List of All Articles with Tag 'tec'

Discord, the chat app, has stopped working properly. Users complained on Tuesday that messages were slow to send, if they could sign in at all.

Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced former Theranos CEO, has "limited financial means" and should not be forced to pay $250 a month to victims of her crimes after she is released from prison, her lawyers argued in a court filing on Monday.

Influencers in the video-game industry are evolving from playing games to making them. Over the weekend, One True

Artificial intelligence has been used to generate images showing some of the most controversial world leaders as babies and the results are strangely sweet. In recent years, AI has come to the fore as one of the most powerful and perhaps terrifying new types of technology we have ever seen. It has the ability to learn via data and produce results based on the information it is fed. One person has now used the technology to produce images of different world leaders as babies. On Instagram, a user named Planet AI explained they asked “AI to Draw World Leaders as Babies” and the results were pretty surprising. Included in the images were Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, the French President, Emmanuel Macron, the UK’s former PM Boris Johnson and the former US president Donald Trump. Remarkably, the AI-generated image managed to make the war-mongering Russian leader Vladimir Putin appear relatively sweet and innocent. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter In the comments, people certainly had some thoughts about the images AI had come up with. Someone commented: “Kim Jong Un did not change.” Another said: “I'm finding it really funny that Pope Francis is still in his pope clothes. Makes me think of a baby running the Catholic church.” “Putin is so sweet and Obama also,” another argued. On Twitter, another person wrote: “Joe Biden looks so old that even his baby version looks about 60 years old!” While AI technology can be used for relatively harmless entertainment purposes, one woman discovered how powerful it can be after claiming she “lost her job to AI” and had to apply for the job to train it. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

When Tim Cook took over as Apple CEO from Steve Jobs nearly 12 years ago, some thought the company was already at its peak.

Even as Apple Inc.’s shares have powered their way to a fresh record high, worries over cooling demand

A white dwarf star is undergoing the process of turning into a “cosmic diamond” as it begins to crystalise. The lullaby “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” talks about stars in the sky looking like diamonds, but for one specific type of star, that observation is truer than for others. Astronomers have observed that when a specific type of dead star starts to cool, it begins to crystalise and harden. An international team of astronomers, led by Alexander Venner of the University of Southern Queensland in Australia, have explained in a new paper Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society how a white dwarf star around 104 light-years away is doing just that. They noticed that the star, composed primarily of carbon and metallic oxygen, has a temperature-mass profile that suggests its centre is hardening into a dense “cosmic diamond” made of crystallised carbon and oxygen. The study explained: "In this work we present the discovery of a new Sirius-like quadruple system at 32 parsecs distance, composed of a crystallizing white dwarf companion to the previously known triple HD 190412.” Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter It continued: “By virtue of its association with these main sequence companions, this is the first crystallizing white dwarf whose total age can be externally constrained, a fact that we make use of by attempting to empirically measure a cooling delay caused by core crystallization in the white dwarf.” All stars eventually die out when they run out of energy. Of those that have a mass of less than around eight times that of the Sun, the vast majority will form a white dwarf star. The matter of a white dwarf star is highly compressed and as they gradually cool, they evolve into a black dwarf star when they lose heat and crystalise. Scientists’ calculations estimate the process takes around a quadrillion years (one million billion years) to complete, though the signs that the process is occurring can be identified by experts. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Welcome to Social Buzz, a daily column looking at what’s trending on social media platforms. I’m Caitlin Fichtel,

