Telescope #64
SUSTAINABILITY
~ Fall is a special time of year in the forests, as trees explode in brilliant shades of red and gold. The air is crisp, the days are still warm, and the turning foliage offers an irresistible riot of color—one that, by one estimate, generates as much as $1 billion in tourism revenue. But fall is getting warmer as a result of climate change, jeopardizing these beloved colors. DETAIL
~ US authorities said they have issued a "breakthrough" first-ever fine over space debris, slapping a $150,000 penalty on a TV company that failed to properly dispose of a satellite. DETAIL
~ Measurements from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite show that this year’s ozone hole over Antarctica is one of the biggest on record. The hole, which is what scientists call an ‘ozone depleting area,’ reached a size of 26 million sq km on 16 September 2023. This is roughly three times the size of Brazil. DETAIL
Credit: esa.int
~ More than 100 Amazon dolphins found dead as water temperatures reach 39C. Ongoing drought probably caused their deaths, say scientists trying to save endangered species. DETAIL
HEALTH
~ A drug that stimulates muscles to burn fuel as if they're exercising has been found to reduce fat mass in obese mice. Developed by researchers in the US, the compound belongs to a proposed class of therapeutics known as exercise mimetics, that has been mostly tested in animals and is yet to be approved. DETAIL
~ More than 100 female students were hospitalized in Kenya due to an undiagnosed disease.
~ A type of insulin-producing pancreas cell grown from stem cells in the laboratory showed great promise in a small, early-stage trial of patients with type 1 diabetes (T1D). Researchers hope the approach developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals may one day lead to a better treatment or even a cure for insulin-dependant patients. Data on the first six adults to receive the stem cell-derived islet cells, half of whom no longer require insulin, was presented at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes annual meeting in Hamburg on Tuesday. DETAIL
DIGITAL / TECHNOLOGY / SCIENCE / AI
~ ChatGPT now has a voice. Choose from one of five lifelike synthetic voices and you can have a conversation with the chatbot as if you were making a call, getting responses to your spoken questions in real time. ChatGPT also now answers questions about images. OpenAI teased this feature in March with its reveal of GPT-4 (the model that powers ChatGPT), but it has not been available to the wider public before. This means that you can now upload images to the app and quiz it about what they show. DETAIL
~ Getty Images is so confident its new generative AI model is free of copyrighted content that it will cover any potential intellectual-property disputes for its customers. The generative AI system, announced today, was built by Nvidia and is trained solely on images in Getty’s image library. It does not include logos or images that have been scraped off the internet without consent. DETAIL
~ X Social Media is suing X, a social media company / An ad agency called X Social Media alleges that the company formerly known as Twitter has caused marketplace confusion and lost revenue. DETAIL
ENERGY / TRANSPORTATION
~ The boom has finally been lowered on Chinese electric-vehicle companies. On September 13, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen used her State of the Union speech to announce that the organization is launching an “anti-subsidy investigation into electric vehicles coming from China.” DETAIL
~ A hit-and-run driver struck a pedestrian Monday night, tossing her into the path of a Cruise self-driving car that then drove over her, according to videos of the collision taken by Cruise in San Francisco and seen by NBC News. The woman who was hit was in critical condition Tuesday morning, according to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. The incident boosts city officials’ argument that the vehicles aren’t safe enough to operate independently. DETAIL
~ Israeli battery developer StoreDot has signed a multi-year contract with Volvo Cars for battery cell development. The cooperation, involving experts from both sides, is expected to produce modified XFC cells that will be tailor-made for Volvo Cars’ future electric cars. Among other things, the XFC cell is said to excel in its extremely fast-charging capability – in May 2022, StoreDot demonstrated a charge to 86 per cent in ten minutes, and in October, it reported proof of durability of 1,000 fast-charge cycles with production-ready cells. DETAIL
~ For three months beginning in November 1973, the Dutch government prohibited private motor vehicles from driving on Sundays. The measure aimed to reduce oil consumption during the OPEC energy crisis, and it allowed citizens to roller-skate, picnic and cycle on the nation's highways. Now, half a century later and amid a far more consequential fossil fuel-related crisis, Dutch bike subscription service Swapfiets is urging authorities to reinstate Sunday bans. Swapfiets sent letters to the city councils of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague, advocating for the reintroduction of car-free Sundays once a month. The scaleup is encouraging local politicians to adopt a long-term perspective and implement no-car days as a means to decrease pollution, reduce emissions and improve air quality. To help council members imagine what they could accomplish, Swapfiets employed AI to recreate photos from 1973 and envision what car-free Sundays would look like today. For the occasion of World Car-Free Day (September 22nd), Swapfiets also polled 2,000 Brits on which city they thought would be the world's first to go car-less and when. The consensus? London, by 2050. Using survey replies on what the UK's capital and other major European cities would look like if cars were swapped for bikes, AI artists generated images of London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris and Berlin showing fewer roads, more green spaces and more street dining. DETAIL
Credit: Trendwatching
CYBERSECURITY
~ On Monday, a “CBS Mornings” co-host warned thousands of social media followers that an AI-rendered image of her was falsely promoting a product that she has no connection with. DETAIL
Mind the red button below :)