Tag: General News

An app shows how ancient Greek sites looked thousands of years ago. It’s a glimpse of future tech
Technology

An app shows how ancient Greek sites looked thousands of years ago. It’s a glimpse of future tech

[ad_1] Tourists at the Acropolis this holiday season can witness the resolution of one of the world's most heated debates on cultural heritage.All they need is a smartphone. Visitors can now pinch and zoom their way around the ancient Greek site, with a digital overlay showing how it once looked. That includes a collection of marble sculptures removed from the Parthenon more than 200 years ago that are now on display at the British Museum in London. Greece has demanded they be returned. For now, an app supported by Greece's Culture Ministry allows visitors to point their phones at the Parthenon temple, and the sculptures housed in London appear back on the monument as archaeologists believe they looked 2,500 years ago.We are now on WhatsApp. Click to join.Other, less widely known featur...
Digital clones and Vocaloids may be popular in Japan. Elsewhere, they could get lost in translation
Technology

Digital clones and Vocaloids may be popular in Japan. Elsewhere, they could get lost in translation

[ad_1] Kazutaka Yonekura dreams of a world where everyone will have their very own digital “clone” — an online avatar that could take on some of our work and daily tasks, such as appearing in Zoom meetings in our place.Yonekura, chief executive of Tokyo startup Alt Inc., believes it could make our lives easier and more efficient. His company is developing a digital double, an animated image that looks and talks just like its owner. The digital clone can be used, for example, by a recruiter to carry out preliminary job interviews, or by a physician to screen patients ahead of checkups. “This liberates you from all the routine (tasks) that you must do tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and the day after that,” he told The Associated Press as he showed off his double — a thumbnail video imag...
Whistleblower tells Congress the US is concealing ‘multi-decade’ program that captures UFOs
Technology

Whistleblower tells Congress the US is concealing ‘multi-decade’ program that captures UFOs

[ad_1] The U.S. is concealing a longstanding program that retrieves and reverse engineers unidentified flying objects, a former Air Force intelligence officer testified Wednesday to Congress. The Pentagon has denied his claims.Retired Maj. David Grusch's highly anticipated testimony before a House Oversight subcommittee was Congress' latest foray into the world of UAPs — or “unidentified aerial phenomena," which is the official term the U.S. government uses instead of UFOs. While the study of mysterious aircraft or objects often evokes talk of aliens and “little green men,” Democrats and Republicans in recent years have pushed for more research as a national security matter due to concerns that sightings observed by pilots may be tied to U.S. adversaries. Grusch said he was asked in 201...
Bluesky, championed by Jack Dorsey, was supposed to be Twitter 2.0. Can it succeed?
Technology

Bluesky, championed by Jack Dorsey, was supposed to be Twitter 2.0. Can it succeed?

[ad_1] Bluesky, the internet's hottest members-only spot at the moment, feels a bit like an exclusive club, populated by some Very Online folks, popular Twitter characters, and fed up ex-users of the Elon Musk-owned platform.Musk is not on it — and this might be part of the appeal for those longing for the way things were before the Tesla billionaire bought Twitter and upended nearly everything about the social network, from rules against harassment to content moderation to its system for verifying prominent users' identities. It also helps that Bluesky grew out of Twitter — a pet project of former CEO Jack Dorsey, who still sits on its board of directors. “It was designed to replace Twitter,” said Sol Messing, who worked at Twitter as a data scientist until January and is now associate...
AI chips are hot. Here’s what they’re for and why investors see gold
Technology

AI chips are hot. Here’s what they’re for and why investors see gold

[ad_1] The hottest thing in technology is an unprepossessing sliver of silicon closely related to the chips that power video game graphics. It's an artificial intelligence chip, designed specifically to make building AI systems such as ChatGPT faster and cheaper.Such chips have suddenly taken center stage in what some experts consider an AI revolution that could reshape the technology sector — and possibly the world along with it. Shares of Nvidia, the leading designer of AI chips, rocketed up almost 25% last Thursday after the company forecast a huge jump in revenue that analysts said indicated soaring sales of its products. The company was briefly worth 80 billion transistors — about 13 million more than Apple's latest high-end processor for its MacBook Pro laptop. Unsurprisingly, thi...
White House unveils new efforts to guide federal research of AI
Technology

White House unveils new efforts to guide federal research of AI

[ad_1] The White House on Tuesday announced new efforts to guide federally backed research on artificial intelligence as the Biden administration looks to get a firmer grip on understanding the risks and opportunities of the rapidly evolving technology.Among the moves unveiled by the administration was a tweak to the United States' strategic plan on artificial intelligence research, which was last updated in 2019, to add greater emphasis on international collaboration with allies. White House officials on Tuesday were also hosting a listening session with workers on their firsthand experiences with employers' use of automated technologies for surveillance, monitoring, evaluation, and management. And the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Educational Technology issued a report focu...