Almost 11 years after Boston Dynamics revealed the Atlas humanoid robot, its finally being retired. The DARPA-funded robot was designed for search-and-rescue missions, but it rose to fame thanks to videos showing off its dance moves andlets be honestrudimentary parkour skills.
Atlas is trotting off into the sunset with one final YouTube video, thankfully including plenty of bloopers which are the best parts. Boston Dynamics, of course, has more commercially successful robots in its lineup, including Spot. Its likely not the end of the line for the companys humanoid robots, either.
Mat Smith
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NASA confirms its space trash pierced Florida mans roof
It was part of a cargo pallet the space station dropped in 2021.
Back in March, a piece of space debris hit the roof of a house in Naples, FL, ripped through two floors and (fortunately) missed the son of homeowner Alejandro Otero. On Tuesday, NASA confirmed it was a piece of equipment dumped from the International Space Station (ISS), three years ago. NASA expected the haul of discarded nickel-hydrogen batteries to orbit Earth for between two to four years, before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere. Not the case.
Continue reading.
A Netflix true crime documentary may have used AI-generated images of a real person
Its the messy hands.
Netflix
Netflix is accused of using AI-manipulated imagery in the true crime documentary What Jennifer Did. Several photos show the usual AI issues: mangled hands and fingers, strange artifacts, curved edges that should be straight and more. If accurate, the report raises serious questions about using such images in documentaries, particularly since the person depicted is currently awaiting retrial. Netflix has yet to acknowledge the report.
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Insta360s X4 camera is the first 8K 360-degree video
And is better than the last model in every way.
Engadget
When the X3 landed, it was a 360-degree action cam that solved a lot of the usual problems with that camera genre. With the X4, Insta360 has just upgraded everything. The technical improvements focus on video, with the new ability to record footage at up to 8K 30 fps or 5.7k at 60 fps. Slow-mo video has been boosted up to 4K resolution, too. In short, it captures more of everything. The X4 has a 2,290mAh battery, 67 percent bigger than the X3s. According to the press release, it should be able to capture video for up to 135 minutes. The camera is available for $500 now.
Continue reading.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-boston-dynamics-bi-ped-atlas-robot-is-going-into-retirement-111534431.html?src=rss
The whole world is ragging on a barely functional $700 AI pin at the moment, but what if similar tech was squeezed into a gigantic robot that lives in your home? Thats a worst case scenario for the recently-introduced Menteebot, a human-sized robot thats stuffed to the brim with AI-adjacent bells and whistles.
Its being advertised as the personalized AI-based robot you can mentor. It can run, walk sideways and even turn, all with the same balance and control as a human. Manufacturer Mentee Robotics also says itll adjust its gait when lifting heavy objects. It should be able to lift these heavy objects with ease due to the fact that its, well, absolutely gigantic. Many of the models also have no head, which certainly doesnt recall any old-time myths about a scary demon on a horse.
Now, weve had humanoid robots for a while. There was Hondas Asimo, which has been sadly discontinued, and the army of nightmare creatures that Boston Dynamics is busy cooking up. Agility Robotics has been building out its robot assistant Digit and Elon Musk, who never makes false promises ever swear to God, says that Tesla is working on a humanoid robot called Optimus.
Theres one major difference between the aforementioned bots and Mentees creation. Menteebot is stuffed with AI algorithms, natural language processing models and software that unlocks advanced training techniques. The company says that this means the robot is not bound to a limited set of commands and that it can even hold conversations with humans. As a matter of fact, users issue commands to the robot via natural language.
Its a robot with two arms and two legs that can, in theory, do many of the same things we do. The company says that we can train it to do these things. This seems to sort of work like another controversial piece of AI tech, the Rabbit R1. To teach Menteebot a new task, you run a simulated version of the bot through a digital version of the task. The software completes the task over and over until it figures it out. Then the robot should be able to complete the task in the real world. This seems like an extremely lofty promise, but well wait to see the final result. Heres hoping it doesn't hallucinate and do whatever the heck it wants like other bits of AI tech.
Menteebot does look quite agile. There are tons of videos of the robot being put through its paces. It can run and the arms and hands present a full range of motion and enough accuracy to perform delicate tasks. To that end, theres a video of it gently handing a piece of dinnerware to a person.
