mo

Freeze-thaw cycle helps asteroids ferry molecules of life to planets

Cracks running through samples of asteroid Ryugu were probably formed by the repeated thawing and freezing of water inside it, which could have helped asteroids like this carry the building blocks of life to early Earth




mo

Space may be filled with more antimatter than we can explain

A detector on the International Space Station found signatures of unexpectedly abundant antimatter – which may have been created in clashes of dark matter particles




mo

SpaceX targets Starship flight next week – just a month after last one

SpaceX is preparing for the sixth test flight of Starship, the world's most powerful rocket. Next week's launch – if successful – will be the fastest turnaround yet




mo

Period atmosphere is best part of game set on turbulent oil rig

In Still Wakes the Deep, you play as a Glaswegian electrician on a 1970s oil rig. The well-crafted setting gives way to horror, but I wish I could linger in mundanity for longer, says Jacob Aron




mo

AI models can't learn as they go along like humans do

After their initial training phase, AI algorithms can’t update and learn from new data, meaning tech companies have to keep training new models from scratch




mo

A glob of jelly can play Pong thanks to a basic kind of memory

Researchers trained a polymer gel to play the computer game Pong by passing electric current through it and measuring the concentration of ions




mo

NATO tests autonomous drone technology in DARPA-style competition

In a basement beneath City St George's, University of London, senior NATO leaders watch on as four research teams demonstrate the latest in AI-controlled, autonomous drone technolo0gy




mo

Meet Valkyrie, NASA’s humanoid robot paving way to the moon and Mars

NASA’s Valkyrie is undergoing tests to understand what it would take to get a humanoid robot onto offshore facilities or into space. New Scientist's James Woodford took the controls to see what it is capable of




mo

A riveting exploration of how AI models like ChatGPT changed the world

Supremacy, a new book from tech journalist Parmy Olson, takes us inside the rise of machine learning and AI, and examines the people behind it




mo

The deepfakes of Trump and Biden that you are most likely to fall for

Experiments show that viewers can usually identify video deepfakes of famous politicians – but fake audio and text are harder to detect




mo

OpenAI’s warnings about risky AI are mostly just marketing

A powerful new AI called o1 is the most dangerous that OpenAI has ever released, the firm claims – but who are these warnings for, asks Chris Stokel-Walker




mo

AI tweaks to photos and videos can alter our memories

It has become trivially easy to use artificial intelligence to edit images or generate video to remove unwanted objects or beautify scenes, but doing so leads to people misremembering what they have seen




mo

Samantha Morton stars in dystopian docudrama 2073

What if tech bros ruled the world, asks Asif Kapadia's 2073. This docudrama is captivating and disturbing, but lacks enough heft to stand out




mo

AIs are more likely to mislead people if trained on human feedback 

If artificial intelligence chatbots are fine-tuned to improve their responses using human feedback, they can become more likely to give deceptive answers that seem right but aren’t




mo

Teaching computers a new way to count could make numbers more accurate

A new way to store numbers in computers can dynamically prioritise accuracy or range, depending on need, allowing software to quickly switch between very large and small numbers




mo

Musical AI harmonises with your voice in a transcendent new exhibition

What happens if AI is trained to write choral music by feeding it a specially created vocal dataset? Moving new exhibition The Call tackles some thorny questions about AI and creativity – and stirs the soul with music




mo

DNA has been modified to make it store data 350 times faster

Researchers have managed to encode enormous amounts of information, including images, into DNA at a rate hundreds of times faster than was previously possible




mo

Tiny battery made from silk hydrogel can run a mouse pacemaker

A lithium-ion battery made from three droplets of hydrogel is the smallest soft battery of its kind – and it could be used in biocompatible and biodegradable implants




mo

AI models fall for the same scams that we do

Large language models can be used to scam humans, but AI is also susceptible to being scammed – and some models are more gullible than others




