Yes, yes, we might all still be waiting for The Winds of Winter to get finished sometime this decade, but that doesn’t mean more George R.R. Martin content isn’t on the way. There’s of course HBO’s upcoming Game of Thrones TV spin-off House of the Dragon, but now the author’s other novelized passion project is jumping…
Faced with a Russian attempt to redraw borders in Europe, the U.S. is preparing sanctions and European allies are signaling solidarity with the government in Kiev.
The medical anthropologist and physician, who was known for his work providing health care in poor countries, died Monday in Rwanda.
Did the Peacemaker cast have fun together making the show? Did they flub their lines? Did they do silly little dances on camera? Did John Cena laugh so much a member of the set crew had to come over and dab away Cena’s tears from his face because it was during the scene where Judomaster had Peacemaker tied up? As this…
The US Copyright Office has once again denied an effort to copyright a work of art that was created by an artificial intelligence system. Dr. Stephen Thaler attempted to copyright a piece of art titled A Recent Entrance to Paradise, claiming in a second request for reconsideration of a 2019 ruling that the USCO’s “human authorship” requirement was unconstitutional.
In its latest ruling, which was spotted by The Verge, the agency accepted that the work was created by an AI, which Thaler calls the Creativity Machine. Thaler applied to register the work as “as a work-for-hire to the owner of the Creativity Machine.”
However, the office said that current copyright law only offers protections to “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the [human] mind.” As such, a copyrighted work “must be created by a human being” and the office says it won’t register works “produced by a machine or mere mechanical process” that lack intervention or creative input from a human author.
The agency said Thaler failed to provide evidence that A Recent Entrance to Paradise is the result of human authorship. It also stated he was unable to convince the USCO’s “to depart from a century of copyright jurisprudence” — in other words, to change the rules.
The ruling notes that courts at several levels, including the Supreme Court, have “uniformly limited copyright protection to creations of human authors” and that lower courts have “repeatedly rejected attempts to extend copyright protection to non-human creations,” such as for photos taken by monkeys.
Thaler has put copyright and patent laws to the test in a number of countries. He has attempted to have an AI called DABUS recognized as the inventor of two products in patent applications. The US Patent and Trademark Office, UK Intellectual Property Office and European Patent Office rejected the applications because the credited inventor wasn’t human. Appeals have been filed against those rulings and ones in Australia and Germany.
However, a judge in Australia ruled last year that AI-created inventions can qualify for patent protection. South Africa granted Thaler a patent for one of the products last year and noted “the invention was autonomously generated by an artificial intelligence.”
LiDAR technology, while relatively new, has infiltrated various facets of scientific research and everyday life, from archaeology to ocean mapping.
Because non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are uniquely owned assets, NASA has opted to prevent its public domain imagery from being coined in this fashion.
Henry Cavill has made something of a habit out of turning his geekiest passions into dreams come true—from playing the Man of Steel to getting to embody his love of the Witcher games as Netflix’s own Geralt of Rivia. Now the actor has taken his passion for Warhammer 40,000, and leveraged it get hands-on at the home of…
Astronomers have mapped the atmospheres of exoplanets for a while, but a good look at their night sides has proven elusive — until today. An MIT-led study has provided the first detailed look at a “hot Jupiter” exoplanet’s dark side by mapping WASP-121b’s altitude-based temperatures and water presence levels. As the distant planet (850 light-years away) is tidally locked to its host star, the differences from the bright side couldn’t be starker.
The planet’s dark side contributes to an extremely violent water cycle. Where the daytime side tears water apart with temperatures beyond 4,940F, the nighttime is cool enough (‘just’ 2,780F at most) to recombine them into water. The result flings water atoms around the planet at over 11,000MPH. That dark side is also cool enough to have clouds of iron and corundum (a mineral in rubies and sapphires), and you might see rain made of liquid gems and titanium as vapor from the day side cools down.
The researchers collected the data using spectroscopy from the Hubble Space Telescope for two orbits in 2018 and 2019. Many scientists have used this method to study the bright sides of exoplanets, but the dark side observations required detecting minuscule changes in the spectral line indicating water vapor. That line helped the scientists create temperature maps, and the team sent those maps through models to help identify likely chemicals.
This represents the first detailed study of an exoplanet’s global atmosphere, according to MIT. That comprehensive look should help explain where hot Jupiters like WASP-121b can form. And while a jovian world such as this is clearly too dangerous for humans, more thorough examinations of exoplanet atmospheres could help when looking for truly habitable planets.
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