STEM

[Cadavre Exquis]

First Small Modular Nuclear Reactor Certified For Use In US
Posted by BeauHD on Saturday January 21, 2023 @02:00AM from the historic-step-forward dept.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has certified the design for what will be the United States' first small modular nuclear reactor. The Associated Press reports:

The rule that certifies the design was published Thursday in the Federal Register. It means that companies seeking to build and operate a nuclear power plant can pick the design for a 50-megawatt, advanced light-water small modular nuclear reactor by Oregon-based NuScale Power and apply to the NRC for a license. It's the final determination that the design is acceptable for use, so it can't be legally challenged during the licensing process when someone applies to build and operate a nuclear power plant, NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell said Friday. The rule becomes effective in late February.

The U.S. Energy Department said the newly approved design "equips the nation with a new clean power source to help drive down" planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions. It's the seventh nuclear reactor design cleared for use in the United States. The rest are for traditional, large, light-water reactors. Diane Hughes, NuScale's vice president of marketing and communications, said the design certification is a historic step forward toward a clean energy future and makes the company's VOYGR power plant a near-term deployable solution for customers. The first small modular reactor design application package included over 2 million pages of supporting materials, Hughes added.

"NuScale has also applied to the NRC for approval of a larger design, at 77 megawatts per module, and the agency is checking the application for completeness before starting a full review," adds the report.

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

UK Scientists Discover Method To Reduce Steelmaking's CO2 Emissions By 90%
Posted by BeauHD on Saturday January 28, 2023 @05:00AM from the innovative-methods dept.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham have developed an innovative method for existing furnaces that could reduce steelmaking's CO2 emission by nearly 90%. The Next Web reports:

The iron and steel industry is a major cause of greenhouse gasses, accounting for 9% of global emissions. That's because of the inherent carbon-intensive nature of steel production in blast furnaces, which currently represent the most-widely used practice. In blast furnace steel manufacturing, coke (a type of coal) is used to produce metallic iron from ore obtained from mining -- which releases large quantities of carbon dioxide in the process. According to Dr Harriet Kildahl, who co-devised the method with Professor Yulong Ding, their technology aims to convert this carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide that can be reused in the iron ore reaction.

This is realized using a thermochemical cycle which performs chemical reactions through changes in temperature. That way, the typically damaging CO2 is turned into a useful part of the reaction, forming "an almost perfect closed carbon loop." This drastically reduces emission by the amount of coke needed and, subsequently, lowers steelmaking's emissions by up to 88%. As per the researchers, if this method was implemented in the remaining two blast furnaces in the UK, it could save 1.28 billion pounds in 5 years, all while reducing the country's overall emissions by 2.9%.

"Current proposals for decarbonizing the steel sector rely on phasing out existing plants and introducing electric arc furnaces powered by renewable electricity. However, an electric arc furnace plant can cost over 1 billion pounds to build, which makes this switch economically unfeasible in the time remaining to meet the Paris Climate Agreement," Professor Ding said. "The system we are proposing can be retrofitted to existing plants, which reduces the risk of stranded assets, and both the reduction in CO2, and the cost savings, are seen immediately."

The study has been published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

An ALS Patient Set a Record For Communicating Via a Brain Implant: 62 Words Per Minute
Posted by BeauHD on Friday January 27, 2023 @10:30PM from the big-breakthrough dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review:

Eight years ago, a patient lost her power of speech because of ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, which causes progressive paralysis. She can still make sounds, but her words have become unintelligible, leaving her reliant on a writing board or iPad to communicate. Now, after volunteering to receive a brain implant, the woman has been able to rapidly communicate phrases like "I don't own my home" and "It's just tough" at a rate approaching normal speech. That is the claim in a paper published over the weekend on the website bioRxiv by a team at Stanford University. The study has not been formally reviewed by other researchers. The scientists say their volunteer, identified only as "subject T12," smashed previous records by using the brain-reading implant to communicate at a rate of 62 words a minute, three times the previous best. [...] People without speech deficits typically talk at a rate of about 160 words a minute. Even in an era of keyboards, thumb-typing, emojis, and internet abbreviations, speech remains the fastest form of human-to-human communication.

