173523134
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
to find out you have access to God's developer console. What's the first thing you do with this power?
Me:
sudo rm -rf oceans/*/contents/*.plastic
sudo rm -rf people/*/*.cancer
sudo rm -rf badviruses/human/*.std
sudo mv magic.disabled magic
173435300
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
Imagine the vast expanse of the world’s oceans. Now, picture an underwater realm three times that size, not across the globe’s surface, but tucked away deep beneath it, at a depth of 700 kilometers. This isn’t the plot of a sci-fi novel but the startling discovery made by a team of scientists, unraveling the mysteries of our planet’s water origins.
The quest to pinpoint the origins of Earth’s water has led researchers to a monumental find—a colossal ocean ensconced within the Earth’s mantle, over 700 kilometers below the surface. This hidden ocean, concealed within a blue rock known as ringwoodite, challenges our understanding of where Earth’s water came from. The size of this subterranean sea is so vast that it triples the volume of all the planet’s surface oceans combined.
This discovery not only fascinates with its scale but also proposes a new theory about Earth’s water cycle. It suggests that instead of arriving via comet impacts, as some theories have posited, Earth’s oceans may have slowly seeped out from its very core.
173311331
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
Stephen Scherr, chief executive officer of Hertz Global Holdings Inc. and a member of its board of directors, will step down on March 31, following the car rental company’s largest quarterly loss since 2020 after a risky bet on electric vehicles.
Scherr, 59, joined Hertz two years ago as the company was emerging from bankruptcy and putting a big focus on EVs during that time. Hertz soon discovered that EVs are more expensive to maintain than they had initially thought.
Scherr reportedly told investors that Hertz’s profits experienced a $348 million loss, which he blamed EVs for.
In January, Hertz announced its plan to offload 20,000 electric vehicles from its U.S. fleet throughout 2024, and switch back to gas cars.
In November, the Associated Press reported on a Consumer Reports survey that found EVs from the 2021 to 2023 model years are significantly less reliable than gasoline-powered vehicles.
A whopping eighty percent less reliable, according to the AP, particularly with battery and charging systems, as well as fit issues with body panels and interiors.
Car dealers and manufacturers are reportedly also struggling to sell EVs despite using deep discounts and promotional tactics.
173266349
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
The mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 continues to baffle the aviation world, making it one of the most perplexing incidents in history. Departing from Kuala Lumpur en route to Beijing on March 8, 2014, the aircraft vanished from radar screens, carrying 239 passengers and crew members. Despite extensive multinational efforts spanning a decade, involving the scanning of a vast 46,300 square mile area, the aircraft remains missing.
Recent developments have thrust tiny sea creatures, known as barnacles, into the spotlight of scientific inquiry, offering a potential breakthrough in the search for MH370's wreckage.
These barnacles were discovered clinging to the initial piece of debris conclusively linked to MH370—a flaperon bearing the distinctive marking "657 BB," which washed ashore on Reunion Island, situated off the coast of Africa, a year following the event.
Barnacles have earlier also helped researchers in tracking "ghost nets" posing threats to marine life to locating missing vessels.
173238567
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
In this short portion of a video interview, Scott Kirby, the CEO of United Airlines, describes how Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) is taking priority over merit, experience and skill, with racial and gender quotas as the the key considerations when determining who will be piloting your upcoming flight.
What could possibly go wrong?
173238535
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
A biotech company that hopes to resurrect extinct species said Wednesday that it has reached an important milestone: the creation of a long-sought kind of stem cell for the closest living relative of the woolly mammoth.
"This is probably the most significant step in the early stages of this project," said George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded Colossal Biosciences in Dallas.
The woolly mammoth was a big, shaggy species of elephant that roamed the tundra before going extinct thousands of years ago. Colossal has been working to bring the mammoth, the dodo bird and other extinct species back to life using the latest cloning and genetic engineering techniques.
