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Category: futurism

“This is the break of dawn,” declared Slush CEO Eerika Savolainen, kicking off this year’s event and its messages of hope, renewal and change. The sense of positivity was palpable among the 12 000 attendees, including 4 600 startups and 2 600 investors, gathered at the Helsinki Exhibition Centre.

Since its inaugural event in 2008, which attracted 250 participants, Slush has become a landmark in the tech industry’s event calendar. It has developed a secret sauce featuring a student-led organisation, relaxed atmosphere and knack for attracting big names in tech both on stage and to Helsinki in general. At the same time, it has been able to maintain its mission to create and help ground-breaking entrepreneurs.

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BOSTON — Scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have developed a drug that potently neutralizes SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 coronavirus, and is equally effective against the Omicron variant and every other tested variant. The drug is designed in such a way that natural selection to maintain infectiousness of the virus should also maintain the drug’s activity against future variants.

The investigational drug, described in a report published today in Science Advances, is not an antibody, but a related molecule known as an ACE2 receptor decoy. Unlike antibodies, the ACE2 decoy is far more difficult for the SARS-CoV-2 virus to evade because mutations in the virus that would enable it to avoid the drug would also reduce the virus’s ability to infect cells. The Dana-Farber scientists found a way to make this type of drug neutralize coronaviruses more potently in animals infected with COVID-19 and to make it safe to give to patients.

This report comes at a time when antibody drugs used to treat COVID-19 have lost their effectiveness because the viral spike protein has mutated to escape being targeted by the antibodies.

Continue reading “New receptor “decoy” drug neutralizes COVID-19 virus and its variants” | >

It’s proving tough to reign in systems like ChatGPT

Did a human.

Did a human write that, or ChatGPT? It can be hard to tell — perhaps too hard, its creator OpenAI thinks, which is why it is working on a way to “watermark” AI-generated content.

In a lecture at the University of Austin, computer science professor Scott Aaronson, currently a guest researcher at OpenAI, revealed that OpenAI is developing a tool for “statistically watermarking the outputs of a text [AI system].” Whenever a system — say, ChatGPT — generates text, the tool would embed an “unnoticeable secret signal” indicating where the text came from.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s attempts to watermark AI text hit limits” | >

Papilio antimachusPhoto by Luis Miguel Bugallo Sánchez (Lmbuga Commons)(Lmbuga Galipedia); CC-BY-SA-3.0 The Giant African Swallowtail (Papilio antimachus) is a species of giant butterfly in the family of swallowtail butterflies. As a giant butterfly, Papilio antimachus belongs to the family Papilionidae and has a wingspan of between 7.1 and 9.1 inches. It is not unusual to see wings that can measure 10 inches or more from tip to tip.

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Elon Musk told Twitter’s founder Jack Dorsey that there was allegedly important data being hidden from the former CEO during his tenure at the helm of the social media company after Mr Dorsey had called for “full transparency” around the so-called “Twitter Files”.

On Wednesday, Mr Dorsey responded to a tweet from Mr Musk and asked him to publish all data from the microblogging platform, uncensored, in a Wikileaks-style dump.

“If the goal is transparency to build trust, why not just release everything without filter and let people judge for themselves? Including all discussions around current and future actions?” tweeted Mr Dorsey. “Make everything public now.”

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Year 2019 o.o!

3D printers work by laboriously printing objects layer by layer. For larger objects, that process can take hours or even days.

But now scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have found a shortcut: a printer that can fabricate objects in one shot using light — and which could, potentially, revolutionize rapid manufacturing technology.

Continue reading “Scientists Have Built a Real Star Trek ‘Replicator’ That Builds Objects With Light” | >