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Category: robotics/AI

New Technique for 3D Printing Artificial Muscle Paves the Way for More Freaky Robots

While 2026 has been an objectively terrible year for humans thus far, it’s turning out—for better or worse—to be a banner year for robots. (Robots that are not Tesla’s Optimus thingamajig, anyway.) And it’s worth thinking about exactly how remarkable it is that the new humanoid robots are able to replicate the smooth, fluid, organic movements of humans and other animals, because the majority of robots do not move like this.

Take, for example, the robot arms used in factories and CNC machines: they glide effortlessly from point to point, moving with both speed and exquisite precision, but no one would ever mistake one of these arms for that of a living being. If anything, the movements are too perfect. This is at least partly due to the way these machines are designed and built: they use the same ideas, components, and principles that have characterised everything from the water wheel to the combustion engine.

But that’s not how living creatures work. While the overwhelming majority of macroscopic living beings contain some sort of “hard” parts—bones or exoskeletons—our movements are driven by muscles and ligaments that are relatively soft and elastic.

DeepRare AI helps shorten the rare disease diagnostic journey with evidence-linked predictions

Researchers developed DeepRare, an LLM-driven multi-agent diagnostic system that integrates clinical descriptions, phenotype data, and genomic information to improve rare disease identification. Across thousands of cases, the system showed higher diagnostic recall than existing AI tools and clinicians in benchmark testing, while providing traceable reasoning linked to medical evidence.

By 2050 we could get “10,000 years of technological progress”

Every major AI company has the same safety plan: when AI gets crazy powerful and really dangerous, they’ll use the AI itself to figure out how to make AI safe and beneficial. It sounds circular, almost satirical. But is it actually a bad plan? Today’s guest, Ajeya Cotra, recently placed 3rd out of 413 participants forecasting AI developments and is among the most thoughtful and respected commentators on where the technology is going.

She thinks there’s a meaningful chance we’ll see as much change in the next 23 years as humanity faced in the last 10,000, thanks to the arrival of artificial general intelligence. Ajeya doesn’t reach this conclusion lightly: she’s had a ring-side seat to the growth of all the major AI companies for 10 years — first as a researcher and grantmaker for technical AI safety at Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy), and now as a member of technical staff at METR.

So host Rob Wiblin asked her: is this plan to use AI to save us from AI a reasonable one?

Ajeya agrees that humanity has repeatedly used technologies that create new problems to help solve those problems. After all:
• Cars enabled carjackings and drive-by shootings, but also faster police pursuits.
• Microbiology enabled bioweapons, but also faster vaccine development.
• The internet allowed lies to disseminate faster, but had exactly the same impact for fact checks.

But she also thinks this will be a much harder case. In her view, the window between AI automating AI research and the arrival of uncontrollably powerful superintelligence could be quite brief — perhaps a year or less. In that narrow window, we’d need to redirect enormous amounts of AI labour away from making AI smarter and towards alignment research, biodefence, cyberdefence, adapting our political structures, and improving our collective decision-making.

The plan might fail just because the idea is flawed at conception: it does sound a bit crazy to use an AI you don’t trust to make sure that same AI benefits humanity.

Continue reading “By 2050 we could get “10,000 years of technological progress”” | >

AI ‘blind spot’ could allow attackers to hijack self-driving vehicles

A newly discovered vulnerability could allow cybercriminals to silently hijack the artificial intelligence (AI) systems in self-driving cars, raising concerns about the security of autonomous systems increasingly used on public roads. Georgia Tech cybersecurity researchers discovered the vulnerability, dubbed VillainNet, and found it can remain dormant in a self-driving vehicle’s AI system until triggered by specific conditions. Once triggered, VillainNet is almost certain to succeed, giving attackers control of the targeted vehicle.

The research finds that attackers could program almost any action within a self-driving vehicle’s AI super network to trigger VillainNet. In one possible scenario, it could be triggered when a self-driving taxi’s AI responds to rainfall and changing road conditions. Once in control, hackers could hold the passengers hostage and threaten to crash the taxi.

The researchers discovered this new backdoor attack threat in the AI super networks that power autonomous driving systems.

Anti-aging effect of Hedgehog signaling

Aging weakens the body’s ability to maintain balance and repair damage, increasing vulnerability to disease. This study reveals that the Hedgehog (Hh) signaling pathway plays a crucial role in preserving tissue integrity and regenerative capacity. Using animal models, researchers found that activating Hh signaling in multiple tissues such as the liver and brain enhances tissue repair and mitigates age-related functional decline. These findings suggest that targeting Hh signaling could be a promising strategy to promote healthy aging by enhancing regeneration and alleviating age-related dysfunction.

This summary was initially drafted using artificial intelligence, then revised and fact-checked by the author.

AI Tool Sets New Standard in Diagnosing Rare Diseases

A new system, which consists of a large LLM and a network of agentic tools, outperformed several other models and human physicians [1].

Too rare to easily diagnose

Rare diseases can be notoriously hard to diagnose. Patients average over 5 years to receive a correct diagnosis, enduring repeated referrals, misdiagnoses, and unnecessary interventions in what is known in rare disease medicine as ‘the diagnostic odyssey’ [2]. These rare diseases, defined as conditions affecting fewer than 1 in 2000 people, collectively impact over 300 million people worldwide. About 7,000 distinct disorders of this type have been identified, with 80% of them being genetic in origin [3].

Radiation-Induced Optic Neuropathy Following Radiation Therapy for a Recurrent Tuberculum Sellae Meningioma: A Case Report

A new light-based imaging approach has produced an unprecedented chemical map of the Alzheimer’s brain.

Rice University researchers have produced what they describe as the first full, label-free molecular atlas of an Alzheimer’s brain in an animal model. In simple terms, they created a brain-wide “chemical map” that can help scientists study where the disease appears to take hold and how it spreads over time. Alzheimer’s is also a major public health threat, killing more people than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined.

Instead of focusing only on classic pathology markers, the team examined the brain’s underlying chemistry using a light-based imaging approach paired with machine learning. Their study, published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces, shows that Alzheimer’s-linked chemical shifts are patchy across the brain rather than uniform. It also suggests those shifts extend beyond amyloid plaques, the best-known feature of the disease.

A neural blueprint for human-like intelligence in soft robots

A new AI control system enables soft robotic arms to learn a wide repertoire of motions and tasks once, then adjust to new scenarios on the fly without needing retraining or sacrificing functionality. The work was co-led by researchers at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).

Hybrid Cosmopsychism: A Bold New Answer to the Mystery of Consciousness

How Exactly does Panpsychism Help Explain Consciousness?
In this episode, we explore a provocative new theory in the philosophy of mind—hybrid cosmopsy-chism. This hybrid form of panpsychism claims that conscious experience is rooted in the universe itself and distributed through emergent subjects like humans. By combining strong and weak emergence, this view promises to overcome the limitations of both physicalism and dualism, offering a radical yet elegant solution to the hard problem of consciousness.

Disclaimer:

In this video, we use Google’s NotebookLM to assist in the analysis and understanding of complex doc-uments. NotebookLM is a research and writing tool that allows us to generate summaries directly from uploaded documents. The podcast like audio overview you will hear is generated by Google’s AI based on the content of the published paper on the topic.

Please note that the interpretations and summaries generated by NotebookLM are automated and may not capture every detail or nuance. They are intended to aid in understanding but should not be consid-ered a substitute for professional advice or a legal interpretation of the documents.

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