Researchers at the University of Illinois have developed a Roomba-like robot that can tend to crops autonomously. At Carnegie Mellon, they’re building a suite of A.I. and drones to take on some of agriculture’s most demanding tasks. And just last year, a team of automated machines farmed an acre and a half of barley, from planting to harvesting, without a single human setting foot on the field.
A Swiss company called ecoRobotix recently unveiled its contribution to automated agriculture — a robotic weed-killing machine. The four-wheeled robot doesn’t look like much more than a mobile table top, but Reuters reports that the unassuming machine may reshape the way we approach agriculture.
Some $26 billion is spent on herbicides each year. These chemicals are often indiscriminately sprayed over entire fields of crops that have been genetically modified to resist the chemical onslaught. And it’s agrochemical giants like Bayer, DowDuPont, and Syngenta that usually create both the genetically modified seeds and the chemicals that are sprayed on them.
The ecoRobotix weeder could undercut the agrochemical complex by spraying herbicides more precisely. Powered by a series of solar panels, the robot coasts across the field, using GPS to navigate. A camera extends up from the robot like a long neck, using computer vision sensors to search the ground ahead and distinguish weeds from crops. On its underside, two spider-like arms spray microdoses of herbicide wherever necessary.
At under 300 pounds, the machine has a much smaller footprint than typical farm equipment. It can run autonomously for 12 hours and be also be configured and controlled manually via a smartphone. The company claims a team of its machines can use up to 20 times less herbicide than conventional spraying systems.
The swiss company isn’t alone in its precision spraying approach. A Silicon Valley startup called Blue River develops a device that use sensors to identify weeds and apply efficient amount of herbicides as it’s pulled behind a tractor. The green and yellow farm equipment giant John Deere acquired Blue River last year for $305 million.
In the broad context of AI and its perceived harms, health and medical risks often pop up in the conversation. The warnings even come from frontier AI labs, such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic, both of which have warned about misusing AI to cook up bioweapons. Security experts have already spotted a few such incidents in the wild, especially with the usage of AI models without any solid guardrails.
Well, it appears that the risks run deeper. As per an analysis appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), AI bots are now being deployed to influence public policies governing health risks to citizens. In this instance, an attempt was made using AI bots to thwart regulations that aim to restrict the sale of disposable vapes, all while disguising the manipulation efforts as a response from real humans.
What if checking your drinking water for dangerous chemicals were as simple as plugging a tiny gadget into your smartphone? Researchers in Japan have developed a compact sensor that could make that possible, potentially bringing sophisticated water contamination testing out of expensive laboratories and into people's hands.
Scientists at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) have created a portable device capable of detecting extremely low concentrations of PFAS, commonly known as "forever chemicals." The findings were published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics, which demonstrate how an inexpensive sensor and a smartphone could make identifying potentially harmful chemicals in water a lot easier.
Comets probably weren’t reliable couriers for the ingredients that helped life begin on Earth. A new Cambridge-led study found that fragile organic molecules would usually have been destroyed when the comets carrying them struck the surface.
Published in Scientific Reports, the research tracked hydrogen cyanide, a molecule involved in chemistry that can precede life. Rare successful deliveries remain possible, but the simulations offered little support for a steady supply from comets.