetic nanofilm made from nickel and gold.

At the University of Toronto, Ted Sargent runs a test kitchen of sorts. His team, composed of researchers and students, develops recipes, measures and mixes ingredients carefully, and then evaluates the aftermath. The concoctions mostly--if not always--turn out to be inedible. Fortunately, though, flavor is not the point. Their goal is to invent recipes to "upgrade" the greenhouse gas into useful materials, says Sargent, an electrical engineer.

Seville, Spain – He maybe silent and his moves mechanical but he can pull you a pint without the slightest concern about contamination: meet Beer Cart, the robotic barman serving beer in Seville. He made his debut when the southern city began enjoying new freedom as Spain eased a two-month lockdown, with bars and cafes in half of the country allowed to reopen their terraces. Sitting in the middle of the bar at La Gitana Loca (The Crazy Gypsy), the giant robotic arm with a "Captain Hook" pincer smoothly reaches over to a dispenser, takes a plastic cup then spins around to hold it at an angle under the tap. Gradually straightening the cup as it fills, the robot then places it on the counter for the customer to pick up. Serving up small draft beers -- or canas -- for just over a week in the center of Seville, the bionic barman has drawn a steady stream of both customers and curious onlookers. Spain has lost more than 27,700 people to the virus and taken a very cautious approach to lifting the lockdown, with bar and cafe terraces operating at a reduced capacity and under strict hygiene conditions.

The model simulates realistic production environments using a training model from Fischertechnik, the protocols MQTT, OPC UA, as well as Amazon Web Services and a programmable logic controller from Siemens. The AR apps were designed to be platform-independent, so that they run on iPadOS, iOS and Android, as well as HoloLens 1 and 2. The "SmARt Factory" continues to evolve: in the future, for example, a multi-agent system will enable adaptable production.

For engineers developing new materials or protective coatings, there are billions of different possibilities to sort through. Lab tests or even detailed computer simulations to determine their exact properties, such as toughness, can take hours, days, or more for each variation. Now, a new artificial intelligence-based approach developed at MIT could reduce that to a matter of milliseconds, making it practical to screen vast arrays of candidate materials. The system, which MIT researchers hope could be used to develop stronger protective coatings or structural materials -- for example, to protect aircraft or spacecraft from impacts -- is described in a paper in the journal Matter, by MIT postdoc Chi-Hua Yu, civil and environmental engineering professor and department head Markus J. Buehler, and Yu-Chuan Hsu at the National Taiwan University. The focus of this work was on predicting the way a material would break or fracture, by analyzing the propagation of cracks through the material's molecular structure.

Google has announced that it will stop developing AI tools for oil and gas companies following a report from Greenpeace which criticised the search giant as well as Microsoft and Amazon. The latest report just shows that while firms may wish to present themselves as pro-renewable energy, if you scratch beneath the surface, things aren't as rosy as they appear to be. Responding to Google's decision to cut these ties with gas and oil firms, Elizabeth Jardim, senior corporate campaigner at Greenpeace USA, said: "While Google still has legacy contracts with oil and gas firms that we hope they will terminate, we welcome Google's move to no longer create custom solutions for upstream oil and gas extraction." "We hope Microsoft and Amazon will quickly follow with commitments to end AI partnerships with oil and gas firms, as these contracts contradict their stated climate goals and accelerate the climate crisis." According to the Greenpeace report, Microsoft has the most contracts with gas and oil companies and offers AI capabilities in all phases of oil production.