Indonesian president Joko Widodo’s years-long wooing on Elon Musk may have finally paid off. The Southeast Asian leader, commonly known as Jokowi, openly courted the Tesla CEO for investment in the country’s fledgling EV sector, even making a personal visit to see the billionaire in Texas in 2022.
Musk has now made his first visit to Indonesia after Jokowi’s charm offensive. The billionaire traveled to the resort island of Bali over the weekend—not for Tesla, but for one of his other companies: SpaceX. On Sunday, Musk inaugurated SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service in Indonesia, saying he was “excited to bring connectivity to places that have low connectivity.”
Starlink received a license to operate in Indonesia earlier this month. It’s the third Southeast Asian country to approve the satellite internet service, following the Philippines in 2022 and Malaysia last year.
Telegram, a social media platform commonly used by Ukrainians and Russians alike, has been used as a “legalized darknet” and a tool for Russian disinformation, and there’s a need to at least “de-anonymize” the platform, said Andriy Yusov, spokesperson of Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence Directorate (HUR).
“Often Telegram is used as a somewhat legalized darknet in which you can find anything from selling drugs to groups of draft dodgers or some other people who are engaged in anything up to child pornography,” said Yusov in an interview with the Center for Countering Disinformation.
Olga Loiek, a Ukrainian student and YouTuber was digitally cloned and used to promote Russia on Chinese social media in mandarin through AI generated video.
Olga Loiek, a Ukrainian student at UPenn, cloned on Chinese social media, portrayed as a Russian
Olga Loiek, a Ukrainian girl, found her AI-generated videos flooding Chinese social media, advocating for Russia, Russian products, and its friendship with China.
She started receiving messages from people that they had seen her speak Mandarin on Chinese social media soon after she began posting videos on her YouTube channel in 2023. Perplexed by this information, Olga checked for herself and found that several accounts were using her face. Profiles with names such as Sofia, Natasha, April, and Stacy were created using generative AI.
Olga was frustrated by this mass identity theft she suddenly became a victim of. “I don’t want anyone to think that I ever said these horrible things in my life. Using a Ukrainian girl’s face to promote Russia. It’s crazy.”
France has announced the winners of its 250 MW South Brittany floating offshore wind auction, the world’s first conducted at a commercial scale.
The tendered 250 MW site will be the biggest floating offshore wind farm in Europe upon completion and more than double Europe’s current floating offshore wind capacity, WindEurope said.
So far Europe has only built small pilot and demonstrator projects, which makes the French auction a big step towards commercialisation and large-scale deployment of floating wind.
A Wyoming company that started as a way to use up an odd, leftover piece of land in a Jackson parking lot is about to cultivate new territory.
Vertical Harvest in Jackson lays claim to being North America’s first vertical hydroponic farm, and it really packs an agricultural punch. The business grows 40 acres worth of produce — tomatoes, micro greens, basil and more — on a quarter-acre urban hydroponic farm.
On top of that, it’s created an employment model that provides a marginalized population of disabled workers with good-paying jobs. That’s created opportunities for independent living and advancement that didn’t really exist for that population before.
Several months into her steady relationship with a hunky web designer, Emily Robertson* was hopeful she’d found her life partner.
Handsome and attentive, Tom* was also fun and thoughtful, slipping handwritten notes into her handbag and springing romantic surprises on her. Her family and friends liked him, too.
There was just one chink in this otherwise near-perfect armour.
‘Tom spent a lot of time on his phone, and sometimes he looked guilty or unsettled if I caught him unawares,’ recalls Emily, a 31-year-old personal trainer. ‘It started to get under my skin, and although I tried to convince myself I was overthinking it, I found myself wondering whether he was contacting other women.’
WROCłAW, POLAND, May 20, 2024 /EINPresswire.com/ — As informed by Facebook Payments International Limited, “From July 1, 2024, fundraising tools will no longer be available on our platforms for any charities in the European Economic Area.” This means that charitable organisations will no longer be able to collect donations using Meta’s tools on Facebook or Instagram. This change, which follows the end of personal fundraising on Facebook and Instagram, has essentially ended the crowdfunding capabilities of leading social media platforms in Europe.