While its highly unlikely this robot will live up to the initial promotional materials when it arrives in 2025 (just look at the initial promises Humane made for the AI pin), it still seems pretty darned cool. Theres no announced price, but its certainly going to be a whole lot more than the aforementioned $700 pin. This is an agile humanoid robot that weighs over 150 pounds.
Menteebot will be available in two flavors. Theres the residential bot, which is forced to do household chores, and the commercial bot, which is forced to do manual labor. No matter which you choose, for heavens sake, be extra nice to the thing. Dont boss it around. Let it sit at the dinner table. Keep it away from the vast majority of sci-fi. It can watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, maybe, as Data seems like a decent enough role model.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/menteebot-is-a-human-sized-ai-robot-that-you-command-with-natural-language-110052927.html?src=rss
In addition to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way also serves as home to smaller stellar black holes that form when a massive star collapses. Scientists believe there are 100 million stellar black holes in our galaxy alone, but most of them have yet to be discovered. The ones that had already been found are, on average, around 10 times the size of our sun, with the biggest one reaching 21 solar masses. Thanks to the information collected by the European Space Agency's Gaia mission, though, scientists have discovered a stellar black hole that's 33 times the size of our sun, making it the biggest one of its kind we've ever seen in our galaxy so far. It's also relatively close to our planet at around 1,926 light-years away.
Gaia BH3, as it's now called, was first noticed by a team of ESA scientists poring over data from the mission to look for anything unusual. An old giant star from the nearby Aquila constellation caught their attention with its wobbling, leading to the discovery that it was orbiting a massive black hole. BH3 was hard to find despite being so close it's now the second closest known black hole to our planet because it doesn't have celestial bodies close enough that could feed it matter and make it light up in X-ray telescopes. Before its discovery, we'd only found black holes of comparable size in distant galaxies.
The ESA team used data from ground-based telescopes like the European Southern Observatory to confirm the size of the newly discovered celestial body. They also published a paper with preliminary findings before they release a more detailed one in 2025, so that their peers could start studying Gaia BH3. For now, what they know is that the star orbiting it has very few elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, and since stellar pairs tend to have similar compositions, the star that collapsed to form BH3 could've been the same.
Scientists have long believed that it's the metal-poor stars that can create high-mass black holes after they collapse, because they lose less mass in their lifetimes. In other words, they'd theoretically still have a lot of materials left by the time of their death to form a massive black hole. This was apparently the first evidence we've found that links metal-poor stars with massive stellar black holes, and it's also proof that older giant stars developed differently than the newer ones we see in our galaxy.
We'll most likely see more detailed studies about binary systems and stellar black holes that use data from BH3 and its companion star in the future. The ESA believes that BH3's discovery is just the beginning, and it's going to be the focus of more investigations as we seek to unravel the mysteries of the universe.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/esas-gaia-mission-discovers-the-biggest-stellar-black-hole-in-our-galaxy-yet-085753239.html?src=rss
Take-Two Interactive plans to lay off 5 percent of its workforce, or about 600 employees, by the end of the year, as reported in an SEC filing Tuesday. The studio is also canceling several in-development projects. These moves are expected to cost $160 million to $200 million to implement, and should result in $165 million in annual savings for Take-Two.
As the publisher of Grand Theft Auto and the parent company behind Rockstar Games, 2K, Private Division, Zynga and Gearbox, Take-Two is a juggernaut in the video game industry. It reported $5.3 billion in revenue in 2023, a nearly $2 billion increase over the previous year. Just a few weeks ago, Take-Two agreed to purchase Gearbox, the studio responsible for Borderlands, for $460 million. The company is preparing to release Grand Theft Auto VI in 2025, a move that should bring in billions on its own.
Take-Two instituted a round of layoffs in 2023 across Private Division the indie label behind Kerbal Space Program, The Outer Worlds and Rollerdrome and other in-house studios.
An estimated 8,800 people in the video game industry have lost their jobs in 2024 so far, and a total of 10,500 industry employees were laid off in 2023. These are, depressingly, record-breaking figures. Sony in February laid off about 900 people at PlayStation; Microsoft fired about 1,900 workers across its gaming division in January; Riot Games let go more than 500 people that same month and these are just some of the industry's most recent and largest layoffs. Take-Two is now at the head of this list.
