Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at North Carolina State University have now identified a welding technique that can be used to join composite metal foam (CMF) components together without impairing the properties that make CMF desirable. CMFs hold promise for a wide array of applications because the pockets of air they contain make them light, strong and effective at insulating against high temperatures.

CMFs are foams that consist of hollow, metallic spheres—made of materials such as stainless steel or titanium—embedded in a metallic matrix made of steel, titanium, aluminum or other metallic alloys. The resulting material is both lightweight and remarkably strong, with potential applications ranging from aircraft wings to vehicle armor and body armor.

In addition, CMF is better at insulating against high heat than conventional metals and alloys, such as steel. The combination of weight, strength and thermal insulation means that CMF also holds promise for use in storing and transporting nuclear material, hazardous materials, explosives and other heat-sensitive materials.

Nvidia stock has more than tripled this year as investors bet the graphics-chip specialist will power the artificial-intelligence revolution. Elon Musk is among those who can’t get enough of its semiconductors, Oracle’s Larry Ellison said on Monday.

Musk has opted to use Oracle’s servers to run his xAI company’s recently launched chatbot, Grok. The cloud-infrastructure giant managed to provide enough Nvidia chips to power the first version of Grok, but fell short of Musk’s demands, Ellison said during Oracle’s latest earnings call, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense/Sentieo.

“Boy, did they want a lot more GPUs than we gave them,” Oracle’s billionaire cofounder and tech chief said. “We gave them quite a few but they wanted more, and we are in the process of getting them more.”

That’s in large part due to these tools’ ability to churn out content at much faster rates than human writers — and at a fraction of the cost.

Given the biblical flood of bottom-shelf AI-generated content polluting the internet today, it’s clear that everyday internet users are not going to benefit.

However, some entrepreneurs are hellbent on making a buck by repurposing existing content, laundering it through an AI algorithm, and passing it off as their own.

An organizer of an upcoming software and developer conference called DevTernity has been accused of cooking up fake women speakers featured on the event’s website — AI-generated headshots and all.

It looks a lot like a horrifically misfired attempt to pad out the apparent diversity in a heavily male-dominated space, a hypothesis the event’s organizer Eduards Sizovs has since forcefully denied.

The bizarre development triggered a resounding outcry, leading to high-profile engineering leaders from the likes of Microsoft and Google to bow out of the conference.

Earlier this week, Meta announced a new AI image generator dubbed “Imagine with Meta AI.”

And while it may seem like an otherwise conventional tool meant to compete with the likes of Google’s DALL-E 3, Diffusion, and Midjourney, Meta’s underlying “Emu” image-synthesis model has a dirty little secret.

What’s that? Well, as per the company’s official documentation — the latest example of Meta squeezing every last drop out of its user base and its ever-valuable data.

Whether the company’s actually getting closer to achieving this goal remains highly debatable. The company has also historically been highly secretive when it comes to its research, making it even more difficult to read the tea leaves over recent weeks.

But an interesting new twist to the story suggests OpenAI may have been on the verge of a major leap forward, and that it may indeed have been related to the shakeup.

Last week, Reuters and The Information reported that some OpenAI leaders may have gotten spooked by a powerful new AI the company was working on called Q*, pronounced “Q star.” This new system was apparently seen by some as a significant step towards the company’s goal of establishing AGI, and is reportedly capable of solving grade school math problems.

The AI, which takes orders from drive-thru customers at Checkers and Carl’s Jr, relies on humans for most of its customer interactions.

Scientists have discovered an impossibly large planet — so big, they say, that it should be too big to exist.

And yet. In a new study published in the journal Science, researchers out of Pennsylvania State described their whopper discovery: a Neptune-sized planet that’s 13 times the mass of Earth, which is orbiting a tiny ultracool star that’s nine times less massive than our Sun.

As a press release about the new research explains, this finding is exceptional because the mass ratio between the planet and the dwarf star, dubbed LHS 3,154, is 100 times greater than the same ratio Earth has with its Sun — which scientists didn’t think was possible until they saw it with their own eyes.

The world’s first factory mass-produced humanoid robots will soon be opening in the Pacific Northwest. God help us all.

Agility Robotics CEO Damion Shelton told Axios in an unsettling interview that the company is slated to make 10,000 robots at its “RoboFab” facility once it reaches its “peak.”

Shelton used the term “humanoids” to refer to its walking and working robots produced for companies like Amazon. The company’s forthcoming move from its smaller factory in the tiny town of Tangent, Oregon to the much larger “RoboFab” plant in the nearby city of Salem will see it going from a tangential player in the robotics sphere to, if successful, one of the largest-producing in the United States.