Comments

Comments

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: There's a lot of matter around, which ensures that any antimatter produced experiences a very short lifespan. Studying antimatter, therefore, has been extremely difficult. But that's changed a bit in recent years, as CERN has set up a facility that produces and traps antimatter, allowing for extensive studies of its properties, including entire anti-atoms. Unfortunately, the hardware used to capture antiprotons also produces interference that limits the precision with which measurements can be made. So CERN decided that it might be good to determine how to move the antimatter away from where it's produced. Since it was tackling that problem anyway, CERN decided to make a shipping container for antimatter, allowing it to be put on a truck and potentially taken to labs throughout Europe. [...] Overall, the hardware stayed cold, generally at a bit over 5 Kelvin. The exception was when the system was reconnected to the antimatter source hardware and the system reconnected to the electrical system at CERN. While those actions show up as temperature spikes, the superconducting magnets remained well under 7 Kelvin. An accelerometer was in place to track the forces experienced by the hardware while the truck was moving. This showed that changes in the truck's speed produced turbulence in the liquid helium, making measurements of its presence unreliable. Levels had dropped from about 75 percent of maximum to 30 percent by the time the system was reconnected, suggesting that liquid helium presents the key limiting factor in shipping. Measurements made while the system was in transit suggest that the whole process occurred losslessly, meaning that not a single proton escaped during the entire transport. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (paywalled), Apple has big plans to turn Siri into a true ChatGPT competitor. "A next-generation, chatbot version of Siri has reportedly made significant progress during testing over the past six months; some executives allegedly now see it as 'on par' with recent versions of ChatGPT," reports MacRumors. "Apple is also apparently discussing giving Siri the ability to access the internet to gather and synthesize data from multiple sources, just like ChatGPT." From the report: The report added that Apple now has artificial intelligence offices in Zurich, where employees are working on an all-new software architecture for Siri. This "monolithic model" is entirely built on an LLM engine that will eventually replace Siri's current "hybrid" architecture that has been incoherently layered up with different functionality over many years. The new model will make Siri more conversational and better at synthesizing information. Google's Gemini is expected to be added to iOS 19 as an alternative to ChatGPT in Siri, but Apple is also apparently in talks with Perplexity to add their AI service as another option in the future, for both Siri and Safari search.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comments