Lifeboat Foundation

In a world where deforestation directly leads to biodiversity loss, disrupts the water cycle, and alters rainfall, looking for alternatives to recycle or produce paper is more important than ever.

Scientists at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) have developed a pollen-based paper that, after being printed, can be erased and reused multiple times without any damage to the paper.

Continue reading “Sunflower pollen-based paper that you can print on and unprint” »

In January, 2021, the OpenAI consortium — founded by Elon Musk and financially backed by Microsoft — unveiled its most ambitious project to date, the DALL-E machine learning system. This ingenious multimodal AI was capable of generating images (albeit, rather cartoonish ones) based on the attributes described by a user — think “a cat made of sushi” or “an x-ray of a Capybara sitting in a forest.” On Wednesday, the consortium unveiled DALL-E’s next iteration which boasts higher resolution and lower latency than the original.

The first DALL-E (a portmanteau of “Dali,” as in the artist, and “WALL-E,” as in the animated Disney character) could generate images as well as combine multiple images into a collage, provide varying angles of perspective, and even infer elements of an image — such as shadowing effects — from the written description.

“Unlike a 3D rendering engine, whose inputs must be specified unambiguously and in complete detail, DALL·E is often able to ‘fill in the blanks’ when the caption implies that the image must contain a certain detail that is not explicitly stated,” the OpenAI team wrote in 2021.

Forest floor-dwelling fungi can send one another electrical signals to form word-like clusters, according to a computer scientist, but whether that represents something akin to language isn’t clear.

During the Chiriquí Period between AD 800 – 1,500, many settlements grew into large communities around the alluvial lands of the Térraba River and its main tributaries, constructing large structures using round-edged boulders, paved areas, burial sites, and circular or rectangular mounds with stone walls.

The Diquís reached an apex of cultural development during this period, with Diquís artisans creating elaborate ceramic, bone, and gold objects, and sculpturing stone spheres in important zones within the settlements. Stone spheres were also placed in alignments in public plazas, or along the approach to the dwellings of the ruling elite or chieftains.

Archaeologists from the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) and the National Museum of Costa Rica (MNCR) have excavated 6 stone spheres as part of a wider project to preserve the monuments.

The Defense Department, in partnership with the private sector, is building three transient training barracks using advanced 3D printing technology.

COLORADO SPRINGS — A shortage of Ukrainian Antonov aircraft raises the prospect of more delays for satellite projects already bogged down by supply chain issues.

Satellite manufacturers make heavy use of large cargo space on Antonovs to transport GEO spacecraft from factory to launch site.

But some Antonovs have been destroyed amid Russia’s war in Ukraine, noted Mark Quinn, head of Willis Towers Watson’s satellite insurance business, and those that are in service tend to be owned by Russian air cargo companies subject to Western sanctions or are being used to support the war effort.

A German astrophotographer has taken an HD photo of the ISS from the surface of Earth, showing two astronauts on a spacewalk.

The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter took an incredibly detailed image of the Sun as it passed with 50 million kilometers.

This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals tendrils of dark dust threading across the heart of the spiral galaxy NGC 7172. The galaxy lies approximately 110 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Piscis Austrinus. The lane of dust threading its way across NGC 7,172 is obscuring the luminous heart of the galaxy, making NGC 7,172 appear to be nothing more than a normal spiral galaxy viewed from the side.

When astronomers inspected NGC 7,172 across the electromagnetic spectrum they quickly discovered that there was more to it than meets the eye: NGC 7,172 is a Seyfert galaxy—a type of galaxy with an intensely luminous active galactic nucleus powered by matter accreting onto a supermassive black hole.

This image combines data from two sets of Hubble observations, both proposed to study nearby active galactic nuclei. The image also combines data from two instruments—Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys and Wide Field Camera 3.