Schnucks store tests new AI-powered shopping carts – KSDK.com

The pilot program is rolling out at two more grocery stores in the next few weeks.

ST. LOUIS New smart shopping carts that allow customers to avoid the checkout lines have rolled out at one St. Louis-area Schnucks store.

In July, the St. Louis Business Journal reported that Schnuck Markets was working with Instacart, Inc. to roll out the AI-powered shopping carts at a few St. Louis-area stores.

The pilot program finally launched last week at the Twin Oaks location, located at 1393 Big Bend Road, a spokesperson with Schnuck Markets said.

Editor's note: The above video aired in July 2023.

In the upcoming weeks, the Lindenwood (1900 1st Capitol Drive in St. Charles) and Cottleville (6083 Mid Rivers Mall Drive in St. Peters) locations will join in on the pilot, which is still in its early stages, the spokesperson said.

According to Business Journal reporting, the new carts use AI to automatically identify items as they're put in the basket, allowing customers to bag their groceries as they shop, bypass the checkout line and pay through the cart from anywhere in the store.

The shopping carts will connect to the Schnucks Rewards App, according to the Business Journal, allowing customers to access clipped promotions and to "light up" electronic shelf labels from their phones to easily find items.

It's not the only way that Schnucks is utilizing artificial intelligence. Earlier this year, the chain brought in new high-tech, anti-theft liquor cabinets to several locations that allow customers to unlock it by entering their phone number on a keypad to receive a code via text message.

The liquor cases also monitor customers' behaviors when accessing the case, including the number of products removed, how frequently a customer accesses it and how long the door is left open, to identify suspicious activity in real-time.

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Russia launches a Valentine’s Day Progress supply ship to the ISS – Space.com

A fresh load of supplies is headed for the International Space Station.

Russia launched its robotic Progress 87 cargo ship on a Valentine's Day delivery mission toward the International Space Station tonight (Feb. 14).

The freighter lifted off atop a Soyuz rocket from the Russian-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 10:25 p.m. EST (0325 GMT and 8:25 a.m. on Feb. 15 local time in Baikonur).

Related: Facts about Roscosmos, Russia's space agency

Progress 87 is carrying about 3 tons of food, propellant and other supplies.

If all goes according to plan, the freighter will reach the orbiting lab early Saturday (Feb. 17), docking with the Russian Zvezda service module at 1:12 a.m. EST (0612 GMT). You can watch that rendezvous live here at Space.com, via NASA; coverage will begin at 12:30 a.m. EST (0530 GMT) on Saturday.

Progress is one of three robotic spacecraft that currently fly resupply missions to the ISS, along with Northrop Grumman's Cygnus vehicle and SpaceX's Cargo Dragon capsule.

Progress and Cygnus are expendable spacecraft, burning up in Earth's atmosphere when their time in orbit is done. But Dragon is designed to be reusable; it splashes down safely in the ocean under parachutes, which means it can bring science samples back down to Earth.

Editor's note: This story was updated at 10:45 p.m. EST on Feb. 14 with news of a successful liftoff.

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Russia launches a Valentine's Day Progress supply ship to the ISS - Space.com

How NASA’s moon landing with Intuitive Machines will help pave the way for Artemis astronaut missions – Space.com

NASA hopes a robotic moon landing this month will help prep the lunar ground for astronauts a few years from now.

Intuitive Machines' Nova-Cmoonlander, named Odysseus after the mythical Trojan War voyager, is scheduled to launch early Wednesday morning (Feb. 14) on a SpaceXFalcon 9rocket.

The Valentine's Day launch will happen from Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in coastal Florida. If all goes according to plan, Odysseus will touch down near the moon's south pole on Feb. 22, pulling off the first-ever private lunar landing.

Odysseus' mission, known as IM-1, includes 12 payloads, half commercial and half NASA science packages. NASA is using this research to get ready for the Artemis program missions that will land astronauts near the moon's south pole, beginning in 2026 or so.

