SoylentNews

c0lo writes:

Tech Exec Predicts Billion-Dollar AI Girlfriend Industry

When witnessing the sorry state of men addicted to AI girlfriends, one Miami tech exec saw dollar signs instead of red flags.

In a blog-length post on X-formerly-Twitter, former WeWork exec Greg Isenberg said that after meeting a young guy who claims to spend $10,000 a month on so-called "AI girlfriends," or relationship-simulating chatbots, he realized that eventually, someone is going to capitalize upon that market the way Match Group has with dating apps.

"I thought he was kidding," Isenberg wrote. "But, he's a 24-year-old single guy who loves it."

To date, Match Group — which owns Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, OKCupid, Plenty of Fish, and several others — has a market cap of more than $9 billion. As the now-CEO of the Late Checkout holding company startup noted, someone is going to build the AI version and make a billion or more.

During the exchange, Isenberg said that he was "speechless" when the young man explained his rationale, citing his ability to "play" with his AI paramours the way some people play video games, sending them voice notes and customizing their likes and dislikes as some of the reasons he spends so much money on the services.

The unnamed guy told the tech bro that he is particularly into Candy.ai and Cupid.ai, both of which allow for the kind of NSFW chatting that other apps ban.

"It's kinda like dating apps," the AI GF aficionado told Isenberg. "You're not on only one."

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Long COVID affects millions of Americans of almost all ages, but there has been no standard definition for the condition until now.

The U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine announced the definition for long COVID June 11.

Previous definitions of long COVID have been all over the map, each with its own set of accepted symptoms, timelines and requirements for proof of infection (SN: 7/29/22).

That lack of standardization “left many patients in the lurch without clear ability to be recognized for the condition that they had, with difficulty explaining to family and even to their caregivers,” says Harvey Fineberg, a public health expert who chaired the committee that drafted the definition. “We heard from literally hundreds of people experiencing long COVID about the challenges that they had in being heard, in gaining access to care and obtaining the care they needed.”

More than 1,300 people contributed to the definition. The committee decided to adopt the patients’ own term “long COVID” instead of more medical terms such as “post-acute sequelae of COVID-19” that have also been used to describe the long-term condition.

Adoption of the name the patients advocated for gives validation to everyone with the condition who has been struggling, sometimes for years, to have their experience acknowledged, says Daria Oller, a physical therapist in New Jersey who developed long COVID in 2020. “Now, people are trying to not use the term long COVID, and all of us, patients from the first wave, are fighting. We were ignored. That’s ours. We named it.”

The committee chose to go with the name because it’s simple, familiar and easy to communicate, Fineberg said during a webinar introducing the definition. 

No one knows exactly how many people have long COVID, but a recent survey found that more than 17 percent of adults in the United States have experienced the condition. While the National Academies don’t have regulatory or legal power to enforce adoption of the definition, the respected body of scientific experts’ recommendations are often used in making regulatory decisions, determining medical and scientific policies and crafting laws.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

New Hampshire officials issued two warnings of potentially dangerous algae blooms along parts of Lake Winnipesaukee, the state's largest lake.

The New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services said on Thursday it detected high concentrations of cyanobacteria, also known as blue-green algae, at Carry and Brewster beaches in Wolfeboro and at 19-Mile Bay and Tuftonboro Neck in Tuftonboro the previous day.

Visitors should avoid contact with the water and keep pets away, the department advised in a statement.

The cyanobacteria blooms are occurring as green clouds of material accumulating along shorelines. In some areas, they appear more yellow because they are mixed in with dense pollen, the department said.

Symptoms of cyanobacteria exposure can include skin irritation, stomach cramps, vomiting, nausea, diarrhea, fever, sore throat, headache, muscle and joint pain, mouth blisters and acute liver damage, the department said.

The affected areas will be resampled on June 19 and resampling will continue weekly if the bloom continues, the department said.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in action and conducting normal science operations for the first time since the veteran probe began spouting gibberish at the end of 2023.

All four of the spacecraft's remaining operational instruments are now returning usable data to Earth, according to NASA.

Some additional work is needed to tidy up the effects of the issue. Engineers need to resynchronize the timekeeping software of Voyager 1's three onboard computers to ensure that commands are executed at the correct times. Maintenance will also be performed on the digital tape recorder, which records some data from the plasma instrument for a six-monthly downlink to Earth.

