Lifeboat Foundation

In 2022, staff from Hanoi University purchased a selection of ’supergiant’ isopods at a seaford market in Quy Nhơn City in Vietnam, intrigued by a burgeoning market for the deep sea crustaceans as a delicacy.

Among them was a species unknown to science at the time. National University of Singapore carcinologist Peter Ng and colleagues have now formally described the novel sea bug in a new paper.

As the head of the animal’s carapace resembles the iconic scifi helmet adorned by Star Wars’ infamous Darth Vader, Ng and team named the giant woodlice relative Bathynomus vaderi.

Multiagent Finetuning. Our self improvement approach constructs a multiagent set of language models over multiple rounds of finetuning. At each round of finetuning, models specialize to become generation and critic agents, and agents in each further specializing based off their generations in the previous round of finetuning.

General Motors crushed it in 2024, moving just over 114,000 electric Cadillacs, GMCs and Chevrolets. That’s thanks to a stable of heavy-hitters that it was finally able to mass-produce in 2024 following battery-assembly and software snafus.

The Chevy Blazer EV and Cadillac Lyriq racked up over 50,000 sales combined. The Chevy Equinox EV was GM’s real MVP. Americans snapped up 29,000 of them last year, including a whopping 18,000 in the fourth quarter alone. That’s what happens when you give people what they want: EVs that look great, go over 300 miles per charge and won’t break your budget.

They just needed a little light.

A huge number of ultracold atoms have been corralled into a grid that could form the basis of the next largest quantum computer.

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

First step towards agentic AI.

ChatGPT enters the agentic AI era.

Just as ChatGPT signaled an inflection point for AI to enter the mainstream; robots may be nearing a similar breakout moment.

In today’s AI news, Synthesia, a generative AI start-up based in Britain, has raised $180 million valuing it at $2.1 billion. The company uses artificial intelligence to create lifelike human faces and speech that are almost indistinguishable from real video but do not need cameras, actors or film studios.

And, shortly after OpenAI released o1, its first “reasoning” AI model, people began noting a curious phenomenon. The model would sometimes begin “thinking” in Chinese, Persian, or some other language — even when asked a question in English.

Then, MiniMax is perhaps today best known here in the U.S. as the Singaporean company behind Hailuo, a realistic, high-resolution generative AI video model. Today, for instance, it announced the release and open-sourcing of the MiniMax-01 series, a new family of models built to handle ultra-long contexts and enhance AI agent development.

Continue reading “British Start-Up Synthesia Hits $2.1 Billion Valuation On AI Video Boom” »

Gamma oscillations in the brain reveal pain intensity, driven by PV interneurons in the somatosensory cortex. New research highlights their role as biomarkers and therapeutic targets for pain management.

Summary: Parvalbumin (PV) interneurons in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) have been identified as key players in encoding pain intensity and driving gamma oscillations, according to a study. Cross-species experiments confirmed that gamma oscillations in S1 selectively reflect pain levels in humans and are linked to PV interneuron activity in rodents.

Optogenetic manipulation of these interneurons demonstrated their ability to modulate pain-related behaviors, solidifying their role in pain processing. The findings establish a direct connection between PV interneurons and gamma oscillations, highlighting their potential as a biomarker and target for pain therapies.