Related: Intuitive Machines moon lander to carry tiny NASA cameras to study lunar surface (video)

IM-1 is part of the series of low-cost private moon missions that include NASA-funded instruments, which are manifested via the agency's Commercial Lunar Payloads Services (CLPS) program.

Each of these private robotic missions is small in cost individually, with the tradeoff being fewer backup systems in case of trouble. That tradeoff was illustrated vividly by the first CLPS mission, which launched Astrobotic's Peregrine lander last month. Peregrine suffered an anomaly shortly after deploying from its United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket, scuttling its moon dreams. Peregrine ended up coming back home for a controlled destruction in Earth's atmosphere.

Smaller and cheaper missions allow NASA to test technologies faster than traditional mission planning allows for, emphasized Susan Lederer, CLPS project scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, during a teleconference today (Feb. 12). The high risk is worth it, as "this will allow us to prepare for Artemis more efficiently," with more missions launching more frequently, Lederer said.

Another advantage is the proliferation of landing options if multiple CLPS missions succeed: There's "a far greater number of places you can go to on the moon and the diversity of people involved" if lots of CLPS missions reach the surface, Lederer said.

IM-1 will help NASA engineers learn about how to communicate from the moon's south pole, where staying in touch with Earth is a challenge due to our planet being at a "very, very low point on the horizon," Lederer said.

"The communications can kind of bounce along the terrain, coming and going," she added. "So, having a location that's close to the south pole will help us to start investigating those kinds of things that are happening."

Additionally, IM-1's equipment will be assessed for how well it performs in the harsh cold of the moon, including components such as solar panels and instruments. But even if that mission or some other CLPS landers don't make it, she emphasized, NASA will proceed with plans for its Artemis 3 mission, which aims to land astronauts near the lunar south pole in September 2026.

"It won't endanger efficiency," Lederer said.

The experiments on board IM-1 from NASA include "instruments focusing on plume-surface (dust) interactions, space weather/lunar surface interactions, radio astronomy, precision landing technologies, and a communication and navigation node for future autonomous navigation technologies," the agency's website states.

Editor's note: This story was corrected at 5:15 p.m. ET on Feb. 12 to state that IM-1 will launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, not Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

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How NASA's moon landing with Intuitive Machines will help pave the way for Artemis astronaut missions - Space.com

JPM2024: Big Tech Poised to Disrupt Biopharma with AI-Based Drug Discovery – BioSpace

Pictured: Medical professionals use technology in healthcare/iStock,elenabs

2024 will continue to see Big Tech companies enter the artificial intelligence-based drug discovery space, potentially disrupting the biopharma industry. That was the consensus of panelists at a Tuesday session on AI and machine learning held by the Biotech Showcase, co-located with the 42nd J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.

The JPM conference got a reminder of Big Techs inroads into AI-based drug discovery with Sundays announcement that Google parent Alphabets digital biotech company Isomorphic Labs signed two large deals worth nearly $3 billion with Eli Lilly and Novartis.

Big Tech is coming for AI and its coming in a big way, said panel moderator Beth Rogozinski, CEO of Oncoustics, who noted that the AI boom has seen the rise of the Magnificent 7, a new grouping of mega-cap tech stocks comprised of the seven largest U.S.-listed companiestech giants Amazon, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Nvidia and Tesla.

Last year, the Magnificent 7s combined market value surged almost 75% to a whopping $12 trillion, demonstrating their collective financial power.

Six of the seven have AI and healthcare initiatives, Rogozinski told the panel. Theyre all coming for this industry.

However, Atomwise CEO Abraham Heifets made the case that with Big Tech getting into biopharma there is a mismatch of business models, with the Isomorphic Labs deals looking, in his words, like traditional tech mentality. Heifets contends that its unclear whether the physics of the business will support the risk models in the industry, adding that the influence of small- to mid-size companies focused on AI-based drug discovery should not be underestimated.

Google DeepMinds AlphaFold is the foundation of Isomorphic Labs platform. The problem, according to ArrePath CTO Kurt Thorn, is that its easy for these technologies to have fast followings only to see their market shares wane over time. If you look at AlphaFold, which was a breakthrough when it came out, within two or three years afterwards there were two or three alternatives.

