1. One thing that helps
Mozzies love me. I love seeing people working to keep them away from me. Usually, we require brave human volunteers as test subjects, but a team from Rice University wants to do away with live testing by using robots that are tasty to mozzies.
Researchers used 3D-printed hydrogel as a substitute for human skin. It comes complete with tiny passageways which can be filled with flowing blood. The setup is put in a transparent plastic box where cameras and machine learning record mosquito activity such as when, where, and how long they bite, or whether they bite at all. This setup has been used to determine the effectiveness of certain mosquito repellents with promising results.
Not only is this method painless, but it is also cheaper and more consistent. More labs can perform their own experiments using this setup. It allows researchers to closely examine mosquito behaviour to learn how viruses are transmitted and trial new methods to thwart them. Additionally, this is a good way to show how integrating robots in product testing can spare human and animal subjects alike.
2. One to be wary of
ChatGPT is a wonderful AI tool that has been exploding in popularity. In just two months, the application’s user base has grown to 100 million, making it the fastest-growing application. However, you may be shocked to discover how ChatGPT was trained.
A key requirement is that the training data used cannot include toxic and harmful material. In order to filter this out, workers in Kenya were paid between $1.32 and $2 per hour to spend all day reading through ‘text … pulled from the darkest recesses of the internet. Some of it described situations in graphic detail like child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, suicide, torture, self-harm, and incest.’ Imagine doing this for five days straight! Employees interviewed on condition of anonymity described recurring visions and a high toll on their mental health.
What is the cost of searching for the perfect chatbot? As Andrew Strait, an AI ethicist, says, “They’re impressive, but ChatGPT and other generative models are not magic – they rely on massive supply chains of human labor and scraped data, much of which is unattributed and used without consent.”
3. One to amaze
Scientists have created a ground-breaking robot that can melt through bars just like the scene in Terminator.
It’s a little clumsy but you get the idea. That LEGO mini-figure bridges the gap between hard-bodied robots and soft robots. Inspired by sea cucumbers, it is capable of “shape-shifting” to get in and out of tricky places like this jail. It can achieve this due to the material it’s made out of – gallium-based “magnetoactive solid-liquid phase transitional matter” (MPTM).
Because of MPTM, a magnetic field can cause the robot to change phase and move. The first practical application has been to extract a foreign object from a human stomach by melting over it and wriggling out of the organ! It is also hoped that this robot can help in drug delivery inside the human body.
The future of robots is not just C3PO and R2D2. It is all sizes, shapes, materials and applications. Bring it on!