From branding irons to iris scans, the ancient business of proving who you are has never been stranger--or more lucrative. There are now more bots online than people. The challenge used to be telling who was a person from who was a bot; today, the challenge is telling good bots and bad bots apart--with humanity in the lurch. Three summers ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted on X a fifteen-second video of dozens of people--mostly young, veiled in face masks, and wearing super-hip, white-soled sneakers--waiting in a long, snaky line in the traffic-light-lit but otherwise dusky dark of an unnamed city that appears to have been Nagoya, Japan. "Crazy lines around the world," Altman wrote. "One person getting verified every 8 seconds now." In the video, the camera pans to the front of the line, where a woman is kneeling on the sidewalk as if in prayer, staring into a gleaming silver orb about the size of a volleyball that has been propped up on a stand about the height of an end table. It looks like the eyeball of a giant robot Cyclops. She is bowing before an artificially intelligent machine, seeking a certification that she is human. That eyeball, which is known as the Orb, was developed by Tools for Humanity, a San Francisco-and Munich-based tech company that Altman founded in 2019 with a twenty-five-year-old German physicist named Alex Blania, who is now its C.E.O.

Sam Altman's Orb Was Built for the Bot Era. Welcome back to, TIME's twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox? What to Know: Is Sam Altman's Orb missing its moment? When Moltbook, a social network for AI agents, went viral earlier this month, it should have been a vindication moment for Tools for Humanity -- the startup co-founded by Sam Altman, whose eyeball-scanning "Orb" was designed to solve exactly this kind of problem. Instead, it may have exposed the product's limitations.

Devastating secret message in Savannah Guthrie's video appeal to mother's captors: Hidden agenda revealed by FBI hostage negotiator Crime scene tape goes back up outside missing Nancy Guthrie's home as FBI deploys hostage negotiators to family Savannah Guthrie says'we are ready to talk' as she breaks down in tears during gut-wrenching video while pleading to her mother's captors FBI's Kash Patel heads to Tucson in search for Nancy Guthrie amid daughter Savannah's desperate plea Khloe Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, and Hoda Kotb lead stars rallying around Savannah Guthrie as she makes tearful plea to her mother's captors Big Short investor proved right in $1bn bet that stock bubble bursting... in dire warning for Wall Street and 401(k)s'I was just laid off in the middle of a WAR ZONE': Distraught Washington Post journalist blasts paper for firing her while she sheltered in Ukraine Melania Trump bombshell stuns Hollywood into silence: Rich and famous gathered at elite restaurants to'laugh' about First Lady rumor... now they have'egg on their faces' Woman who went viral on the Coldplay kiss cam cashes in on her fame as she lands keynote gig in Washington DC - and tickets aren't cheap Epstein claimed Bill Gates was'so cheap' he left Russian mistress broke and sleeping on a friend's couch Where's Fergie...? Ex-Duchess of York's whereabouts is a mystery as she's homeless after Royal Lodge eviction - and Epstein emails shame No, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi aren't having an affair... What's REALLY going on is so much worse. I rode with ICE on the frozen streets of Minneapolis. I saw migrants getting arrested. The frontlines are nothing like what you see on TV. New video from a US military drone has captured what UFO investigators are calling a formation of mysterious orbs flying over one of the most contentious regions in the world.

Abstract-- Efficiently delivering items to an ongoing surgery in a hospital operating room can be a matter of life or death. In modern hospital settings, delivery robots have successfully transported bulk items between rooms and floors. However, automating item-level operating room logistics presents unique challenges in perception, efficiency, and maintaining sterility. We propose the Operating Room Bot (ORB), a robot framework to automate logistics tasks in hospital operating rooms (OR). ORB leverages a robust, hierarchical behavior tree (BT) architecture to integrate diverse functionalities of object recognition, scene interpretation, and GPU-accelerated motion planning. The contributions of this paper include: (1) a modular software architecture facilitating robust mobile manipulation through behavior trees; (2) a novel real-time object recognition pipeline integrating YOLOv7, Segment Anything Model 2 (SAM2), and Grounded DINO; (3) the adaptation of the cuRobo parallelized trajectory optimization framework to real-time, collision-free mobile manipulation; and (4) empirical validation demonstrating an 80% success rate in OR supply retrieval and a 96% success rate in restocking operations. These contributions establish ORB as a reliable and adaptable system for autonomous OR logistics.

