#science-fiction

#science-fiction

Gert-Jan takes steps with the aid of implants in his brain and spinal cord, the subject of a study published Wednesday in Nature.(Courtesy of Lausanne University Hospital) Comment Gift Article Scientists and neurosurgeons have implanted electronic devices into the brain and spinal cord of a paralyzed man that communicate wirelessly, enhancing his ability to walk and enabling him to climb stairs, according to a study published Wednesday in Nature.

Clara Moskowitz: We're here today to talk about time travel.A perennial dare I say, timelesstopic of science fiction, but is it possible?Is there any chance at all that it could actually happen?Lee Billings: No. No, no no no no.(laughs).Well, kinda.Not really.ARGH.I'm Lee Billings.Moskowitz: I'm Clara Moskowitz, and this is Cosmos Quickly, the biweekly space podcast from Scientific American.

In 1960, visionary physicist Freeman Dyson proposed that an advanced alien civilization would someday quit fooling around with kindergarten-level stuff like wind turbines and nuclear reactors and finally go big, completely enclosing their home star to capture as much solar energy as they possibly could.

A beautiful piece of furniture can complete a room.It can be the final piece that makes a space come full circle, building a comfortable and cohesive haven, rather than a random area.Furniture pieces make or break a home, they add on to the essence or soul of a home, hence one needs to be extremely picky while choosing a furniture design.

It's normal for furniture designers to find inspiration from some pretty unusual sources.We've seen things that were inspired by nature, pop culture, art, architecture, and sometimes even science fiction.Sometimes we even get companies that are not necessarily furniture makers to create a line inspired by their original products to commemorate something or just because they can.

What better way to commemorate the greatest work of science fiction than with some science fiction of our own?!These imaginary (fictitious) timepieces were created using Midjourney's AI art generator (science).Every year, on the fourth of May, sci-fi aficionados celebrate Star Wars Day.The day, colloquially referred to as "May the Fourth be with you" is a play on Han Solo's iconic dialogue "May the force be with you".

Las Ánimas was one of the standout exhibitors at this year's Madrid Design Festival.Here, the Seville-based duo present seven designs that reveal their fascination with geometry and symbolism.Las Ánimas is formed of the artist couple Trini Salamanca and Pablo Párraga, who have been working together since 2014.

1. Superintelligent AI is a potential threat and should be taken seriously. 2. AI decision-making can be influenced by humans, even if those humans have limited knowledge or understanding of the AI's decision-making process. 3. It is important to understand the implications of AI decision-

Hello!I'm here to help you learn and grow.Let's get started on your learning journey.undefined The new, A.I.-assisted Khanmigo allows students to chat with simulated historical figures or co-write stories with the software.Khan Academy, the popular online learning nonprofit, recently developed an experimental A.I.-assisted tutoring bot for schools called Khanmigo.

Sleep is a semiconscious state, but there are neurons firing in the brain even when all seems quiet.Now brain activity during the deepest sleep phase could make it possible for people to communicate with the waking world during lucid dreaming.If someone is lucid dreaming, they are aware they are dreaming and able to manipulate what happens in the dream.

Boffins at the University of California, Berkeley, have delved into the undisclosed depths of OpenAI's ChatGPT and the GPT-4 large language model at its heart, and found they're trained on text from copyrighted books.Academics Kent Chang, Mackenzie Cramer, Sandeep Soni, and David Bamman describe their work in a paper titled, "Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4."
"We find that OpenAI models have memorized a wide collection of copyrighted materials, and that the degree of memorization is tied to the frequency with which passages of those books appear on the web," the researchers explain in their paper.

It's nearly impossible to imagine American pop culture of the 1980s without Harold Ramis and Bill Murray's collaborations, especially where cinematic comedy is concerned.Ramis and Murray's movies left an indelible impact on the late 1970s and 80s but they peaked with their final film together, which wasn't actually an '80s movie at all.

Technology NPR's Mary Louise Jelly speaks with Robin Murphy, professor at Texas A&M University, about the through line between a science fiction novel and the current state of AI and automation.Copyright 2023 NPR.All rights reserved.Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

Apple lived up to months of expectations on Monday when it introduced new high-tech goggles that blend the real world with virtual reality.The $3,500 device, called the Vision Pro, will offer augmented reality and introduce spatial computing, Apple said.But conspicuously absent from its carefully choreographed announcement were the actual words virtual reality, underscoring the challenges the tech giant will likely face in marketing the device to a mass consumer audience.

It could be a tale from science fiction itself: a machine that uses artificial intelligence to try to supplant authors working in the genre, turning out story after story without ever hitting writer's block.And now, it seems, it's happening in real life.The editors of three science fiction magazines Clarkesworld, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Asimov's Science Fiction said this week that they had been flooded by submissions of works of fiction generated by A.I. chatbots.

The science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld has been forced to stop accepting any new submissions from writers after it was bombarded with what it says were AI-generated stories.The magazine officially shut off submissions on February 20 after a surge in stories that publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke says were clearly machine-written.

This summer, there's nothing so new on television as something old.Series are emerging two years (The Witcher), four (Black Mirror), eight (Justified: Primeval City), 10 (Futurama) and 25 (The Full Monty) after you last had to think about them or the works from which they have been spun off.On the other hand, it's also a bountiful summer for newer favorites, full of the second or third or fourth seasons of popular or praiseworthy (sometimes both) recent shows like The Bear, Heartstopper, How to With John Wilson, Never Have I Ever, Only Murders in the Building, Physical, Reservation Dogs and Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan.

When Wes Anderson comes down from Paris for the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France, he and his actors don't stay in one of Cannes' luxury hotels but more than an hour down the coast and well outside the frenzy of the festival.When we arrived here yesterday, we arrived at a calm, peaceful hotel, Anderson said in a interview.