As the 50th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch rapidly approaches, and with the probe now 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, restoring functionality is quite an engineering feat.

Voyager 1's woes began in November 2023, when the spacecraft stopped transmitting usable data back to Earth. Rather than engineering and science data, NASA found itself faced with a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, as though the spacecraft was somehow stalled.

Engineers reckoned the issue lay with the Flight Data System (FDS) and in March sent a command – dubbed a "poke" – to get the FDS to try some other software sequences and thus circumvent whatever was causing the problem.

The result was a complete memory dump from the computer, which allowed engineers to pinpoint where the corruption had occurred. It appeared that a single chip was malfunctioning, and engineers were faced with the challenge of devising a software update that would work around the defective hardware.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Data centers are the backbone of today’s information technology infrastructure. These centralized hubs are built to manage, store, and distribute large quantities of data and applications, acting as the control centers for digital services and businesses globally. They are essential for maintaining data access, enabling scalability, facilitating disaster recovery, and ensuring strong security protocols, thus supporting the smooth operation of our globally connected digital world.

At the heart of data center operations lie data center interconnects, the vital networking infrastructure responsible for facilitating communication between various components within and across data centers. Digital-to-analog converters (DACs) are indispensable components within these interconnects, tasked with converting digital signals into analog signals for transmission over copper cables. Their role in enabling high-speed, cost-effective, and low-latency connectivity cannot be overstated. However, the challenge arises from the requirement for high-resolution DACs, which poses a significant bottleneck due to the associated increase in the costs of optical modules.

Addressing this challenge head-on, researchers have presented a groundbreaking solution that combines a look-up-table-based nonlinear predistortion technique with digital resolution enhancement. This innovative approach, reported in Advanced Photonics Nexus, aims to alleviate the limitations imposed by high-resolution DACs while maintaining efficient data transfer and communication within data center interconnects.

[...] Notably, the digital signal processing technique enabled the transmission of signals at rates exceeding 124 GBd PAM-4/6 and 112 GBd PAM-8 over 2 km of standard single-mode fiber using 3/3.5/4-bit DACs. Additionally, it facilitated the transmission of 124 GBd PAM-2/3/4 signals over 40 km of standard single-mode fiber using 1.5/2/3-bit DACs. These results represent a significant advancement in data center interconnect technology, demonstrating the feasibility of supporting the next generation of ethernet links targeting speeds of up to 800-GbE or potentially even 1.6-TbE.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

So I came across this article : Fifty Things you can do with a Software Defined Radio and it inspired me to do more research and I plan on trying it out very soon!

The person behind the article had this to say in the start of his article:

"Last week, I attempted the challenge to try to find 50 things to do with an RTL-SDR device in a week!

It was quite an adventure: I received satellites and radio from the other side of the world, I went on a hunt for a radiosonde, and I invented a method to communicate using the NFC tag in a library book!

I used the RTL-SDR Blog V4 for everything, plus the antenna kit, plus a long piece of wire"

- Article Source: https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/
- Archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20240607044616/https://blinry.org/50-things-with-sdr/
- Blog post: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/doing-50-things-with-rtl-sdr-in-one-week/
- Blog post Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20240406040514/https://www.rtl-sdr.com/doing-50-things-with-rtl-sdr-in-one-week/

Has anyone here at SoylentNews tried one of these devices? What were your results? What do you most enjoy about it?

Original Submission

mhajicek writes:

https://spacenews.com/fifth-helium-leak-detected-on-starliner/

NASA confirmed that Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spacecraft has suffered a fifth, although minor, helium leak in its propulsion system as engineers work to prepare the vehicle for its return to Earth next week.

In a June 10 statement, NASA mentioned that spacecraft teams were examining "what impacts, if any, five small leaks in the service module helium manifolds would have on the remainder of the mission." That was the first reference to there being five leaks in the spacecraft; NASA had mentioned there were four in a briefing hours after the spacecraft's June 6 docking with the International Space Station.

[...] NASA closed the helium manifolds in the propulsion system after docking to stop the leaks, although they will have to be opened to use the spacecraft's thrusters for undocking and deorbit maneuvers. NASA said June 10 that engineers estimate that Starliner has enough helium to support 70 hours of flight operations, while only seven hours is needed for Starliner to return to Earth.

