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Category: futurism – Page 362

Ammonium chloride tastes like nothing else. It may be the sixth basic taste

Scientists have just caught up with something that Scandinavians have suspected strongly for over a century: Ammonium chloride (NH4Cl) may be a basic taste, joining sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami.

Denizens of Finland, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, and the Netherlands gobble up the compound in “salmiak,” a salt licorice candy. But don’t be fooled by the “candy” label. As Andrew Richdale wrote for Saveur back in 2017, salmiak tastes nothing like any other candy you have ever tried.

“The first time I sampled salmiak… I spit it out on a Copenhagen street corner. It wasn’t that this powerful little pastille was bad. It’s just that my taste buds had never quite been lit up that way: smacked with a layer of sharp and sour salt dust, then soothed by something bitter and caramel-sweet. It felt simultaneously fascinating and… abusive? Or at least odd, like a knocked funny bone.”

‘Tomb of Cerberus’ is discovered in Italy: Sealed burial chamber features a fresco of the three-headed dog said to guard the gates of the underworld

A sealed tomb featuring a fresco of Cerberus – the three-headed dog from Ancient Greek mythology – has been uncovered in Italy.

The burial chamber was discovered in Giugliano, a suburb of Naples, and is believed to be some 2,000 years old.

It was found on farmland during an archaeological survey carried out prior to the start of maintenance work on the city’s water system.

Character.AI’s $200 Million Bet That Chatbots Are The Future Of Entertainment

Inside Character. AI’s disheveled Palo Alto, California headquarters, employees at first appear to be hard at work, glued to their computer monitors. But rather than coding, many of them are engrossed in lively group chats with their colleagues and the AI chatbot characters that Character has become known for. Now, thanks to a new group chat function the startup launched Wednesday, they were chatting with work friends along with bots that anyone can build to create the illusion that you’re actually talking to the likes of Napoleon Bonaparte, Tony Stark or Lucifer.

“The feature was good enough that people stopped working sometimes to use it,” cofounder Daniel De Freitas told Forbes. De Freitas,… More.

The unicorn AI startup is bringing bots that make it sound like you’re talking to well known people like Taylor Swift into interactions with friends.

What’s The Deal With Chatbots? Can They Actually Think?

We’ve been talking about this a lot in the places where we gather to discuss the potential for AI. There’s an extent to which we’ve already seen the big disruption around chat tech – but then there are all of those question marks about how far it’s going to go from here! You get this when you’re listening to dozens of entrepreneurs, researchers, and people connected to top institutions giving out their pearls of wisdom to expectant crowds. And I’ve done a lot of that lately.

Anyway, what we’re finding in terms of chat evolution is that many of these future chatbot systems are likely to be connected to things that aren’t like large language models at all. Hmmm.

Let’s start with the basic premise of what these large language models do – they source a large amount of training data out on the net, they aggregate it altogether, and they use language as a tool to sort of imitate human cognition in digital environments.

What is Pre-Cancer?

“Cancer” is not a word we want to hear. Conversations with your doctor about cancer can induce fear, anxiety, and a plethora of other emotions. But what if your doctor uses the phrase This terminology will probably still make a lot of people anxious and, in some situations, could result in some unnecessary treatment.

Several types of malignancies are associated with conditions that, while benign, could infer a more significant risk or likelihood of developing cancer in the future. Terminology including lesions, “stage 0” disease, or carcinoma “in situ” can all describe an abnormal, yet not malignant, finding. In addition to fear, these diagnoses can undoubtedly lead to patient confusion.

A diagnosis indicates abnormal cells present in a single location in the body. If a lesion isous, it has not spread to any other tissue, distant or nearby. This explains why theous conditions associated with several cancer types have names that involve the phrase “in situ,” which means “in its original place.”

Discovery of half-million-year-old wooden structure shows we’re wrong to underestimate our ancient relatives

To most people, complex technologies separate modern humans from their ancestors who lived in the Stone Age, thousands or hundreds of thousands of years ago. In today’s fast changing world, older technologies, even those from a few years ago, are often described dismissively as “Stone Age.”

Such terms serve to disconnect us from our ancient relatives, who were much more sophisticated than we sometimes think they were.

A team led by archaeologist Larry Barham at the University of Liverpool recently published robust and well dated evidence for the earliest known use of wood technology. The wooden structure, along with artifacts, date to 476,000 years ago and have been excavated from waterlogged deposits at Kalambo Falls, Zambia.