Lifeboat Foundation

A new theory that accounts for disorder in a protein’s structure sheds light on the development inside a cell of tiny droplets that are vital to a cell’s function.

Through the $1.4 billion partnership, DARPA will establish a domestic center for microelectronics manufacturing at the university.

Cambodia has welcomed 60 baby Siamese crocodiles — a hatching record for the endangered species in this century, conservationists say.

They have called it a “real sign of hope”, after more than 20 years of efforts to revive the reptile’s numbers in the remote Cardamom Mountains.

The olive green freshwater reptile has a distinct bony crest at the back of its head — by some estimates, it can grow up to 3m or nearly 10ft.

The pressures at which some elements start superconducting are so high that making detailed measurements of the transition has been impossible—until now.

For the first time, an international research team has succeeded in observing a two-photon decay on a so-called bare atomic nucleus from which the entire electron shell has been removed.

Related: High-G data recorder helps Air Force munitions testing

The Army wants a company to build and deliver MDAC prototypes using existing fielded and mature technologies. MDAC will be air-, rail-, and sea-transportable per MIL-STD-1366; will be able to move rapidly for survivability; have automated high rates of fire with HVP; and have emote weapon firing; have deep magazine capacity, rapid ammunition resupply, and high operational availability. Companies interested also will demonstrate supportability, safety, and cyber security.

Abstract: Text-to-Image (T2I) models are being increasingly adopted in diverse global communities where they create visual representations of their unique cultures. Current T2I benchmarks primarily focus on faithfulness, aesthetics, and realism of generated images, overlooking the critical dimension of cultural competence. In this work, we introduce a framework to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models along two crucial dimensions: cultural awareness and cultural diversity, and present a scalable approach using a combination of structured knowledge bases and large language models to build a large dataset of cultural artifacts to enable this evaluation. In particular, we apply this approach to build CUBE (CUltural BEnchmark for Text-to-Image models), a first-of-its-kind benchmark to evaluate cultural competence of T2I models. CUBE covers cultural artifacts associated with 8 countries across different geo-cultural regions and along 3 concepts: cuisine, landmarks, and art. CUBE consists of 1) CUBE-1K, a set of high-quality prompts that enable the evaluation of cultural awareness, and 2) CUBE-CSpace, a larger dataset of cultural artifacts that serves as grounding to evaluate cultural diversity. We also introduce cultural diversity as a novel T2I evaluation component, leveraging quality-weighted Vendi score. Our evaluations reveal significant gaps in the cultural awareness of existing models across countries and provide valuable insights into the cultural diversity of T2I outputs for under-specified prompts. Our methodology is extendable to other cultural regions and concepts, and can facilitate the development of T2I models that better cater to the global population.

From: Nithish Kannen [view email].

Unlike letters carved on the Rosetta stone, digital data is not written on a virtually immutable support. Just a few years after it is written, its format becomes obsolete, the readout analysis tools can’t run on computers and the visualization code no longer works. But data can still contain interesting scientific information that should remain available to future generations of scientists.

Engineers at UC San Diego are pioneering the future of humanoid robots by incorporating dance moves and expressive gestures.