Tech News This Week #17 | NF World Latest News
Virovore organism | NASA Black Hole eating a star | ChatGPT vs PaLM | Paper-Thin Solar Cell | Smart Ring Evie – Tech News this week
Check out below to read the Top 5 Interesting Tech News this Week in the NF World Latest News Section. In this section, you can read the weekly summary of Gadgets, Space and Science-related Tech News.
Researchers discovered the first ‘virovore’ organism which feeds on virus
John DeLong of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln wanted to investigate if any microorganism actively sought out these viruses and if feasting on them may help its growth.
DeLong and his colleagues collected pond water and extracted several bacteria before introducing significant quantities of chlorovirus, a freshwater virus that infects green algae.
They discovered that one specific microbe, a ciliate known as Halteria, appeared to be feeding on the viruses.
Even in the absence of other food, halteria populations increased by around 15 times in just two days, but chlorovirus levels decreased 100-fold. Halteria did not grow in control samples that did not contain the virus.
This experiment demonstrated how the newly formed term “virovory” may now stand alongside herbivory, carnivory, and so on, with Halteria being crowned the first known virovore.
Future studies will focus on the phenomenon’s impacts on food webs and bigger systems such as the carbon cycle.
NASA released an unusually close picture of a Black Hole eating a star
Multiple telescopes recently observed a gigantic black hole approximately 10 times the mass of our sun located about 250 million light-years distant from Earth “tearing apart an unfortunate star that ventured too close,” according to the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
It was the fifth-closest observation of a tidal disruption event, which was first seen on March 1, 2021.
According to NASA, the process can take weeks or months as the black hole’s gravity slowly consumes the star’s life. The most recent observation occurred over a period of around five and a half months.
The results of the AT2021ehb event were published in the Astrophysical Journal in September.
According to the study, the event also afforded an “unprecedented picture” of one aspect of the process, the development of a corona. This occurred when the star was being destroyed, causing a “dramatic surge” in high-energy X-ray photons, according to NASA. As a result, a corona developed above the black hole.
MIT engineers have developed a paper-thin solar cell that converts any surface into a power source
MIT researchers have developed a thin and lightweight solar cell that can be attached to almost any surface, turning it into a solar power source.
The flexible cells are much thinner than human hair and are glued to a lightweight fabric for easy installation. Although not as efficient as traditional silicon solar cells, the researchers believe that their technology will eventually reach the same level of efficiency.
The cells are made with nanomaterials in printable electronic inks and are deposited onto a substrate using a “slot-die coater.” They are then printed with an electrode using a screen printing technique. The resulting solar cell is about 15 microns thick and can be removed from the plastic substrate.
However, it is fragile and can easily be damaged, so the researchers attached it to a special fabric known as Dyneema using UV-curable glue.
The fabric is ultra-light and durable, and the cells retained more than 90% of their power generation capabilities after being rolled and unrolled over 500 times. However, they would still need to be protected from the elements.
Google’s PaLM is going to compete with ChatGPT
Google has released the Pathways Language Model (PaLM), which is trained with the Pathways system and can be scaled up to 540 billion parameters, making it more powerful than GPT-3’s 175 billion parameters.
The Pathways system allows PaLM to generalize tasks across different domains and modalities, such as text, images, or speech, and to process them efficiently.
PaLM has also outperformed prior large models, including GPT-3 and Chinchilla, on 28 out of 29 natural language processing tasks, beating most state-of-the-art benchmarks and the average human.
The rising popularity of ChatGPT, which runs on GPT-3.5 architecture, has raised concerns that it may threaten Google’s advertising business, but the company’s release of PaLM has demonstrated its continued leadership in the AI field.
Evie: Medical Grade smart ring that monitors the vitals specifically for women
Movano is introducing Evie, a medical-grade smart ring designed specifically for women, at CES 2023.
The ring will track key health metrics such as resting heart rate, heart-rate variability, and menstrual cycle information.
The company plans to file for FDA clearance and will offer medical-grade health data that can be translated into personalized insights through a connected app.
The ring will be priced under $300 and will not require a monthly subscription for app access. In addition to measuring baseline body temperature, Evie will also track resting heart rate, heart-rate variability, oxygen levels, respiration rate, skin temperature variability, menstrual symptoms, activity levels, sleep stages and duration, and mood.
The company has already completed a trial demonstrating the accuracy of its heart rate and oxygen levels and has built the device in a facility meeting regulatory standards.
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