Lifeboat Foundation

😗year 2022

Bigger isn’t always better, but when the Looking Glass Factory announces a beast of a holographic display, it tickles our rods, cones and curiosity equally. The screen doesn’t require glasses or other tech to view the effects. Viewable by groups of 50 people, the display generates up to 100 different perspectives of 3D content from 100 million points of light every 60th of a second.

The company claims its 8K-resolution, 65-inch display is five times larger than any other 3D holo display ever shown off. The new display is “group viewable,” meaning that it differs from a lot of the other offerings out there that can be seen by only one person at a time. The company highlights marketing, engineering and design-forward applications as possible uses. The new display is the fourth display in Looking Glass Factory’s growing (geddit?!) lineup.

Continue reading “The world’s largest holographic display is here” »

The company is terminating free trials owing to “exceptional demand and trial misuse.”

After users used its AI picture generator to produce high-profile deep fakes, Midjourney has decided to stop offering it for free. The company is terminating free trials owing to “exceptional demand and trial misuse,” according to CEO David Holz on Discord.

Midjourney tries to overcome unwanted attention nowadays, primarily because of the “arrested Donald Trump.” Also, deep fake Pope Francis wearing a trendy coat drew attention. Although the images were soon determined to be fake, there is a worry that malicious actors could distribute false information using Midjourney, OpenAI’s DALL-E, and other similar generators.

Continue reading “Midjourney: AI picture generator is now restricted to tackle misuse” »

The AI race has just gone global.

Chinese e-commerce and technology giant, Alibaba, unveiled its generative artificial intelligence (AI) model Tongyi Qianwen, a ChatGPT-like service, earlier today. The service can work in English and Chinese and will be rolled out across Alibaba products, ranging from Slack-like communication apps to smart home speakers.

Interest in the area of large language models has increased in the recent past after ChatGPT took the world by storm.

Continue reading “AI race: Chinese giant Alibaba enters the fray with its bilingual AI model” »

The data centers that help train ChatGPT-like AI are very ‘thirsty,’ finds a new study.

A new study has uncovered how much water is consumed when training large AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. The estimates of AI water consumption were presented by researchers from the Universities of Colorado Riverside and Texas Arlington in a pre-print article titled “Making AI Less ‘Thirsty.’”

Continue reading “GPT-3 training consumed 700k liters of water, ‘enough for producing 370 BMWs’” »

From high-tech fighting machines to supercomputers and killer robots, science fiction has a lot to say about war. You might be surprised to learn that some governments (including the UK and France) are now turning their attention to these fantastical stories as a way to think about possible futures and try and ward off any potential threats.

For many years now, science fiction writers have made prophesies about futuristic technologies that have later become a reality. In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke famously predicted the internet. And in 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted that modern life would become impossible without computers.

Continue reading “Science Fiction Is Influencing How We Conduct War And We Might Not Like The Results” »

A new material was used in a simple snail robot, but it could one day make artificial nervous systems for more complex machines.

A team of researchers designed a two-dimensional photonic time crystal that they say could have applications in technologies like transmitters and lasers.

Despite their name, photonic time crystals have little in common with time crystals, a phase of matter first proposed in 2012 and observed several years later. The fundamental commonality is that both crystals have structural patterns over time, but time crystals are quantum materials—the atoms are suspended in quantum states—while photonic time crystals are artificial materials not found in nature and they are not necessarily suspended in quantum states.

While a pandemic unleashed by a disease from the distant past sounds like the plot of a sci-fi movie, scientists warn that the risks, though low, are underappreciated. Chemical and radioactive waste that dates back to the Cold War, which has the potential to harm wildlife and disrupt ecosystems, may also be released during thaws.

Permafrost covers a fifth of the Northern Hemisphere, having underpinned the Arctic tundra and boreal forests of Alaska, Canada and Russia for millennia. It serves as a kind of time capsule, preserving — in addition to ancient viruses — the mummified remains of a number of extinct animals that scientist have been able to unearth and study in recent years, including two cave lion cubs and a woolly rhino.

Warmer temperatures in the Arctic are thawing the region’s permafrost — a frozen layer of soil beneath the ground — and potentially stirring viruses that, after lying dormant for tens of thousands of years, could endanger animal and human health.

Continue reading “Scientists have revived a ‘zombie’ virus that spent 48,500 years in permafrost” »

The Tibetan Plateau, the highest and largest plateau above sea level, is one of the harshest environments settled by humans. It has a cold and arid environment and its elevation often surpasses 4,000 meters above sea level (masl). The plateau covers a wide expanse of Asia—approximately 2.5 million square kilometers—and is home to over 7 million people, primarily belonging to the Tibetan and Sherpa ethnic groups.

However, our understanding of their origins and history on the plateau is patchy. Despite a rich archaeological context spanning the plateau, sampling of DNA from ancient humans has been limited to a thin slice of the southwestern plateau in the Himalayas.

Now, a study published in Science Advances led by Prof. Fu Qiaomei from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has filled this gap by sequencing the genomes of 89 ancient humans dating back to 5,100 BP from 29 archaeological sites spanning the Tibetan Plateau.