Saturday - July 22 2023, 12:56 UTC - 1 year ago

EV use is being expanded with right-to-charge laws that require wiring for EV chargers be installed in all parking spots at new homes and multiunit dwellings. This increases the accessibility of EV charging and makes the transition towards electric vehicles more equitable.

Saturday - July 22 2023, 08:04 UTC - 1 year ago

Johns Hopkins University cybersecurity and artificial intelligence expert Anton Dahbura is warning consumers, industry players, and governments about the dangers of large language models and their tendency to produce fabricated and biased content. Better data, corporate accountability, and educating users about what AI is and what its risks are can help mitigate risk. The AI Uncertainty Principle expresses the inherent difficulty in predicting the outcome of an AI system when not every possible situation has been explicitly trained.

Saturday - July 22 2023, 03:02 UTC - 1 year ago

Astronomers have discovered over 5,000 exoplanets that may be home to life, and astronomers need more powerful telescopes to learn more about these distant planets. A new type of space telescope, called the Nautilus Space observatory, is being developed by a team of professors and NASA scientists that would use a lightweight and inexpensive lens instead of large, heavy mirrors. If successfully built, this telescope could revolutionize the search for extraterrestrial life and allow us to explore the universe on an unprecedented level.

Friday - July 21 2023, 22:58 UTC - 1 year ago

In the US, the movement to regulate face recognition technology has largely come to a halt. Right now, the Massachusetts Legislature is attempting to enact a law limiting law enforcement's use of the technology. If they are able to pass the bill, it could set a standard for other US states to follow when it comes to regulating face recognition tech. Beyond the US, the technology is widely used in other countries for purposes such as identifying customers within retail stores.

Friday - July 21 2023, 18:47 UTC - 1 year ago

Researchers at Champalimaud Researchhave discovered a way to manipulate the brain's perception of time by controlling neural activity in rats, and the Population Clock Hypothesis suggests that the brain maintains a decentralized and flexible sense of time which could be influenced by patterns of activity evolving in groups of neurons during behavior. By artificially slowing down or speeding up these neural patterns, scientists were able to ahce and warp their judgement of time duration.

Friday - July 21 2023, 13:55 UTC - 1 year ago

Wildfires have been a natural part of northern forest and tundra ecosystems for thousand of years. However, the severity, frequency and types of wildfires in northern and Arctic regions have changed in recent decades due to rising global temperatures. This has resulted in 'zombie fires' which smoulder through winter, cause hazardous smoke production and are difficult to extinguish. Rising temperatures could potentially exceed the 1.5 Celsius global threshold, putting the Arctic in a precarious position.

Friday - July 21 2023, 09:39 UTC - 1 year ago

A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has developed a dual-mapping technique which enables robots to explore their surroundings much more efficiently. This approach works for both single robots and teams of robots, as well as for both ground and aerial robots. The technique won the "Most Sectors Explored Award" during DARPA's Subterranean Challenge, and has been published to the journal Science Robotics.

Friday - July 21 2023, 05:08 UTC - 1 year ago

In the summer, mosquitoes come out across the US, and the use of mosquito repellents can protect your health and sanity. These repellents interfere with a mosquito's sense of smell, taste or both, although not all work. To stay safe, always read the labels of any products you use and avoid bracelets and ultrasonic repellent devices.

Friday - July 21 2023, 00:21 UTC - 1 year ago

In order to ensure AI agents act in the interest of humanity, experts have proposed adding 'artificial empathy' into AI-powered robots and algorithms. This empathy would be based on demonstrating a self-perception of physical pain, and allow AI agents to experience the ramifications of their decisions before taking action. Such an idea would require a multi-disciplinary approach that draws insights from neuroscience, psychology, and robotics.

Thursday - July 20 2023, 19:55 UTC - 1 year ago

This study demonstrates that cellular aging can be reversed and injury recovery can be accelerated by chemicals rather than genetic means. Small molecules can reverse the transcriptomic age of cells safely without erasing cell identity or inducing iPSC-like states, making this approach more accessible, less costly, and more widely applicable.

Thursday - July 20 2023, 15:18 UTC - 1 year ago

PIGINet is a neural network from MIT CSAIL which uses machine learning to significantly reduce task planning time for household robots. It takes in information from task plans, images, and initial facts to generate a probability that the selected task plan is feasible, and compared against prior approaches, PIGINet can reduce planning time by 80% in simpler scenarios and up to 50% in more complex scenarios. This allows robots to be more efficient in problem solving in various settings and environments.

Thursday - July 20 2023, 11:04 UTC - 1 year ago

Meta is going all in on open-source AI by unveiling their first large language model, LLaMA 2, for anyone to use for free. LLaMA 2 is a suite of AI models and must be downloaded from Meta’s launch partners Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Hugging Face. Meta applied a mix of different machine learning and natural language processing techniques to the model to make it safer and less likely to spew toxic falsehoods. It provides competition for OpenAI’s ChatGPT model.

Thursday - July 20 2023, 06:37 UTC - 1 year ago

In a new paper, Dave Chandler and the author demonstrate that ice sheets are littered with millions of tiny fissures that form moulins, which alters traditional scientific understanding. This spells out the potential tragedy of a destabilizing ice sheet, as it factors in to the global sea level rise. Greenland and Antarctica are especially vulnerable to climate warming.

Thursday - July 20 2023, 02:18 UTC - 1 year ago

Courts are likely to determine the limits on how AI is developed and used in the US, whilst an increasing number of lawsuits are surfacing surrounding AI companies who are allegedly breaking existing laws. The FTC are investigating OpenAI to ensure that consumer protection laws are being followed, and new systems of licensing and royalties could be set up to compensate artists and authors whose works are being used to train AI models.

Wednesday - July 19 2023, 21:20 UTC - 1 year ago

The search for extraterrestrial life (SETI) involves looking for ‘technosigatures’ from aliens, but Earth noise can make this difficult. The new technique devised by the Breakthrough Listen project enables radio-wave monitors to more easily differentiate between signals from deep space and human-made interference and could revolutionize the search for alien life.

Wednesday - July 19 2023, 16:25 UTC - 1 year ago

The Expedition 69 crew consists of six astronauts from different countries who were back to work on their 300th day in space. They performed a variety of maintenance activities, science experiements, and Vision exams, some of which included installing a Surface Avatar laptop, maintaining an EVA battery, and prepping for a Pilot-T experiment.

Wednesday - July 19 2023, 11:44 UTC - 1 year ago

Sanctuary AI is a Canadian company developing general-purpose robots that can be operated using three modes: directly piloted, piloted-assist, and supervised autonomous control. These robots have augmented reality goggles for remote controlling, are designed to be modular, and can be trained to identify objects and avoid obstacles.

Wednesday - July 19 2023, 07:37 UTC - 1 year ago

500 million people live and work under the shadow of active volcanoes worldwide, either for their strong cultural beliefs, economic opportunity, or due to poverty. Centers of identity and economic opportunity provide these people the incentives to remain near volcanoes, and many religions revere them as places of ritual and tradition.

Wednesday - July 19 2023, 02:45 UTC - 1 year ago

In a study published in eLife, Penn State University researchers have illuminated the intricate manner in which bioluminescent bacteria and the Hawaiian bobtail squid cooperate to form a mutually beneficial relationship. This involves bacteria colonizing the squid, while the glow of the bacteria allegedly helps provide camouflage for the squid from predators. The complex coordination of cellular signalling during colonization is important for understanding how bacteria colonize their hosts more generally.