Lifeboat Foundation

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.

Watch Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander lift off from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX and Firefly Aerospace are targeting 1:11 a.m. EST (0611 UTC) Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025, for launch. The lander will carry 10 NASA science investigations to the Moon’s surface.

Following launch, the lander will spend approximately 45 days in transit to the Moon before landing on the lunar surface in early March 2025. The 10 NASA payloads aboard the lander aim to test and demonstrate lunar subsurface drilling technology, regolith sample collection capabilities, global navigation satellite system abilities, radiation tolerant computing, and lunar dust mitigation methods.

Continue reading “Firefly Blue Ghost Mission 1 Launch to the Moon (Official NASA Broadcast)” »

An international team of astronomers has reported the detection of a new exoplanet orbiting a bright late F-type star. The newfound alien world, designated TOI-6038 A b, is about six times larger and nearly 80 times more massive than Earth. The finding is detailed in a paper published Jan. 4 on the arXiv preprint server.

NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is conducting a survey of about 200,000 of the brightest stars near the sun with the aim of searching for transiting exoplanets. So far, it has identified nearly 7,400 candidate exoplanets (TESS Objects of Interest, or TOI), of which 591 have been confirmed so far.

Now, a group of astronomers led by Sanjay Baliwal of the Physical Research Laboratory (PRL) in Ahmedabad, India, reports the confirmation of another planet monitored by TESS. Baliwal’s team has identified a transit signal in the light curve of TOI-6038 A—a late F-type star about 578 light-years away. The planetary nature of this signal was validated by follow-up observations using the 2.5m telescope at the PRL Observatory in India.