This light-powered 3D printer materializes objects all at once

3D printing has changed the way people approach hardware design, but most printers share a basic limitation: they essentially build objects layer by layer, generally from the bottom up. This new system from Berkeley, however, builds them all at once more or less by projecting a video through a jar of light-sensitive resin.

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Robots learn to grab and scramble with new levels of agility

Robots are amazing things, but outside of their specific domains they are incredibly limited. So flexibility — not physical, but mental — is a constant area of research. A trio of new robotic setups demonstrate ways they can evolve to accommodate novel situations: using both “hands,” getting up after a fall, and understanding visual instructions they’ve never seen before.

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SETI neural networks spot dozens of new mysterious signals emanating from distant galaxy

The perennial optimists at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, have joined the rest of the world in deploying AI to help manage huge datasets — and their efforts almost instantly bore fruit. 72 new “fast radio bursts” from a mysteriously noisy galaxy 3 billion miles away were discovered in previously-analyzed data by using a custom machine learning model.

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This box sucks pure water out of dry desert air

For many of us, clean, drinkable water comes right out the tap. But for billions it’s not that simple, and all over the world researchers are looking into ways to fix that. Today brings work from Berkeley, where a team is working on a water-harvesting apparatus that requires no power and can produce water even in the dry air of the desert. Hey, if a cactus can do it, why can’t we?

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