Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) announced the discovery of a promising approach to mitigate the damaging effects of runaway electrons in tokamak fusion devices in a statement.

The key to this discovery lies in harnessing a unique type of plasma wave known as Alfvén waves, named after the renowned astrophysicist Hannes Alfvén, a Nobel laureate in 1970.

Alfvén waves have long been recognized for their ability to loosen the confinement of high-energy particles within tokamak reactors— a type of fusion reactor that confines plasma in the shape of a donut using a magnetic field.

ChatGPT is already everywhere, including games. But let’s back up: What is ChatGPT? How are people using advanced AI to make video games?

23andMe, the popular DNA testing company, has launched an investigation after client information was listed for sale on a cybercrime forum this week.

On Oct. 1, a post was published on the forum with a link to a sample of allegedly “20 million pieces of data” from the genetic testing company, claiming that it was “the most valuable data you’ll ever see.” The first leak included 1 million lines of data, but on Oct. 4, the threat actor began offering bulk data profiles ranging from $1 to $10 per account in batches of 100, 1,000, 10,000, and 100,000 profiles.

The information leaked in the breach includes names, usernames, profile photos, gender, birthdays, geographical location, and genetic ancestry results.

AI startup Reka unveils Yasa-1, a multimodal AI assistant that could rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

AI startup Reka, founded by researchers from DeepMind, Google, Baidu, and Meta, has announced Yasa-1, a multimodal AI assistant that can understand and interact with text, images, video, and audio.

The assistant is available in private beta and competes with, among others, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has received its own multimodal upgrades with GPT-4V and DALL-E 3. Reka’s team says it has been involved in the development of Google Bard, PaLM, and Deepmind Alphacode, to name a few.

Researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have successfully applied reinforcement learning to a video game problem. The research team created a new complicated movement design software based on an approach that has proven effective in board games like Chess and Go. In a single testing, the movements from the new approach appeared to be superior to those of top human players.

These findings could possibly impact robotics and automation, ushering in a new era of movement design. The team’s article in Advanced Intelligence Systems is titled “A Phase-Change Memristive Reinforcement Learning for Rapidly Outperforming Champion Street Fighter Players.”

“Our findings demonstrate that reinforcement learning can do more than just master simple board games. The program excelled in creating more complex movements when trained to address long-standing challenges in movement science,” said principal investigator Desmond Loke, Associate Professor, SUTD.

Non-invasive — just reading brainwaves.

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Continue reading “Not Sci-Fi Anymore: Brain Waves to Speech using AI” »

What would we do without compression?

Those music libraries and personal photo and video collections that would force us to purchase one hard drive after another can instead be squeezed into portions of a single drive.

Compression allows us to pull up volumes of data from the Internet virtually instantaneously.

Picture a smartphone clad in a casing that’s not just for protection but also doubles as a reservoir of electricity, or an electric car where the doors and floorboard store energy to propel it forward. Such technologies may one day be a reality, thanks to recent work by engineers at the University of California San Diego.

The researchers have developed what’s called a structural supercapacitor—a device that provides both structural support and energy storage capabilities. Such a device could add more power to electronic gadgets and vehicles without adding extra weight, allowing them to last longer on a single charge.

While the concept of structural supercapacitors is not entirely new, it has been a longstanding challenge to create a single device that excels at both bearing mechanical loads and storing electrical energy efficiently. Traditional supercapacitors are great at energy storage but lack the mechanical strength to serve as structural components. On the flip side, structural materials can provide support but fall short when it comes to energy storage.

Tesla is stacking a massive supply of Cybertruck castings at Gigafactory Texas, hinting the production is near, which means deliveries aren’t far behind either.

Tesla Cybertruck production has been nearing for months as the company has shown early-stage validation, public road testing, crash assessments, and some of the best-built Cybertruck units, all within the past few months.

Production is obviously getting close, especially when we base this thought on the fact that public-road testing of RC-labeled, or release candidate, Cybertrucks have been spotted throughout the country over the past month and a half.