The two-part special, 'The Amazon Review Killer,' is now streaming on Fox Nation. Amazon already dominates online shopping, but now it's setting its sights even higher. With a new artificial intelligence-powered project called Starfish, the company aims to become the world's most complete and trusted source of product information. The goal? Make every listing on Amazon accurate, detailed and easy to understand, whether the product is sold by Amazon or a third-party seller. If the project works as planned, it could save sellers hours of work and help shoppers find what they need faster.

Gabe Newell, co-founder and CEO of Valve, has been working on a new brain-computer interface project through his Starfish Neuroscience company for several years. The company just announced that it plans to launch its first brain chip by the end of 2025, reports The Verge. This chip isn't a complete implant solution, but a specially designed "electrophysiological" component that can both read and stimulate brain activity. Unlike competitors, such as Elon Musk's Neuralink, Starfish aims to create a less invasive solution that doesn't require a battery and can reach multiple brain regions at once using wireless energy transfer. Starfish is also developing technology to treat neurological disorders such as depression and bipolar disorder, as well as a method to destroy tumors using targeted heat.

Soft robots offer adaptability and safe interaction with complex environments. Rapid prototyping kits that allow soft robots to be assembled easily will allow different geometries to be explored quickly to suit different environments or to mimic the motion of biological organisms. We introduce SoftSnap modules: snap-together components that enable the rapid assembly of a class of untethered soft robots. Each SoftSnap module includes embedded computation, motor-driven string actuation, and a flexible thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU) printed structure capable of deforming into various shapes based on the string configuration. These modules can be easily connected with other SoftSnap modules or customizable connectors. We demonstrate the versatility of the SoftSnap system through four configurations: a starfish-like robot, a brittle star robot, a snake robot, a 3D gripper, and a ring-shaped robot. These configurations highlight the ease of assembly, adaptability, and functional diversity of the SoftSnap modules. The SoftSnap modular system offers a scalable, snap-together approach to simplifying soft robot prototyping, making it easier for researchers to explore untethered soft robotic systems rapidly.

A haunting image showing a sea lion carcass being devoured by at least a dozen color starfish on the seafloor of Monterey Bay in California has won the'Aquatic Life' category in a photo competition. The eerie picture was captured by wildlife photographer David Slater, who submitted it to the California Academy of Science's Big Picture Competition. The bright orange, pink and blue starfish are bat stars - known scavengers of the ocean - which are turning the lifeless body into energy and nutrients that is returned to the marine food web. 'I knew this image was special when I first published it but words cannot even describe how I feel taking first place in such a prestigious contest,' Slater, who resides in Monterey, shared in an Instagram post. The Big Picture Competition includes several categories, all with a wildlife theme, and the grand prize winner is an image of bees swarming together in a mating ball.

Marine biologists have a new AI tool for monitoring and protecting coral reefs. The project--a collaboration between Google and Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO)--employs computer vision detection models to pinpoint damaging outbreaks of crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) through a live camera feed. Keeping a closer eye on reefs helps scientists address growing populations quickly, to protect the valuable Great Barrier Reef ecosystem. Despite covering less than 1% of the vast ocean floor, coral reefs support about 25% of sea species including fish, invertebrates, and marine mammals. When healthy, these productive marine environments provide commercial and subsistence fishing and income for tourism and recreational businesses.

Recently, researchers affiliated with the Baylor College of Medicine, the University of Cambridge, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Rice University created a new way of adapting a neuroscience concept called "brain replay" to the digital realm of artificial neural networks to enable continuous learning. From a neuroscience perspective, the concept of brain replay is analogous to a streaming service that activates repeat showings from its vast archives of stored pre-recorded content. The brain can replay memories by reactivating the neural activity patterns that represent prior experiences, whether asleep or awake. This ability for memory replay starts in the hippocampus, then continues in the cortex. The research trio of Hava Siegelmann, Andreas Tolias, and Gido van de Ven published a study in Nature Communications on August 13, 2020, that shows state-of-the-art performance from neural networks by deploying a new twist on mimicking brain replay.

Starfish are making a comeback on the West Coast, four years after a mysterious syndrome killed millions of them. Starfish are fighting their way back to the West Coast, years after a mysterious syndrome killed millions of them. A catastrophic number of the sea creatures were killed around 2013-2014 by Sea Star Wasting Syndrome. Starfish from British Columbia to Mexico would develop lesions and then disintegrate, with their arms turning into goo. This photos shows a starfish suffering from a wasting disease epidemic is shown in this handout photo courtesy of Kevin Lafferty of the United States Geological Survey, provided November 17, 2014.

Over the last few years there's been an increased focus on robots that can build themselves. This is especially pertinent when you're dealing with robots that are fiddly to make, which includes (at the moment) most robots that are soft and compliant. It seems like soft robots would be quite happy to be 3D printed, but in practice, they need to be made out of highly deformable materials that only behave themselves if you take the trouble to mold them instead, which is tedious any annoying. At ICRA on Tuesday, Cynthia Sung, who was previously with Daniela Rus's group at MIT and is now a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, presented a new approach for making compliant, controllable robotic structures. Called additive self-folding, this origami-inspired technique involves creating 3D shapes made out of a long strip of self-folding 2D material, and all you have to do is add some hot water.

Nineteen stories up in a Brooklyn office tower, the view from Manuela Veloso's office--azure skies, New York Harbor, the Statue of Liberty--is exhilarating. But right now we only have eyes for the nondescript windows below us in the tower across the street. In their panes, we can see chairs, desks, lamps, and papers. The genuine objects are in a building on our side of the street--likely the one where we're standing. A bright afternoon sun has lit them up, briefly turning the facing windows into mirrors. We see office bric-a-brac that looks ghostly and luminous, floating free of gravity. Veloso, a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, and I have been talking about what machines perceive and how they "think"--a subject not nearly as straightforward as I had expected. "How would a robot figure that out?" she says about the illusion in the windows.

Michelangelo's'Creation of Adam' as seen through Google's Deep Dream Created by digital artist Kyle McDonald using Google's Deep Dream program. Have you ever wondered how your computer sees the world? Spoiler alert: it's the stuff of psychedelic nightmares, as the internet found out last month when Google revealed that in order to sort and categorize images online, it uses an artificial intelligence program that looks for patterns and sometimes gets things wrong, finding random dog faces, swirls, and hands where there are none. Google opened the source code up to developers under the name "DeepDream," and now, a couple new websites have sprung up, including a recent one from Psychic VR Lab and (h/t: Prosthetic Knowledge) and earlier, one from entrepreneur Zain Shah called Deep Neural Net Dreams, or #DeepDream for short. Both take code from Google's AI and let you upload your own photos, transforming them into eerie, computerized dreamscapes.