Lifeboat Foundation

Chptr, an app for sharing and holding onto memories of lost loved ones, has raised $1.5 million in seed funding. The app is designed to give people a way to encapsulate the life of their loved ones by inviting others to share and store stories, images, audio messages, videos and more all in one place.

The startup was founded in 2020 by Rehan Choudhry, who came up with the idea for the app when he was helping his wife, a news anchor at CBS New York, put together video tributes for the first victims of COVID-19 in New York City. Choudhry told TechCrunch in an interview that the pair was reaching out to the families, friends, neighbors and colleagues of the victims to paint a picture of what their life was like.

“The thing I realized after talking to a lot of families was that these videos served as almost a reunion point for people that they will continue to grieve around,” Choudhry said. “We noticed that the grieving process that would normally take 90 days was extended to months because they had something to rally around. So then the question for me was why doesn’t everyone on the planet have access to this because we all have smartphones and social media. So I went down the rabbit hole of discovery and it brought me to Chptr.”

The technology that makes it possible, called semantic hearing, could pave the way for smarter hearing aids and earphones, allowing the wearer to filter out some sounds while boosting others.

The system, which is still in prototype, works by connecting off-the-shelf noise-canceling headphones to a smartphone app. The microphones embedded in these headphones, which are used to cancel out noise, are repurposed to also detect the sounds in the world around the wearer. These sounds are then played back to a neural network, which is running on the smartphone; then certain sounds are boosted or suppressed in real time, depending on the user’s preferences. It was developed by researchers from the University of Washington, who presented the research at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) last week.

The team trained the network on thousands of audio samples from online data sets and sounds collected from various noisy environments. Then they taught it to recognize 20 everyday sounds, such as a thunderstorm, a toilet flushing, or glass breaking.

Amazon is reportedly investing millions in training Olympus.

Stockcam/iStock.

The Information reported that Olympus will be Amazon’s answer to the AI leaps made by OpenAI and Microsoft in selling similar software to corporate customers. Another report by Reuters said that the company is investing millions in training Olympus, according to the two people familiar with the matter.

Webb’s observations have offered key insights into the intricate process of rocky planet formation.

NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI)

This high-powered telescope focused its lens on the cosmic disks (protoplanetary disk), where planets came into being, and detected the presence of water vapor.

Continue reading “James Webb: NASA’s time-traveler telescope now traces roots of Earth” »

The process of washing has inspired a new method for engineering efficient lithium-metal batteries.

Vi73777/iStock.

Scientists have long been trying to successfully switch from lithium-ion to lithium-metal batteries. However, there is one issue that has been causing a delay in this transition: traditional electrolytes do not perform well in metal-based batteries.

Continue reading “Soap inspires scientists to create longer-lasting batteries” »

China’s solar industry has invested $130 billion in 2023, dominating the global solar supply chain and widening the technology and cost gap with other countries.

Xijian/iStock.

A new report by Wood Mackenzie reveals that China will control over 80 percent of the world’s production of polysilicon, wafers, cells, and modules — the critical components of solar panels — from 2023 to 2026.

Continue reading “China becomes solar energy superpower, dominates 80% of supply chain” »

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is “seriously preparing” for war as it builds its nuclear weapons arsenal, according to an expert on Korean history.

After decades of international pressure attempting to stop its development of nuclear weapons, North Korea announced during the administration of former President George W. Bush that it was conducting nuclear tests and had weapons. The country now has an arsenal that includes an estimated 35 to 63 warheads, according to the Institute for Science and International Security.

In an interview published by The Financial Times on Thursday, Kookmin University history professor Andrei Lankov said that Kim had been emboldened to build the nuclear arsenal due to Western leaders failing to take advantage of earlier opportunities to pressure the regime, wrongly believing that the nuclear program was not “a realistic threat.”

Android Studio, like so much of Google’s product portfolio, is getting its infusion of AI today at the company’s annual I/O developer conference. Android Studio Hedgehog, the upcoming version of Android Studio currently in the canary release channel, will be the first to add support for the new conversational experience in Android Studio meant to help developers write code and fix bugs and answer more general coding questions.

Built on top of Codey, Google’s new PaLM 2-based foundation model specifically trained for coding, the Studio Bot will roll out to developers in the U.S. first, with a wider rollout expected over time.

face_with_colon_three Year 2017

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, thinker, and futurist famous for forecasting the pace of technology and predicting the world of tomorrow. In this video, Kurzweil suggests the blueprint for the master algorithm—or a single, general purpose learning algorithm—is hidden in the brain.

The brain, according to Kurzweil, consists of repeating modules that self-organize into hierarchies that build simple patterns into complex concepts. We don’t have a complete understanding of how this process works yet, but Kurzweil believes that as we study the brain more and reverse engineer what we find, we’ll learn to write the master algorithm.

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil: Our Brain Is a Blueprint for the Master Algorithm” »