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Submission + - Top Astronomers Confront Possibility They Were Very Wrong About The Universe (futurism.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “We have great data, but the theoretical basis is past its sell-by date,” he added. “More and more people are saying the same thing and these are respected astronomers.”

A number of researchers have found evidence that the universe may be expanding more quickly in some areas compared to others, raising the tantalizing possibility that megastructures could be influencing the universe’s growth in significant ways.

Sarkar and his colleagues, for instance, are suggesting that the universe is “lopsided” after studying over a million quasars, which are the active nuclei of galaxies where gas and dust are being gobbled up by a supermassive black hole.

The team found that one hemisphere actually hosted slightly more of these quasars, suggesting one area of the night sky was more massive than the other, undermining our conception of dark energy, a hypothetical form of energy used to explain why the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate.

“It would mean that two-thirds of the universe has just disappeared,” Sarkar told The Guardian.

Other researchers have suggested that the cosmological constant, which has been used for decades as a way to denote the rate of the universe’s expansion, actually varies across space, which would contradict the standard model of physics.

Submission + - Tesla lays off 'more than 10%' of its global workforce (electrek.co)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: “We don’t know which specific teams will be most or least affected by Tesla’s layoffs, but two well-known Tesla executives are now missing the “Tesla-affiliated” badge on twitter – Drew Baglino and Rohan Patel.”

Submission + - Textbook Prices Have Increased by 1401% Over Last 50 Years (myelearningworld.com) 1

Submitted by LookMan
LookMan writes: Over the last 50 years, the cost of college textbooks has soared by a jaw-dropping 1401%, transforming what was once a manageable expense into a significant financial burden for students across the United States.

This staggering increase, which has seen textbook prices grow at nearly 3 times the rate of inflation, is more than just a statistic—it’s a barrier to education and a source of stress for millions of students trying to pay the already exorbitant costs of higher education.

Submission + - Oregon shutting down small farms to protect the environment

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Small Farms in Oregon Suffer as New CAFO Definitions Threaten Livelihoods
In Oregon, the landscape of small-scale farming is undergoing a seismic shift due to recent regulatory changes affecting water rights and farm operations. These changes are casting a shadow over the future of family farms and local agriculture, invoking a series of legal challenges and widespread concern among the farming community.

At the core of the upheaval are two contentious issues: the expanded definition of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and stringent water usage restrictions. These regulations have placed an undue burden on small farmers, many of whom are now facing the threat of closure due to what they view as overreaching government intervention.

Submission + - OpenAI can clone voices with just 15 seconds of audio (upi.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: A new language model unveiled by ChatGPT creator OpenAI can clone a person's voice using just seconds worth of audio, the company revealed as it shared preliminary insights from studying the technology's capabilities.

The artificial intelligence model, named Voice Engine, needs just a single 15-second audio sample to generate speech mimicking that of the original speaker, OpenAI announced in a blog post Friday. The technology was first developed in late 2022 and has been used to power the preset voices available in the text-to-speech API as well as in its ChatGPT Voice and Read Aloud features.

The technology has been tested with OpenAI's corporate partners with groundbreaking results. For example, the company shared tearjerking audio of a young girl speaking thanks to doctors Fatima Mirza, Rohaid Ali and Konstantina Svokos with the Norman Prince Neurosciences Institute.

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