Lifeboat Foundation

Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratello may have met as graduate students in architecture at Columbia University, but it quickly became clear that “architecture” would prove an inadequate term to describe their eclectic body of work.

As the pair started working together in 2002, they became increasingly aware that “sometimes the forces that enable architecture, chiefly capitalism, can corrupt the architect’s social agenda,” Rael says. “This became the impetus to rethink how and why architecture should be created.”

Microsoft has released a set of vision models called Florence 2 is a prompt-based vision model designed for computer vision and image processing tasks such as image description, object recognition, localization, and segmentation.

An international team of astronomers has uncovered the formation history of young star clusters, many of which are visible to the naked eye at night.

This remarkable research reveals that most nearby young star clusters belong to only three families, each originating from very massive star-forming regions.

The findings offer new insights into the effects of supernovae on the formation of giant gas structures in galaxies like our Milky Way.

Join host Nick Tucker and team for the first ever Hard Reset Podcast episode on vertical farming. We’re diving deeper on the technology and ideas featured in our vertical farming video episode, sharing bonus info that never made it to the final cut, and responding to some of the most popular (and meanest) comments.

As we sleep, the brain rids itself of waste built up throughout the day. But how?

As part of the SERA-Blue Origin collaboration, Brazilian civil engineer Victor Hespanha flew on a New Shepard, in June 2022.

Researchers at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem say they have developed a way to accurately predict the behavior of cancer cells, which will advance diagnosis and treatment of the disease.

The new diagnostic tool uses AI machine learning combined with nanoinformatics (observing nanomaterials) to classify cancer cell behavior in individual patient biopsies, potentially paving the way for personalized monitoring of the progression of the disease and the impact of treatments.

The study was led by Hebrew University doctoral student Yoel Goldstein and Prof. Ofra Benny from its School of Pharmacy in the Faculty of Medicine, working with Prof. Tommy Kaplan, the head of the Department of Computational Biology at the School of Engineering and Computer Science.

Paleontologists in South Africa said they have found the oldest known burial site in the world, containing remains of a small-brained distant relative of humans previously thought incapable of complex behavior.

Led by renowned paleoanthropologist Lee Berger, researchers said in 2023 they had discovered several specimens of Homo naledi – a tree-climbing, Stone Age hominid – buried about 30 meters (100 feet) underground in a cave system within the Cradle of Humankind, a UNESCO world heritage site near Johannesburg.

“These are the most ancient interments yet recorded in the hominin record, earlier than evidence of Homo sapiens interments by at least 100,000 years,” the scientists wrote in a series of preprint papers published in eLife.

Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, has launched a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just one month after formally leaving OpenAI.

Sutskever, who was OpenAI’s longtime chief scientist, founded SSI with former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross and ex-OpenAI engineer Daniel Levy.

At OpenAI, Sutskever was integral to the company’s efforts to improve AI safety with the rise of “superintelligent” AI systems, an area he worked on alongside Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s Superalignment team. Yet both Sutskever and then Leike left the company in May after a dramatic falling out with leadership at OpenAI over how to approach AI safety. Leike now heads a team at rival AI shop Anthropic.