Lifeboat Foundation

More people than ever before—828 million, according to the most recent estimates—do not know where their next meal will come from. Yet we are producing more food than ever, with cereal grain production at an all-time high. How did we get so far off track in ending hunger and how do we get back on course?

Food crises are complex, and the temptation is to fix the symptom, rather than identifying the cause. COVID-19, conflict, and climate change are among the most frequently cited causes of the current food price crisis, but the underlying systemic issue remains: We need to radically transform the way we produce and consume food.

A more stable, equitable, and sustainable food system would connect the world’s 600 million farms with its 8 billion consumers, and capitalize on the ability to both feed the hungry while mitigating greenhouse gas emissions and rapidly adapting to a changing climate. We must act now, together, and decisively, or risk more crises in the future. Five critical actions are set out below.

A researcher is undertaking several parallel approaches to understand the microenvironment’s role in pancreatic cancer.

Artificial intelligence still has a long way to go before completely taking over most human jobs. But it can already make some side hustles easier and more lucrative, primarily by saving people time.

“Automation, I think, is the key to reducing your workload,” Sean Audet, a food photographer who uses generative AI tools like ChatGPT to write emails and business plans, told CNBC Make It earlier this month. “When a client first reaches out to me, I need to be able to quickly deliver a bunch of information about services and costs … in a nice, succinct and personalized way.”

Researchers bypassed the safety guardrails for ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude with a series of adversarial attacks.

One of the world’s strongest structures could be one of its smallest: Collaborators from University of Connecticut, Columbia University, and Brookhaven National Lab have developed a new nanomaterial composed of DNA strands coated in flawless glass. At proportionally four times stronger and five times lighter than steel, the minuscule latticework structures could provide a template for a new wave of extremely durable and lightweight vehicles, body armor, and countless other products.

As detailed recently in Cell Reports Physical Science, the team first connected multiple portions of self-assembling DNA to form a nanostructure framework akin to a building’s support beams. They then coated the enjoined DNA strands with a glass-like material only a few hundred atoms thick, leaving relatively large empty spaces akin to rooms in a house. These spaces allowed the resulting nanomaterial to remain extremely lightweight, while the glass reinforced its durability.

[Related: Microscopic mesh could be the key to lighter, stronger body armor.].

A new soft robotic gripper is not only 3D printed in one print, it also doesn’t need any electronics to work. The device was developed by a team of roboticists at the University of California San Diego, in collaboration with researchers at the BASF corporation, who detailed their work in Science Robotics.

The researchers wanted to design a soft gripper that would be ready to use right as it comes off the 3D printer, equipped with built in gravity and touch sensors. As a result, the gripper can pick up, hold, and release objects. No such gripper existed before this work.

Continue reading “3D printed robotic gripper doesn’t need electronics to function” »

In its second-quarter earnings report for 2023, Tesla revealed its ambitious plan to address vehicle autonomy at scale with four key technology pillars: an extensive real-world dataset, neural net training, vehicle hardware, and vehicle software. Notably, the electric vehicle manufacturer asserted its commitment to developing each of these pillars in-house. A significant milestone in this endeavor was announced as Tesla started the production of its custom-built Dojo training computer, a critical component in achieving faster and more cost-effective neural net training.

While Tesla already possesses one of the world’s most potent Nvidia GPU-based supercomputers, the Dojo supercomputer takes a different approach by utilizing chips specifically designed by Tesla. Back in 2019, Tesla CEO Elon Musk christened this project as “Dojo,” envisioning it as an exceptionally powerful training computer. He claimed that Dojo would be capable of performing an exaflop, or one quintillion (10¹⁸) floating-point operations per second, an astounding level of computational power. To put it into perspective, performing one calculation every second on a one exaFLOP computer system would take over 31 billion years, as reported by Network World.

The development of Dojo has been a continuous process. At Tesla’s AI Day in 2021, the automaker showcased its initial chip and training tiles, which would eventually form a complete Dojo cluster, also known as an “exapod.” Tesla’s plan involves combining two sets of three tiles in a tray, and then placing two trays in a computer cabinet to achieve over 100 petaflops per cabinet. With a 10-cabinet system, Tesla’s Dojo exapod will exceed the exaflop barrier of compute power.

South Park AI is an example of how to generate high-quality episodic content through the use of showrunner agents in the simulation. #AI #simulation #multi-agent

X, formerly known as Twitter, has officially retired its famous blue and white bird logo.

The icon on the mobile app changed to an “X” late Friday night in the latest phase of a sweeping rebrand the platform’s owner Elon Musk announced earlier this month. The company previously introduced the logo on the web and launched the domain X.com, though Twitter.com also remains live.

Musk, who acquired the platform for $44 billion late last year, wrote in a post Sunday that the company would soon “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” The transition from Twitter to X reflects Musk’s vision to turn the platform into what he has called an “everything app.”