Lifeboat Foundation

Artificial general intelligence is the big goal of OpenAI. What exactly that is, however, is still up for debate.

According to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, systems like GPT-4 or GPT-5 would have passed for AGI to “a lot of people” ten years ago. “Now people are like, well, you know, it’s like a nice little chatbot or whatever,” Altman said.

The phenomenon Altman describes has a name: It’s called the “AI effect,” and computer scientist Larry Tesler summed it up by saying, “AI is anything that has not been done yet.”

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Petr Šulc, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s School of Molecular Sciences, worked with Professor Michael Famulok from the University of Bonn, Germany, and Professor Nils Walter from the University of Michigan on this project.

Holograms provide a three-dimensional (3D) view of objects, offering a level of detail that two-dimensional (2D) images cannot match. Their realistic and immersive display of 3D objects makes holograms incredibly valuable across various sectors, including medical imaging, manufacturing, and virtual reality.

Traditional holography involves recording an object’s three-dimensional data and its interactions with light, a process that demands high computational power and the use of specialized cameras for capturing 3D images. This complexity has restricted the widespread adoption of holograms.

Some have described the last several millennia of human dominion over the earth’s resources as the anthropocene, deriving from the Greek “anthropo” meaning human, and “cene” meaning recent. The last century in particular has been dubbed the fourth industrial revolution, due to the pace of technological innovation ushered in by the advent of computers in the middle of the 20th century.

In the past seventy years, computation has transformed every aspect of society, enabling efficient production at an accelerated rate, displacing human labour from chiefly production to services, and exponentially augmenting information storage, generation, and transmission through telecommunications.

How did we get here? Fundamentally, technological advancement draws on existing science. Without an understanding of the nature of electromagnetism and the structure of atoms, we wouldn’t have electricity and the integrated circuitry that power computers. It was only a matter of time, then, before we thought of exploiting the most accurate, fundamental description of physical reality provided by quantum mechanics for computation.

Radiotherapy (also called radiation therapy), a commonly used cancer treatment that uses high-energy radiation, can effectively eliminate or shrink various types of tumors. While radiotherapy benefits many cancer patients, the associated side effects can hinder cancer survivors’ quality of life and overall health.

When a patient receives radiation treatments, the radiation damages the DNA. If the DNA damage becomes severe enough, the cancer cell will not recover and will stop dividing and die. Unfortunately, the exact mechanisms by which radiation elicits cancer cell death can cause similar damage in nearby healthy cells, leading to significant toxicities in some cases.

Many malignancies that develop in the pelvic region, including urinary and rectal cancers, are susceptible to pelvic radiotherapy. Some patients receiving pelvic radiotherapy develop debilitating bowel symptoms, including intestinal inflammation. Doctors do not fully understand these clinical challenges despite the common occurrence of bowel symptoms following pelvic radiotherapy. A better understanding of the link between radiation and bowel damage could help doctors manage cancer treatment more optimally, enhancing survivorship.

Desert-dwelling bacteria that feed on sunlight, slurp up carbon dioxide, and emit oxygen could be incorporated into paint that supplements the air in a habitat on Mars.

It’s called Chroococcidiopsis cubana, and scientists have developed a biocoating that emits measurable amounts of oxygen on a daily basis while reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air around it. This has implications, not just for space travel but here at home on Earth, too, according to a team led by microbiologist Simone Krings of the University of Surrey in the UK.

“With the increase in greenhouse gasses, particularly CO₂, in the atmosphere and concerns about water shortages due to rising global temperatures, we need innovative, environmentally friendly, and sustainable materials,” says bacteriologist Suzie Hingley-Wilson of the University of Surrey.

Quantum mechanics is full of weird phenomena, but perhaps none as weird as the role measurement plays in the theory. Since a measurement tends to destroy the “quantumness” of a system, it seems to be the mysterious link between the quantum and classical world.

Furthermore, when dealing with a vast system of quantum data units called “qubits,” the impact of measurements can lead to profoundly different outcomes, even driving the emergence of entirely new phases of quantum information.

This happens when two competing effects come to a head: interactions and measurement. In a quantum system, when the qubits interact with one another, their information becomes shared nonlocally in an “entangled state.”

Congress is currently debating the FAA’s long-term reauthorization, which might have an impact on the ongoing use of leaded aviation fuel at smaller airports.

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Since 1980, the US has had a stunning 99 percent reduction in airborne lead levels as a result of EPA regulations. However, Leaded gas is still used in the aviation industry, according to a report published by EPA on Wednesday.

Continue reading “Health crisis: 220,000 planes still use lead fuel, warns US agency” »

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Researchers from the Australian National University, the University of Oxford, and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence have developed a new AI system called “3D-GPT” that can generate 3D models simply from text-based descriptions provided by a user.

The system, described in a paper published on arXiv, offers a more efficient and intuitive way to create 3D assets compared to traditional 3D modeling workflows.