Sunday - August 13 2023, 11:20 UTC - 1 year ago

Swarming is essential for the survival of many animal collectives and has potential to change things for humans too. It is already being used for crowd control, traffic management and to understand the spread of infectious diseases and is being shaped how we use data for healthcare operations. Research into swarming is helping us understand swarming and harness its power, and consequentially this technology is being applied to many industries and sectors, and could be contributive to the fight against poverty.

Sunday - August 13 2023, 06:20 UTC - 1 year ago

Llama 2 is a new family of open access pretrained and fine-tuned chat models ranging from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters. Its development has been heavily based on principles of helpfulness and safety. James Brigg discovered how to use the 70B parameter model fine-tuned for chat, and it is the best-performing open-source Large Language Model for chat as of August 2023. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) helps to reduce hallucinations in these models and keep them updated with the latest information.

Sunday - August 13 2023, 01:36 UTC - 1 year ago

Shield AI and Sentient Vision Systems have teamed up to create an AI-powered wide-area-search imagery system for drones. This system will be used by the US Department of Defense (DoD), Australian Defense Forces (ADF), and other international customers, and will be integrated onto Shield AI’s V-BAT tail-sitting unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This system utilizes ViDAR, Sentient’s AI system that can detect and classify targets in the imagery stream, and improved capabilities that bolster threat deterrence worldwide.

Saturday - August 12 2023, 20:32 UTC - 1 year ago

An international team of scientists has recently conducted a Muon g-2 experiment in the U.S. that showed that muons may be behaving differently than expected by the current physics theory. This has been submitted to the Journal Physical Review Letters and could potentially revolutionize our understanding of the universe. In addition, a rival experiment at the Large Hadron Collider is currently looking for signs of new physics beyond the standard model.

Saturday - August 12 2023, 16:13 UTC - 1 year ago

In response to high optical manufacturing costs, a research team from UC Davis is developing a novel approach to vastly enhance the near-infrared absorption in silicon, which could lead to affordable, high-performance photonic devices. Their findings show photon trapping led to a remarkable increase in absorption efficiency over a wide band in the NIR spectrum, exceeding that of GaAs and other group III-V semiconductors.

Saturday - August 12 2023, 11:45 UTC - 1 year ago

AI-generated images, while capable of being used as art or to help accessibility, can easily be abused to create misleading or defamatory content. The White House has called on AI companies to implement "robust technical measures" such as watermarking to make it easier to determine when content is AI-generated. However, the term "watermark" is often used to refer to other disclosure methods, such as provenance. Clarifying these terms is an important step toward creating responsible synthetic media standards, but there are still questions around who has the authority to identify AI-generated content and other risks associated with watermarking.

Saturday - August 12 2023, 06:58 UTC - 1 year ago

The White House on Wednesday launched a competition offering millions of dollars in prize money for creating new artificial intelligence systems that can defend critical software from hackers. DARPA is collaborating with AI tech titans Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, who will provide expertise and technology for the competition. The challenge seeks to bring together many diverse people to think about how AI can improve cybersecurity, and President Biden met with tech leaders to discuss responsible innovation in the AI sector.

Saturday - August 12 2023, 02:14 UTC - 1 year ago

Gradient descent is a common method for solving optimization problems that mathematicians and scientists have been perfecting for over 150 years. However, a recent study contradicted a basic assumption of the technique, showing that in some cases taking bigger leaps can actually get to the optimal solution faster.

Friday - August 11 2023, 21:16 UTC - 1 year ago

Interstellar Technologies is a Japanese startup that has successfully launched three suborbital rockets and is now gearing up for its first orbital mission with Zero rocket. It is a two-stage rocket that uses liquid methane as its propellant, which is cheap and has good performance. Zero will be launched from Hokkaido Spaceport and can carry nearly one tonne of payload to low-Earth orbit, catering to the demand for small satellite launch services in the global market.

Friday - August 11 2023, 16:39 UTC - 1 year ago

A team of Japanese scientists has developed a cube-based device, using layers of hydrogels in a cube-like structure, that allows researchers to construct complex 3D organoids without using elaborate techniques. The group also demonstrated the ability to recreate body-axis patterning of cell differentiation and develop a range of diverse tissue types. This new device has the potential to revolutionize the way we test drugs and also provide insights into how tissues develop and lead to better techniques for growing artificial organs.

