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Blog – Page 2476

An international team of astrophysicists including Princeton’s Andy Goulding has discovered the most distant supermassive black hole ever found, using two NASA space telescopes: the Chandra X-ray Observatory (Chandra) and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

The black hole, which is an estimated 10 to 100 million times more massive than our sun, is 13.2 billion light-years away in the galaxy UHZ-1, which means the telescopes are peering back in time to when the universe was “extremely young,” Goulding said — only about 450 million years old.

“This is one of the most dramatic discoveries to come out of the James Webb Space Telescope” and the discovery of the most distant growing supermassive black hole known, said Michael Strauss, professor and chair of astrophysical sciences at Princeton, who discussed the findings with the researchers but was not part of the research team. “Indeed, it completely smashes the old record.”

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Tesla has signed a deal with the EG Group, a massive gas station and convenience store operator, to sell its Supercharger hardware to be deployed as an EG-branded product.

It’s the second of such deals that Tesla has made in just a few weeks.

Last month, Tesla surprised many when it announced it reached a deal with BP to sell them $100 million worth of Supercharger hardware to be deployed at BP gas stations across the US under the BP brand.

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In a milestone achievement, a whole chromosome has been created from scratch by scientists for the first time ever.

The tRNA Neochromosome is a man-made chromosome of the common baker’s yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It may soon allow for the creation of synthetic and superior yeast cells, according to a collection of new papers in the scientific journals Cell and Cell Genomics.

This discovery is the newest in an international project called Sc2.0, which has also synthesized all 16 of the yeast’s chromosomes with an aim to combine them into a functional cell that might help make yeast faster, more resilient and more productive.

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The government plans to establish a new ¥1 trillion ($6.6 billion) fund in a bid to develop the country’s outer space industry, as starry-eyed officials push to enhance Japan’s capabilities.

The ¥1 trillion fund will be allocated over a 10-year period for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), an Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Ministry spokesperson said. Some ¥300 billion has been set aside for the fund in the latest supplementary budget approved by the Cabinet on Friday.

“We believe it is a necessary fund to speed up our country’s space development so we don’t lag behind the increasingly intensifying international competition,” Sanae Takaichi, minister in charge of space development, said in a news conference last week.

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On Monday, Nvidia announced the HGX H200 Tensor Core GPU, which utilizes the Hopper architecture to accelerate AI applications. It’s a follow-up of the H100 GPU, released last year and previously Nvidia’s most powerful AI GPU chip. If widely deployed, it could lead to far more powerful AI models—and faster response times for existing ones like ChatGPT—in the near future.

According to experts, lack of computing power (often called “compute”) has been a major bottleneck of AI progress this past year, hindering deployments of existing AI models and slowing the development of new ones. Shortages of powerful GPUs that accelerate AI models are largely to blame. One way to alleviate the compute bottleneck is to make more chips, but you can also make AI chips more powerful. That second approach may make the H200 an attractive product for cloud providers.

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The “bounties” feature has mostly been used to recreate women (big surprise.)

Civitai, an online marketplace for sharing AI models, just introduced a new feature called “bounties” to encourage its community to develop passable deepfakes of real people, as originally reported by 404 Media.

Popular AI platform Civitai just launched a feature called ‘bounties’ that encourages the community to create passable deepfakes upon request. The best one gets some fake money.

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