List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

Twitter has sued the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a nonprofit group that has criticized the company's handling of hate speech, following through on a litigation threat that had been publicly revealed just hours before.

If there’s one thing the Covid pandemic taught us, it’s that viruses shouldn’t be underestimated. People are, therefore, taking note after scientists discovered a whole new range of giant virus-like particles (VLP) that have taken on “previously unimaginable shapes and forms.” The microscopic agents, resembling everything from stars to monsters, were found in just a few handfuls of forest soil. The sample was collected from Harvard Forest, near Boston in the US back in 2019, and flown over to Germany’s Max Planck Institute. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter There, its contents were carefully examined and, at the end of last month, the findings were finally released. The team of researchers behind the investigation said that their discoveries “question our current understanding of the virosphere” and “imply that giant viruses employ a much wider array of [...] structures and mechanisms to interact with their host cells than is currently known.” In other words, the results prove how little we actually know about the universe of viruses that exist here on Earth. They also noted that the origins and functions of the different viral structures they found remain unknown – so there’s still plenty of mystery left to solve. The team at the Max Planck Institute, led by Dr Matthias Fischer, were amazed to find “an astounding diversity of virus-like particles (VLP)," in such a small sample. "Amazingly, we found that a few hundred grams of forest soil contained a greater diversity [of the structures] than that of all hitherto isolated giant viruses combined," they wrote. These included one type that resembled a supernova: Another that the teamed named the “haircut”: Another called the “turtle” morphotype: Another christened the “Christmas star”: And another called the “Gorgon” – named after the sisters with snakes for hair from Greek mythology: To clarify, VLP are molecules that closely resemble viruses, but they differ from them in one crucial way: they are non-infectious. This is because they contain no viral genetic material. Still, as virus-host systems, they are key to better understanding their potentially noxious counterparts. “[Our] findings imply that giant viruses employ a much wider array of [...] structures and mechanisms to interact with their host cells than is currently known,” the authors wrote. They ended their paper: “This fascinating window into the complex world of soil viruses leaves little doubt that the high genetic diversity of giant viruses is matched by diverse and previously unimaginable particle structures, whose origins and functions remain to be studied.” Clearly, there’s still plenty of work to be done. 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.

Elon Musk’s X Corp. sued a nonprofit group that monitors online hate speech, accusing it of falsely describing

Google is reportedly planning to “supercharge” its virtual personal assistant software with the inclusion of new generative artificial intelligence features similar to those in chatbots like Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Work on the new version of Google Assistant has begun with the mobile version of the product, Axios first reported, citing an internal e-mail sent to employees. The tech giant is reportedly reorganising its team working on Assistant with an anticipated elimination of “a small number of roles”. However, it remains unclear how many employees in the team will likely be affected by layoffs. “We remain deeply committed to Assistant and we are optimistic about its bright future ahead,” Axios quoted Peeyush Ranjan, the vice president of Google Assistant, and Duke Dukellis, the company’s product director, as saying. Google spokesperson Jennifer Rodstrom told The Verge in a statement that the company is currently exploring ways to use large language models like ChatGPT to “supercharge Assistant and make it even better”. The move comes as Google announced a major update to its own ChatGPT rival Bard last month, which allows the AI chatbot to respond to queries by talking. Bard draws on vast quantities of training data to come up with human-like responses to a wide range of queries. Similar to ChatGPT, Bard has proven capable of producing a range of output, from summarising texts to generating computer code, for creating games or software programmes. The decision to “supercharge” Assistant also comes as the tech giant noted in a report last month that artificial intelligence marks the “most profound” technology shift in our lifetimes with the potential to “turbocharge” the UK economy. Google estimated in the report that the economic boost from AI would be equivalent to an annual growth of 2.6 per cent, creating £200bn in extra revenues for public services and “turning around the recent growth stagnation”. The tech giant’s estimation did not account for the impact of AI on some jobs, however, with many critics expressing fear of the impact that disruptive technology has. For instance, professor Geoffrey Hinton – widely regarded as the “godfather of AI” for his research contributions to the field – resigned from his job at Google, expressing fear that “bad actors” could use new AI technologies to harm others. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things... I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” he said. Read More Tired of proving you’re not a robot? Say goodbye to Captcha boxes ChatGPT rival with ‘no ethical boundaries’ sold on dark web Google’s AI chatbot Bard can now talk Geothermal breakthrough uses oil drilling tech to tap renewable energy How to take the perfect picture of tonight's supermoon Twitter takes down giant ‘X’ sign on roof after a week following city investigation

Officials from the San Francisco Department of Building Inspection on Monday morning observed that the new "X" on top of the building formerly known as Twitter's headquarters was being dismantled, according to Patrick Hannan, the department's spokesman.