[...] Those teams have some time to complete that work. NASA had initially scheduled a June 14 undocking for Starliner, but NASA said June 9 it was delaying the undocking to no earlier than June 18. That delay was to avoid a conflict with a June 13 ISS spacewalk, or EVA, by NASA astronauts Tracy Dyson and Matt Dominick.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A groundbreaking cancer treatment developed by NUS researchers utilizes engineered bacteria to deliver chemotherapy drugs directly to tumor sites, significantly enhancing treatment efficacy and reducing side effects.

Traditional chemotherapy frequently presents substantial difficulties, such as harsh side effects, harm to healthy cells, and restricted effectiveness.

Researchers at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore (NUS Medicine), have pioneered a groundbreaking cancer treatment method. This new technique offers a more precise, potent, and less harmful alternative to conventional chemotherapy. It not only enhances the efficacy of the treatment but also substantially lowers the dosage of drugs needed for cancer therapy.

[...] Prodrugs are inactive molecules that transform into active drugs within the body, particularly in tumor environments, by leveraging unique tumor conditions, such as low oxygen or high acidity, to activate the drug precisely at the cancer site, minimizing damage to healthy tissues. However, current prodrug strategies exhibit limited target specificity and frequently depend on macromolecular carriers, which complicates both drug distribution and clearance.

To overcome these limitations, NUS Medicine researchers developed a prodrug delivery method that utilizes a commensal Lactobacillus strain that binds specifically to cancer cells via a surface molecule called heparan sulfate. These engineered bacteria carry a prodrug that converts to the chemotherapy drug SN-38 at the tumor site. In preclinical models of nasopharyngeal cancer, the engineered bacteria localized specifically in the tumor and released the chemotherapy drug directly at the cancer site, reducing tumor growth by 67% and increasing the effectiveness of the chemotherapy drug by 54%.

[...] “Cancer treatment often takes a tremendously heavy toll on patients. Our research represents a significant step toward developing a more targeted and less toxic approach to fighting cancer. We hope this can pave the way for therapies that are both mild and effective,” added A/Prof Chang, Dean’s Chair in Medicine and Director of SynCTI and NUS Medicine Syn Bio TRP.

Reference: “Prodrug-conjugated tumor-seeking commensals for targeted cancer therapy” by Haosheng Shen, Changyu Zhang, Shengjie Li, et al., 21 May 2024, Nature Communications. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-48661-y

Original Submission

upstart writes:

Google Wallet takes over app duties, but it looks like Google is quitting P2P payments:

Google has killed off the Google Pay app. 9to5Google reports Google's old payments app stopped working recently, following shutdown plans that were announced in February. Google is shutting down the Google Pay app in the US, while in-store NFC payments seem to still be branded "Google Pay." Remember, this is Google's dysfunctional payments division, so all that's happening is Google Payment app No. 3 (Google Pay) is being shut down in favor of Google Payment app No. 4 (Google Wallet). The shutdown caps off the implosion of Google's payments division after a lot of poor decisions and failed product launches.

Google's NFC payment journey started in 2011 with Google Wallet (apps No. 1 and No. 4 are both called Google Wallet). In 2011, Google was a technology trailblazer and basically popularized the idea of paying for something with your phone in many regions (with the notable exception of Japan). Google shipped the first non-Japanese phones with the feature, fought carriers trying to stop phone payments from happening, and begged stores to get new, compatible terminals. Google's entire project was blown away when Apple Pay launched in 2014, and Google's response was its second payment app, Android Pay, in 2015. This copied much of Apple's setup, like sending payment tokens instead of the actual credit card number. Google Pay was a rebrand of this setup and arrived in 2018.

[...] The 2021 Google Pay was a totally different codebase based on a Google payments app that was originally developed for India, called Google Tez. Tez was rebranded to Google Pay for the US market and launched on the Play Store. Being designed for India, where a phone might be your first and only Internet device, meant the new Google Pay had a lot of design decisions that didn't fit the US market. [...]

upstart writes:

Apple is to boost its Siri voice assistant and operating systems with OpenAI's ChatGPT as it seeks to catch up in the AI race:

The iPhone maker announced the Siri makeover along with a number of other new features at its annual developers show on Monday.

