An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Humanoid robots have surgically removed the gallbladders from living animals in an unprecedented medical experiment -- but not as autonomous machines capable of replacing human doctors. Instead, skilled human surgeons remotely controlled the robots' movements in a new example of human-robot teamups. The teleoperated humanoid robots completed two minimally invasive surgeries by removing gallbladders from live pigs during a preclinical trial that was published in the journal Nature. If this approach eventually proves clinically ready for human patients, surgeons could use such humanoid robots to remotely perform robotic-assisted surgical care in smaller hospitals and clinics that lack the resources to install specialized but expensive surgical robots.

The experiment used a Unitree G1 humanoid robot made by leading Chinese robotics company Unitree. The cheapest baseline G1 model with effectively non-functional hands has a starting price of $13,500 and shipping costs ranging between $300 and $1,200, whereas adding crucial upgrades such as dexterous robotic hands can easily push the cost beyond $67,000. But such humanoid robots made in China are still significantly cheaper than specialized surgical robots like Intuitive Surgical's da Vinci Surgical System, which can cost anywhere between half a million dollars and several million dollars. The specialized surgical robots can also weigh about 1,800 pounds and take up considerably more space in operating rooms. By comparison, the Unitree humanoid robots, standing at 5 feet tall and weighing just 60 pounds, may be more suitable for smaller clinical settings in remote areas.

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Het had een historische revange moeten zijn. Maar opnieuw versperde Frankrijk met een 2-0 overwinning Marokko de weg naar ultieme WK-glorie. In Tanger bouwde de spanning de hele dag op. „Niemand betwist dat Marokko werkelijk een grote naam is geworden op het wereldtoneel.”

Dat AI van alles ingrijpend kan gaan veranderen, wordt steeds duidelijker. Maar hoe verandert AI onszelf, als mens? Wat doet het met onze nieuwsgierigheid? En met ons vertrouwen in wat we de hele dag zien, horen en lezen?

Deze vrijdag om 10.00 uur gaan de verhoren van de parlementaire enquêtecommissie Corona verder met Robèr Willemsen, die tijdens de coronapandemie voorzitter was van Koninklijke…

Adweek reports, that Cloudflare is set to deny access by multi-purpose crawlers to many sites in their content delivery network by default, particularly those that serve to gain data for training generative AI, which stands to block Google's access to up to one-fifth of the World Wide Web.

The default will be set for new accounts and sites on Cloudflare's free tier. The move will affect Apple and Bing, but especially Google, which has used a single crawler to index sites both for their search and their AI training. In the past this would have meant economic suicide for commercial sites, but over time they've been getting so much less traffic from Google that the tradeoff doesn't seem as bad.

"Adventure before dementia" has added a photo to the pool:

Waves are my theme for today, in this shot, a lone surfer braves the waves on a local beach. It's the sad story of my own life, I was born to surf but forced to work.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo: