‘Robocake' includes a rechargeable chocolate battery you can eat
This wedding cake, created by researchers and chefs in partnership with the RoboFood project, has edible robotic bears that dance and chocolate batteries that power the candles.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Forbes
an hour ago
- Forbes
Artificial Intelligence Collaboration and Indirect Regulatory Lag
WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 16: Samuel Altman, CEO of OpenAI, testifies before the Senate Judiciary ... More Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law May 16, 2023 in Washington, DC. The committee held an oversight hearing to examine A.I., focusing on rules for artificial intelligence. (Photo by) Steve Jobs often downplayed his accomplishments by saying that 'creativity is just connecting things.' Regardless of whether this affects the way you understand his legacy, it is beyond the range of doubt that most innovation comes from interdisciplinary efforts. Everyone agrees that if AI is to exponentially increase collaboration across disciplines, the laws must not lag too far behind technology. The following explores how a less obvious interpretation of this phrase will help us do what Jobs explained was the logic behind his genius The Regulatory Lag What most people mean when they say that legislation and regulation have difficulty keeping pace with the rate of innovation because the innovation and its consequences are not well known until well after the product hits the market. While that is true, it only tells half of the story. Technological innovations also put more attenuated branches of the law under pressure to adjust. These are second-order, more indirect legal effects, where whole sets of laws—originally unrelated to the new technology—have to adapt to enable society to maximize the full potential of the innovation. One classic example comes from the time right after the Internet became mainstream. After digital communication and connectivity became widespread and expedited international communication and commercial relations, nations discovered that barriers to cross-border trade and investment were getting in the way. Barriers such as tariffs and outdated investment FDI partnership requirements—had to be lowered or eliminated if the Internet was to be an effective catalyst to global economic growth. Neoliberal Reforms When the internet emerged in the 1990s, much attention went to laws that directly regulated it—such as data privacy, digital speech, and cybersecurity. But some of the most important legal changes were not about the internet itself. They were about removing indirect legal barriers that stood in the way of its broader economic and social potential. Cross-border trade and investment rules, for instance, had to evolve. Tariffs on goods, restrictions on foreign ownership, and outdated service regulations had little to do with the internet as a technology, but everything to do with whether global e-commerce, remote work, and digital entrepreneurship could flourish. These indirect legal constraints were largely overlooked in early internet governance debates, yet their reform was essential to unleashing the internet's full power. Artificial Intelligence and Indirect Barriers A comparable story is starting to unfold with artificial intelligence. While much of the focus when talking about law and AI has been given to algorithmic accountability and data privacy, there is also an opportunity for a larger societal return from AI in its ability to reduce barriers between disciplines. AI is increasing the viability of interdisciplinary work because it can synthesize, translate, and apply knowledge across domains in ways that make cross-field collaboration more essential. Already we are seeing marriages of law and computer science, medicine and machine learning, environmental modeling, and language processing. AI is a general-purpose technology that rewards those who are capable of marrying insights across disciplines. In that sense, the AI era is also the era of interdisciplinary boundary-blurring opportunities triggered by AI are up against legal barriers to entry across disciplines and professions. In many professions, it requires learning a patchwork of licensure regimes and intractable definitions of domain knowledge to gain the right to practice or contribute constructively. While some of these regulations are generally intended to protect public interests, they can also hinder innovation and prevent new interdisciplinary practices from gaining traction. To achieve the full potential of AI-enabled collaboration, many of these legal barriers need to be eliminated—or at least reimagined. We are starting to see some positive movements. For example, a few states are starting to grant nurse practitioners and physician assistants greater autonomy in clinical decision-making, and that's a step toward cross-disciplinary collaboration of healthcare and AI diagnostics. For now, this is a move in the right direction. However, In some other fields, the professional rules of engagement support silos. This must change if we're going to be serious about enabling AI to help us crack complex, interdependent problems. Legislators and regulators cannot focus exclusively on the bark that protects the tree of change, they must also focus on the hidden network of roots that that quietly nourish and sustain it.