The brain-computer interfaces that [co-lead author Krishna Sehnoy's] team works with involve a small pad of sharp electrodes embedded in a person's motor cortex, the brain region most involved in movement. This allows researchers to record activity from a few dozen neurons at once and find patterns that reflect what motions someone is thinking of, even if the person is paralyzed. In previous work, paralyzed volunteers have been asked to imagine making hand movements. By "decoding" their neural signals in real time, implants have let them steer a cursor around a screen, pick out letters on a virtual keyboard, play video games, or even control a robotic arm. In the new research, the Stanford team wanted to know if neurons in the motor cortex contained useful information about speech movements, too. That is, could they detect how "subject T12" was trying to move her mouth, tongue, and vocal cords as she attempted to talk?

These are small, subtle movements, and according to Sabes, one big discovery is that just a few neurons contained enough information to let a computer program predict, with good accuracy, what words the patient was trying to say. That information was conveyed by Shenoy's team to a computer screen, where the patient's words appeared as they were spoken by the computer. [...] The current system already uses a couple of types of machine learning programs. To improve its accuracy, the Stanford team employed software that predicts what word typically comes next in a sentence. "I" is more often followed by "am" than "ham," even though these words sound similar and could produce similar patterns in someone's brain. Adding the word prediction system increased how quickly the subject could speak without mistakes.

Saludos.

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://twitter.com/JamieDJS/status/1610984385565831170

Saludos.

[wanderer]

Pero mira cómo beben los peces en el río
Pero mira cómo beben por ver al Dios nacido
Beben y beben y vuelven a beber
Los peces en el río por ver a Dios nacer....

Piden a una IA que recree la imagen de un salmón nadando en un río y esto es lo que se le ocurre
La surrealista interpretación que realiza la inteligencia artificial de la petición se ha hecho viral en redes
https://www.larazon.es/tecnologia/piden-que-recree-imagen-salmon-nadando-rio-esto-que-ocurre_2023013163d8391be066d300013eb9f3.html

  

[sudden and sharp]

Pero mira cómo beben los peces en el río
Pero mira cómo beben por ver al Dios nacido
Beben y beben y vuelven a beber
Los peces en el río por ver a Dios nacer....

Piden a una IA que recree la imagen de un salmón nadando en un río y esto es lo que se le ocurre
La surrealista interpretación que realiza la inteligencia artificial de la petición se ha hecho viral en redes
https://www.larazon.es/tecnologia/piden-que-recree-imagen-salmon-nadando-rio-esto-que-ocurre_2023013163d8391be066d300013eb9f3.html

Está más que bien... es una máquina. Ya sabemos que te venden otra cosa, pero esta muy bien. Moar training... y listo.






Es de auténtica ciencia ficción... pero claro, las espectativas son de Ultra SF.   

  

[Benzino Napaloni]

Por una vez me permitiré ser un poco troll aquí.

https://www.lasexta.com/programas/zapeando/surrealista-interpretacion-motor-inteligencia-artificial-salmon-nadando_2022102563578a978fa20000019e5e74.html

Ay, hamijos de La Razón... si queréis parecer modernos revisad un poco vuestras fuentes, la noticia original es de hace tres meses por lo menos.

[wanderer]

Pues no sé, pero yo esta mañana me la encontré en Xataka (en los avisos del móvil).

Pero bueno, lo que quería traer con el villancico es desmitificar a los falsos Mesías.

[Cadavre Exquis]

Bing Users Claim a ChatGPT-assisted Bing Temporarily Appeared Friday
Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:34AM from the what-you're-searching-for dept.

Several Bing users say a ChatGPT-assisted version of Bing "mysteriously appeared (and disappeared) earlier today," the Verge reported Friday:

Student and designer Owen Yin reported seeing the "new Bing" on Twitter this morning. He told The Verge via Twitter DM that he has Bing set as his homepage on Microsoft's Edge browser and the new UI just loaded up. "Didn't do anything to find it," said Yin. "After a couple of minutes it stopped working ... Jaw dropped when I realized what I was looking at...!" Yin was able to briefly test the system and shared further details about the integration in a blog post on Medium. He noted that the chatbot could not only answer questions but ask them in a conversational manner.

The new Bing can also apparently cite its sources. This is an important feature, as the inability of language models like ChatGPT to describe where their information is sourced from makes them less reliable.

Yin isn't the only one who says they encountered a new Bing today either. At least two others reported receiving access to the updated search engine on Twitter before it disappeared.

Screenshots of the AI-augmented Bing show a new "chat" option appearing in the menu bar next to "search." Select it and you're taken to a chat interface that says, "Welcome to the new Bing: Your AI-powered answer engine."