mo

AI helps driverless cars predict how unseen pedestrians may move

A specialised algorithm could help autonomous vehicles track hidden objects, such as a pedestrian, a bicycle or another vehicle concealed behind a parked car




mo

Simple fix could make US census more accurate but just as private

The US Census Bureau processes data before publishing it in order to keep personal information private – but a new approach could maintain the same privacy while improving accuracy




mo

Mountaineering astronauts and bad spelling? It's advertising's future

Feedback digs into a baffling ad for a mobile game and identifies a new and devilish way to advertise a product online: make it as confusing as possible to encourage people to click (it worked on Feedback)




mo

How a ride in a friendly Waymo saw me fall for robotaxis

I have a confession to make. After taking a handful of autonomous taxi rides, I have gone from a hater to a friend of robot cars in just a few weeks, says Annalee Newitz




mo

Pair found after month at sea

A yachtsman who went missing at sea with his six-year-old daughter has revealed details of their ordeal.




mo

Gary Lineker replacement decided as BBC tipped for rogue MOTD appointment



Express Sport writers have decided who should replace Gary Lineker




mo

Unitree Demos New $16k Robot


At ICRA 2024, Spectrum editor Evan Ackerman sat down with Unitree founder and CEO Xingxing Wang and Tony Yang, VP of Business Development, to talk about the company’s newest humanoid, the G1 model.

Smaller, more flexible, and elegant, the G1 robot is designed for general use in service and industry, and is one of the cheapest—if not the cheapest—of a new wave of advanced AI humanoid robots.




mo

One AI Model to Rule All Robots



The software used to control a robot is normally highly adapted to its specific physical set up. But now researchers have created a single general-purpose robotic control policy that can operate robotic arms, wheeled robots, quadrupeds, and even drones.

One of the biggest challenges when it comes to applying machine learning to robotics is the paucity of data. While computer vision and natural language processing can piggyback off the vast quantities of image and text data found on the Internet, collecting robot data is costly and time-consuming.

To get around this, there have been growing efforts to pool data collected by different groups on different kinds of robots, including the Open X-Embodiment and DROID datasets. The hope is that training on diverse robotics data will lead to “positive transfer,” which refers to when skills learned from training on one task help to boost performance on another.

The problem is that robots often have very different embodiments—a term used to describe their physical layout and suite of sensors and actuators—so the data they collect can vary significantly. For instance, a robotic arm might be static, have a complex arrangement of joints and fingers, and collect video from a camera on its wrist. In contrast, a quadruped robot is regularly on the move and relies on force feedback from its legs to maneuver. The kinds of tasks and actions these machines are trained to carry out are also diverse: The arm may pick and place objects, while the quadruped needs keen navigation.

That makes training a single AI model for robots on these large collections of data challenging, says Homer Walke, a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. So far, most attempts have either focused on data from a narrower selection of similar robots or researchers have manually tweaked data to make observations from different robots more similar. But in research to be presented at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in Munich in November, they unveiled a new model called CrossFormer that can train on data from a diverse set of robots and control them just as well as specialized control policies.

“We want to be able to train on all of this data to get the most capable robot,” says Walke. “The main advance in this paper is working out what kind of architecture works the best for accommodating all these varying inputs and outputs.”

How to control diverse robots with the same AI model

The team used the same model architecture that powers large language model, known as a transformer. In many ways, the challenge the researchers were trying to solve is not dissimilar to that facing a chatbot, says Walke. In language modeling, the AI has to to pick out similar patterns in sentences with different lengths and word orders. Robot data can also be arranged in a sequence much like a written sentence, but depending on the particular embodiment, observations and actions vary in length and order too.

“Words might appear in different locations in a sentence, but they still mean the same thing,” says Walke. “In our task, an observation image might appear in different locations in the sequence, but it’s still fundamentally an image and we still want to treat it like an image.”

UC Berkeley/Carnegie Mellon University

Most machine learning approaches work through a sequence one element at a time, but transformers can process the entire stream of data at once. This allows them to analyze the relationship between different elements and makes them better at handling sequences that are not standardized, much like the diverse data found in large robotics datasets.