Hundreds of people have attended an AI-generated church service in Germany, involving virtual avatars delivering sermons written by ChatGPT. The 40-minute service at Saint Paul’s church in Fürth received mixed reactions from the Protestant congregation, the Associated Press reported, with the avatars occasionally causing unintentional laughter. Some church members even refused to speak along when the digital avatar read out the Lord’s Prayer. “There was no heart and no soul,” said Heiderose Schmidt, a 54-year-old IT worker who attended the service. “The avatars showed no emotions at all, had no body language and were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said. But maybe it is different for the younger generation who grew up with all of this.” Lutheran pastor Marc Jansen was more impressed by the artificial intelligence, saying he had “imagined it to be worse” than it was. “I was positively surprised how well it worked,” he said. “Also, the language of the AI worked well, even though it was still a bit bumpy at times.” The AI began the service by stating: “Dear friends, it is an honour for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany.” It went on to talk about leaving the past behind and never losing trust in Jesus, while also urging the congregation to overcome their fear of death. More than 300 people attended the service, which was organised by 29-year-old theologian Jonas Simmerlein from the University of Vienna. Mr Simmerlein instructed ChatGPT to include psalms, prayers and a blessing, saying the experiment was designed to show how religious leaders could use AI to help them with their work. “Artificial intelligence will increasingly take over our lives, in all its facets. And that’s why it’s useful to learn to deal with it,” he said, adding that AI will not be able to replace the role pastors serve in interacting with the local community. “The pastor is in the congregation, she lives with them, she buries the people, she knows them from the beginning. Artificial intelligence cannot do that. It does not know the congregation.” Read More What is superintelligence? How AI could wipe out humanity – and why the boss of ChatGPT is doomsday prepping 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity Major Google Bard update allows it to not just write code, but execute it Instagram is working on an AI chatbot with multiple personalities The glaring omission from Apple’s AR headset launch

A whistleblower who claims that the US government has been operating UFO retrieval research in secret has reportedly said that UFOs have been responsible for the deaths of humans. David Grusch worked for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and was involved with the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force. He claimed that some of the “non-human intelligences” discovered have malevolent intentions and have killed people. Speaking to NewsNation [via the Daily Mail], he also reportedly claimed that the US is in a race with Russia and China to study extraterrestrial life. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter “I think the logical fallacy there is because they’re advanced, they’re kind. We’ll never really understand their full intent and that’s because we’re not them. But I think what appears to be malevolent activity has happened.” He added: “That’s based on nuclear site probing activities and witness testimony. Grusch was then asked if UFOs had ever killed humans and he replied: “While I can’t get into the specifics because that would reveal certain US classified operations, I was briefed by a few individuals on the program that there were malevolent events like that.” The 36-year-old also suggested that the US government would go to extreme lengths to keep secrets covered up, saying: “At the very least, I saw substantive evidence that white-collar crime was committed… unfortunately. “I’ve heard some really un-American things I don’t want to repeat right now.” Grusch previously claimed that the US government has a "non-human origin" in-tact craft that they're keeping from the public. Speaking to NewsNation, Grusch said: "These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it a spacecraft if you will, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed." Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Happiness is one of life’s most elusive gifts – it is an emotion that can’t be pinned down. And yet, an animation showing a protein molecule “walking along”, carrying a large sphere, is widely credited with being a visual representation of joy itself. The gif has trended online for almost a decade but continues to breed delight in those who see it. Many people believe that it is – to use the technical terms – a myosin transporting endorphins in the brain. In other words, it is a scientific portrayal of the actual processes that give us that warm and fuzzy feeling. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter However, though we’d hate to dampen the mood, this isn’t quite accurate. In fact, the real brain behind the original clip, medical artist John Liebler, set out the truth back in 2014. @mommyca713 AMAZING! #cells #innerlife #happiness #lookslike #facts #fact #fyi #fyp #brain #research #facts #animation #myosin #interesting #education #viral #fypシ #humanbrain #mentalhealth #science #stem He explained that he, his team at medical technology company XVIVO, and two Harvard University researchers created the 3D computer animation in 2006 for a biology classroom video called ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’, as Science Alert reports. The educational clip wasn't intended to depict a brain process at all but to take the viewer "on a journey through the microscopic world of a cell, illustrating mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus,” according to Liebler himself. So this is all about a protein in a white blood cell, not a protein in a neuron. The Inner Life of the Cell Animation youtu.be At any rate, happiness doesn’t just come about through a single process. So even if the clip did show endorphins being delivered to our brains, this wouldn’t offer a full picture. Dopamine, other neurotransmitters (for example, serotonin), biological health and genetics all play a part in cementing our feelings of contentment. We don’t just rely on jolly little myosin proteins lugging around bundles of cheer. Still, the internet is now awash with jovial variations on the clip and it can’t be denied that the scene-stealing strutting protein is pretty damn cute. So if that’s enough to bring a smile to your face, maybe it is a representation of happiness after all. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

Cathie Wood’s funds have reentered Meta Platforms Inc. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. after nearly a year and