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Aug 9, 2023

Google, record labels working on deal covering musical “deepfakes”

Posted by in categories: media & arts, robotics/AI

“Frank Sinatra’s voice has been used on a version of the hip-hop song ”Gangsta’s Paradise,” while Johnny Cash’s has been deployed on the pop single ”Barbie Girl.” A YouTube user called PluggingAI offers songs imitating the voices of the deceased rappers Tupac and Notorious B.I.G.

”An artist’s voice is often the most valuable part of their livelihood and public persona, and to steal it, no matter the means, is wrong,” Universal Music general counsel Jeffrey Harleston told US lawmakers last month.

Discussions between Google and Universal Music are at an early stage, and no product launch is imminent, but the goal is to develop a tool for fans to create these tracks legitimately, and pay the owners of the copyrights for it, said people close to the situation. Artists would have the choice to opt in, the people said.

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Aug 9, 2023

SpaceX Starship Rocket Takes a Step Closer to Flight

Posted by in category: space travel

SpaceX next-generation Starship rocket took a major step forward on August 6, when it conducted a successful static fire test. The test involved firing all 33 Raptor engines on the Booster 9 prototype, which is the first stage of the Starship rocket.

Aug 9, 2023

Carl Jung — How To Own Yourself (Jungian Philosophy)

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, computing, neuroscience

How To Own Yourself (Jungian Philosophy)
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In this video we will be talking about how to own yourself from the philosophy of Carl Jung. He found his own school of psychology, called analytical psychology and his philosophy is dubbed as “Jungian philosophy”. Within the field of psychology, Jung is famously known for introducing the terms ‘introvert’ and ‘extravert,’ introducing archetypes of the psyche and classifying the boundary between the unconscious and conscious. Our consciousness includes everything that we know about ourselves; the unconsciousness entails everything that is part of us but that we are not aware of. Jung introduced ‘the ego’ and ‘the persona’ as our consciousness, and ‘the shadow’ and ‘the animus and anima’ as the parts that make up our unconsciousness. The shadow is one of the toughest, most intimidating parts to handle: it exists out of everything about ourselves that we dislike, which is why we often refuse to acknowledge it as a part of us. However, what many people don’t know is that not facing the shadow can be an even more intense blow on your self-esteem. But facing it is actually the only way to gain true control over yourself and who you are.

Continue reading “Carl Jung — How To Own Yourself (Jungian Philosophy)” »

Aug 9, 2023

Childhood cancer: ‘New’ immune system responds better to therapy

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Scientists at St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute and the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen have shown that immunotherapy after stem cell transplantation effectively combats certain nerve tumors in children. Crucially, stem cells from a parent provide children with a new immune system that responds much better to immunotherapies. These results of an early clinical trial were published in the prestigious Journal of Clinical Oncology.

Childhood tumors of the nervous system, known as neuroblastomas, are associated with an unfavorable prognosis if the tumor is classified as a high-risk type. The chances are particularly poor for patients in the relapsed stage. In this case, immunotherapy following stem cell transplantation is now associated with in a substantial proportion of the patients included in a recent study. Compared to an earlier study the survival rate was increased.

“After the transplantation of from a parent, the patients are equipped with a new immune system. This enables a better immune response to the subsequent immunotherapy and clearly improves the outcome,” explains Prof. Ruth Ladenstein, MD, head of the Studies & Statistics group for Integrated Research and Projects (S2IRP) at St. Anna Children’s Cancer Research Institute and professor at the Department of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine at MedUni Vienna, who played a key role as co-first author.

Aug 9, 2023

Dual-wavelength technology deactivates antibiotic-resistant bacterium

Posted by in category: biotech/medical

Scientists in New Zealand have combined two wavelengths of light to deactivate a bacterium that is i.

