Lifeboat Foundation

ChatGPT is taking the world by storm and people are continuing to discover interesting new uses for the technology. As the name suggests, its original primary purpose was to act as a very sophisticated chat bot. But it can do much more, including writing code and simple articles. It can also mirror some of the capabilities of voice assistants like Siri and Alexa when combined with voice-to-text and text-to-speech services. Adafruit’s M. LeBlanc-Williams used that capability to create a voice assistant teddy reminiscent of Teddy Ruxpin.

Teddy Ruxpin is an animatronic teddy bear toy for children first released in 1985, when it became an instant success. Using a cassette player build into the back, the original Teddy Ruxpin could read stories aloud to children while moving around. Because cassette tapes have two audio tracks for stereo sound, the toy could use one audio track for the story and use the other for data. That data would contain movement commands, letting Teddy Ruxpin move along with the audio in a choreographed manner. The technology was quite impressive for the time, but doesn’t come close to what LeBlanc-Williams achieved here.

LeBlanc-Williams started with a Peek-A-Boo Teddy Bear from a company called GUND. This is a toy similar to Teddy Ruxpin, but more rudimentary. It can only recite a handful of different pre-recorded audio clips while moving its mouth and pulling up a sheet with its arms to play peek-a-boo. For this project to work, LeBlanc-Williams had to replace the original electronic components with more powerful hardware.

In an exciting milestone for lunar scientists around the globe, India’s Chandrayaan-3 lander touched down 375 miles (600 km) from the south pole of the Moon on August 23, 2023.

In just under 14 Earth days, Chandrayaan-3 provided scientists with valuable new data and further inspiration to explore the Moon. And the Indian Space Research Organization has shared these initial results with the world.

Continue reading “Chandrayaan-3 Detects ‘Unexpected’ Levels of Sulfur on The Moon” »

Unstable nitrogen-9 is the first nucleus known to decay by spitting out five protons.

With video calls becoming more common in the age of remote and hybrid workplaces, “mute yourself” and “I think you’re muted” have become part of our everyday vocabularies. But it turns out muting yourself might not be as safe as you think.

Kevin Fu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science at Northeastern University, has figured out a way to get audio from pictures and even muted videos. Using Side Eye, a machine learning assisted tool that Fu and his research team created, Fu can determine the gender of someone speaking in the room where a photo was taken—and even the exact words they spoke.

“Imagine someone is doing a TikTok video and they mute it and dub music,” Fu says. “Have you ever been curious about what they’re really saying? Was it ‘Watermelon watermelon’ or ‘Here’s my password?’ Was somebody speaking behind them? You can actually pick up what is being spoken off camera.”

Intrigued to see how this assertion holds up…

You can now get high-quality images that depict complex scenes by default.

Now you can talk to your bot — or just send it a screenshot.

Scientists from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena and the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, both Germany, have successfully developed nanomaterials using a so-called bottom-up approach. As reported in the journal ACS Nano, they exploit the fact that crystals often grow in a specific direction during crystallization. These resulting nanostructures could be used in various technological applications.

“Our structures could be described as worm-like rods with decorations,” explains Prof. Felix Schacher. “Embedded in these rods are spherical nanoparticles; in our case, this was silica. However, instead of silica, conductive nanoparticles or semiconductors could also be used—or even mixtures, which can be selectively distributed in the nanocrystals using our method,” he adds. Accordingly, the range of possible applications in science and technology is broad, spanning from information processing to catalysis.

“The primary focus of this work was to understand the preparation method as such,” explains the chemist. To produce nanostructures, he elaborates, there are two different approaches: larger particles are ground down to nanometer size, or the structures are built up from smaller components.

Arizona Telemedicine Program Southwest Telehealth Resource Center Artificial Intelligences Virtual nursing assistants Population health management Automated health records Remote patient monitoring.

Parents and pediatric oncology experts share strategies to help parents cope with a diagnosis of childhood cancer, make treatment-related decisions, support their child and family, and manage cancer information in NCI’s Childhood Cancer Video Series.