Walke and his colleagues aren’t the first to train transformers on large-scale robotics data. But previous approaches have either trained solely on data from robotic arms with broadly similar embodiments or manually converted input data to a common format to make it easier to process. In contrast, CrossFormer can process images from cameras positioned above a robot, at head height or on a robotic arms wrist, as well as joint position data from both quadrupeds and robotic arms, without any tweaks.

The result is a single control policy that can operate single robotic arms, pairs of robotic arms, quadrupeds, and wheeled robots on tasks as varied as picking and placing objects, cutting sushi, and obstacle avoidance. Crucially, it matched the performance of specialized models tailored for each robot and outperformed previous approaches trained on diverse robotic data. The team even tested whether the model could control an embodiment not included in the dataset—a small quadcopter. While they simplified things by making the drone fly at a fixed altitude, CrossFormer still outperformed the previous best method.

“That was definitely pretty cool,” says Ria Doshi, an undergraduate student at Berkeley. “I think that as we scale up our policy to be able to train on even larger sets of diverse data, it’ll become easier to see this kind of zero shot transfer onto robots that have been completely unseen in the training.”

The limitations of one AI model for all robots

The team admits there’s still work to do, however. The model is too big for any of the robots’ embedded chips and instead has to be run from a server. Even then, processing times are only just fast enough to support real-time operation, and Walke admits that could break down if they scale up the model. “When you pack so much data into a model it has to be very big and that means running it for real-time control becomes difficult.”

One potential workaround would be to use an approach called distillation, says Oier Mees, a postdoctoral research at Berkley and part of the CrossFormer team. This essentially involves training a smaller model to mimic the larger model, and if successful can result in similar performance for a much smaller computational budget.

But of more importance than the computing resource problem is that the team failed to see any positive transfer in their experiments, as CrossFormer simply matched previous performance rather than exceeding it. Walke thinks progress in computer vision and natural language processing suggests that training on more data could be the key.

Others say it might not be that simple. Jeannette Bohg, a professor of robotics at Stanford University, says the ability to train on such a diverse dataset is a significant contribution. But she wonders whether part of the reason why the researchers didn’t see positive transfer is their insistence on not aligning the input data. Previous research that trained on robots with similar observation and action data has shown evidence of such cross-overs. “By getting rid of this alignment, they may have also gotten rid of this significant positive transfer that we’ve seen in other work,” Bohg says.

It’s also not clear if the approach will boost performance on tasks specific to particular embodiments or robotic applications, says Ram Ramamoorthy, a robotics professor at Edinburgh University. The work is a promising step towards helping robots capture concepts common to most robots, like “avoid this obstacle,” he says. But it may be less useful for tackling control problems specific to a particular robot, such as how to knead dough or navigate a forest, which are often the hardest to solve.




mo

Video Friday: Mobile Robot Upgrades



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.

ROSCon 2024: 21–23 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK
ICSR 2024: 23–26 October 2024, ODENSE, DENMARK
Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH
Humanoids 2024: 22–24 November 2024, NANCY, FRANCE

Enjoy today’s videos!

One of the most venerable (and recognizable) mobile robots ever made, the Husky, has just gotten a major upgrade.

Shipping early next year.

[ Clearpath Robotics ]

MAB Robotics is developing legged robots for the inspection and maintenance of industrial infrastructure. One of the initial areas for deploying this technology is underground infrastructure, such as water and sewer canals. In these environments, resistance to factors like high humidity and working underwater is essential. To address these challenges, the MAB team has built a walking robot capable of operating fully submerged, based on exceptional self-developed robotics actuators. This innovation overcomes the limitations of current technologies, offering MAB’s first clients a unique service for trenchless inspection and maintenance tasks.

[ MAB Robotics ]

Thanks, Jakub!

