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The FTX/Alameda saga continues, with news late Wednesday that two key Sam Bankman-Fried associates have been charged with federal criminal offenses in the U.S.: Both former Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison and FTX co-founder Gary Wang pleaded guilty to multiple charges, and accepted plea agreements that offer reduced sentencing in exchange for assistance in ongoing investigations into wrongdoing at FTX/Alameda that prove “substantial.”

Meanwhile, Sam Bankman-Fried was also extradited to the U.S. from the Bahamas on Wednesday, facing suits by the SEC and CFTC over fraud, as well as federal criminal charges. When Southern District of New York attorney Damian Williams announced the charges at a press event last week, he noted that his office was “not done” in terms of levying additional charges, and now we know Ellison and Wang were at least some of the individuals he was referring to at the time.

Ellison and Wang are likely to be key witnesses for the feds in the SBF case, given that they are most likely to have direct and best knowledge that SBF knew about the use of FTX customer funds to cover Alameda’s risky crypto trading bets.

Text-to-image AI exploded this year as technical advances greatly enhanced the fidelity of art that AI systems could create. Controversial as systems like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 are, platforms including DeviantArt and Canva have adopted them to power creative tools, personalize branding and even ideate new products.

But the tech at the heart of these systems is capable of far more than generating art. Called diffusion, it’s being used by some intrepid research groups to produce music, synthesize DNA sequences and even discover new drugs.

So what is diffusion, exactly, and why is it such a massive leap over the previous state of the art? As the year winds down, it’s worth taking a look at diffusion’s origins and how it advanced over time to become the influential force that it is today. Diffusion’s story isn’t over — refinements on the techniques arrive with each passing month — but the last year or two especially brought remarkable progress.

Could the AI bot one day replace the search engine?

Three weeks ago, an artificial intelligence research laboratory, Open AI, unveiled its experimental chatbot ChatGPT. Though far away from perfection, a look at its capabilities has been sufficient to send a red alert to Google about how AI can upend its business. Sundar Pichai, the CEO at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has now directed multiple groups to focus on addressing this threat, Business Insider.

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Continue reading “AI Chatbot Wars: Google management on alert after seeing ChatGPT’s potential” »

Hamoudi, H., Berdiyorov, G.R., Zekri, A. et al. Building block 3D printing based on molecular self-assembly monolayer with self-healing properties. Sci Rep 12, 6,806 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-10875-9

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The newly-created Longevity Escape Velocity Foundation (LEV) has released details of the first study in its flagship research programme: Robust Mouse Rejuvenation – Study 1.

Longevity. Technology: A highlight of Longevity Summit Dublin 2022 was Dr Aubrey de Grey’s announcement of his new foundation; LEV Foundation exists to proactively identify and address the most challenging obstacles on the path to the widespread availability of genuinely effective treatments to prevent and reverse human age-related disease, and to that end, its flagship research programme is a sequence of large mouse lifespan studies.

Mouse models are significant in aging research for several reasons. Mice and humans share many genetic and physiological similarities, including similar aging-related pathways, and this makes mice a useful model for studying the molecular and cellular processes underlying aging in humans.

Photonic data-processing is well-suited to the age of deep learning | Science & technology.

The detector would search for ripples in the fabric of space-time left in the spacecraft’s wake.

In a year filled with sweet new observations in astronomy and tantalizing breakthroughs in condensed matter physics, the brand-new space telescope takes the cake.

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A research group led by Prof. Wu Kaifeng from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics (DICP), Chinese Academy of Sciences recently reported the successful initialization, coherent quantum-state control, and readout of spins at room temperature using solution-grown quantum dots, which represents an important advance in quantum information science.

The study was published in Nature Nanotechnology on Dec 19th.

Continue reading “Coherent manipulation of spin qubits at room temperature” »