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LIVERMORE, Calif. — Blueshift Optics, owned by former Sandia employee Joey Carlson, is working to shift the way radioactive materials are detected, using technology that he helped create at Sandia National Laboratories.

Radiation detection has long been a critical aspect of national security and efforts to make the world safer.

“Agencies are trying to cast this wide net to catch nuclear smuggling, and this is one aspect of that effort,” said Sandia materials scientist Patrick Feng. “You could use this technology at a border crossing, in a handheld detector as someone enters a facility or fly it on a drone to map an area.”

Building a robot that’s both human-like and useful is a decades-old engineering dream inspired by popular science fiction. While the latest artificial intelligence craze has sparked another wave of investments in the quest to build a humanoid, most of the current prototypes are clumsy and impractical, looking better in staged performances than in real life. That hasn’t stopped a handful of startups from keeping at it. The intention is not to…

A recent study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets examines the 39th drilling sample collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars from a rock named “Sequoia”, which comes shortly after the pioneering robot passed its 4,000th sol, or Martian day, exploring the Red Planet. This sample was found to contain starkeyite, which is a magnesium sulfate mineral analogous to extremely dry climates such as Mars and holds the potential to help researchers better understand the climate of the Red Planet, specifically pertaining to how it got so dry.

Image of the drill hole made by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover collect a sample on Oct. 17, 2023, the 3,980th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

“The types of sulfate and carbonate minerals that Curiosity’s instruments have identified in the last year help us understand what Mars was like so long ago. We’ve been anticipating these results for decades, and now Sequoia will tell us even more,” said Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, who is a project scientist on the Curiosity mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NASA JPL) and one of almost three dozen co-authors on the study.

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL·E 3, held its first developer conference yesterday in San Francisco. In addition to revealing new products and model upgrades, CEO Sam Altman hinted at something much greater that may be arriving soon.

Credit: Tada Images.

Following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, OpenAI released a more powerful version based on GPT-4 in March 2023. This featured many improvements such as a larger text input length, more creative and nuanced responses, and improved safety and security.

The GPT platform is a no-code way to make custom AI agents for all sorts of tasks, and it’s available exclusively for ChatGPT Plus subscribers.

With the release of ChatGPT one year ago, OpenAI introduced the world to the idea of an AI chatbot that can seemingly do anything. Now, the company is releasing a platform for making custom versions of ChatGPT for specific use cases — no coding required.

In the coming weeks, these AI agents, which OpenAI is calling GPTs, will be accessible through the GPT Store. Details about how the store will look and work are scarce for now, though OpenAI is promising to eventually pay creators an unspecified amount based on how much their GPTs are used. GPTs will… More.


The creator of ChatGPT wants people making their own AI agents.

GPT-4 Turbo, currently in preview, will be three times cheaper for developers. Plus, OpenAI says it will now protect customers against copyright lawsuits.

OpenAI announced more improvements to its large language models, GPT-4 and GPT-3.5, including updated knowledge bases and a much longer context window. The company says it will also follow Google and Microsoft’s lead and begin protecting customers against copyright lawsuits.

GPT-4 Turbo, currently available via an API preview, has been trained with information dating to April 2023, the company announced Monday at its first-ever developer conference. The earlier version of GPT-4 released in March only learned from data dated up to September… More.


OpenAI’s GPT-4 now has a cheaper and more powerful version.

A golden opportunity has been unveiled by AI maker OpenAI for those of you who want to turn your use of ChatGPT and GPT-4 into a money-making activity.

Yes, that’s right, serious dough could be had. In short, a new feature known as GPTs gives you a solid chance to go from simply being a hobbyist or fun-filled user of generative AI into someone who garners nice warm cash for your online labors. Plus, whether you want to do so on a heady full-time basis or just as a part-time side hustle is entirely up to you.

In today’s column, I will lay out what this new announcement by OpenAI foretells and indicate how you can leverage the big break that has arisen. It is then up to you to decide what to do next.


OpenAI has unveiled the advent of GPTs, which are custom ChatGPT applets that you can devise and then make money from their usage. Here’s what you need to know.