A remarkable combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology has produced the world’s first “living robots”. This week, a research team of roboticists and scientists published their recipe for making a new lifeform called xenobots from stem cells. The term “xeno” comes from the frog cells (Xenopus laevis) used to make them. One of the…

A developer and YouTuber named Denis Shiryaev recently used “several neural networks” to update a famous French short film from 1895 to make it appear as though it were shot on a modern phone. Called “L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat,” the 50-second French short documentary shows a train arriving at Ciotat train…

A recent report from Bloomberg revealed that Amazon‘s negotiation strategy during its recent failed bid to build a second headquarters (HQ2) in New York and Virginia was internally referred to as “Fuck you. We’re Amazon.” In 2017 Amazon announced it had begun a global search for a city to host HQ2 prompting hundreds of cities…

Killer robots may remain a dystopian vision of the future for now, but another military deployment of AI could be sooner to arrive on the battlefield. Known as the Aided Threat Recognition from Mobile Cooperative and Autonomous Sensors (ATR-MCAS), the system is being developed by the US Army to transform how the military plans and conducts operations. It’s…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk yesterday announced that he’s throwing a “Super Fun AI Party/Hackathon” with Tesla engineers and a select group of invitees. Tesla will hold a super fun AI party/hackathon at my house with the Tesla AI/autopilot team in about four weeks. Invitations going out soon. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 2, 2020 This…

The US House of Representatives recently proposed a bipartisan bill that would essentially tank NASA‘s plans to build a fully-functioning lunar base. The proposal comes from the House Aeronautics and Space Subcommittee of the House Space and Science Committee and seeks to limit NASA‘s extraterrestrial endeavors going forward. Among various other caveats, the bill would…

Coding time We will use a webcam as the video input to our pose estimation model and show the output on our main page index.html. We are using two libraries here: ml5.js for creating and running our ML model. p5.js for getting the webcam video feed and displaying output in our browser. I’ve added extensive documentation inside the…

Enlarge / No CBS All Access on Linux makes elderly Picard cry. Update, January 31: After this story went live earlier in the week, an Ars reader reached out to speculate that the problem was most likely due to enabling VMP (Verified Media Path) on CBSi's Widevine server. Verified Media Path, similarly to UEFI Secure Boot,…

“The deployment of connected home security cameras that allow footage to be queried centrally are simply not compatible with a free society.” Amazon engineer Max Eliaser The greatest threat posed to democracy in any free nation is that of ubiquitous government surveillance. Many countries today are struggling to find the proper balance between useful facial…

Enlarge / Huawei's logo at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona in November 2019. Getty Images | SOPA Images Market research firms Canalys and Counterpoint Research have posted their 2019 global smartphone market share reports. Both reports say the biggest mover is Huawei, which, thanks to a whopping 16-17 percent annual growth, claimed…