The G1 robot can perform a standing long jump of up to 1.4 meters, possibly the longest jump ever achieved by a humanoid robot of its size in the world, standing only 1.32 meters tall.

[ Unitree Robotics ]

Apparently, you can print out a functional four-fingered hand on an inkjet.

[ UC Berkeley ]

We present SDS (``See it. Do it. Sorted’), a novel pipeline for intuitive quadrupedal skill learning from a single demonstration video leveraging the visual capabilities of GPT-4o. We validate our method on the Unitree Go1 robot, demonstrating its ability to execute variable skills such as trotting, bounding, pacing, and hopping, achieving high imitation fidelity and locomotion stability.

[ Robot Perception Lab, University College London ]

You had me at “3D desk octopus.”

[ UIST 2024 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology ]

Top-notch swag from Dusty Robotics

[ Dusty Robotics ]

I’m not sure how serious this shoes-versus-no-shoes test is, but it’s an interesting result nonetheless.

[ Robot Era ]

Thanks, Ni Tao!

Introducing TRON 1, the first multimodal biped robot! With its innovative “Three-in-One” modular design, TRON 1 can easily switch among Point-Foot, Sole, and Wheeled foot ends.

[ LimX Dynamics ]

Recent works in the robot-learning community have successfully introduced generalist models capable of controlling various robot embodiments across a wide range of tasks, such as navigation and locomotion. However, achieving agile control, which pushes the limits of robotic performance, still relies on specialist models that require extensive parameter tuning. To leverage generalist-model adaptability and flexibility while achieving specialist-level agility, we propose AnyCar, a transformer-based generalist dynamics model designed for agile control of various wheeled robots.

[ AnyCar ]

Discover the future of aerial manipulation with our untethered soft robotic platform with onboard perception stack! Presented at the 2024 Conference on Robot Learning, in Munich, this platform introduces autonomous aerial manipulation that works in both indoor and outdoor environments—without relying on costly off-board tracking systems.

[ Paper ] via [ ETH Zurich Soft Robotics Laboratory ]

Deploying perception modules for human-robot handovers is challenging because they require a high degree of reactivity, generalizability, and robustness to work reliably for diverse cases. Here, we show hardware handover experiments using our efficient and object-agnostic real-time tracking framework, specifically designed for human-to-robot handover tasks with legged manipulators.

[ Paper ] via [ ETH Zurich Robotic Systems Lab ]

Azi and Ameca are killing time, but Azi struggles being the new kid around. Engineered Arts desktop robots feature 32 actuators, 27 for facial control alone, and 5 for the neck. They include AI conversational ability including GPT-4o support, which makes them great robotic companions, even to each other. The robots are following a script for this video, using one of their many voices.

[ Engineered Arts ]

Plato automates carrying and transporting, giving your staff more time to focus on what really matters, improving their quality of life. With a straightforward setup that requires no markers or additional hardware, Plato is incredibly intuitive to use—no programming skills needed.

[ Aldebaran ]

This UPenn GRASP Lab seminar is from Antonio Loquercio, on “Simulation: What made us intelligent will make our robots intelligent.”

Simulation-to-reality transfer is an emerging approach that enables robots to develop skills in simulated environments before applying them in the real world. This method has catalyzed numerous advancements in robotic learning, from locomotion to agile flight. In this talk, I will explore simulation-to-reality transfer through the lens of evolutionary biology, drawing intriguing parallels with the function of the mammalian neocortex. By reframing this technique in the context of biological evolution, we can uncover novel research questions and explore how simulation-to-reality transfer can evolve from an empirically driven process to a scientific discipline.

[ University of Pennsylvania ]




mo

Remote Sub Sustains Science Kilometers Underwater



The water column is hazy as an unusual remotely operated vehicle glides over the seafloor in search of a delicate tilt meter deployed three years ago off the west side of Vancouver Island. The sensor measures shaking and shifting in continental plates that will eventually unleash another of the region’s 9.0-scale earthquakes (the last was in 1700). Dwindling charge in the instruments’ loggers threatens the continuity of the data.

