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As a rather commercially successful author once wrote, “the night is dark and full of terrors, the day bright and beautiful and full of hope.” It’s fitting imagery for AI, which like all tech has its upsides and downsides.

Art-generating models like Stable Diffusion, for instance, have led to incredible outpourings of creativity, powering apps and even entirely new business models. On the other hand, its open source nature lets bad actors use it to create deepfakes at scale — all while artists protest that it’s profiting off of their work.

What’s on deck for AI in 2023? Will regulation rein in the worst of what AI brings, or are the floodgates open? Will powerful, transformative new forms of AI emerge, à la ChatGPT, disrupting industries once thought safe from automation?

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As far as scores go, the laptop version of the RTX 4,080 scored 178,038 points. The Geekbench OpenCL database shows that the average score for an RTX 3,080 Ti laptop GPU is 136,008, and for an RTX 3,080 — 125,425. This means that the upcoming RTX 4,080 may be up to 30% faster than the last-gen RTX 3,080 Ti and up to 42% faster than its predecessor, the RTX 3080.

These scores certainly bode well for the mobile iteration of the RTX 4080. In its desktop version, the card is certainly powerful, but the RTX 4,090 is often a better deal due to the way these cards are priced.

Rumor has it that Nvidia will have several new products up its sleeve, set to come out early in the new year. The desktop RTX 4,070 Ti, which may just be the previously “unlaunched” RTX 4,080 12GB, is said to make an appearance. We may also learn more about upcoming laptop GPUs. Stay tuned for more news during Nvidia’s CES 2023 keynote on January 3.

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A team of researchers at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, working with a colleague at the University of Texas at Austin and another from Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, has found evidence of ripe conditions for planet formation in the vicinity of two closely orbiting protostars.

In their paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the group describes their observations and outline what might be learned from future study of the star system.

The work by the team on this new effort came on the heels of work done by another team that discovered a pair of protostars still in the very early stages of their development—in their first 500,000 years of existence. In this new effort, the researchers have taken a closer look at the two protostars and also the environment in which they exist.

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In a recent study published in Cell, researchers used a multi-omics approach to profile the gut microbiomes and metabolomes of mothers and infants to determine the vertical and horizontal transmission of bacterial species and strains as well as individual genes and understand the dynamics of the gut microbiome assembly that shape the development of the infant before and after birth.

The vertical transmission of gut bacteria from mother to fetus during pregnancy and the horizontal transfer of microbes through breast milk plays a vital role in the physical and cognitive development of the infant long after birth. Studies have shown associations between the gut microbiota composition of breastmilk and the development of the infant’s immune system, as well as autoimmune conditions and allergies. Furthermore, allergies and autoimmune disorders have also been linked to exogenous proteins in infant formula.

Metabolites produced by gut microbiota are also associated with the infant’s cognitive development. However, the development of gut microbiomes and metabolomes in the perinatal stage and their role in infant development remains unclear.

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Support human longevity research.

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100% of your donation will go directly to our three partner nonprofits fighting the diseases of aging. Half will be used for anti-aging work that is currently underway. The rest will be invested in perpetual endowments that will provide ongoing support for this work — forever. Aging affects us all. Help us help you stay healthier for longer. Make your donation today.

Continue reading “Lifespan.io End of Year 2022 Fundraiser” | >

//Although lipomatosis is very common and increases with age, scientists have previously devoted little discussion and research to it. Scientists at Uppsala University have just published a study that offers significant insights into the causes of human lymph node function decline with aging and the effects on immune system performance.

Scientists carefully examined more than 200 lymph nodes to show that lipomatosis starts in the medulla, which is the center of the lymph node. They also provided evidence connecting lipomatosis to converting lymph node supporting cells (fibroblasts) into adipocytes (fat cells). They also demonstrate that fibroblast subtypes in the medulla are more likely to develop into adipocytes.\.

The study is a first step toward understanding why lipomatosis occur.

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Kepler-1658b’s orbit is getting a little shorter — and therefore a little closer to the blazing surface of its star — every year.

Finding doomed planets is slow, painstaking work. It took thirteen years of close observation — first with Kepler and some of the most powerful telescopes here on Earth, and then with NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in 2018 — to notice the slow shrinking of Kepler-1658b’s orbit. Recognizing the signs of deadly orbital decay in other exoplanets is going to take a similar amount of time and a similar volume of data, but Vissapragada and his colleagues say they’re getting there.

“We should begin to see hints of orbital decay for these planets within the next decade,” he and his colleagues write in their recent paper.

As for Kepler-1658b, it’s got about 2.5 million years left. When the time comes, whoever is watching (from whatever alien world harbors astronomers in the distant future) won’t see the planet simply fall into the star’s outer layers and burn up, like a meteor falling into Earth’s atmosphere. Instead, the same tidal forces that sealed its fate will probably rip the planet apart shortly before it takes the final plunge. Something similar probably happened to long-dead moons of planets like Saturn, which now make up parts of the planet’s famous ring system.

Continue reading “Astronomers find a star pulling its giant exoplanet into a death spiral” | >