Lifeboat Foundation

Probably the biggest new feature for the iPhone 14, 14 Plus and 14 Pro isn’t one you’ll use ever day, but you’ll be glad you have it if you need it. The new phones have a built-in satellite connection that people can use to send emergency SOS messages in places where there’s no available cellular signal.

First, your iPhone will help you orient your phone in the direction you need to point it to get the best signal. Once you have a connection, you can open up a message interface that lets you communicate with emergency service providers. Apple says that because of satellite connectivity limits, it’ll take much longer to send messages than you’re used to, so the feature includes some automatic questions it prompts you to answer, like “is anyone hurt?” It’ll have auto-populated answers that you can tap to respond. Apple is also compressing messages to a third of their normal size to make sending them a little quicker.

Apple say that once the message is sent to the satellite, it then gets routed to emergency response centers; if those centers are only set up for voice calls, they’ll first be passed to a response center that’ll then get in touch with emergency response.

Y Combinator’s latest cohort of founders have opinions on the future of fintech. One-fifth of the accelerator’s Summer 2022 batch, which spans 240 companies, is working on solving issues in the financial space. The pitches range from building the Square for micro-merchants in Latin America to creating a way to angel invest in your favorite athlete.

And while the pitches are diverse, some concentrations show key ways that a group of vetted entrepreneurs are thinking about the landscape’s shift in light of finicky venture markets, a downturn, and some public market meltdowns. The most popular problem area among this batch’s fintech cohort has to do with payments, which is unsurprising. The story really begins with which focus made second place: neobanks.

With the image generator Stable Diffusion, you can conjure within seconds a potrait of Beyoncé as if painted by Vincent van Gogh, a cyberpunk cityscape in the style of 18th century Japanese artist Hokusai and a complex alien world straight out of science fiction. Released to the public just two weeks ago, it’s become one of several popular AI-powered text-to-image generators, including DALL-E 2, that have taken the internet by storm.

Now, the company behind Stable Diffusion is in discussions to raise $100 million from investors, according to three people with knowledge of the matter.

Continue reading “Startup Behind AI Image Generator Stable Diffusion Is In Talks To Raise At A Valuation Up To $1 Billion” »

Circa 2021 face_with_colon_three

Welwitschia mirabilis is a unique plant that only has two leaves, but it can survive in hostile conditions of the African desert. Here, the authors report its chromosome-level genome assembly and discuss how gene function and regulation have given rise to its unique morphology and environmental adaptions.

Training a machine-learning model to effectively perform a task, such as image classification, involves showing the model thousands, millions, or even billions of example images. Gathering such enormous datasets can be especially challenging when privacy is a concern, such as with medical images. Researchers from MIT and the MIT-born startup DynamoFL have now taken one popular solution to this problem, known as federated learning, and made it faster and more accurate.

Federated learning is a collaborative method for training a machine-learning model that keeps sensitive user data private. Hundreds or thousands of users each train their own model using their own data on their own device. Then users transfer their models to a central server, which combines them to come up with a better model that it sends back to all users.

A collection of hospitals located around the world, for example, could use this method to train a machine-learning model that identifies brain tumors in medical images, while keeping patient data secure on their local servers.

The head of Google parent company Alphabet chose an funny example to allay fears of artificial intelligence.

Scientists have detected a sunspot that’s so huge it’s changing the way our sun vibrates.

Sunspots appear as dark blotches on the sun’s surface because they are cooler than the surrounding areas. They form where magnetic fields are particularly strong, driven by the electrically charged gases that constantly swirl inside our nearest star.

Sometimes these magnetic fields can be so intense that they prevent some heat from reaching the surface, forming a sunspot.

According to research from the Center for Genomic Regulation (CRG) published in the journal Nature, immature human egg cells bypass a critical metabolic process believed to be necessary for producing energy.

The cells modify their metabolism to stop producing reactive oxygen species, dangerous molecules that can accumulate, damage DNA

DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule composed of two long strands of nucleotides that coil around each other to form a double helix. It is the hereditary material in humans and almost all other organisms that carries genetic instructions for development, functioning, growth, and reproduction. Nearly every cell in a person’s body has the same DNA. Most DNA is located in the cell nucleus (where it is called nuclear DNA), but a small amount of DNA can also be found in the mitochondria (where it is called mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA).

A look at revolutionary new materials with seemingly impossible properties.
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Metamaterials offer many properties normally not found in nature, from superior lenses and communications to stealth applications, potentially offering invisibility. Today we’ll examine the science behind that and look at many other possible applications.

AMA thread tonight (Thursday March 29) at 6 PM EST over at /r/space on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/881rbl/ama_this_is_i…_anything/

Continue reading “Advanced Metamaterials” »