List of All Articles with Tag 'tech'

One of the biggest losers from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s crackdown on the private sector has turned into

To the uninitiated, there isn’t much to water. Sure, the world’s oceans are filled with monsters, marvels and mysteries but, otherwise, they’re just vast, singular expanses of liquid. Right? Wrong. Far from being uniform everywhere, ocean water is a patchwork of interlinked layers and masses which mix and split apart thanks to currents, eddies, and changes in temperature or salinity. Indeed, beneath the surfaces of our great seas, there are waterfalls, rivers and even gigantic blobs, stretching thousands of miles, that somehow manage to evade detection. Now, scientists have discovered one of these massive blobs in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean; extending from the tip of Brazil to the Gulf of Guinea. Until the discovery of this water mass – which has been named the Atlantic Equatorial Water – experts had seen waters mixing along the equator in the Pacific and Indian oceans, but never in the Atlantic. "It seemed controversial that the equatorial water mass is present in the Pacific and Indian oceans but missing in the Atlantic Ocean because the equatorial circulation and mixing in all three oceans have common features," Viktor Zhurbas, a physicist and oceanologist at The Shirshov Institute of Oceanology in Moscow, told Live Science. "The identified new water mass has allowed us to complete (or at least more accurately describe) the phenomenological pattern of basic water masses of the World Ocean." As the name suggests, the Atlantic Equatorial Water is formed by the mixing of separate bodies of water by currents along the equator. To distinguish such masses from the water surrounding them, oceanographers analyse the relationship between temperature and salinity across the ocean — which determines the density of the seawater. Back in 1942, this charting of temperature-salinity led to the discovery of equatorial waters in the Pacific and Indian oceans, as Live Science notes. Because they are created by the mixing of waters to the north and south, the Indian and Pacific Equatorial waters share similar temperatures and salinities curving along lines of constant density, which make them easy to distinguish from the surrounding water. And yet, for years, no such relationship could be spotted in the Atlantic. However, thanks to data collected by the Argo programme – an international collection of robotic, self-submerging floats which have been installed across Earth’s oceans – the researchers spotted an unnoticed temperature-salinity curve located parallel to the North Atlantic and South Atlantic Central waters. This was that elusive Atlantic Equatorial Water. "It was easy to confuse the Atlantic Equatorial Water with the South Atlantic Central Water, and in order to distinguish them it was necessary to have a fairly dense network of vertical temperature and salinity profiles covering the entire Atlantic Ocean," Zhurbas explained in his email to Live Science. The discovery is significant because it offers experts a better understanding of how oceans mix, which is vital to how they transport heat, oxygen and nutrients around the world. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on Tuesday said it reached an agreement for Sam Altman to return as CEO days after

Sam Altman will return to OpenAI after an agreement in principle was reached, the company has announced. Posting on X, formerly known as Twitter, OpenAI also announced a new initial board of former Salesforce chief executive Bret Taylor, the former US treasury secretary Larry Summers and Quora chief executive Adam D’Angelo. Mr Altman also posted, saying “i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together.” Last week the board of OpenAI, which created the ChatGPT artificial intelligence tool, said it had pushed Mr Altman out after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board. Greg Brockman, the company’s president and co-founder, who left in protest at Mr Altman’s sacking said on X: “Amazing progress made today. We will come back stronger and more unified than ever.” “Returning to AI & getting back to coding tonight,” Mr Brockman added. The previous board of directors, which included Mr D’Angelo and Mr Brockman, refused to give specific reasons to why they fired Mr Altman last Friday. This led to mounting pressure within the company to reinstate Mr Altman, including a threatened exodus of nearly all of the company’s 770 employees. Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, moved to hire Mr Altman and Mr Brockman on Monday. In a post on social media on Wednesday morning, the chairman and chief executive of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, said he is “encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board”. “We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.” Read More Data protection watchdog warns websites over cookie consent alerts Employee data leaked during British Library cyber attack Half of adults who chat online with strangers do not check age – poll Businesses embracing generative AI but fear cyberattacks, survey finds Young Britons turning to AI chatbots for help with school and work – survey Police to trial use of drones as first responders to emergencies

OpenAI has reached a deal for ousted boss Sam Altman to return as its chief executive, the company said on Wednesday. The artificial intelligence company said it would reinstate a board consisting of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” the company posted on X. The AI company’s board abruptly fired Mr Altman on Friday saying it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI”. Within days, OpenAI brought in the former head of Twitch Emmett Shear as interim chief. But chaos soon erupted at the company with over 500 employees threatening to quit unless its board resigned and reinstated their dismissed boss. The announcement earlier on Wednesday confirms rumours that the OpenAI founder is returning to the helm of his company. “We are collaborating to figure out the details,” the company said. More follows Read More Microsoft stock just hit an all-time high amid OpenAI chaos Microsoft chief hints Sam Altman may return as OpenAI staff demand board resignation OpenAI staff ‘threaten to quit over ousting of Sam Altman’

SYDNEY Australia said on Wednesday it would spend A$26.2 million ($17 million) to establish "rapid assistance" teams to

Permira and Blackstone on Tuesday said that they willacquire eBay-backed online classifieds group Adevinta ASA for about 141

NEW YORK U.S. government authorities are expected to unveil a settlement with Binance Holdings on Tuesday, resolving a

By Tom Wilson and Elizabeth Howcroft LONDON Crypto investors have welcomed the prospect of a resolution of a

Broadcom Inc.’s $61 billion takeover of software maker VMware Inc. won approval from Chinese regulators, albeit with a

An experiment to see if a laser could beam a message through space to Earth has been successful and could alter the future of spacecraft communication. The experiment was made possible by the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) tool which was travelling onboard NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. It was successfully able to beam a message to Earth, via a near-infrared laser, from far beyond the Moon. It is the furthest such optical communication to have ever been communicated and was encoded with test data to ensure that it worked correctly. The DSOC successfully beamed the data from approximately 16 million kilometers (10 million miles) away to the Hale Telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in California. Hitching a ride on the Psyche spacecraft, the experiment achieved the so-called “first light” on 14 November, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory which is managing the mission from Earth. NASA explained the demo’s “flight laser transceiver – a cutting-edge instrument aboard Psyche capable of sending and receiving near-infrared signals – locked onto a powerful uplink laser beacon transmitted from the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at JPL’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California.” The uplink beacon assisted the transceiver in aiming its downlink to Caltech’s observatory, where the signal was received. Trudy Kortes, director of Technology Demonstrations at NASA HQ, said: “Achieving first light is one of many critical DSOC milestones in the coming months, paving the way toward higher-data-rate communications capable of sending scientific information, high-definition imagery, and streaming video in support of humanity’s next giant leap: sending humans to Mars.” It’s not the first time that optical communications have been used to beam messages from space, but these laser beams mark the furthest a message has ever been transmitted. With missions further than the moon, NASA typically uses radio waves to communicate. However, laser beams allow for a greater amount of data to be packed in them, potentially giving experts more options in future missions. Dr Jason Mitchell, director of the Advanced Communications and Navigation Technologies Division within NASA’s Space Communications and Navigation program, explained: “Optical communication is a boon for scientists and researchers who always want more from their space missions, and will enable human exploration of deep space.” How to join the indy100's free WhatsApp channel Sign up to our free indy100 weekly newsletter Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Anna Tong, Krystal Hu and Jody Godoy (Reuters) -Some investors in OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT, are exploring legal recourse