Lifeboat Foundation

A team of AI researchers at Microsoft Research Asia has developed an AI application that converts a still image of a person and an audio track into an animation that accurately portrays the individual speaking or singing the audio track with appropriate facial expressions.

The team has published a paper describing how they created the app on the arXiv preprint server; video samples are available on the research project page.

The research team sought to animate still images talking and singing using any provided backing audio track, while also displaying believable facial expressions. They clearly succeeded with the development of VASA-1, an AI system that turns static images, whether captured by a camera, drawn, or painted, into what they describe as “exquisitely synchronized” animations.

SpaceX, with the Starlink constellation, has roughly 6,000 satellites, and not once have we had to maneuver around a UFO.

“This study has given us an historical picture of how the emerging modern reef responded to huge environmental stress,” said Dr. Jody Webster.

What events caused the Great Barrier Reef to become what it is today, specifically over the course of the last six to eight thousand years, or just after the last Ice Age? This is what a recent study published in Quaternary Science Reviews hopes to address as a team of international researchers conducted an in-depth scientific analysis on various aspects of the Great Barrier Reef to ascertain the environmental factors that contributed to the Reef’s present conditions. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand how reefs evolve over time and the environment’s role in their evolution.

For the study, the researchers drilled almost two dozen coral samples and analyzed them using a variety of methods, including computer tomography, scanning electron microscopy, and X-ray diffraction to ascertain yearly growth patterns within the coral samples. In the end, they determined that environmental factors, including increased water temperatures, ocean turbulence, and rising sea levels, led to increased nutrients, which contributed to the growth of the Great Barrier Reef, and is consistent with previous studies.

Continue reading “Historical Perspective: The Dynamic Birth of the Modern Great Barrier Reef” »

SpaceX has shown off a futuristic-looking new extravehicular activity (EVA) spacesuit designed to allow space tourists to venture outside of the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft in orbit — and it’s decked out in the latest cutting-edge tech.

The suit will make its first appearance during this summer’s Polaris Dawn mission, which will see a crew of four space tourists stepping out of the capsule to go for a spacewalk.

The suit is astonishingly slim compared to the bulky suits we’ve become accustomed to that allow astronauts to venture outside spacecraft like the International Space Station.

The rapid progress of humanoid robot development is nothing short of astounding. Less than 12 months after introducing its 6th-gen general-purpose humanoid, Canada’s Sanctuary AI has pulled back the curtains on the next iteration of Phoenix.

Sanctuary has been working on a general-purpose humanoid robot for a few years now, with much of the development focus on building and training the upper torso to perform an array of tasks so we don’t have to – including putting labels on boxes, bagging groceries, moving packages, scanning products and soldering. However, it seems that most of the “Robots Doing Stuff” series of videos are actually showing the bots being teleoperated, which is how they’re taught to perform tasks.

Continue reading “General-purpose humanoid is faster on the uptake, works for longer” »

The latest open large language model from Meta — built with NVIDIA technology — is optimized to run on NVIDIA GPUs from the cloud and data center to the edge and the PC.

The newfound black hole, an intense, light-trapping abyss which has been named Gaia BH3, lurks just 1,926 light-years from Earth in the Aquila constellation. (That makes it the second closest black hole to Earth after Gaia BH1, which resides at 1,500 light-years away and is three times lighter than Gaia BH3.) The so-called “sleeping giant” — so named because unlike its ilk, the dormant black hole doesn’t appear to be shredding its companion star to pieces — birthed out of the imminent collapse of a once-massive star. It is the first direct link between a black hole and a progenitor star that was deprived of metals heavier than hydrogen and helium, according to the new study published in April in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The discovery confirms a leading theory of stellar evolution that posits high-mass black holes are remnants of stars that are low on metals. Such metal-poor stars have damped mass-eroding winds compared to their metal-rich counterparts, and thus have more material available to form heavier black holes. Astronomers normally time announcements of science discoveries at the same time as data release, in this case no sooner than early 2026, but “you cannot hide this kind of discovery from the community for two years,” says Panuzzo. “It is a unique case of publication based on the preliminary data because the data is exceptional and also something that’s very interesting for the community.”

An international team led by researchers at the University of Toronto has found a family of natural compounds with potential as new and more effective treatments for parasitic worms. The compounds stall the unique metabolic process that worms use to survive in the human gut.

Depression and cardiovascular disease (CVD) are serious concerns for public health. Approximately 280 million people worldwide have depression, while 620 million people have CVD.

It has been known since the 1990s that the two diseases are somehow related. For example, people with depression run a greater risk of CVD, while effective early treatment for depression cuts the risk of subsequently developing CVD by half. Conversely, people with CVD tend to have depression as well. For these reasons, the American Heart Association (AHA) advises to monitor teenagers with depression for CVD.

What wasn’t yet known is what causes this apparent relatedness between the two diseases. Part of the answer probably lies in lifestyle factors common in patients with depression and which increase the risk of CVD, such as smoking, alcohol abuse, lack of exercise, and a poor diet. But it’s also possible that both diseases might be related at a deeper level, through shared developmental pathways.