Lifeboat Foundation

Microsoft announced some heartbreaking news for Internet Explorer users on Valentine’s Day: Internet Explorer is no more.

The company has permanently disabled the desktop version of Internet Explorer on certain versions of Windows 10, and updated its newer browser, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft announced Tuesday.

All other consumer and commercial devices that weren’t already redirected from Explorer to Microsoft Edge will also be affected, the company said. Now, when users attempt to access Explorer, they will be redirected to Edge.

Google chief evangelist and “father of the internet” Vint Cerf has a message for executives looking to rush business deals on chat artificial intelligence: “Don’t.”

Cerf pleaded with attendees at a Mountain View, California, conference on Monday not to scramble to invest in conversational AI just because “it’s a hot topic.” The warning comes amid a burst in popularity for ChatGPT.

Zhongli Pan is the recipient of the 2023 Distinguished Service Award by the Rice Technical Working Group, which will be presented at the 2023 RTWF Conference on February 20–23. The award recognizes individuals who have given distinguished long-term service to the rice industry in areas of research, education, international agriculture, administration and industry rice technology.

Post-harvest losses are common in the global food and agricultural industry. Research shows that storage grain pests can cause serious post-harvest losses, almost 9% in developed countries to 20% or more in developing countries. To address this problem, Zhongli Pan, an adjunct professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, has developed a potential solution.

Pan’s recent project using an IoT (Internet of Things) based smart wireless technology to remotely detect early insect activity in storage, processing, handling and transportation may solve the insect infestation related challenges for the agricultural industry. The technology uses a novel device called SmartProbe – designed by Pan and his team using wireless sensors and cameras – and leverages cloud computing to monitor and predict insect occurrences. This could help control insect pest, reduce food loss and the fumigants used in agricultural products today. Ragab Gebreil, a project scientist in Pan’s lab, is the co-inventor of this technology.

Reconfigurable antennas—those that can tune properties like frequency or radiation beams in real time, from afar—are integral to future communication network systems, like 6G. But many current reconfigurable antenna designs can fall short: they dysfunction in high or low temperatures, have power limitations or require regular servicing.

To address these limitations, electrical engineers in the Penn State College of Engineering combined electromagnets with a compliant mechanism, which is the same mechanical engineering concept behind binder clips or a bow and arrow. They published their proof-of-concept reconfigurable compliant mechanism-enabled patch antenna today (Feb. 13) in Nature Communications.

“Compliant mechanisms are engineering designs that incorporate elements of the materials themselves to create motion when force is applied, instead of traditional rigid body mechanisms that require hinges for motion,” said corresponding author Galestan Mackertich-Sengerdy, who is both a doctoral student and a full-time researcher in the college’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). “Compliant mechanism-enabled objects are engineered to bend repeatedly in a certain direction and to withstand harsh environments.”

Will the AI chatbots eat Google’s lunch?

Opera announced a new feature that will be added to its browser’s sidebar. Called ‘shorten’, the tool is a ChatGPT-powered tool that can be used to generate summaries of webpages and articles. The blog also displays a short demo video that gives us a glimpse of how ChatGPT will be integrated in the browser.

Song Lin, Co-CEO of Opera, said in the blog post, “In more than 25 years of our company’s history, we have always been at the forefront of browser innovation. Whether inventing browser tabs or providing our users with built-in access to generative AI tools, we always push the limits of what’s possible on the web. Following the mass interest in generative AI tools, we believe it’s now time for browsers to step up and become the gateway to an AI-powered web”.

The results highlight some potential strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT.

Some of the world’s biggest academic journal publishers have banned or curbed their authors from using the advanced chatbot, ChatGPT. Because the bot uses information from the internet to produce highly readable answers to questions, the publishers are worried that inaccurate or plagiarised work could enter the pages of academic literature.

Several researchers have already listed the chatbot as a co-author in academic studies, and some publishers have moved to ban this practice. But the editor-in-chief of Science, one of the top scientific journals in the world, has gone a step further and forbidden any use of text from the program in submitted papers.

Continue reading “Science journals ban listing of ChatGPT as co-author on papers” »

To launch another pair of Starlink stacks to orbit this week, SpaceX will break its all-time launch pad turnaround record. The first launch, Starlink Group 5–4, is currently scheduled to lift off at 12:10 AM EST (05:10 UTC) on Sunday, Feb. 12, pending a forecasted 20% chance of acceptable weather.

If the launch target holds, the mission will break the record for both Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida and the overall record across all three Falcon 9 launch pads. The second mission, Starlink Group 2–5, is slated to launch at 8:32 AM PST (16:32 UTC) on Wednesday, Feb. 15 from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

From A to B, check out this week’s awesome tech stories from around the web.