Take-Two executives have been hinting at a "significant cost reduction program" coming this year, but before today, they deflected questions about mass layoffs. In March, CEO Strauss Zelnick said on an investor call, "The hardest thing to do is to lay off colleagues and we have no current plans."This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/take-two-plans-to-lay-off-5-percent-of-its-employees-by-the-end-of-2024-235903990.html?src=rss
On March 8, a piece of space debris plunged through a roof in Naples, FL, ripped through two floors and (fortunately) missed the son of homeowner Alejandro Otero. On Tuesday, NASA confirmed the results of its analysis of the incident. As suspected, its a piece of equipment dumped from the International Space Station (ISS) three years ago.
NASAs investigation of the object at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral confirmed it was a piece of the EP-9 support equipment used to mount batteries onto a cargo pallet, which the ISS robotic arm dropped on March 11, 2021. The haul, made up of discarded nickel-hydrogen batteries, was expected to orbit Earth between two to four years (it split the difference, lasting almost exactly three) before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere, as NASA predicted at the time. Not quite.
The roof-piercing debris was described as a stanchion from NASA flight support equipment used to mount the batteries onto the cargo pallet. Made of the metal alloy Inconel, the object weighs 1.6 lbs and measures 4 inches tall and 1.6 inches in diameter.
Hello. Looks like one of those pieces missed Ft Myers and landed in my house in Naples. Tore through the roof and went thru 2 floors. Almost his my son. Can you please assist with getting NASA to connect with me? Ive left messages and emails without a response. pic.twitter.com/Yi29f3EwyV Alejandro Otero (@Alejandro0tero) March 15, 2024
Otero told Fort Meyers CBS affiliate WINK-TV that he was on vacation when his son told him that an object had pierced their roof. I was shaking, he said. I was completely in disbelief. What are the chances of something landing on my house with such force to cause so much damage. Im super grateful that nobody got hurt.
NASA says it will investigate the equipment dumps jettison and re-entry to try to figure out why the object slammed into Oteros home instead of disintegrating into flames. NASA specialists use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break apart during atmospheric re-entry, the space agency explained in a news release. These models require detailed input parameters and are regularly updated when debris is found to have survived atmospheric re-entry to the ground.
Most space junk moves extremely fast, reaching up to 18,000 mph, according to NASA. It explains, Due to the rate of speed and volume of debris in LEO, current and future space-based services, explorations, and operations pose a safety risk to people and property in space and on Earth.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nasa-confirms-its-space-trash-pierced-florida-mans-roof-204056957.html?src=rss
Nearly 11 years after it first showed off its current humanoid robot, Boston Dynamics is retiring Atlas. The DARPA-funded robot was designed with search and rescue missions in mind, with the idea that it would be able to enter areas that were unsafe for humans to carry out a range of tasks. However, Atlas became a bit of a star thanks to videos showing off its slick dance moves and impressive feats of strength, agility and balance. Fittingly, Atlas is trotting off into the sunset with one final YouTube video.
"For almost a decade, Atlas has sparked our imagination, inspired the next generations of roboticists, and leapt over technical barriers in the field," the YouTube description reads. "Now its time for our hydraulic Atlas robot to kick back and relax."
Boston Dynamics' farewell to Atlas doesn't just show some of the cool things the robot can do. It's a bit of a blooper reel as well. Along with hurling a toolbag and leaping between platforms, Atlas slips, trips and falls a bunch of times in the clip oddly enough, that makes it seem more human.
Boston Dynamics of course has more commercially successful robots in its lineup, including Spot. It's likely not the end of the line for the company's humanoid robots entirely, though. "Take a look back at everything weve accomplished with the Atlas platform to date," reads the description on the farewell video. Those last two words suggest Boston Dynamics isn't quite done with that side of robotics yet.
Engadget has contacted the company for details about its future humanoid robot development plans. For now, it seems Atlas could be looking for a Wednesday afternoon dance partner at a robot retirement home.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/boston-dynamics-sends-atlas-to-the-robot-retirement-home-184157729.html?src=rss
Whether they're designed to be used indoors or outside, a lot of the best pizza ovens that you can currently buy can only cook a 13-inch pie. That's great for most situations, especially if you're keen on hosting a party where everyone can choose their toppings. However, there are times when you need more space, either for larger pizzas or to bake or roast other foods. Ooni is filling the void with its latest model, the Koda 2 Max, which is the company's largest pizza oven so far. The 24-inch, gas-burning unit can bake pizzas up to 20 inches while still achieving the high-heat cook quality Ooni ovens are known for.
