Lifeboat Foundation

Fable Studio has announced two new conversational AI virtual beings, or artificial people. Their names are Charlie and Beck, and they will be able to hold conversations as if they were real people.

The new characters are a blend of storytelling and artificial intelligence, a marriage that Fable is pioneering in the belief that virtual beings will become a huge market as people seek companionship and entertainment during the tough climate of the pandemic.

CEO Edward Saatchi believes that virtual beings are the start of something big. He organizes the Virtual Beings Summit, and this summer he noted that virtual beings companies — from Genies to AI Foundation — have raised more than $320 million.

This is the car that is set to make the Koenigsegg One:1 seem slow and the Bugatti Chiron positively leisurely. The production Hennessey Venom F5 is a U.S. hypercar that—if it delivers on its maker’s bold claims—will be the fastest production car in the world.

Hennessey has long been known as a tuner—one with a reputation for extravagant claims in the past—but the Venom F5 marks its effective debut as a manufacturer in its own right. (The ultra-limited Venom GT that preceded it used a Lotus tub.) It’s named after the highest rating on the Fujita scale of tornado strength, and just 24 cars will be built, each priced at $2.1 million.

Some areas west of Interstate 95 could see double-digit snowfall totals and power outages.

Scientists discovered a strategy for layering dissimilar crystals with atomic precision to control the size of resulting magnetic quasi-particles called skyrmions. This approach could advance high-density data storage and quantum magnets for quantum information science.

In typical ferromagnets, magnetic spins align up or down. Yet in skyrmions, they twist and swirl, forming unique shapes like petite porcupines or tiny tornadoes.

The tiny intertwined magnetic structures could innovate high-density data storage, for which size does matter and must be small. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory-led project produced skyrmions as small as 10 nanometers – 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.

Warrior for our planet!

Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius:

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Here, he became an authority on the aurora, and after that the director of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He later used his reputation and connections to establish the International Arctic Research Center. His look-away-from-the-crowd nature once made a writer describe him as Alaska’s climate-change skeptic.

Wearing suspenders and a button-up dress shirt, Akasofu would — every weekday until the 2020 pandemic — drive 3 miles into the university for a few hours. His workspace is a cubicle in the Akasofu Building. That sun-catching, metal-and-glass structure on the highest part of the Fairbanks campus houses a science institute — the International Arctic Research Center — that would not exist without him.

Akasofu’s Alaska journey began when he wrote a letter to Sydney Chapman, a British space physicist who lived a reverse-snowbird existence, living in Fairbanks in the winter and Boulder, Colorado, in the summer.

Dogmatic individuals tend to form less accurate judgements thanks to a generic resistance to seeking out additional information, according to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The findings shed new light on the cognitive underpinnings of dogmatic worldviews.

“We have never been so free to decide if we have enough evidence about something or whether we should seek out further information from a reliable source before believing it,” explained study author Lion Schulz, a doctoral researcher in the Department of Computational Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.

“In turn, if we don’t check on quick and uncertain judgements, this can leave us quite vulnerable to misinformation. Understanding the mechanism behind such decisions and how different people approach them is therefore important when we try to understand the current societal climate.”

Plant scientists have revolutionised science and innovation. Research around the cell or cell biology was born out of plant science.

Researching plants is vital for our food security, maintaining our ecosystems and in our fight against climate change. Plant science is equally important to generate new knowledge that breaks disciplinary barriers to revolutionise several fields of research and innovation. But despite its valuable contribution, scientists and prospective young scientists often overlook plant science. It’s because of this low recognition, plant science doesn’t get the same prestige as other disciplines. This is detrimental to the future of plant science as bright young students continue to choose a career away from plant science. I never considered studying plants myself — it was entirely accidental that I studied plant science.

In other words, scientists and prize committees question the influence of basic plant science across different disciplines.

Continue reading “Plant science: overlooked research area that gave birth to cell biology” »

Back to wood?

The shipping industry’s climate impact is large and growing, but a team in Costa Rica is making way for a clean shipping revolution with a cargo ship made of wood.