Month: March 2023

Enlarge / The Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew-6 mission streaks into orbit on Thursday morning. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann)

A Falcon 9 rocket blasted into the starry sky above Florida early on Thursday morning, sending four astronauts safely on their way into low-Earth orbit.

This mission, flown by SpaceX for NASA, will deliver the astronauts to the International Space Station after a 24.5-hour flight to synch up with the orbiting laboratory. During this time, under nominal operations, Dragon will fly entirely autonomously.

SpaceX is conducting its sixth operational human spaceflight for NASA, and accordingly this mission is named Crew-6. The Falcon 9 rocket's first stage, shiny and clean on the launch pad, was actually flying its very first mission, but the Dragon spacecraft is making its fourth overall flight, the most times that any Crew Dragon vehicle has flown into space. Previously this Dragon, named Endeavour, flew NASA's Demo-2 and Crew-2 missions, as well as Axiom Space’s Ax-1 private spaceflight to and from the International Space Station.

Enlarge / An AI-generated image of an electronic brain with an eyeball. (credit: Ars Technica)

On Monday, researchers from Microsoft introduced Kosmos-1, a multimodal model that can reportedly analyze images for content, solve visual puzzles, perform visual text recognition, pass visual IQ tests, and understand natural language instructions. The researchers believe multimodal AI—which integrates different modes of input such as text, audio, images, and video—is a key step to building artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can perform general tasks at the level of a human.

"Being a basic part of intelligence, multimodal perception is a necessity to achieve artificial general intelligence, in terms of knowledge acquisition and grounding to the real world," the researchers write in their academic paper, "Language Is Not All You Need: Aligning Perception with Language Models."

Visual examples from the Kosmos-1 paper show the model analyzing images and answering questions about them, reading text from an image, writing captions for images, and taking a visual IQ test with 22–26 percent accuracy (more on that below).

Enlarge / A digital reconstruction of a humpback whale engaged in trap feeding. (credit: John McCarthy, Flinders University)

About 10 years ago, marine biologists witnessed two different species of whales in different geographic locations engaged in a novel feeding strategy.  The whales would position themselves at the water's surface and stay motionless with their mouths wide open. Fish would swim into their mouths, and the whales would snap their jaws and swallow. It's been dubbed trap feeding, or tread-water feeding. A clip of whales engaged in trap feeding even went viral on Instagram in 2021.

Yet this feeding strategy might not be as recent as scientists initially thought. Researchers at Flinders University in Australia have found striking descriptions of what sounds a lot like trap feeding in Old Norse descriptions of the behavior of a sea creature called the hafgufa, according to a new paper published in the journal Marine Mammal Science. That creature, in turn, can be traced back to medieval bestiaries and a type of whale called aspidochelone, first mentioned in a 2nd century CE Alexandrian manuscript called the Physiologus.

“It’s exciting because the question of how long whales have used this technique is key to understanding a range of behavioral and even evolutionary questions," said co-author Erin Sebo, a medievalist at Flinders University. "Marine biologists had assumed there was no way of recovering this data but, using medieval manuscripts, we’ve been able to answer some of their questions."

Enlarge / The Inland TD510, a MicroCenter exclusive, is dwarfed by the power cable you need to use to run its tiny fan. (credit: Inland)

In the high-end PC market, it's vitally important that the numbers always continue to go up. That means faster performance, newer specs, and (on occasion) new model numbers for existing components. One of the latest numbers to go up is the PCI Express version number supported by many motherboards; all PCs built around AMD's Ryzen 7000-series chips and some PCs using Intel's 12th- or 13th-generation CPUs support graphics cards solid-storage drives that use the PCI Express 5.0 interface, which is up to two times faster than version 4.0.

But actual PCIe 5.0 SSDs are just beginning to arrive on store shelves (via Tom's Hardware), and like so many early-adopter products, they seem purpose-built for people with more money than sense. Based on Phison's E26 SSD controller, the Gigabyte Aorus Gen 5 10000 and MicroCenter-exclusive Inland TD510 promise peak read speeds of up to 10,000MB per second, compared to 7,450MB per second for the PCIe 4.0-based Samsung 990 Pro.

But both drives have major shortcomings, even assuming you have a compatible PC in the first place. The 2TB versions cost more than twice as much as you'll pay for a very-good PCIe 4.0 drive like the Samsung 980 Pro or WD Black SN850X; the Gigabyte drive is currently out of stock but historical pricing data says it sells for $340 when it's available, while the Inland drive is currently discounted to $350 from a regular price of $400.

Enlarge / Advocates with T1Internationals New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut Chapters held a vigil on September 5, 2019, outside of Eli Lilly's offices honoring those who have lost their lives due to the high cost of insulin and demand lower insulin prices. (credit: Getty | Erik McGregor)

Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, one of the country's leading insulin makers, announced Wednesday that it will slash its high list prices for some of its insulins and will immediately offer programs to limit out-of-pocket costs to $35 per month for people with commercial insurance as well as those who are uninsured.

The price cap matches the one set by the federal government for Medicare, which went into effect this year via the Inflation Reduction Act.

While Lilly's announcement comes just two months after enactment of the government's $35 cap, it follows years of blistering outrage over the skyrocketing prices of insulin in the US, widely seen as price gouging.