Looks like the Simpsons had it right again, now that an Australian radio station has been caught using an AI-generated DJ for their midday slot. Station CADA, a Sydney-based broadcaster that’s part of the Australian Radio Network, revealed that “Workdays with Thy” isn’t actually hosted by a person; rather, “Thy” is a generative AI text-to-speech system that has been on the air since November. An actual employee of the ARN finance department was used for Thy’s voice model and her headshot, which adds a bit to the creepy factor.

The discovery that they’ve been listening to a bot for months apparently has Thy’s fans in an uproar, although we suspect that the media doing the reporting is probably more exercised about this than the general public. Radio stations have used robo-jocks for the midday slot for ages, albeit using actual human DJs to record patter to play between tunes and commercials. Anyone paying attention over the last few years probably shouldn’t be surprised by this development, and we suspect similar disclosures will be forthcoming across the industry now that the cat’s out of the bag.

Also from the world of robotics, albeit the hardware kind, is this excellent essay from Brian Potter over at Construction Physics about the sad state of manual dexterity in humanoid robots. The whole article is worth reading, not least for the link to a rogue’s gallery of the current crop of humanoid robots, but briefly, the essay contends that while humanoid robots do a pretty good job of navigating in the world, their ability to do even the simplest tasks is somewhat wanting.

Brian’s example of unwrapping and applying a Band-Aid, a task that any toddler can handle, as being unimaginably difficult for any current robot to handle is quite apt. He attributes the gap in abilities between gross movements and fine motor control partly to hardware and partly to software. We think the blame skews more to the hardware side; while the legs and torso of the typical humanoid robot offer a lot of real estate for powerful actuators, squeezing that much equipment into a hand approximately the size of a human’s is a tall order. These problems will likely be overcome, of course, and when they do, Brian’s helpful list of “Dexterity Evals” or something similar will act as a sort of Turing test for robot dexterity. Although the day a humanoid robot can start a new roll of toilet paper without tearing the first sheet is the day we head for the woods.

We recently did a story on the use of nitrogen-vacancy diamonds as magnetic sensors, which we found really exciting because it’s about the simplest way we’ve seen to play with quantum physics at home. After that story ran, eagle-eyed reader Kealan noticed that Brian over at the “Real Engineering” channel on YouTube had recently run a video on anti-submarine warfare, which includes the uses of similar quantum magnetometers to detect submarines. The magnetometers in the video are based on the Zeeman effect and use laser-pumped helium atoms to detect tiny variations in the Earth’s magnetic field due to large ferrous objects like submarines. Pretty cool video; check it out.

And finally, if you have the slightest interest in civil engineering you’ve got to check out Animagraff’s recent 3D tour of the insides of Hoover Dam. If you thought a dam was just a big, boring block of concrete dumped in the middle of a river, think again. The video is incredibly detailed and starts with accurate 3D models of Black Canyon before the dam was built. Every single detail of the dam is shown, with the “X-ray views” of the dam with the surrounding rock taken away being our favorite bit — reminds us a bit of the book Underground by David Macaulay. But at the end of the day, it’s the enormity of Hoover Dam that really comes across in this video. The way that the structure dwarfs the human-for-scale included in almost every sequence is hard to express — megalophobics, beware. We were also floored by just how much machinery is buried in all that concrete. Sure, we knew about the generators, but the gates on the intake towers and the way the spillways work were news to us. Highly recommended.