Grief-laden vitriol directed at AI fails to help us understand paths to better futures that are neither utopian nor dystopian, but open to radically weird possibilities.
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Generative AI models have changed the way we create and consume content, particularly images and art. Diffusion models such as MidJourney and Stable Diffusion have been trained on large datasets of scraped images from online, many of which are copyrighted, private, or sensitive in subject matter. Many artists have discovered significant numbers of their art pieces in training data such as LAION-5B, without their knowledge, consent, credit or compensation.
To make it worse, many of these models are now used to copy individual artists, through a process called style mimicry. Home users can take art work from human artists, perform “fine-tuning” or LoRA on models like stable diffusion, and end up with a model that is capable of producing arbitrary images in the “style” of the target artist, when evoked with their name as a prompt. Popular independent artists find low quality facsimilies of their artwork online, often with their names still embedded in the metadata from model prompts.
Diapause is a peculiar sleep of insects in which the animal’s motor activity completely ceases. During this period, insects become a good target for parasitoids, freely attacking them with their mobile ovipositors. We found that the parasitic wasp, Eupelmus messene (Hymenoptera, Eupelmidae, Cynipidae), stirs the internal contents of the diapausing host pupa of Aulacidea hieracii (Bouché, 1834) with its long and flexible ovipositor “making a shake” inside the pupa. However, the attacked pupae stay morphologically indistinguishable from healthy diapausing ones for several months. Using non-invasive Raman spectroscopy (RS), we, for the first time, studied the molecular composition of live diapausing and parasitized A. hieracii pupae.
Tech companies, including Amazon Web Services, are striking deals with U.S. nuclear power plants to secure electricity for their data centers, driven by the skyrocketing demands of artificial intelligence. This move promises 24/7 carbon-free power but stirs controversy, as it could divert existing energy supplies, raise prices, and increase reliance on natural gas. These nuclear-powered data centers might accelerate the AI race, but they also spark debates over economic development, grid reliability, and climate goals. Could this be the future of tech or a risky gamble with unforeseen consequences?
As reported by WSJ, tech businesses searching the country for electrical supplies have focused on one important target: America’s nuclear power facilities.
The owners of about one-third of the United States’ nuclear power reactors are in negotiations with technology companies about providing electricity to new data centers needed to satisfy the needs of an artificial intelligence boom.
For the first time, scientists identify individual brain cells linked to the linguistic essence of a word.
Researchers at Fraunhofer IPM have developed a contactless flow measurement method based on magnetic fields. For the first time, they have been able to show the quantitative impact of the flow profile on the magnetic signal. This opens up new possibilities for improving the measurement method.
The results were recently published in the Journal of Applied Physics.
There are many manufacturing processes across various industries where flowing liquids play a key role. Controlling or automating such processes requires reliable data on the flow rate of the liquids. The magnetic field-based flow measurement technique developed at Fraunhofer IPM provides accurate flow data without any contact with the liquid.
Now, you can have almost ‘any text on your phone’ read to you in the voices of legendary actors. But many are disturbed by the idea.
We identified five themes centred on the impact of diagnosis: (i) Denial and acceptance (three sub-themes: Denial of diagnosis; Acceptance of diagnosis; Conflict between denial and acceptance); (ii) Stigma of diagnosis and selective disclosure; (iii) The process of diagnosis, (iv) Losing, maintaining, and finding a sense of the self (two sub-themes: The lost self; Constructing and maintaining a sense of self); and (v) Receiving, finding, and providing support.
Figure 1 shows a created a diagram on the potential connections between the themes and subthemes. The process of diagnosis spans the entire experience and has a bearing on denial, conflict and acceptance. Stigma also feeds into denial, conflict and lack of identity. Acceptance of a diagnosis is heavily based on the experience and process of healthcare services, and through supportive peer spaces that reinforce and maintains a clear sense of self/identity.
Objective: Cognitive loss in older adults is a growing issue in our society, and there is a need to develop inexpensive, simple, effective in-home treatments. This study was conducted to explore the use of olfactory enrichment at night to improve cognitive ability in healthy older adults.
Methods: Male and female older adults (N = 43), age 60–85, were enrolled in the study and randomly assigned to an Olfactory Enriched or Control group. Individuals in the enriched group were exposed to 7 different odorants a week, one per night, for 2 h, using an odorant diffuser. Individuals in the control group had the same experience with de minimis amounts of odorant. Neuropsychological assessments and fMRI scans were administered at the beginning of the study and after 6 months.
Results: A statistically significant 226% improvement was observed in the enriched group compared to the control group on the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test and improved functioning was observed in the left uncinate fasciculus, as assessed by mean diffusivity.
