Nerd News: Bruce Willis Sells His Image To A.I. (And More)

Every Friday, I like to run down all the science things we learned from the week. Here’s some of the good stuff:

1. Bruce Willis sold his image rights to an artificial intelligence company called Deepcake.  They made a “digital twin” of him using content from “Die Hard” and “The Fifth Element” that can be used for future film projects.
2. We hit an asteroid with a satellite on Monday to see if we could change its orbit, and the whole thing was streamed live.  NASA also released new photos of it yesterday taken by Hubble and the James Webb telescope.
3. In canine news:  A study found your dog can tell you’re stressed out without even seeing or hearing you.  They can smell stress on people.
4. In climate news:  All the CO2 we’ve pumped out is making trees grow bigger.
5.  In tech news:  The A.I. image generator Dall-E no longer has a waiting list, so anyone can use it now.  And Meta unveiled a similar program that does the same thing, but with videos.  It’s called Make-A-Video but DOES have a waiting list.
6. In robot news:  Amazon is still trying to roll out its robot assistant named Astro that follows you around like a dog, does tasks, and keeps an eye out for burglars.  It’ll eventually cost around $1,500, but you can’t buy it yet.  And . .
7. A two-legged robot broke a record by running the 100-meter dash in under 25 seconds.  But that’s still pretty slow compared to Usain Bolt’s 9.58 seconds.