Lifeboat Foundation

Popular artificial intelligence (AI) powered image generators can run up to 30 times faster thanks to a technique that condenses an entire 100-stage process into one step, new research shows.

Scientists have devised a technique called “distribution matching distillation” (DMD) that teaches new AI models to mimic established image generators, known as diffusion models, such as DALL·E 3, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion.

A number of companies are racing to make a business on the back of these breakthroughs. Most are figuring out what that business is as they go. “I’ll routinely scream, ‘Holy cow, that is wicked cool’ while playing with these tools,” says Gary Lipkowitz, CEO of Vyond, a firm that provides a point-and-click platform for putting together short animated videos. “But how can you use this at work?”

Whatever the answer to that question, it will probably upend a wide range of businesses and change the roles of many professionals, from animators to advertisers. Fears of misuse are also growing. The widespread ability to generate fake video will make it easier than ever to flood the internet with propaganda and nonconsensual porn. We can see it coming. The problem is, nobody has a good fix.

Continue reading “What’s next for generative video” »

How the Red Planet acquired its two moons, Phobos and Deimos, is unknown – they could have formed after something collided with the planet, or started out as asteroids – but now there is a hint of a cometary origin.

By Jonathan O’Callaghan

The static fire test comes less than two weeks after the last Starship mission, which saw the rocket reach orbital velocity for the first time before breaking up upon reentry to Earth’s atmosphere.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s chief operating officer, said last week that the next launch attempt could take place in the “beginning part of May”, though no payload will be onboard.

The fourth major flight test of the fully stacked Starship rocket system will instead aim to resolve the issues that arose during the last mission.

Magnetic and electric dipoles, objects with two oppositely charged ends, have a similar symmetrical structure. One might thus assume that they exhibit similar internal structures and physical states.

Listen to this episode of The HEAL Podcast with Kate Rice on…Spotify — https://tinyurl.com/yt7eha76Apple Podcasts — https://tinyurl.com/3fftfxptEPISODE DES…

A clinical trial led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has shown that a T cell immunotherapy—in which the patients’ own T cells are genetically modified to attack and kill cancer cells—is effective in treating some patients with rare cancers of the body’s soft tissues.

The results of the team’s research showed that the approach, targeting a subset of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) that increase with age, rebalanced blood-cell production and reduced age-related immune decline. The treatment significantly improved the ability of geriatric animals’ immune systems to tackle a new virus, and to respond to vaccination, enabling the animals to fight off a new viral threat months later.

“This is a real paradigm shift—researchers and clinicians should think in a new way about the immune system and aging,” said Stanford postdoctoral scholar Jason Ross, MD, PhD. “The idea that it’s possible to tune the entire immune system of millions of cells simply by affecting the function of such a rare population is surprising and exciting.”

Weissman, who is professor of pathology and of developmental biology, and Kim Hasenkrug, PhD, the chief of Rocky Mountain Laboratories’ Retroviral Immunology Section, are senior authors of the team’s published study in Nature, titled “Depleting myeloid-biased haematopoietic stem cells rejuvenates aged immunity.” Ross and Lara Myers, PhD, a research fellow at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, are lead authors of the report, in which the team concluded, “The clinical development of safe protocols to rebalance HSCs could have broad effects on a number of age-associated issues.”

Many medical implants run on batteries that need to be recharged, but what if you could do so just by breathing?