CNN
2 hours ago
- CNN
First evidence of ‘living towers' made of worms discovered in nature
Nature seems to offer an escape from the hustle and bustle of city life, but the world at your feet may tell another story. Even in the shade of a fruit tree, you could be surrounded by tiny skyscrapers — not made of steel or concrete, but of microscopic worms wriggling and writhing into the shape of long, vertical towers. Even though these miniature architects, called nematodes, are found all over Earth's surface, scientists in Germany recently witnessed their impressive building techniques in nature for the first time. After months of closely inspecting rotten pears and apples in local orchards, researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior and the University of Konstanz were able to spot hundreds of the 1-millimeter-long (0.04-inch) worms climbing onto one another, amassing structures up to 10 times their individual size. Related video Rare video shows 12 sharks co-feed socially To learn more about the mysterious physics of the soft, slimy towers, the study team brought samples of nematodes called Caenorhabditis elegans into a lab and analyzed them. There, the scientists noticed the worms could assemble in a matter of hours, with some reaching out from the twisting mass as exploratory 'arms' sensing the environment and building accordingly. But why the worms formed the structures wasn't immediately clear. The team's findings, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, show that even the smallest animals can prompt big questions about the evolutionary purpose of social behaviors. 'What we got was more than just some worms standing on top of each other,' said senior study author Serena Ding, a Max Planck research group leader of genes and behavior. 'It's a coordinated superorganism, acting and moving as a whole.' To find out what was motivating the nematodes' building behavior, the study team tested the worms' reactions to being poked, prodded and even visited by a fly — all while stacked in a tower formation. 'We saw that they are very reactive to the presence of a stimulus,' said the study's first author, Daniela Perez, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. 'They sense it, and then the tower goes towards this stimulus, attaching itself to our metal pick or a fly buzzing around.' This coordinated reaction suggests the hungry nematodes may be joining together to easily hitch a ride on larger animals such as insects that transport them to (not so) greener pastures with more rotten fruit to feast on, Perez said. 'If you think about it, an animal that is 1 millimeter long cannot just crawl all the way to the next fruit 2 meters (6.6 feet) away. It could easily die on the way there, or be eaten by a predator,' Perez explained. Nematodes are capable of hitchhiking solo too, she added, but arriving to a new area in a group may allow them to continue reproducing. The structures themselves may also serve as a mode of transport, as evidenced by how some worms formed bridges across gaps within the petri dishes to get from one surface to another, Perez noted. 'This discovery is really exciting,' said Orit Peleg, an associate professor of computer science who studies living systems at the University of Colorado Boulder's BioFrontiers Institute. 'It's both establishing the ecological function of creating a tower, and it really opens up the door to do more controlled experimentation to try to understand the perceptual world of these organisms, and how they communicate within a large group.' Peleg was not involved in the study. As the next step, Perez said her team would like to learn whether the formation of these structures is a cooperative or competitive behavior. In other words, are the towering nematodes behaving socially to help each other out, or are their towers more akin to a Black Friday sale stampede? Studying the behaviors of other self-assembling creatures could offer clues to the social norms of nematodes and help answer this question, Ding said. Ants, which assemble to form buoyant rafts to survive floodwaters, are among the few creatures known to team up like nematodes, said David Hu, a professor of mechanical engineering and biology at Georgia Tech. Hu was not involved in the study. 'Ants are incredibly sacrificial for one another, and they do not generally fight within the colony,' Hu said. 'That's because of their genetics. They all come from the same queen, so they are like siblings.' Like ants, nematodes didn't appear to display any obvious role differentiation or hierarchy within the tower structures, Perez said. Each worm from the base to the top of the structure was equally mobile and strong, indicating no competition was at play. However, the lab-cultivated worms were basically clones of one another, so it's not clear whether role differentiation occurs more often in nature, where nematode populations could have more genetic differences, she noted. Additionally, socially cooperative creatures tend to use some form of communication, Peleg said. In the case of ants, it may be their pheromone trails, while honeybees rely on their ritual dance routines and slime molds use their pulsing chemical signals. With nematodes, however, it's still not clear how they might communicate — or if they are communicating at all, Ding said. 'The next steps for (the team) are really just choosing the next questions to ask.' Notably, there has been a lot of interest in studying cooperative animal behaviors among the robotics community, Hu said. It's possible that one day, he added, information about the complex sociality of creatures like nematodes could be used to inform how technology, such as computer servers or drone systems, communicates.
The Drive
2 hours ago
- The Drive
After 66 Years of the Same Old Seatbelt, Volvo Tries Something New
The latest car news, reviews, and features. The electric 2026 Volvo EX60 will be the Swedish automaker's first model to feature its new 'multi-adaptive safety belts.' This new-gen seat belt is designed to more effectively protect you in an accident with a rapid download of impending-crash data from external and internal sensors, optimizing for everything from impact speed to your posture while driving. Modern seat belts are more complicated than they might look—it's not just a ribbon of fabric stapling you into your seat. In any car, pretensioners cinch up on you in extreme deceleration, and load limiters tactically release tension to prevent the belt from hurting you. In most cars made in the last couple of decades, crash sensors communicate with the airbags and speed sensors for some range of load-limiting force adjustment. Volvo holds the honor of having introduced the now-ubiquitous three-point belt to the auto industry. Its 1959 invention is credited to Nils Bohlin. Back then, Volvo described the function of the belt: '[it] effectively, and in a physiologically favorable manner, prevents the body of the strapped person being thrown forward.' That patent was released to the public, and basically every automaker ultimately adopted it. Now, Volvo's taking that same mission, and the systemization of safety equipment, further with the multi-adaptive belt (which, surprisingly, does not have an acronym or cool-sounding proprietary brand name). Building on the idea of pretensioners and load limiters, the EX60's belts will integrate an immense amount of information—about the vehicle and passenger—to more effectively protect whoever's in the seats. An isolated view of the new belt. Volvo From the outside, vehicle direction and speed are factored in. From the inside, the EX60 will include passenger height, weight, and even posture to calculate how best to hold its passengers. 'For example, a larger occupant in a serious crash will receive a higher belt load setting to help reduce the risk of head injury. While a smaller occupant in a milder crash will receive a lower belt load setting to reduce the risk of rib fractures,' Volvo said. While Volvo's traditional seat belt has three different load-limiting profiles it can apply, this new setup has 11. That's certainly a lot more precision in the care of your body in a crash, though it's tough to extrapolate exactly how much injury reduction that will lead to. This quick teaser from Volvo's ES90 reveal video is all we've really seen of the upcoming EX60 so far. Volvo With the EX60, Volvo's promising to continuously evolve the operating scheme of the system as it gathers more real-world crash data, and apply improved logic via over-the-air updates. 'As Volvo Cars gathers more data and insights, the car can improve its understanding of the occupants, new scenarios and response strategies,' the brand stated. I haven't fallen in love with the idea of feeding my telemetry to the company that sold me my car, but this kind of safety innovation does make a case for it. Seat belts are something you never think about until you really need them. And if that ever happens, you're going to want the smartest seat belt ever engineered. Got a tip? Send us a note at tips@