Friday - August 11 2023, 12:04 UTC - 1 year ago

Researchers at Microsoft and CAS Institute of Software recently devised an approach that could improve interactions between LLMs and human users, allowing them to respond to emotion-laced, psychology-based prompts fed to them by human users. The approach, EmotionPrompt, draws inspiration from well-established knowledge rooted in psychology and the social sciences. They tested their approach on four different models: ChatGPT , Vicuna-13b, Bloom and Flan-T5-Large, and found that it improved the performance of these models on eight different tasks, increasing the accuracy of their responses by more than 10% on over half of these tasks.

Friday - August 11 2023, 07:41 UTC - 1 year ago

Dr. Mebrahtu Weldeghebriel and Professor Tim Lowenstein at Princeton and Binghamton University, respectively, used sea salt from sedimentary basins around the world and advanced equipment funded by the National Science Foundation to reconstruct shifts in seawater chemistry spanning 150 million years. They revealed that tectonic plate movement slowed, leading to less lithium in the ocean and less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, ultimately leading to global cooling and the present ice age.

Friday - August 11 2023, 03:26 UTC - 1 year ago

Researchers from China and the UK have uncovered new details about an ancient marine reptile known as Hupehsuchus which lived around 250 million years ago. The hupehsuchians possessed adaptations in their skull that allowed them to filter feed, resembling modern baleen whales. These adaptations allowed the reptile to thrive in its aquatic environment and were part of a rapid re-population of the oceans after the end-Permian mass extinction.

Thursday - August 10 2023, 23:07 UTC - 1 year ago

Two economists published a new study in The Economic Journal that found when people feel happier, they're more likely to donate to charity. We analyzed over 20,000 Twitter users' tweets using natural language processing tools to assess sentiment levels before and after donating. We found donors had an especially upbeat mood prior to donating, and then their sentiment quickly returned to their baseline. Our findings suggest that feeling good may make people more likely to give to charity, which contradicts the theory that people give to charity because it makes them feel good.

Thursday - August 10 2023, 18:02 UTC - 1 year ago

Researchers from Nanjing University and the University of Bristol have unveiled that the earliest mammals, reptiles, and birds might have given birth to live young. A study of 51 fossil species and 29 living species suggests that the success of the amniotes was mainly due to Extended Embryo Retention (EER) rather than the hard-shelled egg. EER is when the young are retained by the mother for a varying amount of time, likely depending on when conditions are best for survival.

Thursday - August 10 2023, 13:04 UTC - 1 year ago

A new drug was granted conditional approval by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) based on weak clinical trial evidence, likely as a result of anecdotes overpowering evidence in decisions on drug approval. We desperately need to question how these decisions are made and who should be involved in the decision-making process as biotechnology quickly advances.

Thursday - August 10 2023, 08:20 UTC - 1 year ago

CNBC reports that Cruise has 400 robotaxi's in San Francisco and Waymo are also requesting expanded operations there. The local NBC reporter has evidence of traffic being blocked for 20 minutes. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) set up rules where city leaders cannot block autonomous vehicle regulation. Despite the expansion of robotaxi operations in the city, they are causing dozens of problems and eliminating thousands of human jobs in the city. Various safety protocols and standards need to be discussed to ensure the safety and efficiency of public transportation.

Thursday - August 10 2023, 04:11 UTC - 1 year ago

Earth has entered a new climate state not seen in more than 100,000 years due to an increase in global temperature over 1°C since pre-industrial times. Scientists study sediment-based records from the bottom of lakes and oceans to reconstruct past global temperatures, but they are limited due to currents and burrowing organisms. Earth's average global temperature has fluctuated between glacial and interglacial conditions in cycles lasting around 100,000 years.

Wednesday - August 9 2023, 23:03 UTC - 1 year ago

After considering more than a year's worth of community feedback, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a draft version of the Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0 which reflects changes in the cybersecurity landscape and makes it easier to put the CSF into practice for all organizations. The framework provides high-level guidance, and has been downloaded more than two million times across more than 185 countries. The CSF 2.0 draft reflects a number of major changes, such as leveraging other technology frameworks to implement the CSF, and providing more guidance for organizations on emerging cybersecurity issues like ransomware and supply chain risks.