Tag: ‘developed
Scientists have developed a GPT model that reads human thoughts
UK economy to fare worse than any country in developed world, including Russia, this year – IMF
Anti-Microbial Proteins Are Being Developed With AI By… Saleforce?
What do you get when the world’s largest CRM breaks into the research industry and leverages AI to build their products? You get ProGen, a new AI system that can make artificial enzymes from scratch that can work just as well as real ones found in nature. ProGen was made by Salesforce Research (yes, that Salesforce) and uses language processing to learn about biology. In short, ProGen takes amino acid sequences and turns them into proteins….
“The artificial designs are better than ones made by the normal process,” said James Fraser, a scientist involved in the project. “We can now make specific types of enzymes, like ones that work well in hot temperatures or acid.”
To make ProGen, the scientists at Salesforce fed the system amino acid sequences from 280 million different proteins. The AI system quickly made a staggering one million protein sequences, of which 100 were picked to test. Out of these, five were made into actual proteins and tested in cells. That’s just 0.0005% of the generated results….
The code for ProGen is available on Github for anyone who wants to try it (or add to it)
The project shows “how generative AI can lead to potential solutions for addressing challenges in human disease and the environment,” argues a statement form Salesforce.
More details from New Scientist:
The AI, called ProGen, works in a similar way to AIs that can generate text. ProGen learned how to generate new proteins by learning the grammar of how amino acids combine to form 280 million existing proteins. Instead of the researchers choosing a topic for the AI to write about, they could specify a group of similar proteins for it to focus on. In this case, they chose a group of proteins with antimicrobial activity.
The researchers programmed checks into the AI’s process so it wouldn’t produce amino acid “gibberish”, but they also tested a sample of the AI-proposed molecules in real cells. Of the 100 molecules they physically created, 66 participated in chemical reactions similar to those of natural proteins that destroy bacteria in egg whites and saliva. This suggested that these new proteins could also kill bacteria. The researchers selected the five proteins with the most intense reactions and added them to a sample of Escherichia coli bacteria. Two of the proteins destroyed the bacteria.
The researchers then imaged them with X-rays. Even though their amino acid sequences were up to 30% different from any existing proteins, their shapes almost matched naturally occurring proteins. James Fraser at the University of California, San Francisco, who was part of the team, says it was not clear from the outset that the AI could work out how to change the amino acid sequence so much and still produce the correct shape…. He was surprised to have found a well-functioning protein in the first relatively small fraction of all the ProGen-generated proteins that they tested.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Google has developed a music-making AI bot
As AI slowly creeps it way into every facet of our digital lives — from essay writing to conversations with therapists to the generation of original art — it’s the least bit surprising that artificial intelligence would also take a step into music. It’s also not surprising that tech giant Google would be the first major player on the scene.
The company is reportedly building an AI bot that can create “original” music from both text and sound prompts — users would be able to type in increasingly specific prompts noting genres and styles or even build songs based on a hummed or whistled melody, according to reports. The future app is known in-house as MusicLM.
The information was revealed in a research paper released on Jan. 26, describing MusicLM as a “model generating high-fidelity music from text descriptions” that “generates music at 24 kHz that remains consistent over several minutes.” The paper explains that songs can be created from richly written captions, such as:
The main soundtrack of an arcade game. It is fast-paced and upbeat, with a catchy electric guitar riff. The music is repetitive and easy to remember, but with unexpected sounds, like cymbal crashes or drum rolls.
Additional sequences of timed text prompts help build the structure of songs, along with a library of sounds and other AI prompts generated from sources like art archives.
Examples of the AI-generated songs have already been posted to Google’s Github account, part of a preliminary release of a 5,500 music-text pair dataset known as MusicCaps.
The unveiling of such a platform will inevitably stir additional conversations about the role of artificial intelligence in intellectual property theft and copyright infringement, generated by a plethora of artists and art repositories who haven’t consented to public use of their art in the creation of AI bots like these — others, meanwhile, are capitalizing on the surge in AI fronted tech. Additional AI developments also pose unique risks for the humans behind the tech as well, as exploited workforces face the brunt of data mining and moderation.
As for now, the Google AI music maker is not going to be released any time soon, with the company explaining ongoing concerns about cultural programming biases, glitches, and concerns about plagiarism that have to be resolved before its launch.
