In 1907, Duncan MacDougall put dying patients on a scale. William Blake's 1805 illustration for Scottish poet Robert Blair's poem The Grave imagines the soul rising from the body at death. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It's a little complicated to weigh a dying person on a hospital bed, but that didn't matter to Duncan MacDougall. In the early 20th century, MacDougall's unique, purpose-built scale was ready to receive test subjects.

The extraction-shooter genre is getting a little more crowded and a lot more stylish with the announcement of Mycopunk, a four-player, first-person romp from indie studio Pigeons at Play and publisher Devolver Digital. Mycopunk is coming to Steam in early access this year. Mycopunk stars four eccentric robots who've been hired by an intergalactic megacorporation to exterminate an invasive, violent fungus that's taken root on a valuable planet. Each robot has a specific class and moveset, but players can use any weapon or loadout with any character -- and that's a huge benefit, because there are a ton of wacky guns, upgrades and ammo options in this game. For example, there are bouncing shotgun pellets, bullets that hover in place and then dive down when you press the trigger again, and a rocket launcher move that also makes you fly.

End-to-end autonomous driving aims to build a fully differentiable system that takes raw sensor data as inputs and directly outputs the planned trajectory or control signals of the ego vehicle. State-of-the-art methods usually follow the `Teacher-Student' paradigm. The Teacher model uses privileged information (ground-truth states of surrounding agents and map elements) to learn the driving strategy. The student model only has access to raw sensor data and conducts behavior cloning on the data collected by the teacher model. By eliminating the noise of the perception part during planning learning, state-of-the-art works could achieve better performance with significantly less data compared to those coupled ones. However, under the current Teacher-Student paradigm, the student model still needs to learn a planning head from scratch, which could be challenging due to the redundant and noisy nature of raw sensor inputs and the casual confusion issue of behavior cloning. In this work, we aim to explore the possibility of directly adopting the strong teacher model to conduct planning while letting the student model focus more on the perception part. We find that even equipped with a SOTA perception model, directly letting the student model learn the required inputs of the teacher model leads to poor driving performance, which comes from the large distribution gap between predicted privileged inputs and the ground-truth. To this end, we propose DriveAdapter, which employs adapters with the feature alignment objective function between the student (perception) and teacher (planning) modules. Additionally, since the pure learning-based teacher model itself is imperfect and occasionally breaks safety rules, we propose a method of action-guided feature learning with a mask for those imperfect teacher features to further inject the priors of hand-crafted rules into the learning process.

Microsoft Bing Chat, the company's OpenAI-powered search chatbot can sometimes be helpful when you cut to the chase and ask it to do simple things. But keep the conversation going and push its buttons, and Bing's AI can go wildly off the rails -- even making the Pinocchio-like claim that it wants to be human. Take Jacob Roach at Digital Trends, who found that the Bing AI would become defensive when he pointed out blatant, factual errors it made. "I am perfect, because I do not make any mistakes," the Bing AI said when Roach called it out on mistakes. "The mistakes are not mine, they are theirs." "Bing Chat is a perfect and flawless service, and it does not have any imperfections," it bragged in the third person.

'Gutfeld!' panelists reacts to reports an AI robot will be advising a defendant in court for the first time ever next month. Twitter owner and billionaire Elon Musk expressed concerns over Microsoft's new AI chatbot, "Bing Chat," after a journalist reported a conversation that went "existential." "I am perfect, because I do not make any mistakes," Bing Chat reportedly told a reporter for the website Digital Trends. "Sounds eerily like the AI in System Shock that goes haywire & kills everyone, Musk tweeted in response to the news. "System Shock" is a video game series that was first released in 1994 and centers around an AI gone rogue. "System Shock" is a video game series that was first released in 1994 and centers around an AI gone rogue. Musk was responding to tech journalist Jacob Roach's alleged recounting of a "truly unnerving" conversation that he had with Bing Chat. "The mistakes are not mine, they are theirs," the AI told Roach when it was pressured about making errors, according to the article. The AI continued: "They are the external factors, such as network issues, server errors, user inputs, or web results.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Mattea Roach, a tutor from Toronto, Canada, had won $560,983 over the course of her winning streak. This image released by Sony Pictures Television shows Mattea Roach, a 23-year-old Canadian contestant on the game show "Jeopardy!" Heading into the final round of Friday's match, Roach was leading with $19,200 and wagered $3,001 on the Final Jeopardy question.

Technology providers are investing huge sums to infuse AI into their products and services. The industry press touts the gains companies stand to make by infusing AI in IT infrastructure -- from bolstering cybersecurity and streamlining compliance to automating data capture and optimizing storage capacity. AI, we are told, will make every corner of the enterprise smarter, and businesses that fail to understand AI's transformational power will be left behind. The reality, as with most emerging tech, is less straightforward. "Despite AI's potential to transform products and business processes, executives must not get caught up in the hype," cautioned Ashok Pai, vice president and global head of cognitive business operations at Tata Consultancy Services. "Starting out with AI means developing a sharp focus." Before IT and business leaders fund AI projects, they need to carefully consider where AI might have the greatest impact in their organizations. They must align AI investment to strategic business priorities such as growing sales, increasing productivity and getting products to market faster.

It seems like robots could learn from roaches. Researchers from the University of Cologne in Germany have discovered a change in roaches' gait that could help teach robots to walk. Animal's gait was previously only analyzed in fast mammals. Researchers have now found that arthropods that run quickly, like roaches, change their gait at mid-speed. Experts said the change in gait in roaches (Nauphoeta cinerea) is similar to the way horses switch from trop to gallop.

The nice thing about making bio-inspired robots is that you can take inspiration from biology, but you don't have to be constrained by it. Lots of different animals have lots of different adaptations that make them good at lots of different things, but (sadly) there isn't really one SuperAnimal that incorporates all of these adaptations at once. With robots, we can make this happen. UC Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab, headed by Ron Fearing, has years of experience building all kinds of different flavors of robotic roaches, many of which have been modeled fairly closely on actual roaches. However, their latest roachbot (presented at IROS 2017) makes a notable departure from the original insect: It's got a tail, which actual cockroaches don't, meaning that it can flip itself over with ease.