Lifeboat Foundation

SHANGHAI, March 22 (Reuters) — Not a single country managed to meet the World Health Organization’s (WHO) air quality standard in 2021, a survey of pollution data in 6,475 cities showed on Tuesday, and smog even rebounded in some regions after a COVID-related dip.

The WHO recommends that average annual readings of small and hazardous airborne particles known as PM2.5 should be no more than 5 micrograms per cubic metre after changing its guidelines last year, saying that even low concentrations caused significant health risks.

But only 3.4% of the surveyed cities met the standard in 2021, according to data complied by IQAir, a Swiss pollution technology company that monitors air quality. As many as 93 cities saw PM2.5 levels at 10 times the recommended level.

Russia is forcing Google to delist URLs associated with virtual private networks, or VPNs, but almost half a million Russians are downloading the technology that allows them to obscure their internet usage and access government-blocked websites.

Clearly, Russians are looking for uncensored information about their government’s war against Ukraine.

“Surfshark conducted an analysis showing that the Russian telecoms regulator (Roskomnadzor) has forced Google to delist more than 36,000 URLs that link to VPN services over the past month,” a Surfshark representative told me via email. (The company offers a VPN product.) “The most significant spike of requests was recorded amid the second week of the war, when the Kremlin banned various media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, while others left due to a ‘fake news’ law.”

Proponents of new products that allow anyone to apply artificial intelligence believe the “no-code” movement will change the world. Here’s how some “citizen developers” are using the products.

Whether it’s photovoltaics or fusion, sooner or later, human civilization must turn to renewable energies. This is deemed inevitable, considering the ever-growing energy demands of humanity and the finite nature of fossil fuels. Much research has been pursued in order to develop alternative sources of energy, most of which use electricity as the main energy carrier. The extensive R&D in renewables has been accompanied by gradual societal changes as the world adopted new products and devices running on renewables. The most striking change has been the rapid adoption of electric vehicles. While they were rarely seen on the roads even 10 years ago, now, millions of electric cars are being sold annually. The electric car market is one of the most rapidly growing sectors.

Unlike traditional cars, which derive energy from the combustion of hydrocarbon fuels, electric vehicles rely on batteries as the storage medium for their energy. For a long time, batteries had far lower energy density than those offered by hydrocarbons, which resulted in very low ranges of early electric vehicles. However, gradual improvement in battery technologies eventually allowed the drive ranges of electric cars to be within acceptable levels in comparison to gasoline-burning cars. It is no understatement that the improvement in battery storage technology was one of the main technical bottlenecks that had to be solved in order to kickstart the current electric vehicle revolution.

However, despite the vast improvements in battery technology, today’s consumers of electric vehicles face another difficulty: slow battery charging speed. Currently, cars take about 10 hours to fully recharge at home. Even the fastest superchargers at the charging stations require up to 20 to 40 minutes to fully recharge the vehicles. This creates additional costs and inconvenience to the customers.

San Francisco firm Aidlin Darling Design has completed a low-slung home in California’s Palm Desert that is intended to contrast the boulders and trees found in its remote setting.

The three-bedroom family home is located on a rocky plateau in the arid landscape, with views of the Coachella Valley and San Jacinto Mountain Range.

This elevated vantage led to the name High Desert Retreat for the project, which earned a 2021 AIA Design Award in the interiors category.

What is the next step toward bridging the gap between natural and artificial intelligence? Scientists and researchers are divided on the answer. Yann LeCun, Chief AI Scientist at Meta and the recipient of the 2018 Turing Award, is betting on self-supervised learning, machine learning models that can be trained without the need for human-labeled examples.

LeCun has been thinking and talking about self-supervised and unsupervised learning for years. But as his research and the fields of AI and neuroscience have progressed, his vision has converged around several promising concepts and trends.

In a recent event held by Meta AI, LeCun discussed possible paths toward human-level AI, challenges that remain and the impact of advances in AI.

Space weather experts have spotted the sun ejecting a large mass of particles and think this could hit Earth in the next few days.

When ejections like this hit Earth’s magnetic field, they can cause solar storms.

An ejection like this is known as a solar flare called a coronal mass ejection (CME).

A Dynamic Programming approach.

We also point out an observation that will be the topic of this post. Classic dynamics system is a solution of an optimal control problem.

A.I. is only beginning to show what it can do for modern medicine.

In today’s society, artificial intelligence (A.I.) is mostly used for good. But what if it was not?

Naive thinking “The thought had never previously struck us. We were vaguely aware of security concerns around work with pathogens or toxic chemicals, but that did not relate to us; we primarily operate in a virtual setting. Our work is rooted in building machine learning models for therapeutic and toxic targets to better assist in the design of new molecules for drug discovery,” wrote the researchers in their paper. “We have spent decades using computers and A.I. to improve human health—not to degrade it. We were naive in thinking about the potential misuse of our trade, as our aim had always been to avoid molecular features that could interfere with the many different classes of proteins essential to human life.”

Continue reading “An artificial intelligence invents 40,000 chemical weapons in just 6 hours” »