#IEEE Spectrum

[sed4906]

[frog707]

Since computer software can be dangerous, I sometimes wonder how much longer hobbyists like myself will be permitted to publish our own code.

[pretendingnottopanic]

"In one real-world test, in two-thirds of the cases (37 out of 55), drones have delivered automated defibrillators faster than the professionals arriving conventionally."

[bidoofenergy]

to the point of invention

IEEE Spectrum | "The Clean House" - Sarah Ruhl | Phillippe Kahn | Petapixel

[stevebattle]

Moonlight Special MS-I (1978) by Art Boland, Ron Dilbeck, Philip Stover, Roy Kelly, Timothy Harrington, and James Thomas, Battelle Northwest Laboratories, WA. IEEE Spectrum launched the Amazing Micro-Mouse Maze Contest in May 1977, competitors were challenged to design and construct a self-contained "thinking mouse" that could solve a 10′ by 10′ maze. MS-I has four levels of intelligence as shown in the second image above. Level 1 provides basic movement, interfacing with the mouse's two motors and sensors to turn left, turn right, go straight, or turn around. Also included at level 1 is the guidance control necessary to prevent contact with the maze walls. Level 2 interprets lower level sensor readings, keeping track of the mouse's current position in the maze, and controlling motion where there is no choice such as corners. Level 3 processes maze junctions with multiple choices, handling new junctions by choosing a direction at random. In MS-I, level 4 provides the mouse the ability to learn from one pass to the next.

"At the first time trial, MS-I was found to be sensitive to the strong incandescent booth lights and those of the local CBS television videotaping crew, which emit heavily in the infrared region and blinded its optical sensors. The sensors have now been AC coupled and modulated to provide better immunity to such light." – Three amazing micromice: hitherto undisclosed details, by Roger Allan, IEEE spectrum November 1978.

[mariacallous]

At the end of March, it emerged that the Trump administration was making a new push for Ukraine’s natural resources, including its now famous rare earths. It’s no surprise that the United States wants access to the precious commodity, since relying on the world’s top processor, China, is hardly sustainable. But very little is known about Ukraine’s actual rare-earth deposits, and a large part of them sit in Russian-occupied territories. Building the infrastructure for extraction would take years—and require peace first.

Here’s a better idea, one that would make the United States dependent on no one and create jobs at home (not to mention do a good deed for the environment): recycle rare earths in Americans’ used gadgets.

On March 23, the Trump administration sent Ukraine a proposal on its natural resources that went far beyond the draft agreement on which the two sides agreed in February, the Financial Times reports. The draft agreement, the Times explains, “would apply to all mineral resources, including oil and gas, and major energy assets across the entire Ukrainian territory.”

It also marks the latest salvo in U.S. President Donald Trump’s long-standing quest for Ukraine’s supposed rare-earth riches. “I told them [Ukraine] that I want the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earth, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that. So at least we don’t feel stupid,” Trump told Fox News on Feb. 10.

Ukraine’s rare earths are the core of the natural resources agreement Trump has been pushing President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign. A softer version of the now proposed deal was supposed to have been signed during Zelensky’s visit to Washington in February, but it was derailed by the acrimonious meeting between the two sides.

And now Washington has upped the ante with a proposed agreement that covers the entirety of Ukrainian natural resources and would send revenues directly abroad, with the United States receiving royalties before Ukraine, the Times notes. The deal, which also foresees a U.S.-majority board, would effectively give Washington ownership of Ukraine’s rare earths.

Getting the minerals out of the Ukrainian rock would, alas, be extremely difficult. Three of Ukraine’s four major rare-earth deposits are within or near Russian-controlled areas, as Erik Jonsson, a senior geologist with the Geological Survey of Sweden, told IEEE Spectrum, a journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

There’s also the matter of how large the deposits actually are. “The numbers are believed to come from Soviet surveys dating as far back as the 1960s,” Spectrum notes. Rare earths are notoriously difficult to mine because they appear in tiny quantities within larger pieces of rock, making the commercial aspect of any deal highly sketchy. Spectrum concludes, in italics to emphasize the fact, that “there are no deposits of rare-earth ore in Ukraine known to be minable in an economically viable way.”

For years, the United States has tried to solve its increasingly painful dependence on rare-earth imports, which it needs mainly for electronics, from smartphones to F-35s. (An F-35 needs 920 pounds of rare earths.) Though rare earths are mined in different countries, usually African ones, nearly 90 percent are processed in China, which during globalization’s heyday was not a problem. Now, though, it is.

Since 2020, China has blocked exports of graphite—which is, like rare earths, a crucial component of electric vehicle batteries, though it doesn’t belong to the rare-earth group—to Sweden, where lithium-ion firm Northvolt had been trying to jump-start European EV-battery production before declaring bankruptcy last month. China has also threatened to withhold rare earths from Lockheed Martin, the U.S. maker of the F-35, and is imposing a wide range of controls in response to Trump’s trade war.

