Lifeboat Foundation

Artificial intelligence powers more apps on your mobile devices than you may realize. Here’s how to take advantage of the technology — or turn it off.

A million bears walking on the streets of Hong Kong. A strawberry frog. A cat made out of spaghetti and meatballs.

These are just a few of the text descriptions that people have fed to cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems in recent weeks, which these systems — notably OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 and Google Research’s Imagen — can use to produce incredibly detailed, realistic-looking images.

The plant seen here will capture 40,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO₂) each year – 100 times more than the UK’s current largest facility and equivalent to taking 20,000 cars off the roads. The £20 million investment has been completed by Northwich-based Tata Chemicals Europe, one of Europe’s leading producers of sodium carbonate, salt and sodium bicarbonate.

The project will help to unlock the future of carbon capture and utilisation, as it proves the viability of the technology at a large scale, removing CO₂ from gas power plant emissions for use in high-end manufacturing applications.

In a world-first, the captured emissions are being purified to food and pharmaceutical grade, then used as raw material for a form of sodium bicarbonate that will be known as Ecokarb. This unique and innovative manufacturing process is patented in the UK, with further patents pending in key territories around the world. Ecokarb will be exported to more than 60 countries.

Unlike a 3D zoetrope, which animates a sequence of small changes in objects, a bloom animates as a single, self-contained sculpture. The animation effect of the flower is achieved by progressive rotations of the golden ratio, phi (ϕ), the same ratio that nature uses to generate the spiral patterns we see in pine cones and sunflowers. The rotational speed and frequency of the flower’s strobe light are synchronized so that a flash is produced each time the flower rotates 137.5° (the angular version of phi). The particular shape and behavior of each bloom is determined by a unique parametric seed that I call phi-nomial.

Sculpture: Blooms 2 by John Edmark.

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If you’re ready for connectivity on the move, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband may soon be the answer. The US Federal Communications Commission on Thursday gave the internet provider the greenlight to provide service on moving vehicles, boats, and planes.

The new authority should help SpaceX meet “the growing user demands that now require connectivity while on the move,” wrote FCC International Bureau Chief Tom Sullivan in the approval, “whether driving an RV across the country, moving a freighter from Europe to a U.S. port, or while on a domestic or international flight.”

After a yearlong restoration led by Marmol Radziner, Richard Neutra’s Lew House can now be rented for $26,000 a month.

This is the story of how one man, with a controversial past as a Nazi believed he had the knowledge and vision to make Kennedy’s dream a reality.

BEIJING, June 29 (Reuters) — An uncrewed Chinese spacecraft has acquired imagery data covering all of Mars, including visuals of its south pole, after circling the planet more than 1,300 times since early last year, state media reported on Wednesday.

China’s Tianwen-1 successfully reached the Red Planet in February 2021 on the country’s inaugural mission there. A robotic rover has since been deployed on the surface as an orbiter surveyed the planet from space.

Among the images taken from space were China’s first photographs of the Martian south pole, where almost all of the planet’s water resources are locked.

Under a microscope, mammalian tissues reveal their intricate and elegant architectures. But if you look at the same tissue after tumour formation, you will see bedlam. Itai Yanai, a computational biologist at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine in New York City, is trying to find order in this chaos. “There is a particular logic to how things are arranged, and spatial transcriptomics is helping us see that,” he says.

‘Spatial transcriptomics’ is a blanket term covering more than a dozen techniques for charting genome-scale gene-expression patterns in tissue samples, developed to complement single-cell RNA-sequencing techniques. Yet these single-cell sequencing methods have a downside — they can rapidly profile the messenger RNA content (or transcriptome) of large numbers of individual cells, but generally require physical disruption of the original tissue, which sacrifices crucial information about how cells are organized and can alter them in ways that might muddy later analyses. Immunologist Ido Amit at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, says that such experiments would sometimes leave his group questioning their results. “Is this really the in situ state, or are we just looking at something which is either not a major [factor] or even not real at all?”

By contrast, spatial transcriptomics allows researchers to study gene expression in intact samples, opening frontiers in cancer research and revealing previously inaccessible biology of otherwise well-characterized tissues. The resulting ‘atlases’ of spatial information can tell scientists which cells make up each tissue, how they are organized and how they communicate. But compiling those atlases isn’t easy, because methods for spatial transcriptomics generally represent a tension between two competing goals: broader transcriptome coverage and tighter spatial resolution. Developments in experimental and computational methods are now helping researchers to balance those aims — and improving cellular resolution in the process.