The 4-metric-ton, C$8-million (US $5.8-million) remotely operated vehicle (ROV) is 50 meters from its target when one of the seismic science platforms appears on its sonar imaging system, the platform’s hard edges crystallizing from the grainy background like a surgical implant jumping out of an ultrasound image. After easing the ROV to the platform, operators 2,575 meters up at the Pacific’s surface instruct its electromechanical arms and pincer hands to deftly unplug a data logger, then plug in a replacement with a fresh battery.

This mission, executed in early October, marked an exciting moment for Josh Tetarenko, director of ROV operations at North Vancouver-based Canpac Marine Services. Tetarenko is the lead designer behind the new science submersible and recently dubbed it Jenny in homage to Forrest Gump, because the fictional character named all of his boats Jenny. Swapping out the data loggers west of Vancouver Island’s Clayoquot Sound was part of a weeklong shakedown to test Jenny’s unique combination of dexterity, visualization chops, power, and pressure resistance.

Jenny is only the third science ROV designed for subsea work to a depth of 6,000 meters.

By all accounts Jenny sailed through. Tetarenko says the worst they saw was a leaky O-ring and the need to add some spring to a few bumpers. “Usually you see more things come up the first time you dive a vehicle to those depths,” says Tetarenko.

Jenny’s successful maiden cruise is just as important for Victoria, B.C.–based Ocean Networks Canada (ONC), which operates the NEPTUNE undersea observatory. The North-East Pacific Time-series Undersea Networked Experiments array boasts thousands of sensors and instruments, including deep-sea video cameras, seismometers, and robotic rovers sprawled across this corner of Pacific. Most of these are connected to shore via an 812-kilometer power and communications cable. Jenny was custom-designed to perform the annual maintenance and equipment swaps that have kept live data streaming from that cabled observatory nearly continuously for the past 15 years, despite trawler strikes, a fault on its backbone cable, and insults from corrosion, crushing pressures, and fouling.

NEPTUNE remains one of the world’s largest installations for oceanographic science despite a proliferation of such cabled observatories since it went live in 2009. ONC’s open data portal has over 37,000 registered users tapping over 1.5 petabytes of ocean data—information that’s growing in importance with the intensification of climate change and the collapse of marine ecosystems.

Over the course of Jenny’s maiden cruise, her operators swapped devices in and out at half a dozen ONC sites, including at several of NEPTUNE’s five nodes and at one of NEPTUNE’s smaller sister observatories closer to Vancouver.

Inside Jenny

ROV Jenny aboard the Valour, Canpac’s 50-meter offshore workhorse, ahead of October’s NEPTUNE observatory maintenance cruise.Ocean Networks Canada

What makes Jenny so special?

  • Jenny is only the third science ROV designed for subsea work to a depth of 6,000 meters.
  • Motion sensors actively adjust her 7,000-meter-long umbilical cable to counteract topside wave action that would otherwise yank the ROV around at depth and, in rough seas, could damage or snap the cable.
  • Dual high-dexterity manipulator arms are controlled by topside operators via a pair of replica mini-manipulators that mirror the movements.
  • Each arm is capable of picking up objects weighing about 275 kilograms, and the ROV itself can transport equipment weighing up to 3,000 kg.
  • 11 high-resolution cameras deliver 4K video, supported by 300,000 lumens of lighting that can be tuned to deliver the soft red light needed to observe bioluminescence.
  • Dual multibeam sonar systems maximize visibility in turbid water.

Meghan Paulson, ONC’s executive director for observatory operations, says the sonar imaging system will be particularly invaluable during dives to shallower sites where sediments stirred up by waves and weather can cut visibility from meters to centimeters. “It really reduces the risk of running into things accidentally,” says Paulson.

To experience the visibility conditions for yourself, check out recordings of the live video broadcast from the NEPTUNE maintenance cruise. Tetarenko says that next year they hope to broadcast not only the main camera feed but also one of the sonar images.

