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☆ Grimes said she got a brain gadget for her birthday from a company competing with Elon Musk's Neuralink
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-22 | by ( Grace Kay | Hilary Brueck | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Neurosity's device is designed to help people focus, but some developers are using it as a BCI. "Getting a non invasive brain computer interface for my birthday (!!!!? Grimes' birthday 'Crown' measures brain activity, and is designed to help people focusNeurosity's headset uses electroencephalogram technology, or EEG, to measure brain activity by placing small metal electrodes on a person's scalp. In a now-deleted tweet, the singer said Neurosity's device allowed her to use her mind to move a cursor. Meanwhile, Neurosity's device is already on the market.

☆ Google CEO tells employees 'things will go wrong' as the public tests its ChatGPT rival Bard
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-22 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Google's CEO told employees "things will go wrong" with the company's AI chatbot, Bard. Google began rolling out staggered access to its ChatGPT rival on Tuesday. On Tuesday, Google began rolling out staggered public access to its much-anticipated ChatGPT rival, Bard. A spokesperson for Google told Insider that "Bard can sometimes give inaccurate or inappropriate information that doesn't represent Google's views." In the email to employees on Tuesday, Pichai said that public feedback is "critical" to improving Bard's functionality.

☆ NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is so powerful it discovered sand storms on a planet 235 trillion miles away
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-22 | by ( Grace Eliza Goodwin | Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope found sand storms on a planet hundreds of trillions of miles away. From its vantage point in space, Webb can peer at a distant world and analyze the entire infrared spectrum of starlight passing through the planet's atmosphere. The James Webb Space Telescope fully deploys its primary mirror during development at Northrop Grumman Space Systems in Redondo Beach, California. The spectrum Webb found on the planet VHS 1256 b, showing signatures of silicate clouds, water, methane, and carbon monoxide. That means the stars' light doesn't drown out the light of the planet, making it an ideal target for the Webb telescope.

☆ Google begins rolling out its ChatGPT rival
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-21 | by ( Samantha Murphy Kelly | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +3 min

CNN —Google is opening up access to Bard, its new AI chatbot tool that directly competes with ChatGPT. A company representative told CNN it will be a separate, complementary experience to Google Search, and users can also visit Search to check its responses or sources. Google said in a blog post it plans to “thoughtfully” add large language models to search “in a deeper way” at a later time. Like ChatGPT, which was released publicly in late November by AI research company OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model. Google's ChatGPT rival Bard GoogleBut Bard’s blunder highlighted the challenge Google and other companies face with integrating the technology into their core products.

Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Mars are set to align in an arc formation on the nights of March 25 through 30, alongside the moon. If you want to spot all five planets in one night, timing, dark skies, and a clear view of the horizon are key. You'll need to peer low on the horizon to spot Jupiter and Mercury. An easy way to identify the planets is to download an astronomy app like Sky Tonight or SkySafari, which will show you exactly where each planet is in the night sky. NASANow it's time to admire Venus — the brightest "star" in the sky, poised above Jupiter — and look for Uranus with your binoculars.

☆ Image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals a rare star preparing to explode and die in a supernova
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-14 | by ( Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | Jessica Orwig | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope captured a star getting ready to die in stunning detail. The image shows a rare Wolf-Rayet star, expelling its outer layers in the phase before a supernova. A Wolf-Rayet star is "among the most luminous, most massive, and most briefly-detectable stars known," according to NASA. Webb helps investigate a dusty cosmic mysteryThat cosmic dust is of great interest to astronomers. An artist's conception of the James Webb Space Telescope.

☆ NASA image may show first-ever 'rogue' supermassive black hole, leaving a trail of newborn stars in its wake
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-09 | by ( Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

A NASA Hubble image may show the first runaway supermassive black hole ever discovered. Astrophysicists have long theorized that black holes could "go rogue" or "run away," if other black holes pushed them out of their galaxies. But nobody has ever confirmed a black hole wandering through intergalactic space, much less a supermassive black hole going rogue. And while two galaxies colliding is the simplest explanation for a rogue black hole, that's not what seems to have happened here. Even though they're invisible, there's no reason to worry about rogue supermassive black holes sneaking up on us from other galaxies.