What should NGOs do in terms of Meta changes?
The latest update may come as a shock to many – NGOs and socially engaged Facebook and Instagram users. For a long time, these platforms offered interesting solutions for charity fundraising. Users of these platforms could create fundraisers on behalf of their favourite organisations. Nonprofits, on the other hand, could add a handy donation button to their profile.
Using more robots to close labor gaps in the hospitality industry may backfire and cause more human workers to quit, according to a new study.
The study, which included more than 620 lodging and food service employees, found that “robot-phobia”—specifically the fear that robots and technology will take human jobs—increased workers’ job insecurity and stress, leading to greater intentions to leave their jobs.
The impact was more pronounced with employees who had real experience working with robotic technology. It also affected managers in addition to frontline workers.
The Boeing Starliner continues to experience setbacks and new launch date has now been set down for the end of May.
A small helium leak in the Starliner’s service module caused the latest postponement.
The decision by the launch partners Boeing, NASA and United Launch Alliance means the spacecraft will be sent up no earlier than Saturday 25 May at 3:09pm USEDT (Sunday 26, 5:09am AEST).
A joint statement clarified the next launch window would allow crews to “work through spacecraft closeout processes and flight rationale before proceeding”.
Columbia Engineers use nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy to examine lithium metal batteries through a new lens — their findings may help them design new electrolytes and anode surfaces for high-performance batteries
New York, NY—May 20, 2024—A Columbia Engineering team has published a paper in the journal Joule today that details how nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy techniques can be leveraged to design the anode surface in lithium metal batteries. The researchers also present new data and interpretations for how this method can be used to gain unique insight into the structure of these surfaces to share with the field.
“We believe that, armed with all the data we’ve pulled together, we can help accelerate the design of lithium metal batteries and help make them safe for consumers, which folks have been trying to do for more than four decades,” said the team’s leader Lauren Marbella, associate professor of chemical engineering.
A team of astronomers at Nanjing University has found evidence that Mars likely has more potentially hazardous asteroids in its path than Earth. In their study, posted on the arXiv preprint server, the group investigated the number of potentially hazardous asteroids that are big enough to cause a major impact should they strike Mars and compared them to similar estimates for Earth.
A lot of work is currently being done to try to identify near Earth objects (NEOs)—asteroids or comets—that might be on a collision course with our planet. The hope is that if a large NEO is found that is likely to strike Earth, a means could be found to change its course. In this new effort, the research team looked at the same possible hazard for future humans living on Mars.
In their work, the researchers looked at a subset of NEOs called potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) that are large enough to cause problems if they strike Mars and that appear likely to do so—or to at least approach closely.
The hunt for extrasolar planets has revealed some truly interesting candidates, not the least of which are planets known as “Hot Jupiters.” This refers to a particular class of gas giants comparable in size to Jupiter but which orbit very closely to their suns. Strangely, there are some gas giants out there that have very low densities, raising questions about their formation and evolution. This is certainly true of the Kepler 51 system, which contains no less than three “super puff” planets similar in size to Jupiter but is about one hundred times less dense.
These planets also go by the moniker “cotton candy” giants because their density is comparable to this staple confection. In a recent study, an international team of astronomers spotted another massive planet, WASP-193b, a fluffy gas giant orbiting a Sun-like star 1,232 light-years away. While this planet is roughly one and a half times the size of Jupiter, it is only about 14% as massive. This makes WASP-193b the second-lightest exoplanet observed to date. Studying this and other “cotton candy” exoplanets could provide valuable insight into how these mysterious giants form.
Researchers from the University of Oxford and Harvard University were able to narrow down the creature that has the best chance of survival in a 2017 study which looked at the resilience of life to astrophysical events.
This study went beyond our atmosphere to look at potential threats to the planet, forgetting about deforestation, wildfires or nuclear war to instead focus on world-ending events that might come from space.
