The company behind Pornhub and other popular pornographic sites broke Canadian privacy law by allowing intimate images to be shared on its websites without the direct knowledge or consent of everyone depicted, the federal privacy commissioner has ruled. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner’s (OPC) investigation into Aylo (formerly MindGeek), one of the world’s largest […]

Apple Music gives a whole new meaning to the phrase the hits just keep on coming.  It’s not the opposing candidates, it’s public AI systems that are spreading election disinformation, and LockBit, the cybercriminal gang may be back from the dead and saying so long to the ChatGPT plugins, which went from innovation to legacy […]

Imagine a world without Facebook. For just half an hour. A group of AI leaders get together but don’t seem to invite Elon Musk. Amazon takes data centres nuclear. A new competitor for ChatGPT and Google. And public trust in AI is declining.  All this and more on the “just breath, Facebook will be back” […]

Iowa archaeologists have unearthed a 13,600-year-old mastodon skull in pristine condition during a nearly two-week excavation at an eroding creek bank in Wayne County.

A stadium-sized asteroid is passing relatively close to Earth on Tuesday, NASA announced. Its distance from Earth and its massive size makes it a "potentially hazardous object."

Archaeologists have discovered a "remarkable" section of one of Britain's most important Roman roads in southeast London.

Ryzen and Epyc chips have two main issues; L3 cache latency, and 'preferred core' tech.

Depending on PC config you may see up to a 30fps uplift with anti-tamper tech ditched.

Dis-Ease by Mariam Ghani uses strong visuals and compelling interviews to argue that how we see and describe disease affects how we deal with it, says Simon Ings

Red and processed meat, and even poultry, seem to raise the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a study of nearly 2 million adults, but not everyone is convinced

Flu and other respiratory viruses seem to barely exist outside of winter, but covid-19 cases have consistently risen every summer over the past few years

Amid rising cases of mpox in Central Africa, it is important to uncover whether this virus causes symptoms even after the infection has cleared

A network of neurons in the brain seems to be larger in people with depression, which could change how we think about the condition's causes

An intricate atlas of the inner lining of the uterus could help researchers better understand conditions like endometriosis, infertility and abnormal menstruation

A single dose of a smallpox vaccine seems to lower the risk of catching mpox by around 60 per cent, and two doses would probably be even better

Modern life disrupts the circadian rhythms controlling our biology – increasing our risk of developing conditions ranging from diabetes to dementia. Lynne Peeples's new book The Inner Clock explores and offers solutions

Interacting with animals seems to provide emotional support to young people with a serious illness, even when the contact is via letters and not face to face

Dopamine was long thought to play a part in the placebo effect for pain relief, but a new study is questioning its true role

A chemical produced by gut bacteria could be the basis for a non-invasive test for endometriosis – and mouse experiments suggest it might also help treat the condition

New research into the moments between wakefulness and sleep could bring hope for insomniacs and even make us more creative problem-solvers

Recent research shows that anti-inflammatory diets are not as faddish as they might sound, with the power to reduce the risk of heart attacks and some cancers

A bird flu virus that has been circulating in dairy cattle for months has now been found in a pig in the US for the first time, raising the risk of the virus evolving to become more dangerous to people

Experts predict that the number of cancer cases around the world will skyrocket, resulting in millions more fatalities by 2050

Blood tests have shown that about 7 per cent of workers on dairy farms that had H5N1 outbreaks had antibodies against the disease

President-elect Trump is nominating former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel, he announced Tuesday in a social media post.

Health officials in Saskatchewan Canada are urging customers of Domino’s Pizza in Martensville to watch for symptoms of typhoid fever. The restaurant’s customers may have been exposed to Salmonella typhi, also known as typhoid fever. Anyone who consumed food or drink from the Domino’s store at 717 Centennial Drive South... Continue Reading

On Tuesday, three of nine ballot issues Denver voters had to decide dealt with animals and animal products. But nothing changed because all of them were slaughtered at the ballot  box. One of the ballot issues called for prohibiting any slaughterhouse from operating in the City or County of Denver. That... Continue Reading

The appointment of a political outsider like Musk could help Trump cut regulations and rein in government bureaucracy, even if the moves are unpopular

Several people were rescued on Saturday after a wave damaged their vessel off the coast of Florida, sending some of the boaters into the water.