Aug 9, 2023

NASA regains contact with Voyager 2 after it went dark for two weeks

Posted by in category: space

NASA has reestablished connection with Voyager 2 after a tense two weeks of not hearing anything from the probe. On July 21st, the agency lost contact with Voyager 2 following a series of planned commands that mistakenly pointed it two degrees away from our planet. While it is scheduled to automatically reset its orientation on October 15th, it’s not surprising that NASA scientists didn’t just wait for that date to know whether the spacecraft is still running. Voyager 2 was launched way back in 1977, and it’s one of the only two probes sending us back valuable data on interstellar space.

For a few days after July 21st, NASA wasn’t even sure what the spacecraft’s condition was. It wasn’t until August 1st that multiple ground antennas from the Deep Space Network (DSN) were able to detect a carrier signal from the probe. A carrier signal is what a spacecraft uses to beam data back to the ground, but NASA said the one DSN detected was too weak to be able to transmit any information. Still, it was enough to confirm that Voyager 2 was still working and that it hadn’t deviated from its trajectory.

Instead of simply waiting for October, Voyager’s ground team decided to take action. They concocted a plan to “shout” a command to the spacecraft across over 12.3 billion miles of space using the DSN, telling it to turn its antenna back to Earth. The whole process illustrated just how vast outer space truly is: It took 18.5 hours for that message to reach the probe, and another 18.5 hours for NASA to start receiving science and telemetry data again, indicating that Voyager 2 had received the command.

Aug 9, 2023

Alzheimer’s: Bodybuilding supplement may improve memory

Posted by in categories: biotech/medical, neuroscience

A new study suggests that a bodybuilding supplement may help protect against cognitive decline by reducing amyloid plaque buildup, at least in mice.

Aug 9, 2023

More Efficient Than Natural Photosynthesis — New Photocatalytic System Converts Carbon Dioxide Into Valuable Fuel

Posted by in category: energy

A joint research team from the City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and collaborators recently developed a stable artificial photocatalytic system that is more efficient than natural photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis is how plants and some microorganisms use sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water.

Aug 9, 2023

Could a Large Language Model Be Conscious?

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

On the twelfth challenge: Suppose that in the next decade or two, we meet all the engineering challenges in a single system. Will we then have a conscious AI systems? Not everyone will agree that we do. But if someone disagrees, we can ask once again: what is the X that is missing? And could that X be built into an AI system?

My conclusion is that within the next decade, even if we don’t have human-level artificial general intelligence, we may well have systems that are serious candidates for consciousness. There are many challenges on the path to consciousness in machine learning systems, but meeting those challenges yields a possible research program toward conscious AI.

I’ll finish by reiterating the ethical challenge.4 I’m not asserting that we should pursue this research program. If you think conscious AI is desirable, the program can serve as a sort of roadmap for getting there. If you think conscious AI is something to avoid, then the program can highlight paths that are best avoided. I’d be especially cautious about creating agent models. That said, I think it’s likely that researchers will pursue many of the elements of this research program, whether or not they think of this as pursuing AI consciousness. It could be a disaster to stumble upon AI consciousness unknowingly and unreflectively. So I hope that making these possible paths explicit at least helps us to think about conscious AI reflectively and to handle these issues with care.

Aug 9, 2023

HBP researchers identify three new human brain areas involved in sexual sensation, motor coordination, and music processing

Posted by in categories: mapping, media & arts, neuroscience

HBP researchers from Germany performed detailed cytoarchitectonic mapping of distinct areas in a human cortical region called frontal operculum and, using connectivity modelling, linked the areas to a variety of different functions including sexual sensation, muscle coordination as well as music and language processing.

The study contributes to the further unravelling of the relationship of the human brain’s structure with function, and is the first proof-of-concept of structural and functional connectivity analysis of the frontal operculum. The newly identified cytoarchitectonic areas have been made publicly available as part of the Julich-Brain Atlas on the EBRAINS platform, inviting for future research to further characterise this brain region.

Based on cell-body stained histological sections in ten postmortem brains (five females and five males), HBP researchers from Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and Research Centre Jülich identified three new areas in the frontal operculum: Op5, Op6 and Op7. Each of these areas had a distinct cytoarchitecture. Connectivity modelling showed that each area could be ascribed a distinct functional role.