Focusing on events that would ‘completely sterilise an Earth-like planet’, the researchers looked at three astrophysical sources – supernovae, gamma-ray bursts, large asteroid impacts – and passing-by stars…
That creature is the tardigrade, and if you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry – people don’t exactly keep them as pets.
Also known as ‘water bears’ or ‘moss piglets’, tardigrades are near-microscopic aquatic animals with flat heads, eight legs and plump bodies.
Three high-profile Indian ministries are collaborating to form an inter-ministerial taskforce, according to HT Mint.
The goal is to combat misleading and fraudulent advertisements on digital platforms.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, and the Ministry of Consumer Affairs are spearheading this initiative.
The taskforce will create a comprehensive regulatory framework for monitoring social media advertisements, ensuring compliance, and penalizing violators.
The operator, a man named Johann Maelzel, would assemble a paying audience, open the doors of the lower cabinet and show an impressively whirring clockwork mechanism that filled the inner compartments beneath the seated figure. Then he would close the cabinet, and invite a challenger to play chess. The automaton – the robot, as we would say now – would gaze at the opponent’s move, ponder, then raise its mechanical arm and make a stiff but certain move of its own.
The thing was a sensation.
Before it was destroyed by fire in New York in the 1850s, it played games with everyone from Benjamin Franklin to, by legend at least, Napoleon Bonaparte. Artificial intelligence, the 18th Century thought, had arrived, wearing a fez and ticking away like Captain Hook’s crocodile.
I should rush to say that, of course, the thing was a fraud, or rather, a trick – a clever magician’s illusion. A sliding sled on well-lubricated castors had been fitted inside the lower cabinet and the only real ingenuity was that this let a hidden chess player glide easily, and silently, into a prone position inside. There was just a lot more room to hide in the cabinet than all that clockwork machinery suggested.
Shiba Inu, the popular meme coin, is experiencing a period of growth and increased utility. Amoré Orthodontic Aligners, a company that specializes in orthodontic care, recently announced that it will now accept SHIB as payment for braces, retainers, and other services.
Amoré Orthodontic Aligners, a prominent supplier of orthodontic care, has announced that it would now take Shiba Inu (SHIB) as payment for its services, demonstrating cryptocurrency’s expanding popularity. This revelation follows Shiba Inu’s sponsorship of the Blockchain Futurist Conference in Canada, which reinforces the meme coin’s potential for real-world applications, as per Coinfomania.
BETHLEHEM, Pa. — Josh Siegel’s biggest fear is that a resident of one of the Lehigh Valley’s major cities will throw a battery in the trash.
After that trash gets picked up from the curb by sanitation workers, Siegel said, the battery ends up in a garbage truck, where it could burst into flames.
“And now that garbage truck is on fire in the middle of a densely-packed, crowded street, and all of a sudden cars are on fire, houses on fire,” said state Rep. Josh Siegel, D-Lehigh.
“I’m trying to prevent the loss of life and the loss of property and basically make sure that we are being as proactive as possible and making sure that we don’t have those incidents here in the Lehigh Valley.”
Researchers at the Delft University of Technology at the Netherlands have developed a new type of drone called a “neuromorphic drone” that is modelled after animal brains in how it processes data. The initial tests reveal these neuromorphic drones process data 64 times faster than drones using conventional GPUs and use three times less energy to do so.
One of the authors of the study, Jesse Hagenaars, said “The calculations performed by spiking neural networks are much simpler than those in standard deep neural network. Whereas digital spiking neurons only need to add integers, standard neurons have to multiply and add floating point numbers. This makes spiking neural networks quicker and more energy efficient. To understand why, think of how humans also find it much easier to calculate 5 + 8 than to calculate 6.25 x 3.45 + 4.05 x 3.45.”
Researchers at Delft University of Technology have created a drone that can fly autonomously, utilizing neuromorphic image processing and control inspired by the functioning of animal brains. Animal brains process data and consume energy more efficiently than the deep neural networks typically operated on GPUs. Consequently, neuromorphic processors are ideal for small drones, as they eliminate the need for bulky hardware and large batteries.
