A new approach to monitoring arachnid behavior could help understand their social dynamics, as well as their habitat’s health.
Category: habitats – Page 12
Building on experiments during October’s partial solar eclipse in the U.S, NASA has a once-in-400 years opportunity to study how an eclipse affects Earth’s atmosphere.
A recent study reveals how hydrogen gas, often touted as the energy source of tomorrow, provided energy in the past, at the origin of life 4 billion years ago. Hydrogen gas is clean fuel. It burns with oxygen in the air to provide energy with no CO2.
Hydrogen is a key to sustainable energy for the future. Though humans are just now coming to realize the benefits of hydrogen gas (H2 in chemical shorthand), microbes have known that H2 is a good fuel for as long as there has been life on Earth. Hydrogen is ancient energy.
The very first cells on Earth lived from H2 produced in hydrothermal vents, using the reaction of H2 with CO2 to make the molecules of life. Microbes that thrive from the reaction of H2 and CO2 can live in total darkness, inhabiting spooky, primordial habitats like deep-sea hydrothermal vents or hot rock formations deep within the Earth’s crust, environments where many scientists think that life itself arose.
UK-based construction technology firm Automated Architecture (AUAR) has bagged $3.2 million in funding to advance its mission to automate the construction process to solve housing-related issues.
AUAR is creating a network of dispersed micro-factories for environmentally friendly timber homes. AUAR claims that it presents an alternative vision for the built environment, in which local ecosystems comprising developers, contractors, architects, and communities are empowered to construct better homes instead of centralized automation in massive factories.
This apparent paradox has a simple yet surprising explanation, according to Meredith Whitney: Employers are finally exacting revenge on remote workers who’ve secretly had a second job.
The veteran researcher, who became known as the “Oracle of Wall Street” for her early warnings about banks before the financial crisis, is no stranger to thinking outside the box about everything from the housing market to the economy, and this theory is no exception.
But there’s evidence to support Whitney’s thesis that many of the job cuts made have been to remote positions that were filled by people working at multiple companies under the radar.
The software development sector stands at the dawn of a transformation powered by artificial intelligence (AI), where AI agents perform development tasks. This transformation is not just about incremental enhancements but a radical reimagining of how software engineering tasks are approached, executed, and delivered. Central to this shift is introducing AI-driven frameworks that transcend traditional code assistance tools, marking a leap toward more autonomous, efficient, and secure software development methodologies.
The integration of AI in software development has been confined largely to providing code suggestions and aiding in file manipulation. This approach, while beneficial, barely scratches the surface of what is technologically feasible. AI-powered tools operate within a constrained scope, missing out on Integrated Development Environments (IDEs)’ vast capabilities, such as comprehensive code building, testing, and version control operations. This limitation underscores a critical gap in the software development toolkit, where the potential for AI to contribute more profoundly to the development lifecycle remains largely untapped.
Microsoft researchers present AutoDev, which empowers AI agents to tackle a broad spectrum of software engineering tasks autonomously, from intricate code editing and comprehensive testing to advanced git operations. This framework is designed to focus on autonomy, efficiency, and security. By housing operations within Docker containers, AutoDev ensures that development processes are streamlined and secure, safeguarding user privacy and project integrity through meticulously designed guardrails.
Private space company Sierra Space has blown up its first full-scale inflatable space habitat, dubbed the Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) — and it was all part of the plan.
The balloon-like contraption, which measured just over 20 feet tall, held a third of the volume of the International Space Station once fully inflated. During a recent test, engineers at the Colorado-based company kept pumping it with air, reaching a whopping 77 psi — well above NASA’s recommended level of 60.8 psi — before it exploded in spectacular fashion.
A video of the test shows the habitat quite literally bursting at its seams in a fraction of a second, successfully concluding the company’s “first stress test of a full-size, inflatable space station structure.”
With skull parts that click together like puzzle pieces and a large central tooth, the real-life sandworm is stranger than fiction.
Amphisbaenians are strange creatures. Like worms with vertebrae, scales, a large central tooth, and sometimes small forearms, these reptiles live underground, burrowing tunnels and preying on just about anything they encounter, not unlike a miniature version of the monstrous sandworms from “Dune.”
Even though they’re found around much of the world, little is known about how amphisbaenians behave in the wild because they cannot be observed while in their natural habitat under sand and soil. But thanks to two papers published in the March issue of The Anatomical Record, new light is being shed on these animals and their specialized anatomy.
Apple announces MM1
Methods, Analysis & Insights from Multimodal LLM Pre-training.
In this work, we discuss building performant Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs).
Join the discussion on this paper page.