Enlarge/ The new, all-electric Atlas. (credit: Boston Dynamics)
The humanoid robotics market is starting to heat up, and the company that's been doing this the longest isn't going to sit by and watch. Boston Dynamics has a new humanoid robot that the company says represents a path to commercialization. It's the company's next-generation, all-electric "Atlas" robot.
While new Atlas and old Atlas share a name, they couldn't be more different when it comes to construction. The old Atlas—a research platform and viral sensation that could handle nearly any terrain, do backflips, and pick up heavy objects—was powered by a heavy, complicated hydraulics system. The new Atlas is all-electric and looks like it's a fraction of the size and weight of the hydraulic version. It also looks like a product, with covers around all the major components and consumer-friendly design touches like a giant status light in the head and a light-up power button that looks like it was ripped right from the Spot assembly line.
Hydraulic Atlas is being retired to make way for the all-electric version. The company posted one last goodbye video for the hydraulic model on its YouTube page, showing the history of the project. Atlas has done a lot of neat tricks over the years, but getting there has required a lot of learning—part of that is taking some absolutely gnarly slams, which are highlighted in the video. The video seemed to go out of its way to show just how cumbersome hydraulics can be. At one point, it looks like Atlas' foot completely breaks off, and hydraulic fluid gushes all over the floor. Other times, the robot just springs a leak, and a fine mist of high-pressure fluid sprays everywhere as the robot goes limp. The fluid has a red tinge to it, so with a little imagination, it can look pretty gory!
Enlarge/ From magnets we came, to magnets we return. (credit: Garner Products)
There is the mental image that most people have of electronics recycling, and then there is the reality, which is shredding.
Less than 20 percent of e-waste even makes it to recycling. That which does is, if not acquired through IT asset disposition (ITAD) or spotted by a worker who sees some value, heads into the shredder for raw metals extraction. If you've ever toured an electronics recycling facility, you can see for yourself how much of your stuff eventually gets chewed into little bits, whether due to design, to unprofitable reuse markets, or sheer volume concerns.
Traditional hard drives have some valuable things inside them—case, cover, circuit boards, drive assemblies, actuators, and rare-earth magnets—but only if they avoid the gnashing teeth. That's where the DiskMantler comes in. Garner Products, a data elimination firm, has a machine that it claims can process 500 hard drives (the HDD kind) per day in a way that leaves a drive separated into those useful components. And the DiskMantler does this by shaking the thing to death (video).
Enlarge/ Dental students, working as volunteers, attend to patients at a Remote Area Medical (RAM) mobile dental and medical clinic on October 7, 2023 in Grundy, Virginia. More than a thousand people were expected to seek free dental, medical and vision care at the two-day event in the rural and financially struggling area of western Virginia. (credit: Getty | Spencer Platt)
In the 1960s and 1970s, people who lived in rural America fared a little better than their urban counterparts. The rate of deaths from all causes was a tad lower outside of metropolitan areas. In the 1980s, though, things evened out, and in the early 1990s, a gap emerged, with rural areas seeing higher death rates—and the gap has been growing ever since. By 1999, the gap was 6 percent. In 2019, just before the pandemic struck, the gap was over 20 percent.
While this news might not be surprising to anyone following mortality trends, a recent analysis by the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service drilled down further, finding a yet more alarming chasm in the urban-rural divide. The report focused in on a key indicator of population health: mortality among prime working-age adults (people ages 25 to 54) and only their natural-cause mortality (NCM) rates—deaths among 100,000 residents from chronic and acute diseases—clearing away external causes of death, including suicides, drug overdoses, violence, and accidents. On this metric, rural areas saw dramatically worsening trends compared with urban populations.
The federal researchers compared NCM rates of prime working-age adults in two three-year periods: 1999 to 2001, and 2017 to 2019. In 1999, the NCM rate in 25- to 54-year-olds in rural areas was 6 percent higher than the NCM rate of this age group in urban areas. In 2019, the gap had grown to a whopping 43 percent. In fact, prime working-age adults in rural areas was the only age group in the US that saw an increased NCM rate in this time period. In urban areas, working-age adults' NCM rate declined.
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it has finalized rules for handling water supplies that are contaminated by a large family of chemicals collectively termed PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances). Commonly called "forever chemicals," these contaminants have been linked to a huge range of health issues, including cancers, heart disease, immune dysfunction, and developmental disorders.
The final rules keep one striking aspect of the initial proposal intact: a goal of completely eliminating exposure to two members of the PFAS family. The new rules require all drinking water suppliers to monitor for the chemicals' presence, and the EPA estimates that as many as 10 percent of them may need to take action to remove them. While that will be costly, the health benefits are expected to exceed those costs.
Going low
PFAS are a collection of hydrocarbons where some of the hydrogen atoms have been swapped out for fluorine. This swap retains the water-repellant behavior of hydrocarbons while making the molecules highly resistant to breaking down through natural processes—hence the forever chemicals moniker. They're widely used in water-resistant clothing and non-stick cooking equipment and have found uses in firefighting foam. Their widespread use and disposal has allowed them to get into water supplies in many locations.
Wastewater pipes at a reclamation plant in California on Wednesday, August 4, 2021. | Getty Images
Big brands are paying startup Vaulted Deep $58.3 million to shoot poop and other organic waste products into underground wells as a way to fight climate change.
The deal was brokered by a group called Frontier Climate, which Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey Sustainability launched in 2022 to support emerging climate tech. Specifically, Frontier is interested in trying to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They connect buyers with startups like Vaulted Deep that are developing ways to capture CO2 and sequester it underground so that it doesn’t heat up the planet.
