Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It's inspired by the daily TechCrunch column where it gets its name. If you aren't in the United States, it's a little hard to explain. In short, certain deficiencies in our policing and judicial systems flared brightly as the week came to a close. So, today's Exchange newsletter will be shorter than intended. Hug the people you love, and everyone else.

These are some of the scariest and freakiest Artificial Intelligence Moments that have occurred by A.I. Some people believe they will take over the world, others think they are only as powerful as humans allow them to be. However, this is some of the oddest stuff an A.I. has done so far, what do you think?

Scientists have taken an unprecedented look at the supermassive black hole in our galaxy – and found an unknown star near to it. The new research has allowed scientists to take an estimate of the black hole's mass that is more accurate than ever before. Two studies covering the research are published today in Astronomy & Astrophysics is published today. Both include the work of Reinhard Genzel, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2020 for his work on the black hole, known as Sagittarius A*. "We want to learn more about the black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*: How massive is it exactly? Do stars around it behave exactly as we expect from Einstein's general theory of relativity?" Genzel said in a statement.

Jenée Desmond-Harris is online weekly to chat live with readers. Here's an edited transcript of this week's chat. Q. Hurt and betrayed: I recently found out my husband of seven years has been on adult dating sites and OnlyFans. I found multiple purchases from these sites over a year-and-a-half span and had no idea about it. He doesn't think he cheated since he didn't physically ever meet these women; I guess he only bought videos or pictures.

"His companies have faced allegations of sexual harassment and poor working conditions; in October, a federal jury ordered Tesla to pay $137 million to a Black employee who accused the automaker of ignoring racial abuse. The businesses have also been fined for numerous regulatory violations. The feds are probing Tesla's Autopilot software, which has been involved in an alarming number of crashes with parked emergency vehicles, resulting in injuries and death. The company's expansion in China required cozying up to its repressive autocrats." So naturally, let's make him Time's Person of the Year! No one can accuse Time of rolling over for its pick.

As consensus across the various published AI ethics principles is approached, a gap remains between high-level principles and practical techniques that can be readily adopted to design and develop responsible AI systems. We examine the practices and experiences of researchers and engineers from Australia's national scientific research agency (CSIRO), who are involved in designing and developing AI systems for a range of purposes. Semi-structured interviews were used to examine how the practices of the participants relate to and align with a set of high-level AI ethics principles that are proposed by the Australian Government. The principles comprise: Privacy Protection & Security, Reliability & Safety, Transparency & Explainability, Fairness, Contestability, Accountability, Human-centred Values, and Human, Social & Environmental Wellbeing. The insights of the researchers and engineers as well as the challenges that arose for them in the practical application of the principles are examined. Finally, a set of organisational responses are provided to support the implementation of high-level AI ethics principles into practice.

Solving some of the major challenges of the 21st Century, such as producing clean electricity or developing high temperature superconductors, will require us to design new materials with specific properties. To do this on a computer requires the simulation of electrons, the subatomic particles that govern how atoms bond to form molecules and are also responsible for the flow of electricity in solids. Despite decades of effort and several significant advances, accurately modelling the quantum mechanical behaviour of electrons remains an open challenge. Now, in a paper published in Science, we propose DM21, a neural network achieving state of the art accuracy on large parts of chemistry. To accelerate scientific progress, we're also open sourcing our code for anyone to use.

Congratulations to Huy Ha and Shuran Song who have won the CoRL 2021 best system paper award! Their work, FlingBot: the unreasonable effectiveness of dynamic manipulations for cloth unfolding, was highly praised by the judging committee. "To me, this paper constitutes the most impressive account of both simulated and real-world cloth manipulation to date.", Below, the authors tell us more about their work, the methodology, and what they are planning next. In my most recent publication with my advisor, Professor Shuran Song, we studied the task of cloth unfolding.

Where you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Nitesh Chawla: I'm from New Delhi although I was born in Calcutta. I did my schooling from Delhi Public School. Then I did my engineering from Pune. Then I came to the United States in 1993 right after finishing my undergrad.

The video gaming community is mourning the loss of one of its early pioneers, Masayuki Uemura. Uemura, whose death on Monday at the age of 78 was just announced, was the lead architect behind the Nintendo Entertainment System [NES] and its successor the Super Nintendo Entertainment System [SNES]. Uemura was born in Tokyo in 1943 and became an electrical engineer. In 1972, he joined Nintendo and was soon working on the predecessor to early hit game "Duck Hunt". In the early '80s, he was tasked with creating a home console to rival Atari, and Nintendo's president asked Uemura come up with a game using cartridges.