SoylentNews

hubie writes:

Researchers have created a sturdy, lightweight material made from sugar and wood-derived powders that disintegrates on-demand:

Sturdy, degradable materials made from plants and other non-petroleum sources have come a long way in recent years. For example, cornstarch-based packing peanuts disappear simply by dousing them in water, and some utensils are based on polymers synthesized from plant sugars. But those packing peanuts can't be used to protect anything wet, and plant-derived polymers still take a long time to break down. One potential alternative is a new type of rigid material designed from isomalt, which is a sugar alcohol rather than a polymer. With isomalt, bakers can create breathtaking, but brittle, structures for desserts, and then dissolve them away quickly in water. So, Scott Phillips and colleagues wanted to boost the sturdiness of isomalt with natural additives to create a robust material that degrades on-demand.

The researchers heated isomalt to a liquid-like state and mixed in either cellulose, cellulose and sawdust, or wood flour to produce three different materials. Then, using commercial plastics manufacturing equipment, the materials were extruded into small pellets and molded into various objects, including balls, a dodecahedron, a chess piece and flower-shaped saucers. All of the tested additives doubled the strength of isomalt, creating materials that were harder than plastics, including poly(ethylene terephthalate) (known as PET) and poly(vinyl chloride) (known as PVC), but were still lightweight. In experiments, samples dissolved in water within minutes. And saucers made of the material, and coated with a food grade shellac and cellulose acetate, withstood being immersed in water for up to seven days. However, once the saucers were broken and the coating cracked, they rapidly disintegrated in water. The team also repeatedly crushed, dissolved and recycled both coated and uncoated objects into new ones that were still as strong as the original items.

The researchers say that the material could be used for food-service items and temporary décor, and then crushed and sprayed with water to fall apart. But even if such items were simply tossed into the trash or somehow got into the environment, the slightest crack in the coating would start their collapse into sugars and the plant-based additives, which the researchers say might be good for soil.

There is also a video version of this press release

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The winery's layout and finishes suggest the wine-making was merely a spectacle for ancient Roman elites:

Archaeologists have discovered the remains of an 1,800-year-old winery at the Villa of the Quintilii outside of Rome. By the team's measure, the winery was designed as much for the spectacle of wine-making as the practice itself.

Decorated rooms around the winery appear to have hosted guests who would observe the wine-making process, the researchers found, and the finishes (including marble floors) seem installed for appearances over practicality. The team's research is published in Antiquity.

"Agricultural labor was romanticized by the ruling classes of many ancient cultures, especially as it was often the source of both their wealth and status," said Emlyn Dodd, a researcher at the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, in an Antiquity release.

Journal Reference:
Emlyn Dodd, Giuliana Galli and Riccardo Frontoni, The spectacle of production: a Roman imperial winery at the Villa of the Quintilii, Rome [open], Antiquity, 97, 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2023.18

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Apple's WaveOne purchase heralds a new era in smart-streaming of AR and video:

Apple's surprise purchase at the end of last month of WaveOne, a California-based startup that develops content-aware AI algorithms for video compression, showcases an important shift in how video signals are streamed to our devices. In the near-term Cuppertino's purchase will likely lead to smart video-compression tools in Apple's video-creation products and in the development of its much-discussed augmented-reality headset.

However, Apple isn't alone. Startups in the AI video codec space are likely to prove acquisition targets for other companies trying to keep up.

[...] AI codecs, having been developed over the course of decades, use machine-learning algorithms to analyze and understand the visual content of a video, identify redundancies and nonfunctional data, and compress the video in a more efficient way. They use learning-based techniques instead of manually designed tools for encoding and can use different ways to measure encoding quality beyond traditional distortion measures. Recent advancements, like attention mechanisms, help them understand the data better and optimize visual quality.

During the first half of the 2010s, Netflix and a California-based company called Harmonic helped to spearhead a movement of what's called "content-aware" encoding. CAE, as Harmonic calls it, uses AI to analyze and identify the most important parts of a video scene, and to allocate more bits to those parts for better visual quality, while reducing the bit rate for less important parts of the scene.