☆ The unraveling of fintech darling Vise
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-03 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +28 min

It was April, and more than two dozen salespeople who worked for the fintech startup Vise had been ordered to a multiday off-site at the W Hoboken hotel in New Jersey to share exhaustive reports on their performance. Even salespeople at bigger, established, top-tier investment-management firms typically wouldn't close $250 million in a year, multiple sales employees said. (K-means clustering is an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm often referred to as a form of AI, Vise's founders said). (Vise's founders disputed this, saying the company received updated financial data only once a day for its portfolio-construction engine.) And to address its "leaky funnel" of overestimating prospective sales, Vise was to stop outreach to new clients while it onboards and upsells to existing clients, the document said.

☆ Elon Musk's Starlink satellites are ruining images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, threatening future science
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-03 | by ( Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is getting more satellites ruining its images, a new study found. Hubble images streaked with white lines show the impact of just one satellite flying through the telescope's field of view. The proportion of Hubble images that look like this is increasing as more satellites fill Earth's orbit, the study found. Hubble peers through a growing 'wall' between us and the universeThe Hubble Space Telescope in Earth's orbit. So far SpaceX has launched more than 3,000 Starlink satellites and plans to eventually maintain up to 42,000 satellites in orbit.

☆ Studies show how asteroid-bashing spacecraft was 'phenomenally successful'
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-01 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

[1/4] This image depicts NASA's DART spacecraft and its two long solar panels over the spot where it impacted asteroid Dimorphos in September 2022. "The DART test was phenomenally successful. The Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided on Sept. 26 at about 14,000 miles per hour (22,530 kph) into Dimorphos, an asteroid about 490 feet (150 meters) in diameter, roughly 6.8 million miles (11 million km) from Earth. Finally, the spacecraft bus - the box between the solar panels - hit between these two boulders," Daly said. The research also clarified details such as the precise location of the impact and the angle of impact.

☆ How to see the Venus and Jupiter conjunction, when the two brightest planets align in the sky
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-01 | by ( Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Jupiter and Venus will appear to almost touch in the night sky on Wednesday and Thursday. They're the brightest objects in the sky after the sun and moon, so they're visible to the naked eye. In fact, Venus is the third brightest object in the sky after the sun and moon. How to spot Jupiter and Venus in the skyJupiter (left) and Venus (right) are two of the brightest objects in the sky. They'll creep away from each other night after night, Venus rising and Jupiter dropping toward the horizon and the sun.

☆ NASA to name solar scientist as agency's science chief, sources say
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-27 | by ( Joey Roulette | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +1 min

WASHINGTON, Feb 27 (Reuters) - NASA has picked a longtime solar scientist who heads its heliophysics division to become the U.S. space agency's science chief, according two people familiar with the decision. Nicola Fox, former top scientist on the Parker Solar Probe mission studying the sun, will be named this week as NASA's associate administrator for the agency's Science Mission Directorate, said the two sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the official announcement. Fox will lead NASA's science directorate, a unit with an annual budget of roughly $7 billion that oversees some of the agency's best-known programs from the robotic hunts for past life on Mars to exploring distant galaxies with the James Webb Space Telescope. Fox will succeed Thomas Zurbuchen, a Swiss-American astrophysicist who had led the directorate since 2016 before his retirement in December. Sandra Connelly, formerly Zurbuchen's deputy, has been leading the directorate in an acting capacity.

☆ 5 times scientists thought they'd maybe discovered signs of extraterrestrial life but sadly didn't
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-23 | by ( Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +7 min

Extraterrestrial life could exist, but mysterious objects in the sky aren't evidence of aliens. Scientists have thought they were close to discovering alien life a few times — none of it via UFOs. As the US discovered a flurry of UFOs — officially called "unidentified anomalous phenomena," or UAPs — in early February, Google searches for "extraterrestrial life" and "are aliens real" spiked. There have been incidents in the past where some researchers thought they'd come close to discovering signs of alien life — or even extraterrestrial intelligence — but none were UFOs. They dubbed the first interstellar object 'Oumuamua, which is a Hawaiian term meaning "a messenger from afar arriving first."

