alone in the Amazon rainforest
The math is pretty simple. We could meet the world’s energy needs by harnessing just 0.01 per cent of the billions of megawatts of solar power that are hitting the Earth’s surface at any given moment. But scaling up quickly to capture that energy is a bit more complicated—even if the necessary technology is already at our disposal. Pavagada Ultra Mega Solar Park [in India], a clean-power plant the size of Manhattan, could be a model for the world—or a cautionary tale.
Logan Paul, an American YouTube personality, purchased a rare ‘Bumblebee’ 0N1 Force NFT for $623,000 back in 2021. Today, it’s worth $10.
For years, Ville Pulkki, a professor of acoustics at Aalto University, has been wondering why it feels so difficult to shout upwind. […] It isn’t harder to shout into the wind; it’s just harder to hear yourself.
A gene in the brain driving anxiety symptoms has been identified. Modification of the gene is shown to reduce anxiety levels, offering an exciting novel drug target for anxiety disorders.
Earlier this year, German stock photographer Robert Kneschke used Have I Been Trained?, a website that tells you if your photos were used to train AI image generators. He discovered many of his images in the dataset of LAION [the nonprofit that created the data set that trained Stable Diffusion]. Knescke asked LAION to remove his work from the training data. But he got a response he didn’t expect: a letter from a law firm on behalf of LAION [in which] LAION’s attorney claims that the non-profit is “doing voluntary research with the aim of further developing self-learning algorithms in the sense of artificial intelligence and making them available to the general public,” and that they “do not violate copyright or data protection law. […] We also point out that our client can assert claims for damages in accordance with Section 97a (4) UrhG if they are unjustified in terms of copyright.” LAION lawyers are now reportedly demanding almost €900 (~$1000 USD) from Kneschke while LAION continues to use his pictures.
On Artifice and Intelligence — How to spot counterfeit cognition
The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born — Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they’d designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. They followed it to a clinic there, called New Hope Fertility Center, where they put the instrument back together, assembling a microscope, a mechanized needle, a tiny petri dish, and a laptop. Then one of the engineers, with no real experience in fertility medicine, used a Sony PlayStation 5 controller to position a robotic needle. Eyeing a human egg through a camera, it then moved forward on its own, penetrating the egg and dropping off a single sperm cell.
Juliane Koepcke became famous at the age of 17 as the sole survivor of the 1971 LANSA Flight 508 plane crash; after falling 3,000 m (10,000 ft) while strapped to her seat and suffering numerous injuries, she survived 11 days alone in the Amazon rainforest until local fishermen rescued her.
