The Download: robotic table tennis, and future space habitats

August 9, 2024
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Google DeepMind trained a robot to beat humans at table tennis What’s new: Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play table tennis at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the company has…

Google DeepMind trained a robot to beat humans at table tennis

August 9, 2024
Do you fancy your chances of beating a robot at a game of table tennis? Google DeepMind has trained a robot to play the game at the equivalent of amateur-level competitive performance, the company has announced. It claims it’s the first time a robot has been taught to play a sport with humans at a…

Watch a video showing what happens in our brains when we think

August 9, 2024
This article first appeared in The Checkup, MIT Technology Review’s weekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first, sign up here. What does a thought look like? We can think about thoughts resulting from shared signals between some of the billions of neurons in our brains. Various chemicals are…

This futuristic space habitat is designed to self-assemble in orbit 

August 9, 2024
More people are traveling to space, but the International Space Station can only hold 11 people at a time. The Aurelia Institute, a nonprofit space architecture lab based in Cambridge, MA, has an approach that may help: a habitat that can be launched in compact stacks of flat tiles and self-assemble in orbit. Building large…