Lifeboat Foundation

Circa 2018

It may look like just another giant smokestack, but a 200-foot tower in the central Chinese city of Xi’an was built to pull deadly pollutants from the air rather than add more. And preliminary research shows the tower — which some are calling the world’s largest air purifier — has cut air pollution significantly across a broad swath of the surrounding area.

Given those findings, the researchers behind the project say they hope to build an even taller air-purifying tower in Xi’an, and possibly in other cities around China.

Continue reading “This skyscraper-sized air purifier is the world’s tallest” »

How many credit cards do you have? If you’re like the average American, you carry four in your wallet.

Chances are your credit cards are from different banks. But if you dumped out your wallet on the table and laid all your cards side by side, you’d notice something odd.

While all the cards are from different banks—and they all have their own special privileges, prestigious names, and color schemes—most have one thing in common:

San Francisco startup RealityEngines. AI has turned off stealth mode and today launched its completely autonomous cloud AI service. It’s all very tedious to the common reader IMO — enterprise-level business stuff — but the technology itself and how it could shape our future in both data and perceived reality should be at least mildly considered.

Here’s how RealityEngines. AI works: using a Neural Architecture Search (NAS) technique called BANANAS, when a user points their data (through an API) to RealityEngines. AI and selects a use case (churn predictions, fraud detection, sales lead forecasting, security threat detection, cloud spend optimization, et al.), the data is attacked by the NAS to create cutting-edge models then refined by a generative adversarial network (GAN) in order to augment sparse or noisy data with synthetic data to further enhance the data modeling. Now that, is bananas.

Continue reading “RealityEngines.AI Launches World’s First Autonomous Cloud AI Service” »

Circa 2019 o.o

Deepfakes exist not only for photos and videos but for audio too. AI can be used to clone people’s voices, and this AI clone of podcaster Joe Rogan created by startup Dessa is the most convincing we’ve ever heard.

Continue reading “This AI-generated Joe Rogan fake has to be heard to be believed” »

Every year, Americans spend something like $35 billion on vitamins, minerals, botanicals and various other substances that are touted as health-giving but mostly do nothing at all. Nothing at all!

Could the entire category really just be a rip-off? I turned to the National Institutes of Health. I spoke with Carol Haggans, a scientific and health communications consultant with the Office of Dietary Supplements, about vitamins and minerals, and to Craig Hopp, deputy director of the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, about botanical and other kinds of supplements.

UNEARTHED | The list of those that have well-established benefits is short.

Continue reading “Most dietary supplements don’t do anything. Why do we spend $35 billion a year on them?” »

Industrial designer Vladimir Pirojkov was called upon to work on the interior design for a new spacecraft for the Russian Space Agency. Here he talks about the experience.

Can you tell us a little about your background?

My roots are in the transportation industry. I graduated from Art Center College of Design in Switzerland. My first job was as a Citroen interior designer in Paris. After six years I moved to Nice in the south of France to join the Toyota Europe Design Development Centre as senior interior designer. It was a great experience, where many countries and cultures met and learned from each other. We worked on projects for show cars and some for on-the-road production vehicles. In 2007, I returned to Russia to work on the future of the world.

Why you’re more of a sucker than you think.

A new kind of robot at a warehouse near Berlin is performing tasks that until recently had been out of the reach of machines.

At a facility near Berlin, a new kind of robot is automating tasks that until recently had been out of the reach of machines.

Credit… Video by Robert Rieger.

Worrisome.

The atmosphere is literally changing the food we eat, for the worse. And almost nobody is paying attention.