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“It was very curiosity-driven,” says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University who led the effort. “We thought: ‘Can we do it? Let’s do it, let’s put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality.’”

“I have colleagues who are at the forefront in a field we call electronic plants. … We have worked with dead woods for this project, but the next step might be to integrate it also into living plants.” —Isak Engquist, Linköping University.

Even though the wooden transistor still awaits its killer app, the idea to build wood-based electronics is not as crazy as it sounds. A recent review of wood-based materials reads, “Around 300 million years of tree evolution has yielded over 60,000 woody species, each of which is an engineering masterpiece of nature.” Wood has great structural stability while being highly porous and efficiently transporting water and nutrients. The researchers leveraged these properties to create conducting channels inside the wood’s pores and electrochemically modulate their conductivity with the help of a penetrating electrolyte.

A developer release of Microsoft’s Edge browser has a new address bar advertisement for the company’s Bing AI — but it only appears when the user goes to its main competitor’s site at bard.google.com.

Microsoft’s Edge can be a great Chromium browser alternative to Google’s Chrome, but the former is displaying some annoying new rivalry antics: advertising Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot while you’re trying out Google’s Bard AI. As pointed out by developer and Twitter user Vitor de Lucca, a new developer version of Edge will now display a new Bing ad next to the Google Bard URL.

When pointing Edge to bard.google.


Microsoft adds a Bing AI ad to Edge’s address bar when trying Google Bard.

VC firms including Tiger Global, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive and K2 Global picking up new shares, according to documents seen by TechCrunch. A source tells us Founders Fund is also investing. Altogether the VCs have put in just over $300 million at a valuation of $27 billion — $29 billion.


Updated to note that the Microsoft investment closed in January. The money from VCs reported here, part of a tender offer, is separate to that.

OpenAI, the startup behind the widely used conversational AI model ChatGPT, has picked up new backers, TechCrunch has learned.

There is a new war happening online: the browser war. Tech companies everywhere are seeking to integrate AI in browsers in an attempt to please and attract users looking for the best possible search experience.

This is according to a new article by FOX Business published on Friday.

This phenomenon was amplified with Microsoft’s announcement earlier this year that it would roll out a new AI-powered version of its Bing search engine and Edge web browser that will incorporate OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“The new capability of low thermal budget growth on an 8-inch scale enables the integration of this material with silicon CMOS technology and paves the way for its future electronics application.”

With our pockets and houses filling with electronic gadgets and AI and Big Data fueling the rise of data centers, there is a need for more computer chips— more powerful, potent, and denser than ever.

These chips are traditionally made with boxy 3D materials bulky in nature, making stacking these into layers difficult.

Using an advanced method, researchers have discovered seven elements, including the rare substance terbium, which has never before been found in any exoplanet’s atmosphere.

Last week.

On the heels of the previous discovery, scientists have detected another element, Terbium, in an exoplanet’s atmosphere for the first time. Known as KELT-9, the exoplanet is said to be the galaxy’s hottest, orbiting its distant star about 670 light years from Earth.

The quarterly reports by these tech behemoths show their efforts to increase AI productivity in the face of growing economic worries.

The US tech giants like Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are increasing their large language model (LLM) investments as a show of their dedication to utilizing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) while cutting costs and jobs.

Since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022, these businesses have put their artificial intelligence AI models on steroids to compete in the market, CNBC reported on Friday.


The IT behemoths Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta are increasing their large language model (LLM) investments as a show of their dedication to utilizing the power of artificial intelligence (AI) while cutting costs and jobs.

“We can now ask the robots about past and future missions and get an answer in real-time.”

A team of programmers has outfitted Boston Dynamics’ robot dog, Spot, with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Text-to-Speech speech modulation in a viral video.

Santiago Valdarrama, a machine learning engineer, tweeted about the successful integration, which allows the robot to answer inquiries about its missions in real-time, considerably boosting data query efficiency, in a viral video on Twitter.