Content-aware video compression adjusts an encoder for different resolutions of encoding, adjusts the bit rate according to content, and adjusts the quality score—the perceived quality of a compressed video compared to the original uncompressed video. All those things can be done by neural encoders as well.

upstart writes:

Kodiak Robotics will haul freight autonomously for Tyson Foods:

Autonomous trucking startup Kodiak Robotics is partnering with truckload carrier C.R. England to autonomously ship Tyson Foods products between Dallas and San Antonio, Texas.

A human safety operator will be present in the one dedicated truck Kodiak is allocating to this pilot. Deliveries will begin this month, according to the company.

The pilot program is the latest in Kodiak's growing string of paid partnerships with major carriers, and it further demonstrates the startup's potential path to sustainability and even profitability once it removes the human safety driver from operations.

A spokesperson for Kodiak said the company aims to remove the safety operator within the next couple of years.

[...] Kodiak says the partnership is not only emblematic of how human-driven trucks and autonomous trucks can work together, but it also provides a use case for autonomy as a solution for moving perishable products in a timely manner.

[...] As part of the partnership, C.R. England is also joining Kodiak's Partner Development Program, which is Kodiak's way of working with carriers to help establish autonomous freight operations and, hopefully, integrate Kodiak's self-driving system into their fleet.

"Our intent is to be a 'one-stop shop' for customers, whether they need their freight moved autonomously or not," said England.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Create an AI agent that works from a set of goals:

To get good output from ChatGPT or another LLM, you usually have to feed it several prompts. But what if you could just give your AI bot a set of fairly broad goals at the start of a session and then sit back while it generates its own set of tasks to fulfill those goals? That's the idea behind Auto-GPT, a new open-source tool that uses the OpenAI API (same LLM as ChatGPT) to prompt itself, based on your initial input.

We've already seen a number of Twitter users talk about how they are using Auto-GPT for everything from creating marketing plans to analyzing market data for investments to preparing topics for a podcast. Based on our hands-on experience, we can't say that it always works well (we asked it to write a Windows 11 how-to and the result was awful), but it's early days and some tasks may work better than others.

If you want to try Auto-GPT on your computer, it is easy to install, and while there are a few sticky points in the process, we've found ways to work with them, or around them to write this condensed guide on how to create your own Auto-GPT AI to help you in your goals.

[...] You may or may not need to add payment information to your OpenAI account. By default, the system will give you a certain amount of free credits. In Editor-in-Chief Avram Piltch's case, it was $18 worth of free credit that he was able to use without entering any payment methods. You may not get as much free credit or may need to add a payment method to your OpenAI account to proceed.

The article has a step-by-step guide for getting up and running on a Windows machine. If you choose to add a payment method, make sure put a limit on how much money it can charge.

Let the chaos begin!

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A punctured bone fragment predates eyed needles in Western Europe by about 15,000 years:

An animal bone fragment full of human-made pits hints at how prehistoric people in Western Europe may have crafted clothing.

The nearly 40,000-year-old artifact probably served as a punch board for leatherwork, researchers report April 12 in Science Advances. They suggest that the bone fragment rested beneath animal hide while an artisan pricked holes in the material, possibly for seams. If so, it's the earliest-known tool of its kind and predates eyed needles in the region by about 15,000 years.

Found at an archaeological site south of Barcelona, the roughly 11-centimeter-long bone fragment contains 28 punctures scattered across one flat side, with 10 of them aligned and fairly evenly spaced.

The marks don't seem to have been a notation system or decoration, given that some holes are hard to see and the bone fragment wasn't otherwise shaped, says archaeologist Luc Doyon of the University of Bordeaux in France. He thought leatherwork could have made the marks. But it wasn't until he visited a cobbler shop and saw one of the artisan's tools that the hypothesis solidified, guiding Doyon's next steps.

[...] Scientists knew that humans wore clothing long before the oldest-known eyed needles existed (SN: 4/20/10). "What [the new finding] tells us is that the first modern humans who lived in Europe had the technology in their toolkit for making fitted clothes," Doyon says.

