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MIT study says combustion emissions cause ~200,000 premature deaths/year in US; vehicles and power generation top sources

Green Car Congress

Source: MIT. Researchers from MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment have concluded that ground-level PM 2.5 Steven Barrett, an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, and colleagues have published their results in the journal Atmospheric Environment. Click to enlarge. —Caiazzo et al.

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Video Friday: Monocycle Robot With Legs

Cars That Think

The recent progress in commercial humanoids is just exhausting. Starship ] By blending 2D images with foundation models to build 3D feature fields, a new MIT method helps robots understand and manipulate nearby objects with open-ended language prompts. The bit at the end there was Nadia not quite managing to do lateral arm raises.

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The Man Who Coined The Word "Robot" Defends Himself

Cars That Think

What is or is not called a robot is an ongoing debate that most roboticists seem to try to avoid, but personally, I appreciate the idea that very broadly, a robot is something that seems alive but isn’t—something with independent embodied intelligence. Published by The MIT Press. Copyright © 2024 MIT. Excerpted from R.U.R.

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The Creepy New Digital Afterlife Industry

Cars That Think

Everyone in the family feels physically and emotionally exhausted from his long decline. This article is adapted from the author’s new book , We, the Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age (MIT Press, 2023). Consider that Microsoft has a patent for creating a conversational chatbot of a specific person using their “social data.”