A man from Eugene, Oregon, pleaded guilty to federal hate crimes on Tuesday after he spray-painted antisemitic graffiti on a synagogue in 2023 and 2024.

Fox News host Sean Hannity says the "decentralization of power as our founders intended is very much on its way to DC."

The Associated Press has declared a winner in Colorado's 8th Congressional District which has been one of the most closely watched races in the country.

Senate Republicans met on Tuesday night to hear from the three candidates to succeed Mitch McConnell, and Rick Scott left with two new endorsements.

Senator-elect Jim Justice's office has clarified reports that his famous pooch Babydog was banned from the Senate floor, saying Justice never intended to bring the dog onto the floor.

Country music star Darius Rucker paid the East Tennessee State University's NIL fund $10 for every minute he was on the field Saturday after what he called an "awkward" appearance.

'Gutfeld!' panelists react to President-elect Trump's choice for 'border czar.'

In the first quarter of Monday's Dolphins-Rams game, ESPN reported that Tyreek Hill said a torn ligament in his wrist became worst after he was detained by police.

Azerbaijan next week will garner much of the attention of the climate tech world, and not just because it will host COP29, the United Nation’s giant annual climate change conference. The country is promoting a grand, multi-nation plan to generate renewable electricity in the Caucasus region and send it thousands of kilometers west, under the Black Sea, and into energy–hungry Europe.

The transcontinental connection would start with wind, solar, and hydropower generated in Azerbaijan and Georgia, and off-shore wind power generated in the Caspian Sea. Long-distance lines would carry up to 1.5 gigawatts of clean electricity to Anaklia, Georgia, at the east end of the Black Sea. An undersea cable would move the electricity across the Black Sea and deliver it to Constanta, Romania, where it could be distributed further into Europe.

The scheme’s proponents say this Caspian-Black Sea energy corridor will help decrease global carbon emissions, provide dependable power to Europe, modernize developing economies at Europe’s periphery, and stabilize a region shaken by war. Organizers hope to build the undersea cable within the next six years at an estimated cost of €3.5 billion (US $3.8 billion).

To accomplish this, the governments of the involved countries must quickly circumvent a series of technical, financial, and political obstacles. “It’s a huge project,” says Zviad Gachechiladze, a director at Georgian State Electrosystem, the agency that operates the country’s electrical grid, and one of the architects of the Caucasus green-energy corridor. “To put it in operation [by 2030]—that’s quite ambitious, even optimistic,” he says.

Black Sea Cable to Link Caucasus and Europe

The technical lynchpin of the plan falls on the successful construction of a high voltage direct current (HVDC) submarine cable in the Black Sea. It’s a formidable task, considering that it would stretch across nearly 1,200 kilometers of water, most of which is over 2 km deep, and, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, littered with floating mines. By contrast, the longest existing submarine power cable—the North Sea Link—carries 1.4 GW across 720 km between England and Norway, at depths of up to 700 meters.

As ambitious as Azerbaijan’s plans sound, longer undersea connections have been proposed. The Australia-Asia PowerLink project aims to produce 6 GW at a vast solar farm in Northern Australia and send about a third of it to Singapore via a 4,300-km undersea cable. The Morocco-U.K. Power Project would send 3.6 GW over 3,800 km from Morocco to England. A similar attempt by Desertec to send electricity from North Africa to Europe ultimately failed.

Building such cables involves laying and stitching together lengths of heavy submarine power cables from specialized ships—the expertise for which lies with just two companies in the world. In an assessment of the Black Sea project’s feasibility, the Milan-based consulting and engineering firm CESI determined that the undersea cable could indeed be built, and estimated that it could carry up to 1.5 GW—enough to supply over 2 million European households.