Go read this story about a mood decoder developed by neuroscientists that can measure depression
Whenever I see news about deep brain stimulation, I perk up. The procedure — which involves implanting electrodes deep into the brain to deliver regular pulses of electricity — is used to treat people like my mom with movement disorders like Parkinson’s disease or epilepsy. Researchers are also exploring whether it can be used to treat depression, but results on that front have been decidedly mixed.
That’s one reason that this story published by MIT Technology Review caught my eye. Neuroscientists have discovered a “mood decoder” — a way to measure a person’s moods by simply looking at their brain activity for the first time — that could improve deep brain stimulation for depression. The research was recently presented at the Society…
The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was developed using Tiger Woods engine
It’s become apparent that The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was developed using an engine from a starkly different game: an unnamed Tiger Woods title.
This is with thanks to Wired and Glen Schofield, who took part in a recent interview where the Striking Distance Studios’ CEO responded to questions from Twitter. In response to the question, “why don’t startup studios just make their own game engine?”, Schofield states that his teams have made engines before, but it’s a lot of hard work.
“They take years and years, especially nowadays,” which prompts Schofield to talk about his time with EA. “When I got to EA, they had a lot of different engines. We were starting to build one for Lord of the Rings.”
Water recycling technologies developed for space are helping a parched American west
Whether you live in the rapidly drying American West or are aboard the International Space Station for a six-month stint, having enough water to live on is a constant concern. As climate change continues to play havoc on the West’s aquifers, and as humanity pushes further into the solar system, the potable supply challenges we face today will only grow. In their efforts to ensure humanity has enough to drink, some of NASA’s cutting-edge in-orbit water recycling research is coming back down to Earth.
On Earth
In California, for example, the four billion gallons of wastewater generated daily from the state’s homes and businesses, storm drain and roof-connected runoff, makes its way through more than 100,000 miles of sewer lines where it — barring obstructionist fatbergs — eventually ends up at one of the state’s 900 wastewater treatment plants. How that water is processed depends on whether it’s destined for human consumption or non-potable uses like agricultural irrigation, wetland enhancement and groundwater replenishment.
The city of Los Angeles takes a multi-step approach to reclaiming its potable wastewater. Large solids are first strained from incoming fluids using mechanical screens at the treatment plant’s headworks. From there, the wastewater flows into a settling tank where most of the remaining solids are removed — sludged off to anaerobic digesters after sinking to the bottom of the pool. The water is then sent to secondary processing where it is aerated with nitrogen-fixing bacteria before being pushed into another settling, or clarifying, tank. Finally it’s filtered through a tertiary cleaning stage of cationic polymer filters where any remaining solids are removed. By 2035, LA plans to recycle all of its wastewater for potable reuse while Aurora, Colorado, and Atlanta, Georgia, have both already begun augmenting their drinking water supplies with potable reuse.
“There are additional benefits beyond a secure water supply. If you’re not relying on importing water, that means there’s more water for ecosystems in northern California or Colorado,” Stanford professor William Mitch, said in a recent Stanford Engineering post. “You’re cleaning up the wastewater, and therefore you’re not discharging wastewater and potential contaminants to California’s beaches.”
Wastewater treatment plants in California face a number of challenges, the Water Education Foundation notes, including aging infrastructure; contamination from improperly disposed pharmaceuticals and pesticide runoff; population demands combined with reduced flows due to climate change-induced drought. However their ability to deliver pristine water actually outperforms nature.
“We expected that potable reuse waters would be cleaner, in some cases, than conventional drinking water due to the fact that much more extensive treatment is conducted for them,” Mitch argued in an October study in Nature Sustainability. “But we were surprised that in some cases the quality of the reuse water, particularly the reverse-osmosis-treated waters, was comparable to groundwater, which is traditionally considered the highest quality water.”
The solids pulled from wastewater are also heavily treated during recycling. The junk from the first stage is sent to local landfills, while the biological solids strained from the second and third stages are sent to anaerobic chambers where their decomposition generates biogas that can be burned for electrical production and converted to nitrogen-rich fertilizer for agricultural use.
New York, for example, produces 22,746 tons of wastewater sludge per day from its 1,200-plus statewide wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). However, less than a tenth of plants (116 specifically) actually use that sludge to produce biogas, per a 2021 report from the Rockefeller Institute for Government, and is “mainly utilized to fuel the facilities and for the combined heat and power generation of the WWTPs.”
Non-potable water can be treated even more directly and, in some cases, on-site. Wastewater, rainwater and greywater can all be reused for non-drinking uses like water the lobby plants and flushing toilets after being captured and treated in an Onsite non-potable water reuse system (ONWS).
