What did the plant say to the other plant?
Airships are essentially rigid, steerable balloons that fly because they’re filled with a lighter-than-air gas. The Hindenburg is probably the most well-known example of an — and also the most-well known example of why filling them with flammable hydrogen is dangerous.
Brin’s plan is to fill hiss with non-flammable helium and then use them to transport tons of cargo hundreds of miles efficiently and cleanly. He also hopes to use them for humanitarian missions, delivering supplies and personnel to places that are hard to access by road.
The Pathfinder-1: In 2015, Brin founded a startup, LTA Research, to help him reach this goal, and the team came up with the Pathfinder-1, a 400-foot-long prototype with electric motors, a carbon-fiber skeleton, and an ultra-light synthetic cover.
The Glaze/Nightshade team, for its part, denies it is seeking destructive ends, writing: Nightshade’s goal is not to break models, but to increase the cost of training on unlicensed data, such that licensing images from their creators becomes a viable alternative.
In other words, the creators are seeking to make it so that AI model developers must pay artists to train on data from them that is uncorrupted.
How did we get here? It all comes down to how AI image generators have been trained: by scraping data from across the web, including scraping original artworks posted by artists who had no prior express knowledge nor decision-making power about this practice, and say the resulting AI models trained on their works threatens their livelihood by competing with them.
By transferring laser-induced graphene to a hydrogel film at cryogenic temperatures, stretchable graphene–hydrogel interfaces can be created for application in wearable and implantable electronics.
Over ten years ago, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) began mapping the universe to find evidence that could help us understand the nature of the mysterious phenomenon known as dark energy. I’m one of more than 100 contributing scientists that have helped produce the final DES measurement, which has just been released at the 243rd American Astronomical Society meeting in New Orleans.
Dark energy is estimated to make up nearly 70% of the observable universe, yet we still don’t understand what it is. While its nature remains mysterious, the impact of dark energy is felt on grand scales. Its primary effect is to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe.
The announcement in New Orleans may take us closer to a better understanding of this form of energy. Among other things, it gives us the opportunity to test our observations against an idea called the cosmological constant that was introduced by Albert Einstein in 1917 as a way of counteracting the effects of gravity in his equations to achieve a universe that was neither expanding nor contracting. Einstein later removed it from his calculations.
Amid controversy, industry goes all in on plastics pyrolysis.
Chemical companies are fully backing this plastic waste recycling process. To prove their detractors wrong, they will need to make it work.
Combining three OLED light sources to mimic white light has reduced interference and bit error rates.
The year 2023 saw the “enshittification” of platforms from Facebook to Google Search. A new exit strategy means platforms will have to play nicely with your data, even if you leave for a rival.
But in the past few years, a climate change hero technology has made its way into electric vehicles, one that has improved—but not solved—their cold weather issues: heat pumps. Heat pumps transfer heat from outside the car to help keep passengers warm, and so avoid sucking too much power away from the battery. And yes, heat pumps can still bring warm air into the car even if it’s freezing outside, albeit with mixed success. As counterintuitive as it sounds, there is still a good amount of heat that can be drawn from air that’s, say, 10 degrees Fahrenheit.
Today, heat pumps come in many, but not all, new electric vehicles. Teslas have come with a proprietary heat pump tech since 2021. Jaguar’s I-Pace has one built in, as does BMW’s latest i-series cars, Hyundai’s Ioniq 5, Audi’s newest e-Tron, and Kia’s new electrified flagship, the EV9.
“Any electric vehicle that comes out right now and doesn’t have a heat pump is a dinosaur already,” says John Kelly, an automotive technology professor and instructor focusing on hybrid and electric vehicle technology at Weber State University.
Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed a cache of treasures—including more than 50 wooden sarcophagi, a funerary temple dedicated to an Old Kingdom queen and a 13-foot-long Book of the Dead scroll—at the Saqqara necropolis, a vast burial ground south of Cairo, according to a statement from the…
The team also discovered dozens of sarcophagi, wooden masks and ancient board games.