Lifeboat Foundation

A team of researchers from Stanford University and Google let 25 AI-powered bots loose inside a virtual town — and they acted a lot more like humans than you might expect.

As detailed in a recent, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, the researchers trained 25 different “generative agents,” using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 large language model, to “simulate believable human behavior” such as cooking up breakfast, going to work, or practicing a specific profession like painting or writing.

A virtual town called “Smallville” allowed these agents to hop from school to a cafe, or head to a bar after work.

face_with_colon_three year 2021.

Dogs have been added to a group of animals that, like humans, “recognize themselves as distinct entities from their environment,” a new study shows.

A report by Live Science noted the study’s findings were published Feb. 18 in the journal Scientific Reports.

Continue reading “Dogs have self awareness like humans, new study shows” »

23–25 May 2023 – Register now

Despite the wins offered by DoE, many of us working in commercial research, development, and manufacturing have yet to experience the method. This may be due in part to a lack of awareness and lack of know-how. The best way to gain an appreciation for what DoE may offer you is to experience it.

This series of three one-hour workshops will provide inspirational examples of the use of DoE in many aspects of bringing products to the market, including product design, discovery, and development, process development, scale-up, transfer, and analytical method development. It will also provide the necessary know-how and resources you will need to get started with DoE.

For the first time, scientists have created healthy, fertile mouse pups from the DNA of two adult males — no female DNA required.

While the research is currently only a proof of concept and has yet to be peer-reviewed, the team behind the process thinks it could translate to people — meaning two men could potentially have biological children together one day.

Reproduction 2.0: For nearly all of humanity’s existence, reproduction has required sperm from one man and an egg from one woman — put the two together in a welcoming womb, and nine months later, you have a baby.

AI powered photo editing tool.

The research team noted in its paper that new details can be added within the regeneration of the edited aspects of images that are beneficial to the update. “Our approach can hallucinate occluded content, like the teeth inside a lion’s mouth, and can deform following the object’s rigidity, like the bending of a horse leg.”

There are many brands that are attempting to offer editing options for generative AI content. However, most do not go as far as allowing for the actual editing of images, but rather for aspects such as editing around images. For example, Microsoft’s Designer app allows you to generate AI images from a text prompt, and you can select your favorite from three results, then take it to the design studio where you can create a host of creativity and productivity-based projects, such as social media posts, invitations, digital postcards, or graphics with the image as the focal point. However, you cannot edit the AI-generated image.

Continue reading “Click and drag AI image editing could change everything” »

California NanoSystems Institute News Member News May 15, 2023 | Quantum physics proposes a new way to study biology – and the results could revolutionize our understanding of how life works.

John Yang:

Artificial intelligence is finding its place in all sorts of scientific fields, and perhaps none holds more life savings promise than healthcare programs are learning to answer patient’s medical questions and diagnose illnesses. But there’s still some problems to be worked out. Earlier, I spoke with Dr. Isaac Kohane, the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine AI, and the chair of Harvard’s Department of Biomedical Informatics. I asked him about AI’s potential in medicine.

Dr. Isaac Kohane, Editor-in-Chief, New England Journal of Medicine AI: Doctors can definitely use AI as an augmentation, so they’ll remember or be reminded of all the things that they should know about their patient, their specific patient, and all other similar patients like them.

On Friday, May 19, SpaceX released a 20-second video demonstrating that it is already conducting tests on technology aimed at fortifying the ground beneath its enormous Starship rocket’s orbital launch pad. The launch pad, situated at SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas, endured significant damage during the inaugural test flight of a fully-integrated Starship vehicle on April 20. During the test flight, the sheer power of the Super Heavy rocket’s 33 Raptor engines created a substantial crater beneath the pad. As a result, chunks of shattered concrete were sent soaring through the air.

SpaceX founder Chief Engineer Elon Musk shared that SpaceX is actively developing a solution to mitigate such damage. He said that they plan to build “a massive water-cooled, steel plate to go under the launch mount.” The footage of the test shows a methane-fueled Raptor engine ignited with its beam hitting a steel-plate and a massive stream of water. “One hell of a plasma beam!” said Musk when he shared the video via Twitter, shown below. A single Raptor V2 engine is capable of generating around 230 tons of thrust. Engineers must build a strong structure that could support such intense power, collectively, all 33 Raptor engines generate over 17 million pounds of thrust!

Regarding launch pad modifications –“We’re going to put down a lot of steel” under the launch tower before the next Starship flight with a water flame diverter system, Musk said during a Subscriber-only Twitter Spaces discussion on April 29. “We certainly didn’t expect” to destroy the concrete under the launch pad during the flight test, he said (pictured below). He speculates that the crater was caused due to “compressed the sand underneath the concrete to such a degree that the concrete effectively bent and then cracked.”

😗

German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg first introduced his uncertainty principle in a 1925 paper. It’s special because it remains intact no matter how good our experimental methods get; this isn’t a lack of precision in measurement. It doesn’t matter how smart you are, or how sophisticated your equipment, is you can’t think your way past it. It’s a fact of nature.

Legendary physicist and master bongo player Richard Feynman put it like this: “The uncertainty principle ‘protects’ quantum mechanics. Heisenberg recognized that if it were possible to measure both the momentum and the position simultaneously with greater accuracy, quantum mechanics would collapse. So he proposed that must be impossible.”

Continue reading “Our Existence Always Contains Some Uncertainty. This Physics Principle Explains Why” »