In addition to being the biggest option in Ooni's lineup, the Koda 2 Max has several additional features that make it an upgrade over some of the company's other models. First, it offers dual-zone cooking with independent controls for both burners. This will allow you to cook two things at different temperatures simultaneously, or to simply have a hot and cold side of the oven when needed. To facilitate this, Ooni positioned the two burners on the sides of the Koda 2 Max rather than having one at the rear of the oven. The company says its G2 gas technology includes burners with tapered flames for more efficient heat distribution and more consistent cooking stone temps.
Another update is the color digital temperature display mounted on the front. While this isn't the first Ooni oven to show you the temp inside, it is the first to do so in color and it's the first to send those stats to your phone. The Koda 2 Max retains the overall look of previous gas-burning Koda products, including the folding legs for transport. It will also connect to a propane tank like previous models in order to provide fuss-free cooking where you don't have to manage a fire while you're making pizza and other dishes.
The Ooni Koda 2 Max will be available in May for $999, making it the most expensive outdoor-only option in the company's pizza oven range. The all-electric Volt was the same price at launch, but it currently goes for $899. If you can do without all of the fancy new features and extra cooking space, the Koda 16 ($599) and Koda 12 ($399) are hundreds of dollars cheaper, baking 16- and 12-inch pizzas as the names imply.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/oonis-largest-pizza-oven-yet-offers-dual-zone-heat-control-and-temperature-tracking-on-your-phone-181537924.html?src=rss
If you like the idea of turning on a light just by talking, here's an affordable smart home starter bundle. For those already comfortable with the automated life, this deal will give you one more thing to control and one more receptacle for your demands. Amazon's smallest smart speaker, the Echo Pop, bundled with a TP-Link Kasa smart bulb is now $23. The speaker goes for as much at $40 at full price, though the lowest we've seen it drop is $18 for Black Friday last year. The bulb has a $23 list price, but dropped to $15 a few times before. In all, the bundle marks a $40 discount off the full price and a $22 savings over the two items' current sale prices. The Kasa bulb made the cut in our guide to smart bulbs.
The larger Echo Dot speaker is also on sale, bundled with the same bulb. The set is down to $40, a 45 percent discount over buying the two items separately and at full price. Since they're both on sale individually right now, getting the set saves you $22 over current sale prices. The Echo Dot is our top pick for a smart speaker under $50 because it puts out big sound for its size, has handy physical controls and grants access to Alexa's helpfulness a selling point if you prefer that assistant's capabilities over another.
Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter and subscribe to the Engadget Deals newsletter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/get-an-echo-pop-speaker-with-a-free-tp-link-smart-light-bulb-for-only-23-160052418.html?src=rss
Amazon Music is joining Spotify in starting to offer a generative AI-powered playlist feature. For now, Maestro is available in beta to a small number of Amazon Music users in the US on iOS and Android.
Folks who are included in the beta will see Maestro on the home screen after they update to the latest version of the app. They can also access the tool by tapping the plus button to create a new playlist.
The idea is to use natural language prompts to create any kind of playlist imaginable. Your prompts can include sounds, activities, emotions and even emoji. Amazon suggests you might ask Maestro to whip up a playlist of songs that sound like the robot emoji (in which case you'll probably hear a bunch of Daft Punk tracks). Other prompts the company suggests include " and eating ," "Make my a genius," "Myspace era hip-hop" and, bizarrely, "Music my grandparents made out to." Ewwww.
Based on those ideas, it does seem that Maestro is more or less ready to handle whatever prompts you can throw at it, though Amazon notes that the tech is still in beta. As such, Maestro might not always get things right immediately. The company also says that it has safeguards in place to prohibit offensive language and inappropriate prompts.
Amazon plans to roll out Maestro more broadly over time. As things stand, Amazon Music Unlimited subscribers can listen to Maestro playlists instantly and save them for later (or share them with friends). Prime members and users on the ad-supported free tier can listen to 30-second previews of their playlists before saving them.
Earlier this month, Spotify debuted a similar feature for Premium members in the UK and Australia. AI Playlist works in much the same way as Maestro.This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/amazon-debuts-a-generative-ai-powered-playlist-feature-150848360.html?src=rss
