Lifeboat Foundation

It’s a rare confirmation of the components that go into the iPhone. ‘We’ve been partnering with Sony for over a decade,’ Cook said.

Tim Cook has tweeted an admission that Apple uses Sony image sensors in its iPhones as part of the CEO’s supplier tour of Japan. “We’ve been partnering with Sony for over a decade to create the world’s leading camera sensors for iPhone,” Cook tweeted, and thanked Sony CEO Kenichiro Yoshida for showing him around the Kumamoto facility. A photo shows Cook being shown his company’s own smartphone, which is objectively very funny.

The partnership looks set to continue.

Continue reading “Tim Cook admits that iPhones use Sony camera sensors” »

A first look at the unnamed device, which will feature color passthrough mixed reality.

HTC plans to introduce a new flagship AR / VR headset next month that will reestablish its presence in the consumer virtual reality space. The company isn’t planning to release full details until CES on January 5th.

More details are coming next month.

Continue reading “HTC will announce a lightweight Meta Quest competitor at CES” »

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“The aquarium is damaged, water is leaking. The situation is not clear at the moment,” the Berlin fire brigade further wrote on Twitter.

The Expanse is one of the seminal sci-fi shows of the past decade. Set centuries in the future when humans have colonized the solar system, it’s been called one of the most scientifically accurate sci-fi shows of all time. But just how much does this hold up to scrutiny?

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What if artificial intelligence could help an aspiring author write a novel? Or coach people to improve the quality of their writing? Could machines learn how to make jokes? Inspired by these questions, computer scientist Jiao Sun has been exploring the potential of AI-generated text as a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California (USC).

After a four-month internship at Alexa AI last spring, she is now starting her journey as an Amazon Machine Learning Fellow for the 2022–23 academic year and hopes to continue developing text-generation models that enhance the interaction between humans and AI.

While Sun is passionate about the potential of natural language generation, she also believes it’s important to develop tools that improve human control over machine-created content. She is also cautiously optimistic about the surge in popularity surrounding text generation models.

Robots were once considered capable only of unimaginative, routine work. Today they write articles and create award-winning art.

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect a schedule change for the launch.

A rocket scheduled to lift off in Virginia — that could be visible above at least a portion of New Jersey — has been rescheduled.

Rocket Lab USA’s first Electron rocket’s launch has now been moved, and will not happen earlier than Sunday, Dec. 18, officials announced Thursday night. A specific date and time was not announced.

Next-generation batteries could take on many forms, but one design that scientists are pinning a lot of hope on involves the use of lithium metal. The excellent energy density of this material could see batteries power smartphones for days at a time, and by designing a new electrolyte that can be controlled by an external magnetic fields, scientist in South Korea have edged them a little closer to reality.

A lithium-metal battery is one that would see this material deployed in place of the graphite and copper used in the anode of today’s lithium-ion batteries. This could make for smaller and lighter anodes with far superior energy density, which could see smartphones require far fewer charges each week or an electric vehicle travel much farther on each charge.

But one problem researchers continue to run into is the growth of tentacle-like protrusions on the anode called dendrites, which swiftly cause the battery to fail. There is no shortage of potential solutions when it comes to addressing this issue, and now a team at the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology have thrown another bright idea into the mix.

JWST makes a spectacular debut, AI gets creative, giant bacteria surprise, and the year’s other big advances in science.