“Increasing pressures on water resources have led to greater water scarcity and a growing demand for alternative water sources,” the Environmental Protection Agency points out. “Onsite non-potable water reuse is one solution that can help communities reclaim, recycle, and then reuse water for non-drinking water purposes.”
In Orbit
Aboard the ISS, astronauts have even less leeway in their water use on account of the station being a closed-loop system isolated in space. Also because SpaceX charges $2,500 per pound of cargo (after the first 440 pounds, for which it charges $1.1 million) to send into orbit on one of its rockets — and liquid water is heavy.
While the ISS does get the occasional shipment of water in the form of 90-pound duffle bag-shaped Contingency Water Containers to replace what’s invariably lost to space, its inhabitants rely on the complicated web of levers and tubes you see above and below to reclaim every dram of moisture possible and process it into potability. The station’s Water Processing Assembly can produce up to 36 gallons of drinkable water every day from the crew’s sweat, breath and urine. When it was installed in 2008, the station’s water delivery needs dropped by around 1,600 gallons, weighing 15,960 pounds. It works in conjunction with the Urine Processor Assembly (UPA), Oxygen Generation Assembly (OGA), Sabatier reactor (which recombines free oxygen and hydrogen split by the OGA back into water) and Regenerative Environmental Control and Life Support Systems (ECLSS) systems to maintain the station’s “water balance” and supply American astronauts with a minimum of 2.5 liters of water each day. Cosmonauts in the Russian segment of the ISS rely on a separate filtration system that only collects shower runoff and condensation and therefore require more regular water deliveries to keep their tanks topped off.
In 2017, NASA upgraded the WPA with a new reverse-osmosis filter in order to, “reduce the resupply mass of the WPA Multi-filtration Bed and improved catalyst for the WPA Catalytic Reactor to reduce the operational temperature and pressure,” the agency announced that year. “Though the WRS [water recovery system] has performed well since operations began in November 2008, several modifications have been identified to improve the overall system performance. These modifications aim to reduce resupply and improve overall system reliability, which is beneficial for the ongoing ISS mission as well as for future NASA manned missions.”
One such improvement is the upgraded Brine Processor Assembly (BPA) delivered in 2021, a filter that sieves more salt out of astronaut urine to produce more reclaimed water than its predecessor. But there is still a long way to go before we can securely transport crews through interplanetary space. NASA notes that the WPA that got delivered in 2008 was originally rated to recover 85 percent of the water in crew urine though its performance has since improved to 87 percent.
“To leave low-Earth orbit and enable long-duration exploration far from Earth, we need to close the water loop,” Caitlin Meyer, deputy project manager for Advanced Exploration Systems Life Support Systems at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, added. “Current urine water recovery systems utilize distillation, which produces a brine. The [BPA] will accept that water-containing effluent and extract the remaining water.”
When the post-processed urine is then mixed with reclaimed condensation and runs through the WPA again, “our overall water recovery is about 93.5 percent,” Layne Carter, International Space Station Water Subsystem Manager at Marshall, said in 2021. To safely get to Mars, NASA figures it needs a reclamation rate of 98 percent or better.
But even if the ISS’s current state-of-the-art recycling technology isn’t quite enough to get us to Mars, it’s already making an impact planetside. For example, in the early 2000’s the Argonide company developed a “NanoCeram” nanofiber water filtration system with NASA small business funding support. The filter uses positively charged microscopic alumina fibers to remove virtually all contaminants without overly restricting flow rate, eventually spawning the Oas shower from Orbital Systems.
“The shower starts with less than a gallon of water and circulates it at a rate of three to four gallons per minute, more flow than most conventional showers provide,” NASA noted last July. “The system checks water quality 20 times per second, and the most highly polluted water, such as shampoo rinse, is jettisoned and replaced. The rest goes through the NanoCeram filter and then is bombarded with ultraviolet light before being recirculated.” According to the Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control, the resulting water is cleaner than tap.
Fentanyl Vaccine Developed By Researchers Could Eliminate Drug’s ‘High’
Haile added that the anti-fentanyl antibodies didn’t cross-react with other opioids, meaning a vaccinated person could still be treated for pain relief with other opioids. The vaccine did not cause any adverse side effects in rats involved in lab studies, and clinical trials in humans are planned “soon,” with manufacturing of clinical-grade vaccine to begin in the coming months.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.