👨‍💻 Trump Renames Artificial Intelligence

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💡 To Read the Herculaneum Scrolls, a Researcher Made New Papyrus Scrolls-and Burned Them Former banker and inventor Douglas Seiler came up with a way to read the charred scrolls of Herculaneum without physically unrolling them. To test his idea, he made his own scrolls and burned them. ℹ️ The ancient Roman city of Herculaneum was buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, along with the only known intact library to survive from antiquity. Around 1,800 charred scrolls and fragments remain. Physically unrolling them can reduce the fragile scrolls to dust, while X-rays struggle to distinguish the text from the papyrus because both the carbon-based ink and the charred papyrus are largely made of carbon. But researchers have previously found lead in the ink of some ancient papyri, including fragments from Herculaneum. Lead is much easier to detect with X-rays. Seiler's idea could therefore provide a relatively quick and inexpensive way to identify the scrolls with the best chance of being read. ⚙️ For the experiment, Seiler sourced papyrus and reed pens from Egypt and traditional lampblack ink from Japan. Chemists he knew helped prepare inks with different concentrations of lead. Seiler then paid high school students to write passages from "Star Wars," the Bible, and the 1960s sci-fi series "The Outer Limits" on the papyrus. The scroll was later carbonized in a high-temperature furnace in Seiler's home lab, inside a steel container with very little oxygen. Physicists at NIST scanned the charred scroll using X-ray CT. They then virtually unrolled it using software originally developed to analyze the "jelly rolls" inside lithium-ion batteries. The lead in the ink absorbed up to 25 times as many X-rays as the charred papyrus, making even tiny concentrations of lead stand out. "If you look at the images, the letters light up like a Christmas tree," Seiler said. 📌 The researchers now propose screening real Herculaneum scrolls with an inexpensive handheld X-ray fluorescence scanner. Scrolls showing traces of lead could then be prioritized for more detailed X-ray tomography. The synthetic scrolls can also provide ground-truth training datasets for developing and validating AI-driven text-detection algorithms. 👨 Seiler conceived the project and helped fund it himself, becoming the paper's first author. His path into science was unusual: before retiring, he worked in real estate and banking and as an inventor. He became interested in the Herculaneum scrolls while working with Berkeley SETI on PANOSETI, a telescope project designed in part to search the sky for signs of extraterrestrial technology. @hiaimediaen

✈️ AI Machine Creates Soda in Any Flavor YouTuber Luke Creatives built an AI soda machine that can mix a drink in almost any flavor, even one that doesn't exist. It has 19 base flavors inside, which create about 524,000 combinations. At first, the author planned to use 20 base flavors—which would have given more than 1 million combinations, but one pump broke. 💡 Gemini became the machine's "brain." The AI listens to a request (for example, "Make me a pine soda," "What does a summer night taste like?" or "Make a drink that tastes like sadness"), breaks it down into parts, comes up with a recipe, and controls the pumps with base ingredients to mix the exact flavor. To choose the base flavors, Luke used Claude, which also helped him build the robot's interface and a dilution table so that all the concentrates had roughly the same strength. ⚙️ The robot's body is the case of an old water filter from eBay, and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer controls the hardware. The whole project took more than eight months. Would you try a drink from a machine like this? ❤️ — Yes, I've wanted one for ages! 🔥 — I wouldn't risk it... @hiaimediaen