The results are extraordinary: during flight, the drone’s deep neural network processes data up to 64 times faster and consumes three times less energy than when running on a GPU. Further developments of this technology may enable the leap for drones to become as small, agile, and smart as flying insects or birds. The findings were recently published in Science Robotics.
Researchers in 3 cities in 3 different countries, China, Netherlands, and the United States, achieved a partial quantum entanglement between 3 quantum computers located in the three separate cities. The success of the experiment shows full quantum entanglement is possible in cost-effective ways, but there’s still a long way to go before quantum computers become an everyday part of our lives.
The studies were conducted by three separate research teams who coordinated their efforts to attempt the quantum entanglement.
Three separate research groups have demonstrated quantum entanglement — in which two or more objects are linked so that they contain the same information even if they are far apart — over several kilometres of existing optical fibres in real urban areas. The feat is a key step towards a future quantum internet, a network that could allow information to be exchanged while encoded in quantum states.
Together, the experiments are “the most advanced demonstrations so far” of the technology needed for a quantum internet, says physicist Tracy Northup at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. Each of the three research teams — based in the United States, China and the Netherlands — was able to connect parts of a network using photons in the optical-fibre-friendly infrared part of the spectrum, which is a “major milestone”, says fellow Innsbruck physicist Simon Baier.
A quantum internet could enable any two users to establish almost unbreakable cryptographic keys to protect sensitive information. But full use of entanglement could do much more, such as connecting separate quantum computers into one larger, more powerful machine. The technology could also enable certain types of scientific experiment, for example by creating networks of optical telescopes that have the resolution of a single dish hundreds of kilometres wide.
YouTube has decided to comply to the CCP’s demands to assure a viral video showing Hong Kong Freedom Activists singing a patriotic song “Glory to Hong Kong” is blocked from their platform.
While YouTube complied with the CCP’s demands, it offered a mild protest, stating “We are disappointed by the Court’s decision but are complying with its removal order. We’ll continue to consider our options for an appeal, to promote access to information.”
Protesters sing Glory to Hong Kong outside of Polytechnic University (PolyU) while police keep it under siege in Hong Kong, China, November 25, 2019. Reuters file
Alphabet’s YouTube on Tuesday said it would comply with a court decision and block access inside Hong Kong to 32 video links deemed prohibited content, in what critics say is a blow to freedoms in the financial hub amid a security clampdown.
The action follows a government application granted by Hong Kong’s Court of Appeal requesting the ban of a protest anthem called “Glory to Hong Kong.” The judges warned that dissidents seeking to incite secession could weaponize the song for use against the state.
John Ratcliffe, the former Director of National Intelligence from 2020 to 2021 is warning the federal government about the current state of America’s patent courts, which are allowing foreign nationals to exploit American technology and sabotage American businesses.
First reported by the Washington Post, the 33-page complaint was filed Tuesday, arguing that the law violates First Amendment rights by “[promising] to shutter a discrete medium of communication that has become part of American life”, calling the law an “extraordinary restraint on speech.”
“In supporting the Act, lawmakers claimed that TikTok ‘manipulate[s]’ American minds and disseminates ‘propaganda’ that would ‘use our country’s free marketplace to undermine our love for liberty.’ But it is the Act that undermines the nation’s founding principles and free marketplace of ideas,” reads the complaint.
“The projectile did not follow the expected trajectory and the maximum range and altitude did not meet the design values,” said the Naval Engineering University team led by Lu Junyong in a peer-reviewed paper published by the academic journal Transactions of China Electrotechnical Society.
After scrutinising data transmitted back to the ground by the smart bomb, Lu’s team discovered that the projectile was rotating too fast during its ascent, resulting in an undesired tilt.
With the help of artificial intelligence technology, Lu and his colleagues were able to identify the cause of the failure and find solutions to overcome this technical hurdle impeding the practical application of rail guns.