The Verge adds that they were "unable to verify the authenticity of these screenshots and Microsoft declined to comment on the validity of these apparent leaks."

https://twitter.com/Owen_Yin/status/1621362383162851330

Saludos.

[Saturio]

Bing Users Claim a ChatGPT-assisted Bing Temporarily Appeared Friday
Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:34AM from the what-you're-searching-for dept.

Several Bing users say a ChatGPT-assisted version of Bing "mysteriously appeared (and disappeared) earlier today," the Verge reported Friday:

Student and designer Owen Yin reported seeing the "new Bing" on Twitter this morning. He told The Verge via Twitter DM that he has Bing set as his homepage on Microsoft's Edge browser and the new UI just loaded up. "Didn't do anything to find it," said Yin. "After a couple of minutes it stopped working ... Jaw dropped when I realized what I was looking at...!" Yin was able to briefly test the system and shared further details about the integration in a blog post on Medium. He noted that the chatbot could not only answer questions but ask them in a conversational manner.

The new Bing can also apparently cite its sources. This is an important feature, as the inability of language models like ChatGPT to describe where their information is sourced from makes them less reliable.

Yin isn't the only one who says they encountered a new Bing today either. At least two others reported receiving access to the updated search engine on Twitter before it disappeared.

Screenshots of the AI-augmented Bing show a new "chat" option appearing in the menu bar next to "search." Select it and you're taken to a chat interface that says, "Welcome to the new Bing: Your AI-powered answer engine."

The Verge adds that they were "unable to verify the authenticity of these screenshots and Microsoft declined to comment on the validity of these apparent leaks."

https://twitter.com/Owen_Yin/status/1621362383162851330

Saludos.

Y cuando integren estas cosas en los navegadores...¿Se les podrá pedir resultados que no sean publicidad o enlaces para comprar algo?

[sudden and sharp]

Bing Users Claim a ChatGPT-assisted Bing Temporarily Appeared Friday
Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday February 05, 2023 @07:34AM from the what-you're-searching-for dept.

Several Bing users say a ChatGPT-assisted version of Bing "mysteriously appeared (and disappeared) earlier today," the Verge reported Friday:

Student and designer Owen Yin reported seeing the "new Bing" on Twitter this morning. He told The Verge via Twitter DM that he has Bing set as his homepage on Microsoft's Edge browser and the new UI just loaded up. "Didn't do anything to find it," said Yin. "After a couple of minutes it stopped working ... Jaw dropped when I realized what I was looking at...!" Yin was able to briefly test the system and shared further details about the integration in a blog post on Medium. He noted that the chatbot could not only answer questions but ask them in a conversational manner.

The new Bing can also apparently cite its sources. This is an important feature, as the inability of language models like ChatGPT to describe where their information is sourced from makes them less reliable.

Yin isn't the only one who says they encountered a new Bing today either. At least two others reported receiving access to the updated search engine on Twitter before it disappeared.

Screenshots of the AI-augmented Bing show a new "chat" option appearing in the menu bar next to "search." Select it and you're taken to a chat interface that says, "Welcome to the new Bing: Your AI-powered answer engine."

The Verge adds that they were "unable to verify the authenticity of these screenshots and Microsoft declined to comment on the validity of these apparent leaks."

https://twitter.com/Owen_Yin/status/1621362383162851330

Saludos.

Y cuando integren estas cosas en los navegadores...¿Se les podrá pedir resultados que no sean publicidad o enlaces para comprar algo?

Sí, si hay una parte open source, o libre, que se pueda desarrollar independientemente para cualquier otro tema. Y también se puede programar de cero. (La propiedad intelectual de los demás hay que respetarla.)

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://twitter.com/DotCSV/status/1622261455037792263

https://open-assistant.io/

Saludos.

[sudden and sharp]

Hay que esperar a que ponga "Download beta1".

[Cadavre Exquis]

Hay que esperar a que ponga "Download beta1".

Bueno, por ahora van por la v0.0.1-beta26, pero el proyecto tiene ya 739 forks y 9.8k estrellas y estas cosas van rápidas teniendo en cuenta que el proyecto se creó en GitHub el 13 de diciembre de 2022 y desde entonces se han hecho 2.078 commits en la rama main y tiene 117 contributors.

https://github.com/LAION-AI/Open-Assistant

Saludos.

[sudden and sharp]

Usan Visual Studio Code. Curioso.