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'Robot blood' powers machines for lengthy tasks Researchers at Cornell University have created a system of circulating liquid -- "robot blood" -- within robotic structures, to store energy and power robotic applications for sophisticated, long-duration tasks. The researchers have created a synthetic vascular system capable of pumping an energy-dense hydraulic liquid that stores energy, transmits force, operates appendages and provides structure, all in an integrated design. "In nature we see how long organisms can operate while doing sophisticated tasks. Robots can't perform similar feats for very long," said Rob Shepherd, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Cornell. "Our bio-inspired approach can dramatically increase the system's energy density while allowing soft robots to remain mobile for far longer." Shepherd, director of the Organic Robotics Lab, is senior author of "Electrolytic Vasc...

The tool, called CaImAn, replaces the process of manually tracking the location and activity of neurons Tracking the firings of individual neurons is like trying to discern who is saying what in a football stadium full of screaming fans. Until recently, neuroscientists have had to tediously track each neuron by hand. "People spent more time analyzing their data to extract activity traces than actually collecting it," says Dmitri Chklovskii, who leads the neuroscience group at the Center for Computational Biology (CCB) at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. A breakthrough software tool called CaImAn automates this arduous process using a combination of standard computational methods and machine-learning techniques. In a paper published in the journal  eLife  in January, the software's creators demonstrate that CaImAn achieves near-human accuracy in detecting the locations of active neurons based on calcium imaging data. CaImAn (an abbreviation of c...

Robotic Process Automation or RPA Like AI and Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is another technology that is automating jobs. RPA is the use of software to automate business processes such as interpreting applications, processing transactions. Robotic process automation (RPA) is the application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a “robot” to capture and interpret existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses and communicating with other digital systems. Any company that uses labor on a large scale for general knowledge process work, where people are performing high-volume, highly transactional process functions, will boost their capabilities and save money and time with robotic process automation software. Just as industrial robots are remaking the manufacturing industry by creating higher production rates and improved quality, RPA “robots” are revolutio...

System automatically writes optimized algorithms to encrypt data in Google Chrome browsers and web applications. Nearly every time you open up a secure Google Chrome browser, a new MIT-developed cryptographic system is helping better protect your data. In a paper presented at the recent IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, MIT researchers detail a system that, for the first time, automatically generates optimized cryptography code that’s usually written by hand. Deployed in early 2018, the system is now being widely used by Google and other tech firms. The paper now demonstrates for other researchers in the field how automated methods can be implemented to prevent human-made errors in generating cryptocode, and how key adjustments to components of the system can help achieve higher performance. To secure online communications, cryptographic protocols run complex mathematical algorithms that do some complex arithmetic on large numbers. Behind the scenes, however, a smal...