By David Shepardson WASHINGTON A U.S. government committee on foreign investments reviewed a record number of proposed transactions

A large, flashing “X” sign on San Francisco’s Market Street marked the end of Twitter and its bird

By Jody Godoy NEW YORK Terraform Labs and its founder Do Kwon must face fraud allegations brought by

A next-generation energy storage system made of cement and an ancient ink has the potential to massively scale-up renewable energy operations by transforming homes and roads into giant batteries, according to the scientists who invented it. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Wyss Institute in the US unveiled the design on Monday, claiming that supercapacitors made of this material have “great potential” to assist in the world’s transition to clean energy. “The material is fascinating because you have the most-used man made material in the world, cement, that is combined with carbon black, that is a well-known historical material – the Dead Sea Scrolls were written with it,” said MIT professor Admir Masic, who was involved in the research. “You have these at least two-millennia-old materials that when you combine them in a specific manner you come up with a conductive nanocomposite, and that’s when things get really interesting.” The concrete mix of cement and carbon black only requires water, making it a low-cost alternative to other energy storage systems being developed to allow energy networks to remain stable despite fluctuations to renewable energy sources like solar, wind and tidal power. The researchers say their supercapacitor could be used in the concrete foundations of a house to provide an entire day’s worth of energy without adding any additional construction costs. It could even eventually be used on concrete roadways to provide contactless recharging for electric cars as they travel. “There is a huge need for big energy storage,” said MIT professor Franz-Josef Ulm. “That’s where our technology is extremely promising, because cement is ubiquitous... [It] offers a new way of looking toward the future of concrete as part of the energy transition.” Early applications will likely be with isolated homes or buildings equipped with solar panels that do not have access to grid power. The concrete mixture can also be adjusted to serve other uses, the scientists noted, such as heating systems. A paper detailing the research, titled ‘Cement supercapacitors as a scalable energy storage solution’, was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday. Read More Hundreds of years after it was discovered, one material is about to change the world Battery breakthroughs are about to trigger a transport revolution

E-cigarette company Juul Labs is seeking US authorization to sell a "next-generation" vape with age verification capabilities in the United States.

Nasa has “inadvertently” lost contact with Voyager 2, its pioneering spacecraft. The space agency said that it had sent a series of planned commands to the probe on 21 July. But those moves left Voyager 2 pointing in the wrong direction: its antenna is now pointing two degrees away from Earth, and so it has lost contact with its engineers. It cannot either receive commands or send back data, Nasa said. Ordinarily, it would do so by establishing contact with the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which is a set of ground-based antennas that allow for communications with distant spacecraft. But the data being sent by Voyager 2 is not reaching that network. Voyager 2 is now floating on its own, almost 20 billion kilometres from Earth. Nasa still hopes to be able to re-establish contact with the probe, however. It is programmed to automatically reset its orientation a number of times each year, to push its antenna back to Earth. The next reset is expected to happen on 15 October, Nasa said. Until then, the space agency expects the probe to “remain on its planned trajectory during the quiet period”, it said. As its name suggests, Voyager 2 was part of a pair, both of which were launched in 1977. Voyager 1 is floating even further from Earth – at 24 billion kilometres – and Nasa says it is continuing to operate as normal. The Voyager programme brought with it a host of records: Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft to have visited Uranus and Neptune, and together they are the only spacecraft made by humans to ever have entered interstellar space. Even almost 50 years since they were launched, the pair of Voyager spacecraft have continued to send back useful and important information to Nasa for examination by scientists on Earth. They have contributed to a host of new findings about the very distant edges of our solar system. Read More How to take the perfect picture of tonight's supermoon Elon Musk installs huge, glowing letter on top of his office A game where you go to sleep in real life is one of the most popular in the world

Pokémon Sleep, a game in which players go to bed in real life to win, is rocketing up the App Store charts. The app is now sixth in Apple’s charts, suggesting that makers The Pokémon Company may have found a way to replicate some of the success of their previous hit Pokemon Go. To play the game, people download the app onto their iPhone – or use a separate, paid-for accessory that the company says can be used to track sleep as well as make it easier. Once that is done, users mostly play by going to sleep. When they wake up in the morning, they will receive information about their sleep patterns – how long they slept, what kind of sleep that was, and whether players made any noises during the night – and receive rewards of Pokémon that will be caught based on that data. The game has received some negative reviews: on the iOS App Store, one player called it “deeply flawed and predatory”, criticising the fact that tracking sleep with the iPhone app means sleeping with it and leaving the screen on. While players can use the Pokémon Go Plus +, which has been given a confusing name presumably to separate it from the existing Pokémon Go Plus, that costs $60. It also received a critical review in The Verge, which said that while it was “incredibly cute”, it came with some drawbacks, including the fact that it requires players to undertake dull tasks during the day and offered few meaningful ways to actually improve sleep. Nonetheless, the game appears to have proven incredibly successful on the iPhone’s App Store and Android’s Google Play Store, where it has been downloaded millions of times. The game comes amid a growing interest in the benefits of sleep, and the technology that can help promote it. Multiple wearables such as those made by Apple, Garmin and Whoop all track the sleeping habits of their wearers, and other companies have promoted cooling and massaging technologies that are aimed at helping people get more restful sleep.