☆ Galaxies spotted by Webb telescope rewrite understanding of early universe
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-22 | by ( Will Dunham | ) www.reuters.com time to read: +4 min

These galaxies, one of which appears to have a mass rivaling our Milky Way but 30 times more densely packed, seem to differ in fundamental ways from those populating the universe today. "The leading theory is that an ocean of dark matter filled the early universe after the Big Bang," Labbe said. "This dark matter - we don't know what it is actually is - started out really smooth, with only the tiniest of ripples. These ripples grew over time due to gravity and eventually the dark matter started to collect in concentrated clumps, dragging hydrogen gas along for the ride. "Their explosion set off the chain of events that formed subsequent generations of stars," Labbe said.

☆ Three Years Into Covid, We Still Don’t Know How to Talk About It
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-22 | by ( Jon Mooallem | Photographs Ashley Gilbertson | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +53 min

It will play out and reverberate for years or decades, Hagen told me. “The pathological normal,” Hagen calls it: a patchwork of homespun, bespoke realities, each one invested in a different story about what exactly happened when Covid ruptured the story of our lives. garb.”More than once, life seemed to be attaining “an uncanny resemblance to normal life,” as one man put it. But because we don’t totally understand where that experience has delivered us, we don’t know the right gloss to give it. “The days are strange,” one public-school teacher told Milstein toward the end of his first interview, in May 2020.

☆ Photos released by NASA show once-invisible spiral galaxies and a first look at star formation
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-18 | by ( Kenneth Niemeyer | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: 1 min

Researchers at NASA used infrared wavelengths to take three photos of galaxies, "getting their first look at star formation, gas, and dust in nearby galaxies with unprecedented resolution." The Webb telescope’s images of NGC 1433, NGC 7496 & NGC 1365 reveal the galaxies' networks of gas and dust in extraordinary detail. This data is part of an ongoing Webb survey of 19 spiral galaxies. NASANASA researchers used the James Webb Telescope to capture the images, according to a news release. The first Webb telescope photo shows "a gray spiral galaxy with a bright white, circular core," according to NASA.

☆ The UFO shoot-downs show the hardest part of discovering alien life may be announcing it. Here's how NASA might break the news.
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-18 | by ( Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +9 min

Extraterrestrial life likely wouldn't show up as flying objects, but finding it could cause similar chaos. An illustration of the CoLD scale for determining confidence in a detection of alien life. The president or other countries could be involved in announcing extraterrestrial life existsPresident Joe Biden speaks at Delaware State University. Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesAnnouncing the existence of alien life would be an "administration-level" affair, Glaze said, referring to the US presidency. Needless to say, any discovery of alien life would likely lead to chaos — at least in public discourse.

☆ Ex-Google employee says the 'once-great company has slowly ceased to function' because of 4 core cultural problems
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-16 | by ( Sindhu Sundar | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Ex-Googler Praveen Seshadri wrote on Medium that employees are "trapped in a maze" of bureaucracy. Seshadri said Google's issues boil down to four "core cultural problems." Even small product changes go through the rigor of a "NASA space launch," he wrote, calling out what he said were fundamental issues within the company, and declaring that "a once-great company has slowly ceased to function." He enumerated the company's "four core cultural problems" as being "no mission, no urgency, delusions of exceptionalism, mismanagement." Seshadri also critiqued Google employees in his post, calling MemeGen "a wallow chamber," and said that griping on it "doesn't help anything."

☆ Google CEO Sundar Pichai asks employees to put two to four hours into helping to improve and 'dogfood' its Bard chatbot
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-15 | by ( Thomas Maxwell | Hugh Langley | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +5 min

Google this week began companywide internal testing of Bard, its AI chatbot for search. In a memo, CEO Sundar Pichai has asked all employees to spend 2-4 hours helping test the product. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai sent an internal memo to Googlers on Wednesday asking them to contribute 2-4 hours of their time to helping improve Bard, the company's AI chatbot that it intends to integrate into search. Google kicked off "dogfooding," or internally testing, Bard on Tuesday, according to another memo seen by Insider. Read the full memo below:Hi Googlers,Excited to see us opening up Bard for an internal dogfood to help us get it ready for launch.