Vaulted Deep’s strategy is to gather sewage, manure, and agricultural and paper mill waste and inject it deep underground to keep carbon in the waste from rising into the atmosphere as it decomposes. On top of Frontier’s founding companies, Autodesk, H&M Group, JPMorgan Chase, Workday, and other brands are also part of the deal Frontier announced today. Vaulted Deep agreed to sequester 152,480 tons of carbon dioxide by 2027 as part of the deal. That’s equivalent to taking around 36,000 gas-guzzling cars off the road for a year.
It’s Frontier’s biggest agreement yet and a big endorsement of Vaulted Deep’s technology that the startup says will allow it to scale up a lot faster than its competitors in the growing carbon removal industry.
Vaulted Deep says its advantage is that it is built on technology that’s already been used for decades to get rid of sludge from oil and gas fracking. Hydraulic fracturing — aka fracking — is a particularly messy way to extract fossil fuels. Companies needed to find a way to dispose of all the rock and fluids leftover from drilling that might carry heavy metals like arsenic and radioactive materials like uranium.
Omar Abou-Sayed, Vaulted Deep’s executive chairman, says his father and his colleagues developed the technology to inject the nasty stuff deep underground while working for Arco. His dad went on to become a consultant to other companies that needed to comply with rules established under the 1972 Clean Water Act.
The trick is to find a way to inject solid waste underground without plugging up the well (Abou-Sayed compares the problem to grounds building up on a coffee filter). He adopted his dad’s technology to do the same with carbon-rich organic waste, injecting it with enough pressure to open up fissures and pores in rock.
“There’s no technology magic that has to happen. It’s not a science fair experiment. So our coming down the cost curve is not [like other companies] where they have to invent science to do the thing they’re doing more efficiently,” says Abou-Sayed. “Ours is more like the McDonald’s problem of what’s the best intersection to put the McDonald’s to get the most car traffic.”
A flurry of other companies have opened up shop to suck carbon dioxide out of the air or water, but it’s still an exorbitantly expensive endeavor. The US might need to spend roughly $100 billion a year on these kinds of technologies in order to scale up to a level that would help the country meet its climate goals, according to one recent report.
The company operating the largest facility filtering CO2 out of the air today charges customers (including Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify) roughly $600 per ton of captured CO2. Frontier’s deal with Vaulted Deep breaks down to around $382 per ton, although the industry goal is still to get to under $100 per ton to make it a feasible tool for tackling climate change. Vaulted Deep says it’ll reach that goal in large part by siting its wells closer to where it’s getting the waste it pumps underground. The deal with Frontier is supposed to enable the company to commission three new wells in the US (if it can get the permits for them, of course).
Vaulted Deep already takes about 20 percent of Los Angeles’ sewage sludge, for example. That might be a better feedstock for this technology than manure or farm waste that could be reused as fertilizer in regenerative agriculture. “It just seems like a lot of good stuff along with some bad stuff that’s going to go down into a hole forever,” says Brian Roe, a professor of farm management at Ohio State University. “It’s nice to have more tools in the toolbox. I’m just kind of fascinated to figure out where this is going to work.”
To have a positive environmental impact, Vaulted Deep will have to prove in its carbon accounting that it’s actually avoiding CO2 emissions. If a farm gives up manure that it otherwise would have used to add nutrients back to the soil, for instance — what are the environmental costs of that farm potentially turning to synthetic fertilizers instead? Vaulted Deep says it’s taking these kinds of questions into account and is working with a carbon removal registry called Isometric to vet its process.
Vaulted Deep just spun off from waste management company Advantek, where Abou-Sayed is also executive chairman, in September. But its mature technology means “that we were sort of born a teenager,” says Vaulted Deep CEO Julia Reichelstein, who was an investor at climate VC fund Piva Capital before she hopped on board. “When I met Omar ... there was an aha moment,” she says, and Frontier’s backing now is, “really huge.”
Nvidia is updating its experimental ChatRTX chatbot with more AI models for RTX GPU owners. The chatbot, which runs locally on a Windows PC, can already use Mistral or Llama 2 to query personal documents that you feed into it, but now the list of supported AI models is growing to include Google’s Gemma, ChatGLM3, and even OpenAI’s CLIP model to make it easier to search your photos.
Nvidia first introduced ChatRTX as “Chat with RTX” in February as a demo app, and you’ll need an RTX 30- or 40-series GPU with 8GB of VRAM or more to be able to run it. The app essentially creates a local chatbot server that you can access from a browser and feed your local documents and even YouTube videos to get a powerful search tool complete with summaries and answers to questions on your own data.
Google’s Gemma model was designed to run directly on powerful laptops or desktop PCs, so its inclusion in ChatRTX is fitting. Nvidia’s app takes some of the complexity away of running these models locally, and the resulting chatbot interface lets you pick between models so you can find the one that fits best with your own data that you want to analyze or search through.
ChatRTX, available as a 36GB download from Nvidia’s website, also now supports ChatGLM3, an open bilingual (English and Chinese) large language model that’s based on the general language model framework. OpenAI’s Contrastive Language–Image Pre-training (CLIP) has also been added, which allows you to search and interact with local photo data and essentially train the model to recognize images.
Finally, Nvidia is also updating ChatRTX to support voice queries. Nvidia has integrated Whisper, an AI speech recognition system that lets you search your data using your voice.
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