It is part of a new personalised AI system - called "Apple Intelligence" - that aims to offer users a way to navigate Apple devices more easily.

Updates to its iPhone and Mac operating systems will allow access to ChatGPT through a partnership with developer OpenAI.

[...] There was a cool reaction from the markets though - Apple's share price fell by 1.91% on Monday, the day of the announcement.

The partnership was also not welcomed by Elon Musk, the owner of Tesla and Twitter/X, who has threatened to ban iPhones from his companies due to "data security".

"Apple has no clue what's actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI," Mr Musk said on X. "They're selling you down the river."

Apple has not responded to his allegations.

Smartphone maker Samsung also mocked its rival's announcement.

"Adding 'Apple' doesn't make it new or groundbreaking. Welcome to AI", it posted on X.

upstart writes:

When an earthquake rocked Taiwan, hundreds of Gogoro's battery-swap stations automatically stopped drawing electricity to stabilize the grid:

On the morning of April 3, Taiwan was hit by a 7.4 magnitude earthquake. Seconds later, hundreds of battery-swap stations in Taiwan sensed something else: the power frequency of the electric grid took a sudden drop, a signal that some power plants had been disconnected in the disaster. The grid was now struggling to meet energy demand.

These stations, built by the Taiwanese company Gogoro for electric-powered two-wheeled vehicles like scooters, mopeds, and bikes, reacted immediately. According to numbers provided by the company, 590 Gogoro battery-swap locations (some of which have more than one swap station) stopped drawing electricity from the grid, lowering local demand by a total six megawatts—enough to power thousands of homes. It took 12 minutes for the grid to recover, and the battery-swap stations then resumed normal operation.

Gogoro is not the only company working on battery-swapping for electric scooters (New York City recently launched a pilot program to give delivery drivers the option to charge this way), but it's certainly one of the most successful. Founded in 2011, the firm has a network of over 12,500 stations across Taiwan and boasts over 600,000 monthly subscribers who pay to swap batteries in and out when required. Each station is roughly the size of two vending machines and can hold around 30 scooter batteries.

Now the company is putting the battery network to another use: Gogoro has been working with Enel X, an Italian company, to incorporate the stations into a virtual power plant (VPP) system that helps the Taiwanese grid stay more resilient in emergencies like April's earthquake.

Battery-swap stations work well for VPP programs because they offer so much more flexibility than charging at home, where an electric-bike owner usually has just one or two batteries and thus must charge immediately after one runs out. With dozens of batteries in a single station as a demand buffer, Gogoro can choose when it charges them—for instance, doing so at night when there's less power demand and it's cheaper. In the meantime, the batteries can give power back to the grid when it is stressed—hence the comparison to power plants.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

California Senator Scott Wiener is used to pushback when he proposes laws aimed at reining in reckless drivers and improving road safety in his car-dependent state. But even he was caught off guard when, earlier this year, he introduced a new bill requiring a speed “governor” on all new cars sold in the state. The opposition from drivers was so fierce that he had to rewrite the proposal to only require weaker versions of the technology.

“There were people who loved it, people who hated it, people who were mad at me, spouses who were arguing with each other about it,” Wiener said in an interview. “It was an interesting situation. There’s a certain cultural embrace of being able to drive your car however you want to drive your car.”

Speeding is part of our cultural identity. Automakers frequently advertise new cars tearing through empty cities or weaving through traffic well above safe speeds. Movies and television shows frequently push these boundaries further. And social media further glorifies lawbreaking by providing a platform for speedsters. It all perpetuates the idea that speeding is not only safe but an American right.

“There’s a certain cultural embrace of being able to drive your car however you want to drive your car.”

Yet speeding is one of the most deadly things you can do in a vehicle. In 2023, more than 40,000 people died in traffic accidents, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data released in April of this year. That’s down about 36 percent from 2022, when crashes accounted for nearly 43,000 deaths. The previous year was even worse, with speeding fatalities reaching a 14-year high. 

[...] “Driver’s behavior is the overwhelming cause of traffic crashes,” Jonathan Adkins, CEO of the Governors Highway Safety Association. “We’re driving too fast or drinking, we’re not wearing our seatbelt. We’re distracted by our cell phones. It’s all those behaviors that lead to the vast majority of crashes.”