And now the company says scientists have for the first time created induced pluripotent stem cells for the mammoth's closest living relative: Asian elephants. The company plans to describe the work in a scientific paper that will be posted on the bioRxiv preprint server. It hasn't been peer-reviewed, but the company says that's in progress.
Scientists can now try to use cloning techniques and gene editing to manipulate the cells in the hopes of someday creating elephants with key traits of mammoths, such as their heavy coats and the layers of fat that enabled them to survive in cold climates.
173054750
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
Apple’s Vision Pro headset could distort reality in new ways, generating a world that looks different for everyone.
In the wake of the Vision Pro’s release, researchers set out to discover what long-term use of a virtual reality headset would do to our cognitive functions, and what they found was alarming.
A team of 11 researchers at Stanford University and Michigan University took turns donning several passthrough headsets, including the Vision Pro, the Quest Pro, the Quest 3, the Varjo XR-3, and various night Vision Goggles.
The so-called ‘passthrough’ technology intermixes the real world with virtual reality that might be somewhat off-center from what we’re used to and can distort our sensory functions and how we move through the world.
At first, the researchers had a difficult time navigating while wearing the headsets in both public and private spaces, noting that objects seemed closer or farther away than they were.
They walked with someone nearby to help them in case they tripped or walked into anything and initially reported feelings of nausea, eye strain, headaches, and dizziness – all signs of ‘simulator sickness.’
One of the most widely accepted theories about why simulator sickness occurs is the sensory conflict theory, in which a person experiences mismatches between the visual system, our sense of balance, and the body’s ability to sense movement or the location of a place or object.
The researchers found that one of the most critical issues with the passthrough headset was distortion which showed the world as if through a prism or funhouse mirror.
Researchers reported having trouble pressing the button on an elevator because the buttons appeared farther away from their fingers or experienced difficulty bringing food to their mouths.
Although the researchers’ senses adjusted to the passthrough technology, when they took off the Vision Pro headset, they noted that their perception was reversed, and it was now the real world that looked distorted.
Not only did the VR headset remove walls and barriers, and distort the way the world appears, but it also resulted in delayed responses and missed social cues.
Bailenson and his team described the feeling as ‘social absence,’ – when people feel physically disconnected from others.
172979992
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
The Hong Kong branch of a multinational company has lost $25.6 million after a scammer used deepfake technology to pose as the firm’s chief financial officer (CFO) in a video conference call and ordered money transfers, according to the police, in what is being highlighted as first of its kind cases in the city.
The transaction was ordered during a meeting where it was found that everyone present on the video call except the victim were deepfakes of real people, said the Hong Kong police, on Friday (Feb 2).
Scammers in this case used deepfake technology to turn publicly available video and other footage of staff members into convincing meeting participants.
172818866
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
Researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and the University of California, Irvine (UCI) have developed a repository of surgical outcomes data to help the medical research community build new artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and improve patient outcomes.
The database, known as the Medical Informatics Operating Room Vitals and Events Repository (MOVER), is comprised of electronic health records (EHRs) and high-fidelity physiological waveforms – data from monitors that measure a patient’s physiology either in real time or minute by minute during a medical procedure – from approximately 59,000 patients who underwent 83,500 surgeries.
Specifically, the repository contains information about each patient’s medical and surgical history, including procedure type; medicines, lines, or drains used during surgery; and any postoperative complications. These data may contain insights into patient outcomes that could be useful if incorporated into AI models.
“This information is truly information that physicians and the care team use to make clinical decisions in the acute care setting,” explained Maxime Cannesson, MD, PhD, professor and chair of anesthesiology and perioperative medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, in the press release. “Before this there was no single repository where a very, very large volume of data that includes the physiological waveforms are accessible to researchers.”Link to Original Source
172710621
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
From the "What-Could-Possibly-Go-Wrong" department:
LONDON (AP) — England’s 1,000-year-old legal system — still steeped in traditions that include wearing wigs and robes — has taken a cautious step into the future by giving judges permission to use artificial intelligence to help produce rulings.
