166666183
submission
Anonymouse Cowtard writes:
Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion, is tackling music.
Five years on from the first album produced using AI, how does the future look? This report from TechCrunch:
"The startup behind the open source AI image generator Stable Diffusion is pushing us forward again with its next act: making music.
Harmonai is an organization with financial backing from Stability AI, the London-based startup behind Stable Diffusion. In late September, Harmonai released Dance Diffusion, an algorithm and set of tools that can generate clips of music by training on hundreds of hours of existing songs.
Dance Diffusion remains in the testing stages — at present, the system can only generate clips a few seconds long. But the early results provide a tantalizing glimpse at what could be the future of music creation, while at the same time raising questions about the potential impact on artists."
149926183
submission
Anonymouse Cowtard writes:
This report from The Guardian: Climate scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream, one of the planet's main potential tipping points.
The research found "an almost complete loss of stability over the last century" of the currents that researchers call the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). The currents are already at their slowest point in at least 1,600 years, but the new analysis shows they may be nearing a shutdown.
Such an event would have catastrophic consequences around the world, severely disrupting the rains that billions of people depend on for food in India, South America and West Africa; increasing storms and lowering temperatures in Europe; and pushing up the sea level in the eastern North America. It would also further endanger the Amazon rainforest and Antarctic ice sheets.
148049434
submission
Anonymouse Cowtard writes:
The Earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat as it did in 2005, according to new research, described as an âoeunprecedentedâ increase amid the climate crisis.
Scientists from Nasa, the US space agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), reported in a new study that Earth' s "energy imbalance approximately doubled" from 2005 to 2019. The increase was described as "alarming".
"Energy imbalance" refers to the difference between how much of the Sun's "radiative energy" is absorbed by Earthâ(TM)s atmosphere and surface, compared to how much "thermal infrared radiation" bounces back into space.
142885548
submission
Anonymouse Cowtard writes:
From The New York Times: What could be more exciting than flying a helicopter over the deserts of Mars? How about playing Captain Nemo on Saturnâ(TM)s large, foggy moon Titan â" plumbing the depths of a methane ocean, dodging hydrocarbon icebergs and exploring an ancient, frigid shoreline of organic goo a billion miles from the sun?
NASA recently announced that it would launch a drone called Dragonfly to the Saturnian moon in 2026. Proposals have also circulated for an orbiter, a floating probe that could splash down in a lake, even a robotic submarine.
142827536
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Anonymouse Cowtard writes:
Perseverance hit Mars' atmosphere at almost 12,000 miles per hour (19,312 kilometers per hour) and a mere seven minutes later NASA landed its latest Mars rover softly and safely. Onboard the one-ton mobile science lab is its tiny flying companion, the drone helicopter Ingenuity. If all goes well, the four-pound (1.8 kilograms) Ingenuity will be the first vehicle to ever fly on another world. At 11-light minutes from Earth, no one will fly the dual-propped Ingenuity with a drone controller. Instead, it will fly itself using a combination of Linux and a NASA-built program based on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's (JPL) open-source FÂ (pronounced F prime) framework.
Indeed, Ingenuity is purely a technology demonstration. It's not designed to support the Perseverance mission, which is searching for signs of ancient life and collecting rock and dirt samples for later missions to return to Earth. Its mission is to show that it's possible to fly on Mars using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and open-source software.
In an IEEE Spectrum interview, Timothy Canham, a JPL Embedded Flight Software Engineer, explained the helicopter's processor board is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 running at 500 Hz, not MegaHertz, Hertz. While that may sound painfully slow and old, it's far faster than Perseverance's processors. That's because NASA-grade CPUs and chips must meet NASA's High-Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) radiation standards. These customized processors take years of design work and testing before they're certified for spaceflight. For instance, NASA's newest general-purpose processor is an ARM A53 variant you may know from the Raspberry Pi 3. Ingenuity, however, as a demo project can use a more ordinary, and thus a more modern, CPU.
141139764
submission
Anonymouse Cowtard writes:
SpaceXâ(TM)s attempt to reduce the reflectivity of Starlink satellites is working, but not to the degree required by astronomers.
It's an improvement, but still not good enough, according to the team, led by astronomer Takashi Horiuchi from the National Astronomical Observatory in Japan. These "DarkSats", as they're called, also continue to cause problems at other wavelengths of light.
The first batch of orbiting Starlink satellites is brighter than 99% of objects in low Earth orbit. This is a huge concern, given Elon Muskâ(TM)s desire to launch upwards of 12,000 Starlink satellites and possibly as many as 42,000.
138240650
submission
Anonymouse Cowtard writes:
When you're holding millions in bets on the favourite, you don't take the decision to payout lightly. Betting agencies are often good barometers for political polls, but Sportsbet has been stung before. They incorrectly paid out on bets for the Labor party in Australia to win two days before the election was held, assuming a victory would come to the polling leaders. That party lost. This report from Bloomberg: "Sportsbet has decided to pay out early on Joe Biden to be elected as the U.S President even with the official result still not known, according to a statement.
The online bookmaker has deemed Bidenâ(TM)s lead as "unassailable" after CNN projected Michigan would go to the Democrats and that he holds the ascendancy in Nevada and Arizona. Sportsbet has paid out over 100,000 bets to punters who backed Biden."
137811950
submission
Anonymouse Cowtard writes:
South Australia's renewable energy boom has achieved a global milestone.
The state once known for not having enough power has become the first major jurisdiction in the world to be powered entirely by solar energy.
For just over an hour on Sunday, October 11, 100 per cent of energy demand was met by solar panels alone.
"This is truly a phenomenon in the global energy landscape," Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) chief executive Audrey Zibelman said.
"Never before has a jurisdiction the size of South Australia been completely run by solar power, with consumers' rooftop solar systems contributing 77 per cent."
Large-scale solar farms, like the ones operating at Tailem Bend and Port Augusta, provided the other 23 per cent.
Any excess power generated by gas and wind farms on that day was stored in batteries or exported to Victoria via the interconnector.
136937388
submission
Anonymouse Cowtard writes:
The saying these days among environmentally conscious people is that there is no Planet B, but a new paper published in Astrobiology suggests otherwise. A research team led by Dirk Schulze-Makuch from Washington State University has identified 24 exoplanets with conditions that could make them more suitable for life than Earth, making them âoesuperhabitable.â Sadly, all these exoplanets are farther away than 100 light-years, so people wanting to get off this shitshow of a planet shouldnâ(TM)t pack their bags just yet.
René Heller, an astrobiologist at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and a co-author of the new study, penned a similar paper back in 2014. Heller, with co-author John Armstrong from Weber State University, argued for the existence of superhabitable worlds, saying astronomers should be on the lookout for this hypothetical class of objects. The authors listed some requirements for inclusion, along with one potential candidate. The new work expands on this idea, proposing a more refined set of criteria for superhabitability, along with a list of 24 possible exoplanetary candidates.