Athletes are getting in shape for the Paris Olympic Games in 2024, and so is the world's first electric air taxi network.We are going to make it happen, Solene Le Bris of Paris airports operator Groupe ADP told an industry audience at Amsterdam Drone Week.We are trying to launch the first e-VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] pre-commercial service in the world: that's our ambition.

/
Leaked documents reveal Amazon has a new generative AI technology called Burnham that could make its Astro home robot a whole lot smarter.If you buy something from a Verge link, Vox Media may earn a commission.See our ethics statement.As a smart home reviewer of a certain age, all I've ever wanted for my home is a Rosie the Robot.

04:34 Screens display the logos of OpenAI and ChatGPT in Toulouse, southwestern France, on January 23, 2023.Lionel Bonaventure, AFP An open letter signed by Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and many others, is warning against 'profound risks to society and humanity'.Are tech companies moving too fast in rolling out powerful artificial intelligence technology that could one day outsmart humans?

The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT on March 21, in Boston.A group of prominent computer scientists and other tech industry notables are calling for a 6-month pause to consider the risks of powerful artificial intelligence technology.

The OpenAI logo is seen on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen displaying output from ChatGPT, on March 21, 2023, in Boston.Michael Dwyer (AP) Are tech companies moving too fast in rolling out powerful artificial intelligence technology that could one day outsmart humans?That's the conclusion of a group of prominent computer scientists and other tech industry notables such as Elon Musk and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak who are calling for a 6-month pause to consider the risks.

Say the words alien invasion and the stories most people think of are those told in movies like Roland Emmerich's Independence Day (1996), in which the battle lines between good and evil are cleanly divided.HG Wells dreamed up this template in 1897, with Martian invaders laying waste the home counties in The War of the Worlds.

On Sunday, a Twitter user with the screen name Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood tweeted a command to his approximately 14,000 followers:

This tweet, encouraging followers to read the science fiction novel This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, unexpectedly went mega-viral, and for the past few days El-Mohtar has watched in shock as her book has rocketed up the Amazon charts.

What if you could just put on your headphones and boost your brain, calm your nerves, and increase your focus with just a few odd tones?It's a hack that sounds like something out of science fiction but is actually starting to gain traction among psychotherapists and other experts thanks to the growing evidence from some small studies showing that you can hack your brain with binaural beats.

Keyword stuffing in product names is a handy Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tool to get an item to sneak up to the top of search results - the more keywords, the better!You've probably seen it for a variety of products, from books to sustainable bamboo reusable makeup removing pads.See what I did there?

In the 22 years since the publication of her first story collection, Stranger Things Happen, Kelly Link's fiction has crept from the status of cult favorite to something approaching the mainstream-or, rather, the mainstream has crept toward her.Link has never written a novel, only short stories (although a novel has been promised for next year), and her first two books were published by the small press she operates with her husband, Gavin Grant.

Weekly curated resources for designers - thinkers and makers.In science fiction, one of the main indications that the characters are living in the high-tech future is an insanely smart, AI voice assistant.Star Trek's Enterprise had the omnipresent Computer, and Tony Stark famously traded quips with JARVIS (Just A Rather Very Intelligent System) before the AI became the sentient Vision.

Microsoft Corp. on Thursday trumpeted its latest plans to put artificial intelligence into the hands of more users, answering a spate of unveilings this week by its rival Google with upgrades to its own widely used office software.The technology company previewed a new AI "copilot" for Microsoft 365, its product suite that includes Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations and Outlook emails.

Suzy McKee Charnas, an award-winning feminist science fiction writer who in a four-novel series created a post-holocaust, male-dominated society called the Holdfast that is liberated by an army of women, died on Jan. 2 at her home in Albuquerque.She was 83.David Szanton, a cousin, said the cause was a heart attack.

Shake It Off
With Microsoft's new Bing AI and other artificial intelligence software becoming the biggest news story of 2023 thus far, it's easy to forget that AI chatbots have been around for a long time - and that Microsoft's old one, Tay, is the literal blueprint for out-of-control algorithms.It was March 2016, back when Donald Trump's presidency still seemed impossible and the concept of a global pandemic causing society to shut down still felt like science fiction.

South Korea announced on Monday that it will launch its own 6G network using world-class technology, advanced software-based next-gen mobile networks, and by strengthening its network supply chains.The news was announced by the Korean Ministry of Science and ICT.The South Korean government will incentivize local companies to produce materials, components, and equipment for the development of its 6G network.

Last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a blog post about how he says the company will use superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI), the point at which AI systems are able to compete with and even exceed human intellect, to "benefit all of humanity."The company has gotten copious amounts of attention lately with its AI chatbot ChatGPT, a versatile tool that has seen an exponential rise in popularity since its release just a few months ago.

The Japanese cover of Hold Back The Stars' by Katie Khan (Image: Google) Katie Khan, who visited Putney High School last Thursday as part of the Putney Ideas Exchange (otherwise fondly known as a PIE talk) in celebration of World Book Day, is the author of two novels: Hold Back The Stars' and The Light Between Us', the first of which is currently being adapted into a TV series by the producers of celebrated Netflix show Stranger Things'.

When NASA's balloon-borne exoplanet-observing telescope EXoplanet Climate Infrared TElescope (EXCITE) takes to the skies this fall it'll be doing so with a scaffold and support struts with a unique feature: they were designed by an artificial intelligence algorithm.Using a method dubbed "evolved structures," NASA Goddard Space Flight Center research engineer Ryan McClelland's design said the aim was to reduce the mass of spacecraft structural components by two thirds, while at the same time reducing stress risks, by using commercially-available AI software to build parts that can be machined by commercial vendors.