The U.S. government must reduce America’s dependence on China. But restoring U.S. industrial chains is a long and painful process that can’t be conjured up overnight. In 2022, the Biden administration awarded $35 million for rare-earth processing to MP Materials, whose mine in Mountain Pass, California, is the United States’ only scaled site.

Over many years, Australian miner Syrah Resources has also received several hundred millions of dollars in U.S. government loans and grants to mine rare earths and graphite in Mozambique, including $165 million in January. Syrah also built a processing plant in Louisiana for its graphite. But as soon as Syrah’s mining of graphite in Mozambique seemed to take off, China flooded the market with lower-priced specimens, the Wall Street Journal notes. It was hardly a subtle signal from Beijing.

But there’s another way for Trump to get the United States the rare earths it needs—and this way would not involve forcing a deal on a savaged country or finding exemptions to global tariffs. In fact, it would involve no country other than the United States. It would even aid the environment, which ought to matter now that the world is approaching the climate change point of no return.

That better way is recycling. Electronics waste is growing rapidly because we all have more electronic gadgets, which we replace increasingly often. In 2022, the latest year available, the world discarded e-waste containing 31 million metric tons of metals, 17 million tons of plastics, and 14 million tons of minerals, glass, and other reusable materials. But only an estimated 19 million tons was recycled—mainly “metals like iron which is present in high quantities and has high recycling rates in almost all e-waste management routes,” the Global E-Waste Monitor, a partnership between the International Telecommunication Union and the United Nations, reports.

The United States throws away nearly 7 million tons of e-waste each year, and as elsewhere, only the easiest parts, such as iron, are recycled. That’s doubly wasteful because discarded gadgets often end up in landfills, where they can poison soil and water—and because they contain the very rare-earth metals that are so desperately needed in new electronic gadgets.

If the United States could marshal the rare earths sitting around in people’s homes and garbage cans, it could slash its dependence on China and create jobs at home. What’s more, it wouldn’t need to impose a rare-earth arrangement on Ukraine, and it would help rid U.S. communities of toxins seeping out from landfills.

Recycling rare-earth metals is extremely difficult and thus commercially unattractive, which is why it’s not yet being done on a large scale. That’s because rare earths are often used in extremely small quantities; while some EV batteries use many pounds’ worth of rare earths, the combined rare earths in a smartphone typically weigh no more than 2 grams. Most other electronics fit somewhere in between. And each rare earth has to be extracted separately.

But getting rare earths out of retired gadgets ought to be no harder than getting them out of remote and unexplored rock in Ukraine. Three days before leaving office, the Biden administration awarded $5.1 million to REEcycle, a small Houston-based recycling company, to help restart a demonstration facility and “advance commissioning of a commercial facility with an estimated annual production of 50 tons of rare earth oxides.” REEcycle specializes in recycling four rare earths commonly used in aircraft, missiles, submarines, and unpiloted vehicles. (The grant, if not yet paid, may have been canceled by DOGE, but DOGE.gov contains no such update.)

There is, in fact, a massive opportunity in rare-earth recycling. Turbocharging U.S. efforts to recover rare earths would trigger more research and development and more innovation at home, and it would help the United states reduce its dangerous rare-earth dependence on China in a way that harms no other country—and creates a variety of new jobs at home. Once scientists and businesses have developed a commercially viable way of recycling rare earths, the United States could reuse these versatile metals over and over. That’s surely a deal Trump should like. In fact, I can’t think of a reason any American would dislike it.

[zaraillustrates]

This illustration was commissioned by IEEE Spectrum for an article comparing management and technical career paths in engineering.

© Zara Picken 2024 www.zarapicken.com

[art-journal-inspo]

A binder filled with Donald Bayley’s notes from Alan Turing’s lectures, from “Alan Turing’s Top Secret DIT Project” by Jack Copeland. IEEE Spectrum, March 2025

[moko1590m]

サッカーやバスケの激しい動きにも対応。｢人型ロボ｣のスポーツ大会は近い？ 2025.02.14 07:00 author 岡本玄介

ロボリンピック、見てみたい！

各国で続々と開発されているヒト型ロボット、ヒューマノイドですが、特に最近は運動能力の発達が凄まじいですね。

プロの選手を真似てみた 今度はカーネギーメロン大学が新たな技術を開発し、ヒト型ロボに適用させました。

実験ではロボットに、サッカー選手のクリスティアーノ・ロナウドや、バスケ選手のコービー・ブライアント、レブロン・ジェームズらの動きをコピーさせています。

Video: LeCAR Lab at CMU/YouTube 人間ほどの跳躍力はありませんが、前方にジャンプしたり片脚を上げてのキック、アキレス腱を伸ばして戻るような動きは思ったよりスムーズです。

YES/NOに答えていくだけで、自分に合ったAI PCが見つかります YES/NOに答えていくだけで、自分に合ったAI PCが見つかります Sponsored by インテル株式会社 Advertisement