3D video could be next, according to Canpac ROV pilot and Jenny codesigner, James Barnett. He says they would need to boost the computing power installed topside, to process that “firehose of data,” but insists that real-time 3D is “definitely not impossible.” Tetarenko says the science ROV community is collaborating on software to help make that workable: “3D imagining is kind of the very latest thing that’s being tested on lots of ROV systems right now, but nobody’s really there yet.”

More Than Science

Expansion of the cabled observatory concept is the more certain technological legacy for ONC and NEPTUNE. In fact, the technology has evolved beyond just oceanography applications.

ONC tapped Alcatel Submarine Networks (ASN) to design and build the Neptune backbone and the French firm delivered a system that has reliably delivered multigigabit Ethernet plus 10 kilovolts of direct-current electricity to the deep sea. Today ASN deploys a second-generation subsea power and communications networking solution, developed with the Norwegian international energy company Equinor.

ASN’s “Direct Current/Fiber Optic” or DC/FO system provides the 100-km backbone for the ARCA subsea neutrino observatory near Sicily, in addition to providing control systems for a growing number of offshore oil and gas installations. The latter include projects led by Equinor and BP where DC/FO networks drive the subsea injection of captured carbon dioxide and monitor its storage below the seabed. Future oil and gas projects will increasingly rely on the cables’ power supply to replace the hydraulic lines that have traditionally been used to operate machinery on the seafloor, according to Ronan Michel, ASN’s product line manager for oil and gas solutions.

Michel says DC/FO incorporates important lessons learned from the Neptune installation. And the latter’s existence was a crucial prerequisite. “The DC/FO solution would probably not exist if Neptune Canada would not have been developed,” says Michel. “It probably gave confidence to Equinor that ASN was capable to develop subsea power and coms infrastructure.”




mo

Why Simone Giertz, the Queen of Useless Robots, Got Serious



Simone Giertz came to fame in the 2010s by becoming the self-proclaimed “queen of shitty robots.” On YouTube she demonstrated a hilarious series of self-built mechanized devices that worked perfectly for ridiculous applications, such as a headboard-mounted alarm clock with a rubber hand to slap the user awake.

This article is part of our special report, “Reinventing Invention: Stories from Innovation’s Edge.”

But Giertz has parlayed her Internet renown into Yetch, a design company that makes commercial consumer products. (The company name comes from how Giertz’s Swedish name is properly pronounced.) Her first release, a daily habit-tracking calendar, was picked up by prestigious outlets such as the Museum of Modern Art design store in New York City. She has continued to make commercial products since, as well as one-off strange inventions for her online audience.

Where did the motivation for your useless robots come from?

Simone Giertz: I just thought that robots that failed were really funny. It was also a way for me to get out of creating from a place of performance anxiety and perfection. Because if you set out to do something that fails, that gives you a lot of creative freedom.


You built up a big online following. A lot of people would be happy with that level of success. But you moved into inventing commercial products. Why?

Giertz: I like torturing myself, I guess! I’d been creating things for YouTube and for social media for a long time. I wanted to try something new and also find longevity in my career. I’m not super motivated to constantly try to get people to give me attention. That doesn’t feel like a very good value to strive for. So I was like, “Okay, what do I want to do for the rest of my career?” And developing products is something that I’ve always been really, really interested in. And yeah, it is tough, but I’m so happy to be doing it. I’m enjoying it thoroughly, as much as there’s a lot of face-palm moments.

Giertz’s every day goal calendar was picked up by the Museum of Modern Art’s design store. Yetch

What role does failure play in your invention process?

Giertz: I think it’s inevitable. Before, obviously, I wanted something that failed in the most unexpected or fun way possible. And now when I’m developing products, it’s still a part of it. You make so many different versions of something and each one fails because of something. But then, hopefully, what happens is that you get smaller and smaller failures. Product development feels like you’re going in circles, but you’re actually going in a spiral because the circles are taking you somewhere.

