Lifeboat Foundation

Smartphone sales have had their worst quarterly performance in over a decade, a fact that raises two big questions. Have the latest models finally bored the market with mere incremental improvements? And if they have, what will the next form factor (and function) be? Today a deep tech startup called Xpanceo is announcing $40 million in funding from a single investor, Opportunity Ventures in Hong Kong, to pursue its take on one of the possible answers to that question: computing devices in the form of smart contact lenses.

The company wants to make tech more simple, and it believes the way to do that is to make it seamless and more connected to how we operate every day. “All current computers will be obsolete [because] they’re not interchangeable,” said Roman Axelrod, who co-founded the startup with material scientist and physicist Valentyn S. Volkov. “We are enslaved by gadgets.”

With a focus on new materials and moving away from silicon-based processing and towards new approaches to using optoelectronics, Xpanceo’s modest ambition, Axelrod said in an interview, is to “merge all the gadgets into one, to provide humanity with a gadget with an infinite screen. What we aim for is to create the next generation of computing.”

Continue reading “Canalys Newsroom — North American smartphone shipments to fall 12% in 2023 despite premium segment strength” »

Adobe will premiere the first-ever TV commercial powered by its Firefly generative AI during high-profile sports broadcasts on Monday night. The commercial for Adobe Photoshop highlights creative capabilities enabled by the company’s AI technology.

Set to air during MLB playoffs and Monday Night Football, two of the most-watched live events on television, the new Adobe spot will showcase Photoshop’s Firefly-powered Generative Fill feature. Generative Fill uses AI to transform images based on text prompts.

With Adobe’s new commercial, generative AI will enter the mainstream spotlight, reaching audiences beyond just tech circles. While early adopters have embraced AI tools, a recent study found 44% of U.S. workers have yet to use generative AI, indicating its capabilities remain unknown to many.

The high-profile ad also lets Adobe showcase its AI leadership against rivals like OpenAI’s DALL-E in the increasingly competitive space of generative design. With AI capabilities now embedded in many tools, the commercial provides a chance for Adobe to demonstrate its edge and differentiate Photoshop for creative professionals.

Continue reading “Make stunning updates to your images with text prompts using Generative Fill” »

The molecular synthesizer once thought to be impossible to make is now quite a possibility due to this discovery with electron beams that can heal crystalline structures and also build objects from electron beams this could one day be amplified to create even food with light into matter electron beams. Also this could create even life or even rebirth a universe or planet or sun really eventually anything that is matter. Really it is a molecular assembler with nearly limitless applications.

Electron beams can be used to heal nano-fractures in crystals instead of causing further damage to them, as initially expected by researchers who now report their surprise findings. Used to power microscopes that examine the smallest materials in the universe, electron beams may also be able to be used to create novel microstructures one atom at a time.

A feat once thought impossible, researchers at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities (UMN) behind the discovery said it had been assumed that using electron beams to study nanostructures carried the additional risk of exacerbating microscopic cracks and flaws already in the material.

Continue reading “Electron Beams Magically Heal Microscopic Fractures, May Also Enable Creation of Objects One Atom at a Time” »

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SCIENTISTS were today a step closer to resurrecting the extinct woolly mammoth, after dead animals were brought back to life.

For about 25 years, bird flu viruses typically originated in Asia – but the virus that began spreading in 2021 arose in Europe and Africa.

By Grace Wade

Scientists in Japan have managed to manipulate light as though it was being influenced by gravity. By carefully distorting a photonic crystal, the team was able to invoke “pseudogravity” to bend a beam of light, which could have useful applications in optics systems.

One of the quirks of Einstein’s theory of general relativity is that light is affected by the fabric of spacetime, which itself is distorted by gravity. That’s why objects with extremely high masses, like black holes or entire galaxies, wreak such havoc on light, bending its path and magnifying distant objects.

In recent studies, it was predicted that it should be possible to replicate this effect in photonic crystals. These structures are used to control light in optics devices and experiments, and they’re generally made by arranging multiple materials into periodic patterns. Distortions in these crystals, it was theorized, could deflect light waves in a way very similar to cosmic-scale gravitational lenses. The phenomenon was dubbed pseudogravity.

As Shor looked for applications for his quantum period-finding algorithm, he rediscovered a previously known but obscure mathematical theorem: For every number, there exists a periodic function whose periods are related to the number’s prime factors. So if there’s a number you want to factor, you can compute the corresponding function and then solve the problem using period finding — “exactly what quantum computers are so good at,” Regev said.

On a classical computer, this would be an agonizingly slow way to factor a large number — slower even than trying every possible factor. But Shor’s method speeds up the process exponentially, making period finding an ideal way to construct a fast quantum factoring algorithm.

Shor’s algorithm was one of a few key early results that transformed quantum computing from an obscure subfield of theoretical computer science to the juggernaut it is today. But putting the algorithm into practice is a daunting task, because quantum computers are notoriously susceptible to errors: In addition to the qubits required to perform their computations, they need many others doing extra work to keep them from failing. A recent paper by Ekerå and the Google researcher Craig Gidney estimates that using Shor’s algorithm to factor a security-standard 2,048-bit number (about 600 digits long) would require a quantum computer with 20 million qubits. Today’s state-of-the-art machines have at most a few hundred.

Pepper X is now the world’s hottest chilli pepper, breaking the record by over one million SHU.

I think in order to battle this fungal threat more beneficial fungi could be grown like mosses and other permaculture plants to prevent its spread on the farms.

The disease hits farmworkers and outdoor laborers disproportionately hard.