Lifeboat Foundation

Amazon announced Thursday it is rolling out its pay-by-palm services in Whole Foods Market stores across the country, making it possible for customers to use their palms for purchases without a wallet or phone.

The palm recognition service, called Amazon One, will be available for payment and Prime membership benefits in all Whole Foods Market locations by the end of this year. Instead of traditional payment methods, Amazon One allows customers to hover their palm over an Amazon One device.

Customers who link their Prime membership with their Amazon One profile will also automatically receive savings once their palm is registered, according to the Seattle-based retail giant.

Visible light is a mere fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum, and the manipulation of light waves at frequencies beyond human vision has enabled such technologies as cell phones and CT scans.

Rice University researchers have a plan for leveraging a previously unused portion of the spectrum.

It is believed that Apple is creating its large language model in competition with OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4, Google’s Bert and LaMDA, Meta’s LLaMa-1 and LLaMa-2, among others.

Whenever Apple launches a new product, its competitors, developers, and starry-eyed consumers take it very seriously. And with the veritable craze over artificial intelligence (AI) tools, it was only a matter of time before the iPhone creator came up with something explosive.

It is believed that Apple is creating its large language model (LLM) in competition with OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4, Google’s Bert and LaMDA, Meta’s LLaMa-1 and LLaMa-2, among others. It is also being learned that Apple has created a chatbot service… More.

Continue reading “Apple is quietly working on ‘Apple GPT’ to rival OpenAI” »

The digital devices that we rely on so heavily in our day-to-day and professional lives today—smartphones, tablets, laptops, fitness trackers, etc.—use traditional computational technology. Traditional computers rely on a series of mathematical equations that use electrical impulses to encode information in a binary system of 1s and 0s. This information is transmitted through quantitative measurements called “bits.”

Unlike traditional computing, quantum computing relies on the principles of quantum theory, which address principles of matter and energy on an atomic and subatomic scale. With quantum computing, equations are no longer limited to 1s and 0s, but instead can transmit information in which particles exist in both states, the 1 and the 0, at the same time.

Quantum computing measures electrons or photons. These subatomic particles are known as quantum bits, or ” qubits.” The more qubits are used in a computational exercise, the more exponentially powerful the scope of the computation can be. Quantum computing has the potential to solve equations in a matter of minutes that would take traditional computers tens of thousands of years to work out.

University of Copenhagen researchers have invented a “quantum drum” that can measure pressure, a gas leak, heat, magnetism and a host of other things with extreme precision. It can even scan the shape of a single virus. The invention has now been adapted to work at room temperature and may be finding its way into our phones.

Humans have tried to measure the world around them since ancient times. Now, researchers are using the laws of quantum physics to develop one of the most sensitive measuring devices the world has ever seen. One day, it may even be yours. With two innovative solutions, researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have found a way to get quantum technology into our pockets.

The heart of the apparatus could be called a “quantum drum”: It is a thin membrane that vibrates like a drum skin, but with so small an amplitude that the laws of quantum physics are needed to describe what’s happening. In other words, it’s vibrating really fast. This means the drum can be used as an ultra-precise measuring device—a quantum supersensor.

While Tesla famously won’t support CarPlay, code found in its iOS app update points to at least testing of AirPlay in its cars.

It’s never been possible to use Apple’s CarPlay in Teslas — not without a hack, and a convoluted one at that — but CEO Elon Musk has previously hinted at AirPlay support.

Now according to the unofficial “Tesla App Updates (iOS)” account on Twitter, the latest version of Tesla’s iPhone app includes a mention of AirPlay in its code.

The Death of Death: The Scientific Possibility of Physical Immortality and its Moral Defense (Copernicus Books) — Kindle edition by Cordeiro, José, Wood, David. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Death of Death: The Scientific Possibility of Physical Immortality and its Moral Defense (Copernicus Books).

The images shed light on how electrons form superconducting pairs that glide through materials without friction.

When your laptop or smartphone heats up, it’s due to energy that’s lost in translation. The same goes for power lines that transmit electricity between cities. In fact, around 10 percent of the generated energy is lost in the transmission of electricity. That’s because the electrons that carry electric charge do so as free agents, bumping and grazing against other electrons as they move collectively through power cords and transmission lines. All this jostling generates friction, and, ultimately, heat.

But when electrons pair up, they can rise above the fray and glide through a material without friction. This “superconducting” behavior occurs in a range of materials, though at ultracold temperatures. If these materials can be made to superconduct closer to room temperature, they could pave the way for zero-loss devices, such as heat-free laptops and phones, and ultra-efficient power lines. But first, scientists will have to understand how electrons pair up in the first place.

More earbuds, these from Waverly Labs. They also have the pilot. The Interpreter arrives as a pair of over-the-ear headphones, one for your right ear and one for your friend’s. You download the Ambassador mobile app—where all the translation work gets done—and pair both headphones to your phone using Bluetooth.

Ambassador has three operational modes. Converse mode is a two-way system: You both pick one of the 20 languages and 42 dialects available, and the app translates your language to his and his to yours. (Up to four people at once can talk this way through the app, if you have enough earphones.) Lecture mode is a one-way system that translates your speech and streams it through your smartphone’s speaker in another tongue. Listen mode goes the other way, listening for the language of your choice, translating it into your own language, and piping it into your earpiece.

The Ambassador app-connected earphones translate human speech into multiple tongues, enabling multilingual conversations.