Journal Reference:
Luc Doyon, Thomas Faure, Montserrat Sanz, et al., A 39,600-year-old leather punch board from Canyars, Gavà, Spain [open], Sci. Adv., 12, 2023. (DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adg0834)

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Ancient protein evidence shows milk consumption was a powerful cultural adaptation that stimulated human expansion onto the highland Tibetan Plateau:

The Tibetan Plateau, known as the "third pole", or "roof of the world", is one of the most inhospitable environments on Earth. While positive natural selection at several genomic loci enabled early Tibetans to better adapt to high elevations, obtaining sufficient food from the resource-poor highlands would have remained a challenge.

Now, a new study in the journal Science Advances reveals that dairy was a key component of early human diets on the Tibetan Plateau. The study reports ancient proteins from the dental calculus of 40 human individuals from 15 sites across the interior plateau.

[...] Ancient protein evidence indicates that dairy products were consumed by diverse populations, including females and males, adults and children, as well as individuals from both elite and non-elite burial contexts. Additionally, prehistoric Tibetan highlanders made use of the dairy products of goats, sheep, and possibly cattle and yak. Early pastoralists in western Tibet seem to have had a preference for goat milk.

"The adoption of dairy pastoralism helped to revolutionize people's ability to occupy much of the plateau, particularly the vast areas too extreme for crop cultivation," says Prof. Nicole Boivin, senior author of the study.

[...] "We were excited to observe an incredibly clear pattern," says Li Tang. "All our milk peptides came from ancient individuals in the western and northern steppes, where growing crops is extremely difficult. However, we did not detect any milk proteins from the southern-central and south-eastern valleys, where more farmable land is available."

quietus writes:

It looks like the Paris Agreement is as dead as the fried chicken at my local deli.

At Paris, in 2015, the World agreed to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The latest report of the EU's Climate Change Service shows (summary pdf) that this target has been royally breached, at least for Europe. Temperatures there, averaged over the last 5 years, have increased by 2.2 degrees celsius.

Europe, at least, has a climate change service to measure these things. As for the rest of the world, an extrapolation of the pattern shown in Figure 1c, here, indicates that, there too, demand for swimming pools and flood insurance will grow.

To illustrate the complexity of the problem, the heatwave in mid-July of 2022 was caused by hot air from the Sahara moving into Europe, driving temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius. By mid-August, a stationary high-pressure system with clear skies and weak winds took hold, and caused a second heatwave, which was made worse due to the soil being dried out by the mid-July event, and no rains since.

Events above the Sahara might have come a second time in play, here. Increasing temperatures lead to a stronger evaporation over sea, while the land heats up more. This results in a stronger temperature gradient, which draws rains deeper inland: heavier rainfalls now are reported in the central Sahara, in summer, with formerly dry valleys being put under four meters of water. This causes less Sahara dust in the atmosphere, and hence shields the land less from solar radiation: the EU's report mentions that 2022 surface solar radiation was the highest in a 40 year record, and part of a positive trend.

To end with a positive note, the EU ain't doing so bad, compared to Greenland: three different heatwaves in 2022, and an average September temperature more than 8 degrees Celsius higher than normal.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The Fermi bubbles may have started life as jets of high-energy charged particles:

Bubbles of radiation billowing from the galactic center may have started as a stream of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, new observations suggest. An excess of positrons zipping past Earth suggests that the bubbles are the result of a burp from our galaxy's supermassive black hole after a meal millions of years ago.

For over a decade, scientists have known about bubbles of gas, or Fermi bubbles, extending above and below the Milky Way's center (SN: 11/9/10). Other observations have since spotted the bubbles in microwave radiation and X-rays (SN: 12/9/20). But astronomers still aren't quite sure how they formed.

A jet of high-energy electrons and positrons, emitted by the supermassive black hole in one big burst, could explain the bubbles' multi-wavelength light, physicist Ilias Cholis reported April 18 at the American Physical Society meeting.

In the initial burst, most of the particles would have been launched along jets aimed perpendicular to the galaxy's disk. As the particles interacted with other galactic matter, they would lose energy and cause the emission of different wavelengths of light.

