Lifeboat Foundation

New telescope imagery suggests that stars can survive encounters with black holes, a phenomenon that has been modeled but seldom observed, astronomers say. Using an X-ray telescope orbiting the Earth, astronomers peered 1 billion light-years into deep space and observed black holes partially destroying the same stars over and over, according to the European Space Agency.

Of course, all stars are hot compared with anything we’re used to here on Earth. But while the Sun’s surface chills at a steady 6,000 degrees Kelvin, these stars’ extreme temperatures range from 100,000 to 180,000 degrees.

These are “stars which are a little bit outside the canonical evolution,” Klaus Werner of the University of Tuebingen’s Kepler Centre for Astro and Particle Physics, a co-author of the paper, tells Inverse. “These stars are strange.”

Even among the ultra-hot white dwarfs known by the designation PG1159, the selection that cropped up in this survey lack the helium normally found in their atmosphere: instead, they’ve burned it all away, fusing it into a solar atmosphere of pure carbon and oxygen.

An international study 13 years in the making demonstrates for the first time that degradation in the way DNA is organized and regulated — known as epigenetics — can drive aging in an organism, independently of changes to the genetic code itself.

Researchers confirmed an exoplanet, a planet that orbits another star, using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for the first time. Formally classified as LHS 475 b, the planet is almost exactly the same size as our own, clocking in at 99% of Earth’s diameter. The research team is led by Kevin Stevenson and Jacob Lustig-Yaeger, both of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

The planet is rocky and almost precisely the same size as Earth, but whips around its star in only two days.

The extent of losses faced by investors remains unknown so far.

FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that came crashing down in just a week in November last year, has now recovered assets worth $5 billion, its attorney told a U.S. court, BBC

Valued at over $32 billion just a year ago, the crypto exchange, with its head office in the Bahamas, faced a liquidity crunch. The founder, CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), filed for bankruptcy protection on November 11.

The company aims to hit a sales milestone of 1,000 electric trucks in 2023.

Tevva started commercial production of its medium-duty electric truck after it received the European Community Whole Vehicle Type Approval (ECWVTA). The British vehicle manufacturer will now be able to start mass production and sales of TEV75, its 7.5-tonne battery-electric truck. The critical regulatory approval, granted by the Vehicle Certification Agency (VCA) and the Swedish Transport Agency (STA), will enable Tevva to retail its product across the UK and Europe.

Continue reading “A British company starts mass production of its 7.5-tonne electric truck” »

As those who have read this column over time understand, I have a soapbox that involves authors, whether academics or consultants, pandering to management rather than teaching them. Sadly, Age of Invisible Machines.

The second, and larger issue was mentioned up top. Inventors have a habit, from long before Alfred Nobel, of ignoring the consequences of their inventions. The excuse is the same as scientists often give, that it’s not up to them to decide on the used and societal impact, they’re just discovering and inventing things. While that is true for theoretical science, it’s far past time for technologists focused on applications that directly impact society to give up that attempt to absolve themselves from societal impact.

The ethical AI movement is only an extension of regular movements in society, movements that try to understand how change impacts those societies and to do it from the beginning. Any good programmer looks at system issues from the design phase. Waiting until debugging is too late to create an effective system. Artificial intelligence will clearly impact society in major ways. It will redefine who can work and how society must address a change in the definition of work. It ties into the overvaluing of stocks because of the promise of solutions, in the lack of understanding of most people in what those solutions mean, and a real understanding, among a very few, of what that means.

Continue reading “Age Of Invisible Machines: An Impractical Guide To Hyperautomated Systems” »

FTX founder and former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried launched his own Substack newsletter today, in a very unusual move for someone who was recently arrested and is facing eight counts of U.S. criminal charges.

In a post titled “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview,” Bankman-Fried maintains his innocence surrounding the collapse and bankruptcy of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange he founded in 2019 that went on to raise $2 billion in funding and achieve a valuation of a staggering $32 billion.

The emergence in the last week of a particularly effective voice synthesis machine learning model called VALL-E has prompted a new wave of concern over the possibility of deepfake voices made quick and easy — quickfakes, if you will. But VALL-E is more iterative than breakthrough, and the capabilities aren’t so new as you might think. Whether that means you should be more or less worried is up to you.

Voice replication has been a subject of intense research for years, and the results have been good enough to power plenty of startups, like WellSaid, Papercup and Respeecher. The latter is even being used to create authorized voice reproductions of actors like James Earl Jones. Yes: from now on Darth Vader will be AI generated.

VALL-E, posted on GitHub by its creators at Microsoft last week, is a “neural codec language model” that uses a different approach to rendering voices than many before it. Its larger training corpus and some new methods allow it to create “high-quality personalized speech” using just three seconds of audio from a target speaker.