This article has been accepted for publication in the IEEE Internet of Things Journal (IoT -J). Personal use of this material is permitted. Abstract--Visual Inertial Odometry (VIO) is a widely used computer vision method that determines an agent's movement through a camera and an IMU sensor . This paper presents an efficient and accurate VIO pipeline optimized for applications on micro-and nano-UA Vs. The proposed design incorporates state-of-the-art feature detection and tracking methods (SuperPoint, PX4FLOW, ORB), all optimized and quantized for emerging RISC-V-based ultra-low-power parallel systems on chips (SoCs). Furthermore, by employing a rigid body motion model, the pipeline reduces estimation errors and achieves improved accuracy in planar motion scenarios. The pipeline's suitability for real-time VIO is assessed on an ultra-low-power SoC in terms of compute requirements and tracking accuracy after quantization. The pipeline, including the three feature tracking methods, was implemented on the SoC for real-world validation. This design bridges the gap between high-accuracy VIO pipelines that are traditionally run on computationally powerful systems and lightweight implementations suitable for microcontrollers. The optimized pipeline on the GAP9 low-power SoC demonstrates an average reduction in RMSE of up to a factor of 3.65x over the baseline pipeline when using the ORB feature tracker . The analysis of the computational complexity of the feature trackers further shows that PX4FLOW achieves on-par tracking accuracy with ORB at a lower runtime for movement speeds below 24 pixels/frame. ISUAL Inertial Odometry (VIO) describes the process of determining an agent's movement through the use of camera and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data [1]. Cameras are used in pure Visual Odometry (VO) to generate a movement estimate from one frame to another by considering the displacement of features or brightness patches between camera images [2]. While stereo VO (i.e., using two cameras) can estimate metric depth information through extrinsic This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation's TinyTrainer project under Grant number 207913.

An invasion of small metallic orbs has been spotted hovering over the US in recent years, leaving the Pentagon scrambling to identify these mysterious UFOs. A new report from the crowdsourced platform Enigma, which allows people to report sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs), reveals more than 8,000 sightings across the US between December 2022 and June 2025. Among these, 422 reports specifically describe metallic orbs, with the majority observed between 1am and 4am near military installations in New York, California, and Arizona. Eyewitnesses, including civilians, pilots, and military personnel, reported seeing the spheres hover silently before moving at extreme speeds, leaving no trace of their departure. Some of the sightings have been captured on video or radar, though many remain unexplained.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Gravity seems like a predictable, even mundane, aspect of existence. The physics dictating one of the universe's four fundamental forces is relatively straightforward to understand and calculate (most of the time, at least). Even so, the relationships between objects with mass and energy continues to surprise physical engineers. Take recent observations made by a team at the University of Waterloo, for example.

Kurt Knutsson reports World ID's iris scanning tech launches in six U.S. cities to verify identity, fight AI bots. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, known for creating ChatGPT, has launched World, a project that uses an eye scan to prove you are a real person online. The idea is to help people stand out from bots and AI by creating a digital ID with a quick scan from a device called the Orb. While Altman says this technology keeps humans central as AI advances, it also raises serious concerns about privacy and the security of sensitive biometric data, with critics and regulators questioning how this information will be used and protected. Join the FREE "CyberGuy Report": Get my expert tech tips, critical security alerts and exclusive deals, plus instant access to my free "Ultimate Scam Survival Guide" when you sign up! World ID relies on a device called the Orb, a spherical scanner that captures a person's iris pattern to generate a unique IrisCode.