☆ Google didn't think its Bard AI was 'really ready' for a product yet, says Alphabet chairman, days after the chatbot's very public mistake tanked the company's stock
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-14 | by ( Huileng Tan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet, said Google was hesitant to use its Bard AI in a product as it wasn't "really ready," per CNBC. Google unveiled its Bard AI last week amid intense interest in competitor ChatGPT. But a promo for Google Bard featured a factual error — which sent Alphabet's stock down 9% in a day. Google unveiled Bard amid intense interest in rival chatbot ChatGPT, and just a day before Microsoft rolled out its AI-powered Bing search engine which is built using technology from OpenAI, the parent of ChatGPT. At the conference, Hennessy declined to comment specifically on the public's reaction to Google's Bard, per CNBC.

☆ Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak thinks ChatGPT is 'pretty impressive,' but warned it can make 'horrible mistakes': CNBC
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-13 | by ( Felise Seah | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Steve Wozniak said OpenAI's ChatGPT is "pretty impressive," during an interview with CNBC on Wednesday. "The trouble is it does good things for us, but it can make horrible mistakes by not knowing what humanness is," Wozniak warned. "The trouble is it does good things for us, but it can make horrible mistakes by not knowing what humanness is," Wozniak warned. In the interview, Wozniak also drew a parallel to the concerns surrounding AI technology in self-driving cars, and said that AI cannot currently replace human drivers. Google's new experimental AI chatbot, Bard, gave an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope.

☆ Google search chief warns AI chatbots can give 'convincing but completely fictitious' answers, report says
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-12 | by ( Jyoti Mann | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Google's search engine boss said AI chatbots can give "convincing" but "fictitious" answers. Prabhakar Raghavan told Welt am Sonntag it's considering how to integrate Bard with Google search. Prabhakar Raghavan told Welt Am Sonntag on Saturday that they can sometimes give false but convincing answers. However, an ad for Bard showed it giving an inaccurate answer to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope. Maarten Bosma, a former research engineer at Alphabet's AI division Google Brain, tweeted that the presentation showed the company wasn't taking AI seriously enough.

☆ Mark Cuban: Internet misinformation will only ‘get worse’ as ChatGPT and its competitors grow
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-12 | by ( Megan Sauer | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +4 min

Mark Cuban may be entertained by chatbots like Microsoft-backed ChatGPT and Google's upcoming Bard — but he isn't ready to trust them. Right now, misinformation tends to spread through social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter — and that's with some semblance of human guardrails in place, Cuban said. But so far, the technology isn't showing itself to be smarter than the average human. That's a problem, especially for large swaths of people who don't always fact check claims they see on the internet, Cuban said. Microsoft, for its part, acknowledges that the technology behind ChatGPT isn't perfect — even as it plans to incorporate it into an upcoming version of its search engine, Bing.

☆ Telescope video shows part of the sun breaking off and forming a vortex, making scientists scratch their heads
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-10 | by ( Morgan Mcfall-Johnsen | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

Video from a NASA telescope shows part of the sun breaking off and swirling around its north pole. More plasma is building up to liftoff at the sun's north pole, which is a once-a-decade event. She added that the telescope footage appeared to show a solar prominence — a large, bright filament extending out from the sun, but anchored to the solar surface. More extreme activity is building on the sun's north poleOn Friday morning, more plasma appeared to be swirling at the solar north pole. Cool plasma building at the surface of the sun's pole appears to be getting ready to lift off, or erupt, into space.

☆ Google employees slam CEO Sundar Pichai for ‘rushed’ Bard announcement
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-10 | by ( Jennifer Elias | ) www.cnbc.com time to read: +1 min

Google employees are criticizing leadership, most notably CEO Sundar Pichai, for the way the company handled the announcement this week of its ChatGPT competitor called Bard. Staffers took to the popular internal forum Memegen to express their thoughts on the Bard announcement, referring to it as "rushed," "botched" and "un-Googley," according to messages and memes viewed by CNBC. On Monday, Google got ahead of a Microsoft event the following day and had Pichai publicly divulge some details of the company's chatbot technology. During Google's Wednesday event, search boss Prabhakar Raghavan briefly shared some slides with examples of Bard’s capabilities. While Google employees often turn to Memegen to humorously poke fun at the company's quirks and missteps, the posts after the Bard announcement struck a more serious tone and even went directly after Pichai.

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