Thorn concluded that its not clear that the market sizes are large enough to amortize a large AI platform for drug discovery across an entire industry.

Rogozinski emphasized that these switching costs are a potential barrier to entry in moving to such drug discovery platforms as Big Tech tries to get companies to transition.

Vivodyne CEO Andrei Georgescu commented that drug discovery and development is a difficult and complex process that is not a function of how big your team is or how many people you have behind the bench. The key to the success of AI in biopharma is in the generation and curation of datasets, according to Georgescu, who said the industry is facing a bottleneck on the complexity of the data and the applicability of the data to the outcomes that we want to confirm.

Providing some levity and perspective to Tuesdays AI session, Moonwalk Biosciences CEO Alex Aravanis told the audience he was late to arrive as a panelist due to an accident on the freeway involving a Tesla self-driving vehicle. So, clearly, they need more data, Aravanis said.

Marc Cikes, managing director of the Debiopharm Innovation Fund, told BioSpace that while he has been heartened to see the rise of AI and machine learning usage in biopharma, the forecast remains murky in 2024.

The impact of AI for drug discovery is still largely unknown, Cikes said. The public market valuation of the few AI-drug discovery companies is significantly down versus their peak price, and a large chunk of the high-value deals announced between native AI companies and large pharmas are essentially based on future milestone payments which may never materialize.

Greg Slabodkin is the News Editor at BioSpace. You can reach him atgreg.slabodkin@biospace.com. Follow him onLinkedIn.

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SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launch of secretive X-37B space plane delayed to Dec. 11 – Space.com

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket is poised to launch the X-37B space plane for the U.S. Space Force on Monday evening (Dec. 11) after a one-day delay due to weather, and you can likely watch the action live.

Liftoff of the Falcon Heavy is scheduled to occur from Launch Complex-39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, during a 10-minute window that opens at 8:14 p.m. EST (0114 GMT Dec. 12). If, as expected, SpaceX webcasts the liftoff, you can watch it live here at Space.com. SpaceX announced its delay of the flight by 24 hours early Sunday.

"Now targeting Monday, December 11 for Falcon Heavys launch of the USSF-52 mission, with weather conditions forecasted to improve to 70% favorable for liftoff on Monday night," SpaceX wrote on X (formerly Twitter). "The team will use the time to complete additional pre-launch check outs."

The upcoming launch will be the seventh launch to date for the reusable X-37B space plane its first-ever ride on a Falcon Heavy, which could have consequences for its coming orbital mission.

Five of the six X-37B launches to date have employed United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets, with one other using a SpaceX Falcon 9. Falcon Heavy, which utilizes three Falcon 9 boosters as its first stage, outclasses both of those other rockets when it comes to getting mass to orbit. According to a recent Space Force release, some of the objectives of the coming X-37B mission, known as OTV-7 ("Orbital Test Vehicle-7"), include "operating in new orbital regimes," which, given the launch vehicle, may indicate a higher orbit than usual, farther from Earth.

Related: The Space Force's secretive X-37B space plane: 10 surprising facts

The upgrade in launch vehicle may also have to do with mass. The X-37B features a cargo bay to house equipment and experiments, and it could be carrying a secondary mission payload that requires Falcon Heavy's added lift capability.

The uncertainty here is not surprising; most details of X-37B missions are classified. However, USSF-52 does carry at lease one unclassified experiment: NASA's "Seeds-2" project, which will test the effects of radiation and long-duration spaceflight on plant seeds.

Each successive X-37B mission has been longer than its predecessors, with its most recent orbital jaunt lasting 908 days. That mission, called OTV-6, landed in November 2022.

When Falcon Heavy launches on Sunday, it will be the rocket's ninth mission to date. It will also be the fifth flight for the side boosters supporting this particular mission; the duo most recently launched NASA's Psyche probe, in October of this year.

Editor's note: This story was updated on Dec. 10 to reflect SpaceX's one-day delay of the launch of the Falcon Heavy and X-37B.

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SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launch of secretive X-37B space plane delayed to Dec. 11 - Space.com