But to fill that pipe, countries in the Caucasus region would have to generate much more green electricity. For Georgia, that will mostly come from hydropower, which already generates over 80 percent of the nation’s electricity. “We are a hydro country. We have a lot of untapped hydro potential,” says Gachechiladze.

Azerbaijan and Georgia Plan Green Energy Corridor

Generating hydropower can also generate opposition, because of the way dams alter rivers and landscapes. “There were some cases when investors were not able to construct power plants because of opposition of locals or green parties” in Georgia, says Salome Janelidze, a board member at the Energy Training Center, a Georgian government agency that promotes and educates around the country’s energy sector.

“It was definitely a problem and it has not been totally solved,” says Janelidze. But “to me it seems it is doable,” she says. “You can procure and construct if you work closely with the local population and see them as allies rather than adversaries.”

For Azerbaijan, most of the electricity would be generated by wind and solar farms funded by foreign investment. Masdar, the renewable-energy developer of the United Arab Emirates government, has been investing heavily in wind power in the country. In June, the company broke ground on a trio of wind and solar projects with 1 GW capacity. It intends to develop up to 9 GW more in Azerbaijan by 2030. ACWA Power, a Saudi power-generation company, plans to complete a 240-MW solar plant in the Absheron and Khizi districts of Azerbaijan next year and has struck a deal with the Azerbaijani Ministry of Energy to install up to 2.5 GW of offshore and onshore wind.

CESI is currently running a second study to gauge the practicality of the full breadth of the proposed energy corridor—from the Caspian Sea to Europe—with a transmission capacity of 4 to 6 GW. But that beefier interconnection will likely remain out of reach in the near term. “By 2030, we can’t claim our region will provide 4 GW or 6 GW,” says Gachechiladze. “1.3 is realistic.”

COP29: Azerbaijan’s Renewable Energy Push

Signs of political support have surfaced. In September, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Romania, and Hungary created a joint venture, based in Romania, to shepherd the project. Those four countries in 2022 inked a memorandum of understanding with the European Union to develop the energy corridor.

The involved countries are in the process of applying for the cable to be selected as an EU “project of mutual interest,” making it an infrastructure priority for connecting the union with its neighbors. If selected, “the project could qualify for 50 percent grant financing,” says Gachechiladze. “It’s a huge budget. It will improve drastically the financial condition of the project.” The commissioner responsible for EU enlargement policy projected that the union would pay an estimated €2.3 billion ($2.5 billion) toward building the cable.

Whether next week’s COP29, held in Baku, Azerbaijan, will help move the plan forward remains to be seen. In preparation for the conference, advocates of the energy corridor have been taking international journalists on tours of the country’s energy infrastructure.

Looming over the project are the security issues threaten to thwart it. Shipping routes in the Black Sea have become less dependable and safe since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. To the south, tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan remain after the recent war and ethnic violence.

In order to improve relations, many advocates of the energy corridor would like to include Armenia. “The cable project is in the interests of Georgia, it’s in the interests of Armenia, it’s in the interests of Azerbaijan,” says Agha Bayramov, an energy geopolitics researcher at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands. “It might increase the chance of them living peacefully together. Maybe they’ll say, ‘We’re responsible for European energy. Let’s put our egos aside.’”

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.

Humanoids 2024: 22–24 November 2024, NANCY, FRANCE

Enjoy today’s videos!

Just when I thought quadrupeds couldn’t impress me anymore...

[ Unitree Robotics ]

Researchers at Meta FAIR are releasing several new research artifacts that advance robotics and support our goal of reaching advanced machine intelligence (AMI). These include Meta Sparsh, the first general-purpose encoder for vision-based tactile sensing that works across many tactile sensors and many tasks; Meta Digit 360, an artificial fingertip-based tactile sensor that delivers detailed touch data with human-level precision and touch-sensing; and Meta Digit Plexus, a standardized platform for robotic sensor connections and interactions that enables seamless data collection, control and analysis over a single cable.