Those jets would have been aimed away from Earth, so those particles can never be detected. But some of the particles could have escaped along the galactic disk, perpendicular to the bubbles, and end up passing Earth. "It could be that just now, some of those positrons are hitting us," says Cholis, of Oakland University in Rochester, Mich.

upstart writes:

U.S. government imposes record fine on Seagate for violating sanctions against Seagate:

Seagate has been hit with a massive $300 million fine by the U.S. Department of Commerce [PDF] for violating export control restrictions imposed on Huawei in 2020. The report shows that the U.S. Department of Commerce states that Seagate shipped millions of hard drives to Huawei in 2020 – 2021 and become the sole supplier of HDDs to the company while its rivals Toshiba and Western Digital refrained to work with the conglomerate.

Seagate shipped 7.4 million hard drives to Huawei on 429 occasions between August 2020 and September 2021 without obtaining an export license from the U.S. Department of Commerce's Bureau of Industry and Security. Those drives were worth around $1.104 billion back then, a significant sum for Seagate, which revenue totaled $10.681 billion in 2021.

To settle the matter, Seagate has agreed to pay the $300 million fine in quarterly instalments of $15 million over five years starting in October 2023. The civil penalty of $300 million is more than double the estimated net profits that Seagate made from the alleged illegal exports to or involving Huawei, according to BIS. In fact, $300 million is a record fine for BIS.

"Today's action is the consequence: the largest standalone administrative resolution in our agency's history," said Matthew S. Axelrod, Assistant Secretary for Export Enforcement. "This settlement is a clarion call about the need for companies to comply rigorously with BIS export rules, as our enforcement team works to ensure both our national security and a level playing field."

upstart writes:

The Hyena code is able to handle amounts of data that make GPT-style technology run out of memory and fail:

In a paper published in March, artificial intelligence (AI) scientists at Stanford University and Canada's MILA institute for AI proposed a technology that could be far more efficient than GPT-4 -- or anything like it -- at gobbling vast amounts of data and transforming it into an answer.

Known as Hyena, the technology is able to achieve equivalent accuracy on benchmark tests, such as question answering, while using a fraction of the computing power. In some instances, the Hyena code is able to handle amounts of text that make GPT-style technology simply run out of memory and fail.

"Our promising results at the sub-billion parameter scale suggest that attention may not be all we need," write the authors. That remark refers to the title of a landmark AI report of 2017, 'Attention is all you need'. In that paper, Google scientist Ashish Vaswani and colleagues introduced the world to Google's Transformer AI program. The transformer became the basis for every one of the recent large language models.

But the Transformer has a big flaw. It uses something called "attention," where the computer program takes the information in one group of symbols, such as words, and moves that information to a new group of symbols, such as the answer you see from ChatGPT, which is the output.

That attention operation -- the essential tool of all large language programs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4 -- has "quadratic" computational complexity (Wiki "time complexity" of computing). That complexity means the amount of time it takes for ChatGPT to produce an answer increases as the square of the amount of data it is fed as input.

At some point, if there is too much data -- too many words in the prompt, or too many strings of conversations over hours and hours of chatting with the program -- then either the program gets bogged down providing an answer, or it must be given more and more GPU chips to run faster and faster, leading to a surge in computing requirements.

In the new paper, 'Hyena Hierarchy: Towards Larger Convolutional Language Models', posted on the arXiv pre-print server, lead author Michael Poli of Stanford and his colleagues propose to replace the Transformer's attention function with something sub-quadratic, namely Hyena.

upstart writes:

Proposed emissions from a Mississippi Chevron plant could raise locals' cancer risk by 250,000x the acceptable level and a community group is fighting back:

We need climate action. But just because something gets grouped under the umbrella of things that theoretically combat climate change doesn't mean it's actually good for the planet or people. In an alarming example, production of certain alternative "climate-friendly" fuels could lead to dangerous, cancer-causing emissions.

A Chevron scheme to make new plastic-based fuels, approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, could carry a 1-in-4 lifetime cancer risk for residents near the company's refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. A February joint report from ProPublica and the Guardian brought the problem to light. Now, a community group is fighting back against the plan, suing the EPA for approving it in the first place, as first reported by ProPublica and the Guardian in a follow-up report on Tuesday.

Cherokee Concerned Citizens, an organization that represents a ~130 home subdivision less than two miles away from Chevron's Pascagoula refinery, filed its suit to the Washington D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 7. The petition demands that the court review and re-visit the EPA's rubber stamp of the Chevron proposal.