仮装訓練と実世界のズレを微調整 この新技術の名は｢ASAP｣。｢Aligning Simulation and Real-World Physics for Learning Agile Humanoid Whole-Body Skills｣の略で、機敏に動く学習ヒューマノイドが持つ全身スキルのため、疑似体験と実世界の物理法則を調節する、というものだそう。若者言葉とかけてみました感もありますけどね。

仮想的なシミュレーションは上手く行っても、実際には重力や慣性といった物理法則が働き、失敗するもの。｢ASAP｣は4段階の訓練を行い、そのギャップを補正するのだそうです。

250211_robo1 Image: LeCAR Lab at CMU/YouTube 運動能力が高いロボ 使われたロボは、中国Unitree社の｢H1｣です。

以前には秒速3.3m走行で世界最速記録が認められ、バク宙にするたび成功に震える姿を見てきました。

しかしハロウィーンに『ターミネーター』T-800に仮装し、チョコチョコ歩きで壁に激突して倒れていたこともあります。

練習に付き合って欲しい ロボット同士の競技会はまだ先でしょうけども、バスケやサッカーなど練習に付き合ってくれたら最高です。パス出しや球拾いだけでも大助かりです。

Sources: YouTube, Unitree, ASAP via IEEE SPECTRUM

(サッカーやバスケの激しい動きにも対応。｢人型ロボ｣のスポーツ大会は近い？ | ギズモード・ジャパンから)

[teledyn]

Remotely Operated Robot Takes Straight Razor to Face of Brave Roboticist - IEEE Spectrum

Now, a straight razor is sort of like a safety razor, except with the safety part removed, which in fact does make it significantly less safe for humans, much less robots. Also not ideal for those worried about safety is that as part of the process the razor ends up in distressingly close proximity to things like the artery that is busily delivering your brain’s entire supply of blood, which is very close to the top of the list of things that most people want to keep blades very far away from.

But that didn’t stop Whitney from putting his whiskers where his mouth is and letting his robotic system mediate the ministrations of a professional barber. It’s not an autonomous robotic straight-razor shave (because Whitney is not totally crazy), but it’s a step in that direction, and requires that the hardware Whitney developed be dead reliable.

[protoslacker]

But the Hawk is not a substitute for existing wind turbines. Kitepower believes that the Hawk is ideal for temporary events or users removed from the main grid: farms, construction sites, music festivals, humanitarian efforts, island communities. The entire system fits into a standard shipping container, and Kitepower says assembly at a new site takes less than 24 hours. Today, these locations might rely on a diesel generator—whose logistical demands make the Hawk cost-competitive, according to Schmehl.

Rahul Rao in IEEE Spectrum. Flying Kites Deliver Container-Size Power Generation

Automated wind-energy system brings portable renewables off-grid

[kennak]

南極点にあるアムンゼン-スコット基地に2018年から導入されたRoombaの話。南極にはペットの持ち込みは禁止されており、基地の職員にとってルンバはただのお掃除ロボット以上のものだった。彼らは基地内で誘拐されて人質に取られたりしている。https://spectrum.ieee.org/south-pole-roombasIEEE Spectrum · 10月26日Roombas at the Edge of the EarthEvan Ackerman

新山祐介 (Yusuke Shinyama): "南極点にあるアムンゼン-スコット基地に2018年から導入され…" - Mastodon 🐘

[frog707]

Happy 50th birthday to Ethernet!

[stevebattle]

Cattywampus (1978) by Michael Sipser, University of California at Berkeley, and Howard Katseff of Bell Laboratories, Holmdel, NJ. The micromouse contest was announced in the May 1977 issue of IEEE Spectrum magazine, by editor Don Christiansen. Early time trials were held at NCC '78 (Anaheim, CA), Personal Computing '78 (Philadelphia, PA), WESCON (Los Angeles, CA), and ELECTRO '79 (New York City, NY). "Cattywampus was one of the smarter mice. Its only problem was its poor speed control. Because it used ordinary DC motors instead of stepper ones, it would roar down the maze's opening straightaway, with no control, until it slammed into a wall, whereupon it would get stuck and be unable to negotiate a turn. [It] won the "most ingenious design" award despite the fact that it couldn't solve the maze on its three official tries. It was one of the earliest entries in the contest, having participated at the first time trial in Anaheim, in June 1978, when Mr. Katseff was also doing graduate work at Berkeley." – The amazing micromice: see how they won, by Roger Allan, IEEE spectrum September 1979.

[allnews-95]

Techmeme: A look at Australian startup Cortical Labs' CL1 billed as the first code-deployable biological computer with 115 units shipping this summer at $35K each (Shannon Cuthrell/IEEE Spectrum)

Shannon Cuthrell / IEEE Spectrum: A look at Australian startup Cortical Labs' CL1, billed as the first code-deployable biological computer, with 115 units shipping this summer at $35K each  —  World-first biocomputing platform hits the market  —  Shannon Cuthrell is a freelance journalist covering business and technology. June 04, 2025 at 12:15AM