Lifeboat Foundation

China’s future rocket models will make use of the technology developed for recovering rockets, claims report.

China has successfully tested a rocket’s vertical landing in the ocean, laying the groundwork for upcoming space travel and recycling technology.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) confirmed that its commercial spaceflight firm, CAS Space, conducted the successful testing on Thursday in Haiyang, East China’s Shandong Province, according to the State-run media Global Times.

“Give it a shot! We think this tool will transform your linguistic-visual process both in terms of creative power and discovery.”

San Francisco-based independent Artificial Intelligence research lab Midjourney unveiled their new “/describe” feature that transforms images into words in a tweet. The company, popular for its AI-fueled ability to create images based on a series of prompts, launched more features including “repeat” and “permutations” for its pro subscribers.

Paul DelSignore, creative technologist and artificial intelligence aficionado, took to Medium to break down how these could benefit users. He envisions a future with better search engine indexing and search functionality as a result of “/describe”.

Communication without boundaries. “We’re moving sonar onto the body.”

Cornell University researchers have developed a new technology allowing silent communication through sonar glasses. The glasses use tiny microphones and speakers to read the words that are silently mouthed by the wearer, allowing them to perform various tasks without needing physical input. The technology was developed by Ruidong Zhang, a Ph.D. student at Cornell, and builds off of a similar project that used a wireless earbud and previous models that relied on cameras.

Highly-Accurate Design.

Continue reading “Breaking the silence: Cornell researchers build sonar glasses for communication without words” »

AInstein robot can respond to inquiries from pupils and even illustrate Albert Einstein’s theory of temporal relativity using a pendulum.

High school students in Cyprus have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) robot that uses ChatGPT to enhance classroom learning.

The Three PASCAL schools’ creation, AInstein, can hold dialogues, produce textual content, and crack jokes, according to an article published on Thursday by Voice of America (VOA).

After almost a decade, Google have finally managed to develop a file sharing function like Apple’s AirDrop. Called Nearby Share, here’s how your use it.

Whatever your opinion about which operating system is the best, iOS has had one major advantage over Android and Windows for some time, its AirDrop feature. In fact, for more than a decade, AirDrop has been a source of pride for Apple users and a cause of resentment for many who desire an easy way to share files between Windows and Android.

Continue reading “Google have finally developed a form of AirDrop with Nearby Share” »

Schmidt thinks that if the AI sector doesn’t create protections, politicians will have to step in.

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, has spoken out against the six-month ban on AI development that some tech celebrities and business executives demanded earlier.

“I’m not in favor of a six-month pause, because it will simply benefit China,” said Schmidt, Google’s first CEO.

Continue reading “Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt warns pausing ChatGPT-like AI will benefit China” »

The last few weeks have been abuzz with news and fears (well, largely fears) about the impact chatGPT and other generative technologies might have on the workplace. Goldman Sachs predicted 300 million jobs would be lost, while the likes of Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk asked for AI development to be paused (although pointedly not the development of autonomous driving).

Indeed, OpenAI chief Sam Altman recently declared that he was “a little bit scared”, with the sentiment shared by OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who recently said that “at some point it will be quite easy, if one wanted, to cause a great deal of harm”.

As fears mount about the jobs supposedly at risk from generative AI technologies like chatGPT, are these fears likely to prevent people from taking steps to adapt?

Continue reading “Doomsday Predictions Around ChatGPT Are Counter-Productive” »

Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music… Intelligent life-forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive.

^c Department of Chemical Biology, Xiamen University, Xiamen, 361,005, China.

The concept of xeno-nucleic acids (XNAs) was first proposed in 2009 in a theoretical paper, referring to additional types of nucleic acids, whose sugar moieties would differ from those in DNA and RNA. However, with the rising popularity of XNAs, the definition of XNAs has been extended to unnatural nucleic acids with chemically modified sugar, nucleobase, or phosphate moieties that are distinct from those found in DNA and RNA. The discovery and engineering of both polymerases and reverse transcriptases to synthesize, replicate and evolve a diverse range of XNAs has attracted significant attention and has enabled the discovery of XNA ligands (aptamers) and XNA catalysts (XNAzymes) as well as the synthesis of XNA nanostructures with potential as novel therapeutics. The field of XNAs continues to grow rapidly towards realizing the potential of XNAs in biotechnology and molecular medicine. This themed issue unites a collection of articles attesting to the rapid progress in the field.

One of the key advantages of XNAs is their generally enhanced resistance to nuclease degradation. This biostability, the affinity and specificity towards a target, and the general lack of immunogenicity of modified nucleic acids are critical for their potential application as therapeutics. Modified sugar moieties such as 2′-modified analogs, conformationally locked analogs, and threose-replaced analogs in particular contribute to the increased biological stability of XNAs against enzymatic degradation. Replacing the phosphodiester linkages with charge-neutral backbones including peptide-like backbones and triazole-linked backbones offers further opportunities to tune the stability, conformation and physicochemical properties of XNAs and enhance the affinity to their targets.