What advice do you have for aspiring inventors?

Giertz: Make things that you want. A lot of people make things that they think that other people want, but the main target audience, at least for myself, is me. I trust that if I find something interesting, there are probably other people who do too. And then just find good people to work with and collaborate with. There is no such thing as the lonely genius, I think. I’ve worked with a lot of different people and some people made me really nervous and anxious. And some people, it just went easy and we had a great time. You’re just like, “Oh, what if we do this? What if we do this?” Find those people.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Queen of Useless Robots.”




mo

This Inventor Is Molding Tomorrow’s Inventors



This article is part of our special report, “Reinventing Invention: Stories from Innovation’s Edge.”

Marina Umaschi Bers has long been at the forefront of technological innovation for kids. In the 2010s, while teaching at Tufts University, in Massachusetts, she codeveloped the ScratchJr programming language and KIBO robotics kits, both intended for young children in STEM programs. Now head of the DevTech research group at Boston College, she continues to design learning technologies that promote computational thinking and cultivate a culture of engineering in kids.

What was the inspiration behind creating ScratchJr and the KIBO robot kits?

Marina Umaschi Bers: We want little kids—as they learn how to read and write, which are traditional literacies—to learn new literacies, such as how to code. To make that happen, we need to create child-friendly interfaces that are developmentally appropriate for their age, so they learn how to express themselves through computer programming.

How has the process of invention changed since you developed these technologies?

Bers: Now, with the maker culture, it’s a lot cheaper and easier to prototype things. And there’s more understanding that kids can be our partners as researchers and user-testers. They are not passive entities but active in expressing their needs and helping develop inventions that fit their goals.

What should people creating new technologies for kids keep in mind?

Bers: Not all kids are the same. You really need to look at the age of the kids. Try to understand developmentally where these children are in terms of their cognitive, social, emotional development. So when you’re designing, you’re designing not just for a user, but you’re designing for a whole human being.

The other thing is that in order to learn, children need to have fun. But they have fun by really being pushed to explore and create and make new things that are personally meaningful. So you need open-ended environments that allow children to explore and express themselves.

The KIBO kits teach kids robotics coding in a playful and screen-free way. KinderLab Robotics

How can coding and learning about robots bring out the inner inventors in kids?

Bers: I use the words “coding playground.” In a playground, children are inventing games all the time. They are inventing situations, they’re doing pretend play, they’re making things. So if we’re thinking of that as a metaphor when children are coding, it’s a platform for them to create, to make characters, to create stories, to make anything they want. In this idea of the coding playground, creativity is welcome—not just “follow what the teacher says” but let children invent their own projects.

What do you hope for in terms of the next generation of technologies for kids?

Bers: I hope we would see a lot more technologies that are outside. Right now, one of our projects is called Smart Playground [a project that will incorporate motors, sensors, and other devices into playgrounds to bolster computational thinking through play]. Children are able to use their bodies and run around and interact with others. It’s kind of getting away from the one-on-one relationship with the screen. Instead, technology is really going to augment the possibilities of people to interact with other people, and use their whole bodies, much of their brains, and their hands. These technologies will allow children to explore a little bit more of what it means to be human and what’s unique about us.

This article appears in the November 2024 print issue as “The Kids’ Inventor.”




mo

Trump Is the Most Resilient Politician in U.S. History

Unknown host Charlie Stone analyzes Trump's unprecedented victory with Obama Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson




mo

Too Many See the Democrats as a Hostile Elite

Even though that perception is partly the creation of right-wing media, the Democrats surely need to hone their identity.




mo

The Common Experience That Explains Trump's Gains

The most impressive aspect of Donald Trump's victory over Vice President Kamala Harris last week was the uniformity of his gains across the electoral landscape.




mo

Seth Moulton Does Democrats a Favor

Other Democrats lambasted him. The Tufts political science department spurned him. But Moulton is raising concerns the left needs to take seriously.




mo

Musk Backs Scott After Calling Thune 'Top Choice of Democrats'

Elon Musk has joined the chorus of conservative and MAGA voices online backing Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) for Senate GOP leader - after calling Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) the "top choice of Democrats."




mo

So Who Leads the Democrats Now?

