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Around 450 million metric tons of plastics are produced worldwide each year. The major share of this sheer volume is used only once and then winds up in an incinerator or in landfills. This also applies to so-called polyolefins, which include polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP). As packaging materials and films, they account for approximately half of our plastic consumption.

Alcon Entertainment had accused the studio of helping Elon Musk create unlicensed promotional material using an artificial intelligence image generator. It continues to pursue claims against him and Tesla.

Albanese should tread carefully as he struggles to make case for how the new technology will benefit ordinary voters Get our daily political email, free app or daily news podcast When will Australia see the benefits of the AI and datacentre boom? So far, all we’ve seen is the possibility of changes to copyright which would hurt Australian creatives, special rules about power and water use, and the threat of mass displacement or replacement of workers, with the trade-off being a mere 10% chance of human extinction. Now add the Reserve Bank’s assessment this week that datacentres were part of growing “inflationary pressures” when lifting interest rates to an 18-year high. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s Politics, really newsletter here Continue reading...

The action does not prevent future presidents from restyling the iconic office that President Trump has filled to the brim with gold flourishes, nor does it prevent a successor from rolling back the proclamation itself.

Volcanic heat, electricity to spare. ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.

Once exclusive to techy nerds, Linux is increasingly attracting users tired of privacy-invasive choices from Big Tech. TechRadar sat down with some of them to understand why and how they switched and, perhaps, if we all should.

On November 6th, Apple will release an all-new MacBook Pro. It's thinner and lighter and has a beautiful OLED touchscreen. It is very likely what every new MacBook Pro will look like in a couple of years. The M6 MacBook Pro, which is also out on the 6th, is not that laptop. Instead, it's a […]

Weta FX, the New Zealand visual effects company behind “The Lord of the Rings” and “Avatar,” will invest in Taiwanese animation and VFX outfit Moonshine Studio. The investment is part of a partnership with the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) aimed at making Taiwan an AI hub for Asia’s content industries. Weta FX CEO Daniel […]

Early reviews of the latest MacBook Pro gush with praise for the active OLED display, but are more muted about the touchscreen. (via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Meta has added live voice conversations to Muse, its personal AI agent, so users can talk to it instead of typing. The update also gives Muse an animated avatar that reacts as the conversation goes on. The feature is available now in the Muse app on phones, the web and Mac, but only in the […] This story continues at The Next Web

Toei, the Japanese studio giant behind “Kamen Rider” and the Super Sentai series that became “Power Rangers,” has drawn up rules for generative AI and started using AI in its film and video production, president and CEO Yoshimura Fumio said at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei. A dedicated team at the company […]

One of the great quests in all of science is to discover, at a fundamental level, what the Universe is actually made of. If you took every amount of matter and energy that existed — or even could exist — and cut it up into its smallest possible chunks, until only something that was uncuttable was left, you’d be left with the fundamental, elementary particles that composed our Universe. In physics, this took us first down to the level of the atom, then to atomic nuclei and electrons, then to protons, neutrons, and electrons, and finally to our modern Standard Model of elementary particles: complete with quarks, charged leptons, neutrinos, their antimatter counterparts, the gluons, the photon, the W-and-Z bosons, and one additional unique particle, the Higgs boson. Of all of those particles, the Higgs boson is the most recently discovered particle: found only at particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in 2012. But what’s the story of the Higgs boson? What makes it so unique, where does it come from, and how does it fit in with everything else that we know? That’s what Vu H Nguyen wants to know, asking: “Can you explain the Higgs boson in depth? [It is] difficult for me to understand, but I think this is very important in particle physics. Maybe you can explain it in an easier way?” When we think about matter, we normally think about “fundamental” in the way we outlined above: by cutting it up into its smallest indivisible component parts. But there’s more to the story, and the Higgs boson requires us to go deeper than any other known particle in order to understand it. Here’s the story. From macroscopic scales down to subatomic ones, the sizes of the fundamental particles play only a small role in determining the sizes of composite structures. Whether the building blocks are truly fundamental and/or point-like particles is still not known, but we do understand the Universe from large, cosmic scales down to tiny, subatomic ones. The scale of…

New Zealand-based visual effects powerhouse Weta FX is striking a strategic partnership with Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) to position Taiwan as an AI hub for Asia’s content industry. The partnership involves investment into Taiwanese VFX house Moonshine Studio, founded by Chia Chi Lin. The Lord Of The Rings and Avatar VFX producer will also […]

Yesterday NASA announced the latest addition to its X-series of experimental aircraft that have included the Bell X-1 that first broke the sound barrier nearly 80 years ago, and the more recent X-59 quiet supersonic demonstrator. The new X-70 Fractal is designed to be a "high-performance, highly adaptable research platform" that NASA can use as […]

ChatGPT can now create GIFs using a prompt or a photo uploaded to the AI chatbot. The update, which is rolling out alongside OpenAI's new Images 2.6 model, allows you to adjust the GIF's animation speed, edit individual frames, and share it with others. Before this change, ChatGPT couldn't natively generate GIFs in a single […]

Apple has reportedly delayed the launch of its rumored smart home robot until next year at the earliest or possibly even 2028, according to The Information. It says the robot's hardware "has been finished for around two years," but that the software isn't ready. The device's software team has reportedly pushed to delay the launch […]

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) that oversees the wireless standard has formally adopted Bluetooth High Data Throughput (HDT) as an optional feature of the Bluetooth Core 7.0. It's an upgrade the Bluetooth SIG has been previewing over the past year that increases Bluetooth LE's maximum supported bit rate from 2 Mbps to 7.5 Mbps. […]