Lifeboat Foundation

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One of the more unexpected products to launch out of this year’s Microsoft Ignite conference is a tool that can create a photorealistic avatar of a person and animate that avatar saying things that the person didn’t necessarily say.

Called Azure AI Speech text to speech avatar, the new feature, available in public preview as of today, lets users generate videos of an avatar speaking by uploading images of a person they wish the avatar to resemble and writing a script. Microsoft’s tool trains a model to drive the animation, while a separate text-to-speech model — either prebuilt or trained on the person’s voice — “reads” the script aloud.

“With text to speech avatar, users can more efficiently create video … to build training videos, product introductions, customer testimonials [and so on] simply with text input,” writes Microsoft in a blog post. “You can use the avatar to build conversational agents, virtual assistants, chatbots and more.”

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Fine-tuning large language models (LLM) has become an important tool for businesses seeking to tailor AI capabilities to niche tasks and personalized user experiences. But fine-tuning usually comes with steep computational and financial overhead, keeping its use limited for enterprises with limited resources.

To solve these challenges, researchers have created algorithms and techniques that cut the cost of fine-tuning LLMs and running fine-tuned models. The latest of these techniques is S-LoRA, a collaborative effort between researchers at Stanford University and University of California-Berkeley (UC Berkeley).

It’s worth noting that Airloom’s new wind turbine can be configured vertically or horizontally and that it can be deployed offshore as well as on land.

“For decades, the wind industry has lowered the cost of energy production by scaling ever larger turbines. Although this has been extremely successful in driving down overall costs, the approach now faces challenges in terms of both siting and cost of materials,” said Carmichael Roberts of Breakthrough Energy Ventures in a press release. “Airloom’s unique approach can solve both these problems, opening new market opportunities for wind energy that will further drive down costs. We look forward to Neal’s leadership in bringing this revolutionary technology into the market.”

With small-scale prototypes already up and running, the company plans to use its seed funding for research and development of the Airloom wind energy test device, which is designed to produce 50 kilowatts (kW) of electricity. Future systems are expected to be megawatt-scale and deployed hundreds of megawatts at a time in utility-scale wind farms.

The ability to jump forward and backwards in time has long fascinated science fiction writers and physicists alike. So is it really possible to travel into the past and the future?

Researchers detect and control how a single piezoresisitive molecule changes shape when a mechanical force is applied to it.

Back in the 1950s, when the larger humanity was just beginning to ponder trips beyond the boundary of our world by means of rockets, visionaries were already dreaming of trips to the Moon and the neighboring planets, some of them so large in scope they were akin to the first colonization moves.

Using ESA’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, scientists have observed nightglow in Mars’ atmosphere, a phenomenon where the night sky glows green, almost like an aurora.

An international team of astronomers reports the discovery of a large-scale structure that consists of at least 20 massive galaxies. The structure, dubbed “Cosmic Vine,” has a size of about 13 million physical light years. The finding was detailed in a paper published Nov. 8 on the pre-print server arXiv.

Massive and dense structures of galaxies are perceived as progenitors of galaxy clusters—the most massive gravitationally-bound systems in the universe. Therefore, detecting new structures of this type and investigating them in detail is fundamental for our understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Shuowen Jin of the Technical University of Denmark, has detected a new object of this type—a large vine-like structure, hence its name Cosmic Vine. The structure was revealed at a redshift of 3.44, in the Extended Groth Strip (EGS) field observed with JWST. The observations were complemented by data from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST).