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Nov 10, 2023

Supermassive black holes are messy eaters big on recycling

Posted by in categories: cosmology, sustainability

At the heart of a distant galaxy, scientists saw a fountain of material moving away from the central supermassive black hole — and back.

Nov 10, 2023

VR mental health platform XRHealth blasts off with NASA

Posted by in categories: space, virtual reality

XRHealth, HTC Vive and Nord-Space Aps engineered the Vive Focus 3 headset to withstand microgravity conditions to help treat astronauts’ mental health in space.

Nov 10, 2023

ChatGPT is about to make AI as personal as your iPhone

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI

GPTs are the start of something big.

Nov 10, 2023

Twitter CEO Says She Wishes Elon Musk’s AI Would Talk About Sex With Her Kids

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, humor, robotics/AI, sex

Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino regrets that she was not able to use her boss Elon Musk’s wildly vulgar AI chatbot to teach her kids about sex. You know, regular stuff for an exec to say publicly!

To back up for a second: Grok, as the AI is called, was released this weekend to a small group of test users. Whereas other chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have been criticized by many on the right for being too liberal, Grok is specifically designed to be anti-“woke,” like a seasoned Twitter troll; it has the humor of a 13-year-old boy, and yet somehow a 53-year-old man. Unsurprisingly, the limited users with access quickly took to X-formerly-Twitter to share the AI’s sometimes tame-ish, sometimes deranged outputs with their followers.

One of those posts, shared to X on Tuesday by Babylon Bee staffer Ashley St. Clair and reshared by Musk, featured Grok’s response to the question of how babies are made.

Nov 10, 2023

Former Apple designers launch $700 Humane AI Pin as smartphone replacement

Posted by in categories: mobile phones, robotics/AI

The Humane AI Pin is designed to replace your smartphone, allowing the user to make calls, send texts and look up information through voice controls. It also has a laser display, turning your palm into a mini screen that can show the time, date or what’s nearby.

“There are no wake words so it’s not always listening or always recording,” Chaudhri said at the beginning of a 10-minute launch video on the company’s website. “In fact, it doesn’t do anything until you engage with it, and your engagement comes through your voice, touch, gesture or the laser ink display.”

In addition to the upfront cost of the device, customers will have to pay a $24 monthly data subscription to T-Mobile, the company said. Having a separate phone number means that, unlike smart watches, the pin isn’t tethered to a smartphone.

Nov 10, 2023

New Hope to Treat and Reverse Osteoarthritis

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, health

Current osteoarthritis treatment manages symptoms rather than addressing the underlying disease, but a new University of Adelaide study has shown the condition may be treatable and reversible.

Osteoarthritis is the degeneration of cartilage and other tissues in joints and is the most common form of arthritis in Australia, with one in five people over the age of 45 having the condition.

It is a long-term and progressive condition which affects people’s mobility and has historically had no cure. Its treatment cost the Australian health system an estimated $3.9 billion in 2019–20.

Nov 10, 2023

Giant Planets Cast a Deadly Pall

Posted by in categories: asteroid/comet impacts, climatology, existential risks

How they can prevent life in other planetary systems. Giant gas planets can be agents of chaos, ensuring nothing lives on their Earth-like neighbors around other stars. New studies show, in some planetary systems, the giants tend to kick smaller planets out of orbit and wreak havoc on their climates.

Jupiter, by far the biggest planet in our solar system, plays an important protective role. Its enormous gravitational field deflects comets and asteroids that might otherwise hit Earth, helping create a stable environment for life. However, giant planets elsewhere in the universe do not necessarily protect life on their smaller, rocky planet neighbors.

A new Astronomical Journal paper details how the pull of massive planets in a nearby star system are likely to toss their Earth-like neighbors out of the “habitable zone.” This zone is defined as the range of distances from a star that are warm enough for liquid water to exist on a planet’s surface, making life possible.

Nov 10, 2023

3 Quantum Computing Stocks To Make You The Millionaire Next Door

Posted by in categories: computing, quantum physics

Have you ever wished you could go back in time and invest in trailblazing companies like Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), or Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) before they hit it big? Well, you may just have that chance again today with quantum computing stocks.

The futuristic field of quantum computing has faced some bumps on its road to mainstream adoption lately. The recent Nasdaq correction has hit many once-hot quantum computing stocks hard. But this correction also presents a golden buying opportunity for investors who take the long view.

Nov 10, 2023

Lost childhood memories can be restored using light, scientists discover

Posted by in category: biological

How early is your first memory?

For many of us, it is difficult to remember much of what went on before the age of two. But a new study from Trinity College Dublin has found that this memory loss might be preventable and reversible, with light.

“Infantile amnesia is the most ubiquitous form of ‘forgetting,’” Tomas Ryan, an associate professor at the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience and senior author of the paper, told Newsweek. “Despite its widespread relevance, little is known about the biological conditions underpinning this amnesia. As a society, we assume infant forgetting is an unavoidable fact of life, so we pay little attention to it.”

Nov 10, 2023

In vivo ephaptic coupling allows memory network formation

Posted by in categories: genetics, mathematics, neuroscience

It is increasingly clear that memories are distributed across multiple brain areas. Such “engram complexes” are important features of memory formation and consolidation. Here, we test the hypothesis that engram complexes are formed in part by bioelectric fields that sculpt and guide the neural activity and tie together the areas that participate in engram complexes. Like the conductor of an orchestra, the fields influence each musician or neuron and orchestrate the output, the symphony. Our results use the theory of synergetics, machine learning, and data from a spatial delayed saccade task and provide evidence for in vivo ephaptic coupling in memory representations.