Lifeboat Foundation

Microsoft announced new AI-powered classroom tools today. The company sees its new “Learning Accelerators” as helping students sharpen their speaking and math skills — while making teachers’ jobs a little easier — as children prepare for an even more technologically enhanced world.

Speaker Progress is a new AI classroom tool for teachers. Microsoft says it saves them time by “streamlining the process of creating, reviewing, and analyzing speaking and presentation assignments for students, groups, and classrooms.” It can provide tidy summaries of presentation-based skills while highlighting areas to improve. Additionally, it lets teachers review student recordings, identify their needs and track progress.

It will be a companion for Speaker Coach, an existing feature Microsoft launched in 2021 that provides one-on-one speaking guidance and feedback. For example, it uses AI to give real-time pointers on pacing, pitch and filler words. “Speaker Coach is one of those tools that kind of was a lightbulb tool for a lot of students that I’ve worked with,” said an unnamed teacher in a Microsoft launch video. “Being able to practice and get real-time feedback is where Speaker Coach really comes in and helps our students, and it even helps us as adults.”

It’s a hot new early dark energy summer.

We’re still not sure exactly what dark energy is, but it may have played a key role in the early universe.

Physicists can’t see or measure dark energy (hence the name). The only clue that it exists is how it affects the rest of the universe; dark energy is the force that’s driving the universe to keep expanding faster. Physicists Florian Niedermann of Stockholm University and Martin Sloth of the University of Southern Denmark propose that if dark energy formed bubbles in the dark plasma of the early universe, it could solve one of the biggest mysteries in modern physics.

Continue reading “Dark Energy Bubbles Could Explain Why The Universe Is Expanding So Fast” »

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Aug 27 2019, 17:33 UTC

Continue reading “Footage Captures Monkey Using Sharpened Rock To Smash Through Glass At China Zoo” »

As impressive as AI image and text generation are, they pale in comparison to the wow factor of video that gets the same treatment.

1920s Startrek TOS Series

Let’s imagine what current movies/series would be like in 1920…//

Researchers at the University of Göttingen have created a new approach to generate colored X-ray images. Previously, the only way to determine the chemical composition and arrangement of components in a sample using X-ray fluorescence analysis was to focus X-rays on the entire sample and scan it, which was both time-consuming and costly. The new method allows for the creation of an image of a large area with just one exposure, eliminating the need for focusing and scanning. The findings were published in the journal Optica.

In contrast to visible light, there are no comparably powerful lenses for “invisible” radiation, such as X-ray, neutron, or gamma radiation. However, these types of radiation are essential, for example, in nuclear medicine and radiology, as well as in industrial testing and material analysis.

Uses for X-ray fluorescence include analyzing the composition of chemicals in paintings and cultural artifacts to determine authenticity, origin, or production technique, or the analysis of soil samples or plants in environmental protection. The quality and purity of semiconductor components and computer chips can also be checked using X-ray fluorescence analysis.

Physics gets strange at the atomic scale. Scientists are utilizing quantum analog simulators – laboratory experiments that involve cooling numerous atoms to low temperatures and examining them using precisely calibrated lasers and magnets – to uncover, harness, and control these unusual quantum effects.

Scientists hope that any new understanding gained from quantum simulators will provide blueprints for designing new exotic materials, smarter and more efficient electronics, and practical quantum computers. But in order to reap the insights from quantum simulators, scientists first have to trust them.

That is, they have to be sure that their quantum device has “high fidelity” and accurately reflects quantum behavior. For instance, if a system of atoms is easily influenced by external noise, researchers could assume a quantum effect where there is none. But there has been no reliable way to characterize the fidelity of quantum analog simulators, until now.

Explore what would happen if humans were suddenly eradicated from the world, and the Earth was left to heal itself. From the safety of nuclear power plants to the fate of pets, livestock, and wild animals, this video takes a detailed look at the environmental and societal impacts of such a scenario. Discover how air quality and greenhouse gas emissions would change and the Earth’s temperature would slowly return to its pre-industrial levels.

A more frightening implication of the fermi paradox.

The berserker hypothesis, also known as the deadly probes scenario, is the idea that humans have not yet detected intelligent alien life in the universe because it has been systematically destroyed by a series of lethal Von Neumann probes.^[1][2] The hypothesis is named after the Berserker series of novels (1963−2005) written by Fred Saberhagen.^[1]

The hypothesis has no single known proposer, and instead is thought to have emerged over time in response to the Hart–Tipler conjecture,^[3] or the idea that an absence of detectable Von Neumann probes is contrapositive evidence that no intelligent life exists outside of the Sun’s Solar System. According to the berserker hypothesis, an absence of such probes is not evidence of life’s absence, since interstellar probes could “go berserk” and destroy other civilizations, before self-destructing.

In his 1983 paper “The Great Silence”, astronomer David Brin summarized the frightening implications of the berserker hypothesis: it is entirely compatible with all the facts and logic of the Fermi paradox, but would mean that there exists no intelligent life left to be discovered. In the worst-case scenario, humanity has already alerted others to its existence, and is next in line to be destroyed.^[4].