The Courts and Tribunals Judiciary last month said AI could help write opinions but stressed it shouldn’t be used for research or legal analyses because the technology can fabricate information and provide misleading, inaccurate and biased information.
“Judges do not need to shun the careful use of AI,” said Master of the Rolls Geoffrey Vos, the second-highest ranking judge in England and Wales. “But they must ensure that they protect confidence and take full personal responsibility for everything they produce.”
At a time when scholars and legal experts are pondering a future when AI could replace lawyers, help select jurors or even decide cases, the approach spelled out Dec. 11 by the judiciary is restrained. But for a profession slow to embrace technological change, it’s a proactive step as government and industry — and society in general — react to a rapidly advancing technology alternately portrayed as a panacea and a menace.
172371209
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
Congress at the urging of the Biden administration agreed in 2021 to spend $7.5 billion to build tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change.
Two years later, the program has yet to install a single charger.
States and the charger industry blame the delays mostly on the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds. While federal officials have authorized more than $2 billion of the funds to be sent to states, fewer than half of states have even started to take bids from contractors to build the chargers — let alone begin construction.
Consumer demand for electric vehicles is rising in the United States, necessitating six times as many chargers on its roads by the end of the decade, according to federal estimates. But not a single charger funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law has come online and odds are they will not be able to start powering Americans’ vehicles until at least 2024.
172226837
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
An undergraduate student used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 and AI to decipher a word in one of the Herculaneum scrolls to win a $40,000 prize (via Nvidia). Herculaneum was covered in ash by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, and the over 1,800 Herculaneum scrolls are one of the site's most famous artifacts. The scrolls have been notoriously hard to decipher, because they cannot be unwrapped because they're basically like a stick of charcoal. Instead they must be virtually unwrapped, using a 3D scan dataset of it in its wrapped state. So, the task is to find the tiny bits of ink, assemble them into letters, and try to decipher what they say.
Machine learning is now becoming the key that picks the lock. A student deciphered one of the words using a GTX 1070, which doesn't even have any tensor cores. Imagine what he could do with a RTX 4090!
172218619
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
The European Parliament and Member States have reached an agreement on introducing the Digital Identity.
Also reported this week was that the United Nations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and partners of the Rockefeller Foundation are launching a campaign to accelerate digital ID, digital payments, and data sharing rollouts in 50 countries by 2028, all under the umbrella of digital public infrastructure (DPI). They call it the “50-in-5 Agenda.”
It appears the European Union will be one of the more aggressive governmental bodies to move in the direction of digitizing its citizens. Once this is accomplished, the next step will be the digital currency. And the digital euro (cbdc) is due to be rolled out very soon
It seems a small leap to imagine that the social credit system is coming next. Although governments have enjoyed a long history of abusing their powers in the past, it appears we are very confident our governments will treat us fairly in the future.
172212401
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
01.AI, a Chinese AI startup, has stockpiled enough Nvidia AI and HPC GPUs to last 18 months, in anticipation of a U.S. export ban. Looks like 01.AI is taking 'Go big or go home' to a new level with their GPU shopping spree. They're basically the dragon from 'The Hobbit,' but instead of gold, they're hoarding Nvidia chips. Maybe they're planning the ultimate LAN party or just really into extreme Minecraft graphics. Either way, it's like they say: 'In the land of tech embargos, the one with the secret GPU stash is king.' Or in this case, playing 4D chess while the rest of us are stuck figuring out which port the HDMI cable goes into.
172205519
submission
Press2ToContinue writes:
Viper Shield is the latest digital upgrade turning vintage F-16s into next-gen ninja fighters. They're now equipped with an invisible, high-tech cloak to dodge threats like they're in a game of galactic dodgeball. It's a mash-up of old-school brawn and new-school brains, all while keeping budget bean counters and upgrade-happy generals in a state of blissful coexistence.
If the F-16 were a character in a role-playing game, it just leveled up and put all its skill points into "Countermeasures."Link to Original Source
