Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the biological materials that comprise animals, such as muscle tissue. Using living muscle tissue as an actuator can endow robotic systems with highly desirable properties such as self-healing, compliance, and biocompatibility. Unlike traditional soft robotic actuators, living muscle biohybrid actuators exhibit unique adaptability, growing stronger with use. The dependency of a muscle's force output on its use history endows muscular organisms the ability to dynamically adapt to their environment, getting better at tasks over time. While muscle adaptability is a benefit to muscular organisms, it currently presents a challenge for biohybrid researchers: how does one design and control a robot whose actuators' force output changes over time? Here, we incorporate muscle adaptability into a many-muscle biohybrid robot design and modeling tool, leveraging reinforcement learning as both a co-design partner and system controller. As a controller, our learning agents coordinated the independent contraction of 42 muscles distributed on a lattice worm structure to successfully steer it towards eight distinct targets while incorporating muscle adaptability. As a co-design tool, our agents enable users to identify which muscles are important to accomplishing a given task. Our results show that adaptive agents outperform non-adaptive agents in terms of maximum rewards and training time. Together, these contributions can both enable the elucidation of muscle actuator adaptation and inform the design and modeling of adaptive, performant, many-muscle robots.

Siri and Alexa were only the beginning. As voice recognition and speech synthesis technologies continue to mature, the days of typing on keyboards to interact with the digital world around us could be coming to an end -- and sooner than many of us anticipated. Where today's virtual assistants exist on our mobile devices and desktops to provide scripted answers to specific questions, the LLM-powered generative AI copilots of tomorrow will be there, and everywhere else too. This is the "voice-first" future Tobias Dengel envisions in his new book, The Sound of the Future: The Coming Age of Voice Technology. Using a wide-ranging set of examples, and applications in everything from marketing, sales and customer service to manufacturing and logistics, Dengel walks the reader through how voice technologies can revolutionize the ways in which we interact with the digital world.

Since its release in 1993, id Software's DOOM franchise has become one of modern gaming's most easily recognizable IPs. The series has sold more than 10 million copies to date and spawned myriad RPG spinoffs, film adaptations and even a couple tabletop board games. But the first game's debut turned out to be a close thing, id Software cofounder John Romero describes in an excerpt from his new book DOOM GUY: Life in First Person. With a mere month before DOOM was scheduled for release in December 1993, the iD team found itself still polishing and tweaking lead programmer John Carmack's novel peer-to-peer multiplayer architecture, ironing out level designs -- at a time when the studio's programmers were also its QA team -- and introducing everybody's favorite killer synonym to the gamer lexicon. Published and reprinted by permission of Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. In early October, we were getting close to wrapping up the game, so progress quickened.

The burgeoning AI industry has barrelled clean past the "move fast" portion of its development, right into the part where we "break things" -- like society! Since the release of ChatGPT last November, generative AI systems have taken the digital world by storm, finding use in everything from machine coding and industrial applications to game design and virtual entertainment. It's also quickly been adopted for illicit purposes like scaling spam email operations and creating deepfakes. That's one technological genie we're never getting back in its bottle so we'd better get working on regulating it, argues Silicon Valley–based author, entrepreneur, investor, and policy advisor, Tom Kemp, in his new book, Containing Big Tech: How to Protect Our Civil Rights, Economy, and Democracy. In the excerpt below, Kemp explains what form that regulation might take and what its enforcement would mean for consumers.

Steven Spielberg's wholesome sci-fi classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, became a cultural touchstone following its release in 1982. The film's hastily-developed (as in, "you have five weeks to get this to market") Atari 2600 tie-in game became a cultural touchstone for entirely different reasons. In his new book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, experimental game maker and assistant professor in design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Pippin Barr deconstructs the game design process using an octet of his own previous projects to shed light on specific aspects of how games could better be put together. In the excerpt below, Dr. Barr muses in what makes good cinema versus games and why the storytelling goals of those two mediums may not necessarily align. Excerpted from The Stuff Games Are Made Of by Pippin Barr.

The Apollo 11 moon landing was a seminal event in American history, one etched deeply into our nation's collective psyche. The event ushered in an era of unbridled possibilities -- the stars were finally coming into reach -- and its effects were felt across the culture, from art and fashion to politics and culture. In After Apollo: Cultural Legacies of the Race to the Moon, a multidisciplinary collection of historians, researchers and academics explore the myriad ways that putting a man on the moon impacted the American Experience. Reprinted with permission of the University of Florida Press. From NASA's very beginnings, immigrant engineers, scientists, and technicians lent their talent, labor, and technical skills to the space program.

The problem with studying the universe around us is that it is simply too big. The stars overhead remain too far away to interact with directly, so we are relegated to testing our theories on the formation of the galaxies based on observable data. Simulating these celestial bodies on computers has proven an immensely useful aid in wrapping our heads around the nature of reality and, as Andrew Pontzen explains in his new book, The Universe in a Box: Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos, recent advances in supercomputing technology are further revolutionizing our capability to model the complexities of the cosmos (not to mention myriad Earth-based challenges) on a smaller scale. In the excerpt below, Pontzen looks at the recent emergence of astronomy-focused AI systems, what they're capable of accomplishing in the field and why he's not too worried about losing his job to one. Adapted from THE UNIVERSE IN A BOX: Simulations and the Quest to Code the Cosmos by Andrew Pontzen published on June 13, 2023 by Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

The term "artificial intelligence," in 1955, was an aspiration rather than a commitment to one method. AI, in this broad sense, involved both discovering what comprises human intelligence by attempting to create machine intelligence as well as a less philosophically fraught effort simply to get computers to perform difficult activities a human might attempt. Only a few of these aspirations fueled the efforts that, in current usage, became synonymous with artificial intelligence: the idea that machines can learn from data. Among computer scientists, learning from data would be de-emphasized for generations. Most of the first half century of artificial intelligence focused on combining logic with knowledge hard-coded into machines.

All of those fantastical possibilities promised by burgeoning brain-computer interface technology come with the unavoidable cost of needing its potentially hackable wetware to ride shotgun in your skull. Given how often our personal data is already mishandled online, do we really want to trust the Tech Bros of Silicon Valley with our most personal of biometrics, our brainwaves? In her new book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology, Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke University, Nita A. Farahany, examines the legal, ethical, and moral threats that tomorrow's neurotechnologies could pose. From The Battle for Your Brain: Defending the Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology by Nita A. Farahany. Assume that Meta, Google, Microsoft, and other big tech companies soon have their way, and neural interface devices replace keyboards and mice.

In the years leading up to, and through, World War II, animal behaviorist researchers thoroughly embraced motion picture technology as a means to better capture the daily experiences of their test subjects -- whether exploring the nuances of contemporary chimpanzee society or running macabre rat-eat-rat survival experiments to determine the Earth's "carrying capacity." However, once the studies had run their course, much of that scientific content was simply shelved. In his new book, The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life, Seattle University Assistant Professor of Film Studies Dr. Ben Schultz-Figueroa, pulls these historic archives out of the vacuum of academic research to examine how they have influenced America's scientific and moral compasses since. In the excerpt below, Schultz-Figueroa recounts the Allied war effort to guide precision aerial munitions towards their targets using live pigeons as onboard targeting reticles. Excerpted from The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research into Animal Life by Ben Schultz-Figueroa, published by the University of California Press.