Tata Steel is one of the prominent names in the steel-making industry boasting over three decades of manufacturing expertise. The company is currently the world's second-most geographically-diversified steel producer, with fully integrated operations -- from mining to the manufacturing and marketing of finished products. To sustain its leadership position in a volatile market, Tata Steel needed to fortify its supply chain. Poor visibility of in-plant operations was causing delays in loading trucks. This, in turn, triggered a series of inefficiencies like traffic congestions, parking problems, and forced route diversions for inbound/outbound vehicles.

Scientists created an intelligent material that acts as a brain by physically changing when it learns. This is an important step toward a new generation of computers that could dramatically increase computing power while using less energy. Currently, it is run on machine learning software. But the "smarter" computers get, the more computing power they require. This can lead to a sizable energy footprint, which could destabilize the computer.

Ideally, soft robots could mimic intelligent and autonomous behaviors in nature, combining sensing and controlled movement. But the integration of sensors and the moving parts that respond can be clunky or require an external computer. A single-unit design is needed that responds to environmental stimuli, such as mechanical pressure or stretching. Liquid metals could be the solution, and some researchers have already investigated their use in soft robots. These materials can be used to create thin, flexible circuits in soft materials, and the circuits can rapidly produce heat when an electric current is generated, either from an electrical source or from pressure applied to the circuit.

Farming is a tough business. Global food demand is surging, with as many as 10 billion mouths to feed by 2050. At the same time, environmental challenges and labor limitations have made the future uncertain for agricultural managers. A new company called Future Acres proposed to enable farmers to do more with less through the power of robots. The company, helmed by CEO Suma Reddy, who previously served as COO and co-founder at Farmself and has held multiple roles and lead companies focused on the agtech space, has created an autonomous, electric agricultural robotic harvest companion named Carry to help farmers gather hand-picked crops faster and with less physical demand. Automation has been playing an increasingly large role in agriculture, and agricultural robots are widely expected to play a critical role in food production going forward.

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) has created computers that can drive cars, synthesize chemical compounds, fold proteins and detect high-energy particles at a superhuman level. However, these AI algorithms cannot explain the thought processes behind their decisions. A computer that masters protein folding and also tells researchers more about the rules of biology is much more useful than a computer that folds proteins without explanation. Therefore, AI researchers like me are now turning our efforts toward developing AI algorithms that can explain themselves in a manner that humans can understand. If we can do this, I believe that AI will be able to uncover and teach people new facts about the world that have not yet been discovered, leading to new innovations.

A report examines the potential of materials that can change shape, adapt and repair themselves.

Subsequence-based time series classification algorithms provide accurate and interpretable models, but training these models is extremely computation intensive. The asymptotic time complexity of subsequence-based algorithms remains a higher-order polynomial, because these algorithms are based on exhaustive search for highly discriminative subsequences. Pattern sampling has been proposed as an effective alternative to mitigate the pattern explosion phenomenon. Therefore, we employ pattern sampling to extract discriminative features from discretized time series data. A weighted trie is created based on the discretized time series data to sample highly discriminative patterns. These sampled patterns are used to identify the shapelets which are used to transform the time series classification problem into a feature-based classification problem. Finally, a classification model can be trained using any off-the-shelf algorithm. Creating a pattern sampler requires a small number of patterns to be evaluated compared to an exhaustive search as employed by previous approaches. Compared to previously proposed algorithms, our approach requires considerably less computational and memory resources. Experiments demonstrate how the proposed approach fares in terms of classification accuracy and runtime performance.

Artificial intelligence already is making strides in the development of new drugs, and now the pesticide industry wants in on the action. Switzerland's Syngenta has teamed up with Insilico Medicine to use its deep-learning tools to produce sustainable weedkillers. As well as taking on some of the early-stage work traditionally conducted in a lab, AI could design molecules used in crop-protection tools that are more sustainable and environmentally friendly, the companies said last week. AI is among new methods emerging as environmental and health concerns spur a quest for sustainable alternatives to traditional pesticides used by farmers. Demand also is being supported by regulatory pressures and lawsuits, most notably Bayer's $11 billion settlement deal over claims its long-used glyphosate herbicide causes cancer.

Robot surgeons could one day have an easy way to mend internal injuries with minimal impact. MIT researchers have developed an "origami-inspired," biodegradable medical patch that can be folded around a robot's minimally invasive surgical tools to seal internal damage. While bioadhesive patches are already in use for this kind of surgery, they can create flawed seals and even do their own damage, like inflammation and scar tissue. MIT's design solves these issues through a three-layer patch with a hydrogel-based adhesive, a silicone oil-coated material to prevent unintended sticking and an elastomer outer layer whose zwitterionic nature (that is, a molecular chain with positive and negative ions) protects the patch against bacteria. The result is a tape that easily wraps around robotic tools while adhering strongly to tissue, even after it has been immersed in fluid for long periods.

The optimization of reactions used to synthesize target compounds is pivotal to chemical research and discovery, whether in developing a route for manufacturing a life-saving medicine1 or unlocking the potential of a new material2. But reaction optimization requires iterative experiments to balance the often conflicting effects of numerous coupled variables, and frequently involves finding the sweet spot among thousands of possible sets of experimental conditions. Expert synthetic chemists currently navigate this expansive experimental void using simplified model reactions, heuristic approaches and intuition derived from observation of experimental data3. Writing in Nature, Shields et al.4 report machine-learning software that can optimize diverse classes of reaction with fewer iterations, on average, than are needed by humans. Machine learning has emerged as a useful tool for various aspects of chemical synthesis, because it is ideally suited to extrapolating predictive models that are used to solve synthetic problems by recognizing patterns in multidimensional data sets5.