[ Meta ]

The first bimanual Torso created at Clone includes an actuated elbow, cervical spine (neck), and anthropomorphic shoulders with the sternoclavicular, acromioclavicular, scapulothoracic and glenohumeral joints. The valve matrix fits compactly inside the ribcage. Bimanual manipulation training is in progress.

[ Clone Inc. ]

Equipped with a new behavior architecture, Nadia navigates and traverses many types of doors autonomously. Nadia also demonstrates robustness to failed grasps and door opening attempts by automatically retrying and continuing. We present the robot with pull and push doors, four types of opening mechanisms, and even spring-loaded door closers. A deep neural network and door plane estimator allow Nadia to identify and track the doors.

[ Paper preprint by authors from Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition ]

Thanks, Duncan!

In this study, we integrate the musculoskeletal humanoid Musashi with the wire-driven robot CubiX, capable of connecting to the environment, to form CubiXMusashi. This combination addresses the shortcomings of traditional musculoskeletal humanoids and enables movements beyond the capabilities of other humanoids. CubiXMusashi connects to the environment with wires and drives by winding them, successfully achieving movements such as pull-up, rising from a lying pose, and mid-air kicking, which are difficult for Musashi alone.

[ CubiXMusashi, JSK Robotics Laboratory, University of Tokyo ]

Thanks, Shintaro!

An old boardwalk seems like a nightmare for any robot with flat feet.

[ Agility Robotics ]

This paper presents a novel learning-based control framework that uses keyframing to incorporate high-level objectives in natural locomotion for legged robots. These high-level objectives are specified as a variable number of partial or complete pose targets that are spaced arbitrarily in time. Our proposed framework utilizes a multi-critic reinforcement learning algorithm to effectively handle the mixture of dense and sparse rewards. In the experiments, the multi-critic method significantly reduces the effort of hyperparameter tuning compared to the standard single-critic alternative. Moreover, the proposed transformer-based architecture enables robots to anticipate future goals, which results in quantitative improvements in their ability to reach their targets.

[ Disney Research paper ]

Human-like walking where that human is the stompiest human to ever human its way through Humanville.

[ Engineai ]

We present the first static-obstacle avoidance method for quadrotors using just an onboard, monocular event camera. Quadrotors are capable of fast and agile flight in cluttered environments when piloted manually, but vision-based autonomous flight in unknown environments is difficult in part due to the sensor limitations of traditional onboard cameras. Event cameras, however, promise nearly zero motion blur and high dynamic range, but produce a large volume of events under significant ego-motion and further lack a continuous-time sensor model in simulation, making direct sim-to-real transfer not possible.

[ Paper University of Pennsylvania and University of Zurich ]

Cross-embodiment imitation learning enables policies trained on specific embodiments to transfer across different robots, unlocking the potential for large-scale imitation learning that is both cost-effective and highly reusable. This paper presents LEGATO, a cross-embodiment imitation learning framework for visuomotor skill transfer across varied kinematic morphologies. We introduce a handheld gripper that unifies action and observation spaces, allowing tasks to be defined consistently across robots.

[ LEGATO ]

The 2024 Xi’an Marathon has kicked off! STAR1, the general-purpose humanoid robot from Robot Era, joins runners in this ancient yet modern city for an exciting start!

[ Robot Era ]

In robotics, there are valuable lessons for students and mentors alike. Watch how the CyberKnights, a FIRST robotics team champion sponsored by RTX, with the encouragement of their RTX mentor, faced challenges after a poor performance and scrapped its robot to build a new one in just nine days.

[ CyberKnights ]

In this special video, PAL Robotics takes you behind the scenes of our 20th-anniversary celebration, a memorable gathering with industry leaders and visionaries from across robotics and technology. From inspiring speeches to milestone highlights, the event was a testament to our journey and the incredible partnerships that have shaped our path.

[ PAL Robotics ]

Thanks, Rugilė!