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Jul 9, 2023

New priming method improves battery life, efficiency

Posted by in categories: climatology, particle physics, sustainability

Silicon anode batteries have the potential to revolutionize energy storage capabilities, which is key to meeting climate goals and unlocking the full potential of electric vehicles.

However, the irreversible depletion of lithium ions in silicon anodes puts a major constraint on the development of next-generation lithium-ion batteries.

Scientists at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering have developed a readily scalable method to optimize prelithiation, a process that helps mitigate lithium loss and improves battery life cycles by coating silicon anodes with stabilized lithium metal particles (SLMPs).

Jul 9, 2023

Wearable Sensors that Detect Gas Leaks

Posted by in categories: chemistry, health, holograms, military, wearables

Gas accidents such as toxic gas leakage in factories, carbon monoxide leakage of boilers, or toxic gas suffocation during manhole cleaning continue to claim lives and cause injuries. Developing a sensor that can quickly detect toxic gases or biochemicals is still an important issue in public health, environmental monitoring, and military sectors. Recently, a research team at POSTECH has developed an inexpensive, ultra-compact wearable hologram sensor that immediately notifies the user of volatile gas detection.


[Professor Junsuk Rho’s research team at POSTECH develops wearable gas sensors that display instantaneous visual holographic alarm.].

Jul 9, 2023

Gartner: 79% of strategists see AI as critical to businesses

Posted by in categories: business, robotics/AI

The technological research firm’s recent survey that found corporate strategists view AI and analytics as paramount to future business success.

Jul 9, 2023

Generative AI in Games Will Create a Copyright Crisis

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

Titles like AI Dungeon are already using generative AI to generate in-game content. Nobody knows who owns it.

Jul 9, 2023

Scientists make loudspeakers that can absorb sound for pure silence

Posted by in category: particle physics

This is according to a press release by the institution published last week.

“We wanted to reduce the effect of the membrane as much as possible, since it’s heavy. But what can be as light as air? The air itself,” explained Stanislav Sergeev, a postdoc at EPFL’s Acoustic Group and first author.

“We first ionize the thin layer of air between the electrodes that we call a plasmacoustic metalayer. The same air particles, now electrically charged, can instantaneously respond to external electrical field commands and effectively interact with sound vibrations in the air around the device to cancel them out.”

Jul 9, 2023

Electrons are extremely round, a new measurement confirms

Posted by in category: space

The near-perfect roundness deepens the mystery behind how the universe came to be filled with matter as opposed to antimatter.

Jul 9, 2023

OpenAI makes GPT-4 generally available

Posted by in categories: innovation, robotics/AI

OpenAI today announced the general availability of GPT-4, its latest text-generating model, through its API.

Starting this afternoon, all existing OpenAI API developers “with a history of successful payments” can access GPT-4. The company plans to open up access to new developers by the end of this month, and then start raising availability limits after that “depending on compute availability.”

“Millions of developers have requested access to the GPT-4 API since March, and the range of innovative products leveraging GPT-4 is growing every day,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. “We envision a future where chat-based models can support any use case.”

Jul 9, 2023

MIT develops a motion and task planning system for home robots

Posted by in categories: habitats, robotics/AI

Why aren’t there more robots in homes? This a surprising complex question — and our homes are surprisingly complex places. A big part of the reason autonomous systems are thriving on warehouse and factory floors first is the relative ease of navigating a structured environment. Sure, most systems still require a space be mapped prior to getting to work, but once that’s in place there tends to be little in the way of variation.

Homes, on the other hand, are kind of a nightmare. Not only do they vary dramatically from unit to unit, they’re full of unfriendly obstacles and tend to be fairly dynamic, as furniture is moved around or things are left on the floor. Vacuums are the most prevalent robots in the home, and they’re still being refined after decades on the market.

This week, researchers at MIT CSAIL are showcasing PIGINet (Plans, Images, Goal, and Initial facts), which is designed to bring task and motion planning to home robotic systems. The neural network is designed to help streamline their ability to create plans of action in different environments.

Jul 9, 2023

YouTube tests AI-generated quizzes on educational videos

Posted by in categories: education, habitats, robotics/AI

YouTube is experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app for iOS and Android devices, which are designed to help viewers learn more about a subject featured in an educational video. The feature will also help the video-sharing platform get a better understanding of how well each video covers a certain topic.

The AI-generated quizzes, which YouTube noted on its experiments page yesterday, are rolling out globally to a small percentage of users that watch “a few” educational videos, the company wrote. The quiz feature is only available for a select portion of English-language content, which will appear on the home feed as links under recently watched videos.

Not all of YouTube’s experiments make it to the platform, so it will be interesting to see if this one sticks around. We’re not sure how many people — especially if they’re no longer in school — want to take a quiz while they scroll through videos.

Jul 9, 2023

China wraps up fintech crackdown with big fines on Tencent, Alibaba

Posted by in categories: finance, governance

The regulatory crackdown that has shaken up China’s fintech industry since late 2020 appears to be coming to a close with the imposition of hefty fines on the country’s two digital payments giants.

Tencent, along with its payments subsidiary Tenpay, has been fined approximately 2.99 billion yuan ($410 million) by the People’s Bank of China for “its past regulatory breaches in relation to the provision of payment services in the mainland of China,” the company said in a filing on Friday.

On the same day, the central bank announced it will slap a 7.123 billion yuan (roughly $1 billion) fine on Ant Group, the fintech affiliate of Alibaba, for a range of illegal activities, including those concerning corporate governance, consumer protection, banking and insurance, payments and settlement, anti-money laundering practices and fund sales.