[...] Last year, the EPA greenlit Chevron's plan to emit some unnamed, truly gnarly, cancer-causing chemicals at a refinery in Pascagoula. The approval fell under an effort described as fast tracking the review of "climate-friendly new chemicals." Chevron proposed turning plastics into novel fuels, and the EPA hopped on board, in accordance with a Biden Administration policy to prioritize developing replacements for standard fossil fuels.

By opting to "streamline the review" of certain alternative fuels, the agency wrote it could help "displace current, higher greenhouse gas emitting transportation fuels," in a January 2022 press release. But also, through that "streamlining," the EPA appears to have pushed aside some major concerns.

upstart writes:

Chinese tech giant claims better performance than competing GPUs:

Chinese social media, cloud, and entertainment giant Tencent on Monday revealed that it has started mass production of a home brew video transcoding accelerator.

The announcement comes nearly two years after the company unveiled a trio of custom chips designed to accelerate everything from streaming video to networking and artificial intelligence workloads.

In a post published on WeChat, Tencent Cloud revealed that "tens of thousands" of its Canghai chips, which are designed to offload video encode/decode for latency sensitive workloads, have been deployed internally to accelerate cloud gaming and live broadcasting.

Tencent says the Canghai chip can be paired with GPUs from a variety of vendors to support low-latency game streaming. When used for video transcoding, Tencent said a single node equipped with Canghai can deliver up to 1,024 video channels . We'll note that Nvidia, with the launch of its L4 GPUs last month, made similar claims. Without real-world benchmarks, it's hard to say how either firm's claims stack up.

[...] When it comes to spinning custom chips to improve the efficiency and economics of cloud computing, Amazon Web Services gets a lot of credit. The American e-tail giant and cloud titan has developed everything from custom CPUs, AI training and inference accelerators, and smartNICs to offload many housekeeping workloads.

And while Google has developed an accelerator of its own, called the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), most US cloud providers have largely stuck with commercially available parts from the likes of Intel, AMD, Ampere, Broadcom, or Nvidia, rather than designing their own.

However, in China, custom chips appear to be more prevalent, with development an imperative accelerated by US sanctions that mean some tech products can't be exported to the Middle Kingdom.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The company says it learned much from Terran-1's debut flight and is choosing to go bigger for its successor:

After its rocket failed to reach orbit last month, California-based Relativity Space doesn't want to dwell on the past. Instead, the company is leaping forward with its next launch vehicle, which promises to be bigger and better.

On Wednesday, Relativity Space announced its lessons learned from the launch of Terran-1, a 3D-printed, methane-fueled rocket that was set to break records on its first flight. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on March 22 but an engine failure prevented it from reaching orbit.

Shortly after its stage separation, the rocket engine did not reach full thrust, according to Relativity Space. The company shared key findings from the rocket anomaly, detailing that the engine's main valves opened slower than expected, preventing the propellant from reaching the thrust chamber in time.

Terran-1 is 85% 3D-printed by mass and it's also powered by a liquid methane-oxygen propellant known as methalox. [...]

[...] Unlike its predecessor, Terran-R is designed to be a much larger 3D printed, medium-to-heavy lift orbital launch vehicle capable of carrying 33.5 metric tons to orbit. The rocket's first stage will be outfitted with 13 3D-printed Aeon engines while its second stage will have a single methane-fueled engine.

mhajicek writes:

Potentially good news for old machinists and over-the-hill heavy metal fans:

"Five years ago, a team of researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) was able to regrow cochlear hair cells in mice for the first time. These hair cells are found in the cochlear region of ears in all mammals. They sense sound vibrations, convert those into brain signals, and eventually allow a person to hear and understand the different sounds around them. The new study from URMC researchers sheds light on the underlying mechanism that allowed the ear hairs to regrow in mice."

"We know from our previous work that expression of an active growth gene, called ERBB2, was able to activate the growth of new hair cells (in mammals), but we didn't fully understand why. This new study tells us how that activation is happening—a significant advance toward the ultimate goal of generating new cochlear hair cells in mammals," said Patricia White, one of the study authors and a neuroscience professor at URMC."

https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/can-we-reverse-hearing-loss-yes-we-can-here-is-how-it-works/

Original Submission