Salvation could come from technology like intelligent speed assistance (ISA) systems, but there’s a lot of nuance. These systems use cameras, radar, and lidar in conjunction with GPS data to detect both the speed of your vehicle and “read” the speed limit signs on the road. 

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Imagine misplacing your house keys and then pulling out a 3D printer from your pocket to make new ones.

3D printing has made manufacturing more affordable, especially for low-volume production. However, 3D printers are often huge and heavy devices that need a stable platform to work properly — until now. MIT News reports that its researchers have worked closely with a team from the University of Texas at Austin to create a prototype 3D printer that is smaller than a coin.

This photonic chip focuses its beam into a resin well that rapidly cures when it’s hit by a particular wavelength of light emitted from the chip. The palm-sized 3D printer also saves space by eschewing moving parts — instead of using arms and motors to change the beam’s focal point, the prototype uses tiny optical antennas to move it around and create the desired shape.

If the team is successful in turning this concept into a viable product, it could change the face of instant manufacturing. The portability and speed of this palm-sized printer could allow anyone — engineers, doctors, or even first responders — to create solutions on the fly without needing to lug around a big and heavy device.

[...] These are just some of the exciting possibilities that this 3D printing concept brings to the table. According to MIT Professor Jelena Notaros, “This system is completely rethinking what a 3D printer is. It is no longer a big box sitting on a bench in a lab creating objects, but something that is handheld and portable. It is exciting to think about the new applications that could come out of this and how the field of 3D printing could change.” 

Original Submission

DannyB writes:

Water frost detected on Mars' volcanoes in 'significant' first discovery: Study

Researchers say the frost patches equate to '60 Olympic-size swimming pools.'

[....] The thin yet widespread layers of water frost were discovered atop three of Mars' Tharsis volcanoes, located on a plateau at the planet's equator, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The Tharsis volcanoes, a string of 12 large peaks, are the tallest volcanoes in our solar system, according to the study, which notes that the water frost was discovered on the volcanoes Olympus, Arsia Ascraeus Mons, and Ceraunius Tholus.

"The researchers calculate the frost constitutes at least 150,000 tons of water that swaps between the surface and atmosphere each day during the cold seasons," researchers from Brown University reported in a press release Monday [...]

[...] "We thought it was improbable for frost to form around Mars' equator, as the mix of sunshine and thin atmosphere keeps temperatures during the day relatively high at both the surface and mountaintop — unlike what we see on Earth, where you might expect to see frosty peaks,"

[...] Researchers hypothesize the air circulating above the calderas creates a "unique microclimate that allows the thin patches of frost to form."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Following the strongest solar storm in twenty years, NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite was put into a safe hold on May 10 due to atmospheric drag from the expanded atmosphere. Recovery actions have since raised its orbit, with operations anticipated to restart on June 17.

The lidar instrument on NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite is scheduled to resume collecting data around June 17, after going into a safe hold on May 10 due to impacts from the strongest solar storm to hit Earth in two decades. The storm did not cause any detectable damage to the satellite or its instrument.

Between May 7 and May 11, strong solar flares and coronal mass ejections were released from the Sun and sparked a geomagnetic storm at Earth that caused our planet’s atmosphere to expand in places. This created unexpected drag on ICESat-2, rotating the satellite, and triggering the satellite to enter safe hold, which turned off ICESat-2’s science instrument.

The ICESat-2 team has conducted two thruster burns to raise the spacecraft’s altitude, allowing it to now drift back to its normal orbit around 310 miles (500 kilometers) above Earth. Once there, the team will return the Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System instrument to science mode, to continue measuring the height of Earth’s ice, water, forests, and land cover.

ICESat-2, short for Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2, is a NASA satellite mission designed to measure ice sheet elevation and sea ice thickness, as well as land topography and vegetation characteristics. Launched in September 2018, the satellite employs a sophisticated laser altimeter system called ATLAS (Advanced Topographic Laser Altimeter System) to provide precise and detailed measurements of Earth’s surface.

ICESat-2’s high-resolution data helps scientists understand changes in ice sheets, glaciers, and sea ice that result from climate change, enhancing our ability to accurately predict future sea level rise and assess changes in Earth’s ecosystems. This satellite is a critical tool in NASA’s Earth Observing System, contributing valuable data for environmental research and climate science.

Original Submission