Who Will Fill the Democratic Vacuum?




mo

PlayStation Plus games for November reveal time: Everything coming to Sony's console this month



PS5 owners can play some great games this month, including a Bethesda hit and more. Here's what's free for PS Plus subscribers for November, with more to be announced.




mo

Pokemon set to break Guinness World Record with huge 24-hour livestream



The Pokemon Company is teaming up with content creators to stage a 24-hour unboxing live stream for its new Scarlet & Violet - Surging Sparks card set as you Gotta Catch 'Em All




mo

New Pokemon card only launched last week - and it's already worth £420



Pikachu ex, found in the new Pokemon TCG set Surging Sparks, has seen its value soar with players spending over $500 for the latest card. Here's why.




mo

Epic Games reveals Fortnite OG release date for next month and it's permanent



Fortnite fans are going wild after Epic Games announced it's bringing back the original version of its battle royale as Fortnite OG as a permanent addition to the game.




mo

Efforts underway to save salmon trapped in B.C. lake due to drought

More than 80 per cent of B.C.'s water basins are experiencing level 4 or 5 drought conditions, with salmon in many parts of the province struggling to make it to their spawning grounds.



  • News/Canada/British Columbia

mo

Oh my pod! Orcas moving en masse near N.L. astonish scientist

Fisheries and Oceans Canada whale researchers recently spotted one of the largest pods of orca whales ever reported off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.



  • News/Canada/Nfld. & Labrador

mo

Equity overload: Federal department keeps 294 DEI staffers on payroll, most with six-figure salaries

The Health and Human Services Department employs 294 people whose jobs focus on diversity, and the department maintains seven separate "minority health" offices spread across its various agencies, according to a new report that suggests it will be tough for the incoming Trump administration to unwind it all.




mo

Trump eyes major Day One moves on the border, energy production, electric vehicles and more

President-elect Donald Trump vowed on his first day in office to sign an executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants and kick-start the largest deportation effort in the nation's history.




mo

Republican Rep. David Valadao wins reelection in heavily Democratic California district

Republican Rep. David Valadao has won reelection in California's 22nd Congressional District, defeating Democrat Rudy Salas for the second time.




mo

How a researcher hacked ChatGPT's memory to expose a major security flaw

OpenAI recently introduced a new memory feature for ChatGPT that enables it to remember information about people, including age, gender and beliefs.



  • b0bd179b-ce0e-58f9-8dc9-02b8f3811ca4
  • fnc
  • Fox News
  • fox-news/tech
  • fox-news/tech/artificial-intelligence
  • fox-news/tech/chatgpt
  • fox-news/tech/topics/security
  • fox-news/us/personal-freedoms/privacy
  • fox-news/tech
  • article

mo

Heroes among us: Celebrating American bravery on Veterans Day

Tech expert Kurt “CyberGuy" Knutsson helps you honor our heroes with these powerful podcasts, audiobooks and documentaries this Veterans Day.



  • 52424efb-aa6e-5eb5-9392-dc4ee09364ad
  • fnc
  • Fox News
  • fox-news/tech
  • fox-news/us/military/veterans
  • fox-news/us/military
  • fox-news/entertainment/genres/documentary
  • fox-news/tech
  • article

mo

'Bring on Lampard and Morris!' - Chelsea fans react to reports of Gianfranco Zola exit

The Italian is reportedly set to leave Stamford Bridge at the end of his contract..




mo

Liverpool attempted to trademark 'Allez Allez Allez' after famous fan chant

Liverpool already have one song synonymous with the club but they did attempt to officially do likewise with another. The Reds tried to trademark 'Allez Allez Allez'..