Wants to attract “all demographics” of digital asset investors
Jacqueline Melinek 12 hours
Robin Hood is Having been around for over a decade, its foray into cryptocurrencies is not necessarily new. But the company is still trying to expand its efforts, even among groups that tend to leave the platform.
“I think cryptocurrencies have always been created by and for very technical people,” said Johan Kerblatt, general manager of cryptocurrencies at Robinhood. chain reaction podcast. “At the end of the day, I don’t think customers care too much about what the underlying protocol is when they use cryptocurrencies. What network are they using? They just want things to work. That’s what I’m hoping for.”
While that may be true for novice crypto investors, the app has successfully embraced that group by providing educational resources, but going forward it wants to focus on everyone.do Be aware of the underlying protocol. Robinhood users can do more technical things, such as sending money to crypto wallets, and use “advanced charts and autotypes where you can set things like stop losses,” Curblat said.
While the platform may not be as technologically advanced as crypto-focused platforms, Robinhood does research to understand what its customers want and what they’re missing.
Despite its growth plans, Robinhood appears to be shaky in its stance on digital assets. In June, the app opted to restrict trading and holding of certain cryptocurrencies for U.S. customers at a time when the U.S. government was cracking down on major industry exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase.That being said, the platform still has 14 cryptocurrencies and 1 stablecoinUSDC, which users will be able to buy and sell.
Professor Magdalena Osburn removed the samples during a site visit in August.
A former gold mine serves as a gateway to explore microbes deep within the Earth’s crust. If you add up the mass of all the microorganisms that live beneath the Earth’s surface, their combined biomass exceeds the biomass of all life in the oceans. However, because of the difficulty of accessing these depths, this myriad of subterranean organisms remains largely unexplored and poorly understood. Using a repurposed gold mine in the Black Hills of South Dakota as a laboratory, Northwestern University researchers have created the most comprehensive map yet of the elusive and rare microbes that live beneath our feet. In total, the researchers characterized nearly 600 microbial genomes, some of which were new to science. Within this group, most microbes fit into one of two categories, said Magdalena Osburn, a Northwestern geoscientist who led the study. And “maximalists” are ready to greedily grab any resources that may come their way. This study was recently published in the journal environmental microbiology.
This new research not only expands our knowledge of the microbes that live deep underground, but also hints at potential life that may one day be discovered underground. Mars. Because microbes rely on resources in rocks and water that are physically distant from the surface, these organisms could survive buried in Mars’ dusty red depths. “The deep underground biosphere is huge. It’s just a huge space,” said Osburn, an associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences in Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. “We used the mine as a conduit to access a biosphere that is difficult to reach no matter how we approach it. A lot of that comes from understudied groups. DNA, you can understand what kind of creatures live underground and find out what they do. These are organisms that we cannot grow in the laboratory or study in more traditional settings. They are often referred to as “microbial dark matter” because we know so little about them.
For the past 10 years, Osburn and his students have been regularly visiting the former Homestake Mine in Reed, South Dakota, collecting geochemical and microbial samples.Now Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF)’s deep underground laboratory is home to numerous research experiments across a variety of fields. In 2015, Osburn established his six proving grounds. Mine Deep Microbial Observatorythroughout SURF.
Back in Osburn’s lab at Northwestern University, she and her team sequenced the DNA of the microorganisms held within the samples. Of the approximately 600 genomes characterized, microorganisms represented 50 different phyla and 18 candidate phyla. Osburn discovered that within this diverse microbial community, each lineage, at some point, gravitates toward a life-defining trajectory: becoming a minimalist or a maximalist.
“Some of these strains don’t even have the genes to make their own lipids, which is shocking,” Osburn said. “Because how can you make cells without fat? It’s like humans can’t make all the amino acids. Therefore, by consuming protein, amino acid Something we can’t create on our own. But this is on a more extreme scale. Minimalists are the ultimate specialists and we all work together. There’s a lot to share and no duplicate work
Osburn said these underground microbes may provide clues to what might exist elsewhere as we imagine life beyond Earth. “It’s really exciting to see evidence of microbes operating without us, without plants, without oxygen, without surface atmosphere,” she said. “It’s very likely that this kind of life currently exists deep on Mars or in the icy moon’s oceans. The forms of life tell us what lives elsewhere in the solar system.”
And they also affect our own planet. For example, as industry looks for long-term storage for carbon, many companies are exploring the possibility of injecting it deep underground. As we consider those options, Osburn reminds us not to forget the microbiome.
Reference: “A Metagenomic View of New Microbial and Metabolic Diversity Discovered in the Earth’s Deep Biosphere in DeMMO: Microbial Observatory in South Dakota, USA” by Lily Momper, Caitlin P. Casar, and Magdalena R. Osburn, 2023. November 14th, environmental microbiology.DOI: 10.1111/1462-2920.16543 This research was supported by NASA Exobiology (grant numbers NNH14ZDA001N, NNX15AM086), the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and the Canadian Institute for the Advancement of Research—Earth 4D.
In these difficult times, it seems like complete nonsense to say that food prices are cheap. In the UK, the average grocery bill is Up more than 12% in the past year. But it is. The price tag on food is about two-thirds lower than it would be if we paid full price. But don’t worry. We have a plan to resolve this issue.
That may sound unpleasant. Who wants their grocery bills to go up even more? But in reality, we are already paying the real price, and most of it is just being secretly hidden from us. “In total, he pays four times as much for meals,” he says. Alexander Muller At the sustainability think tank TMG in Berlin. First, pay at the cash register. And we pay the health, environmental and social costs of producing that food, primarily through taxes.
green accounting
These costs are “externalities”. Things that are not free are treated as free, such as the environmental destruction caused by agriculture and the health costs of obesity. Now the producers are ignoring them and letting the rest of us pick up the bill. Maybe it won’t last very long. Economists and accountants – don’t yawn in the back. – We are working on a system called True Cost Accounting (TCA) that aims to internalize these externalities and upend decades of economic tradition. If we play our cards right, we won’t all end up spilling more cash at the register, but rather a massive rebalancing of global supply…
AI startup it’s not Despite reports of disruption at OpenAI dominating the airwaves, OpenAI appears to be on track to stick to its product roadmap this week.
See also: Stability AI announced this afternoon announced Stable Video Diffusion is an AI model that animates existing images to generate videos. Based on Stability’s existing Stable Diffusion text-to-image model, Stable Video Diffusion is one of the few open source and even commercially available video generation models.
But not for everyone.
Stable Video Diffusion is currently in what Stability describes as a “research preview.” Those wishing to run the model may be interested in Stable Video Diffusion’s intended applications (e.g., “educational or creative tools,” “design or other artistic processes,” etc.) and unintended applications (e.g., “representation of people or events,” etc.). (a representation of fact or truth).
how Other such AI research previews – include Unique stability — Historically, I wouldn’t be surprised if this model started circulating on the dark web in a short period of time. If this were to happen, I would be concerned that Stable Video could be exploited, as it does not appear to have a built-in content filter. Once Stable Diffusion was released, it didn’t take long for actors with questionable intentions to use it to create non-consensual deepfake porn of themselves.
But I digress.
Stable Video Diffusion actually comes in two model formats: SVD and SVD-XT. The first SVD converts a still image into 14 frames of 576 × 1024 video. SVD-XT uses the same architecture but increases the number of frames to 24. Both can produce video at 3 to 30 frames per second.
according to white paper Released at the same time as Stable Video Diffusion, SVD and SVD-XT are first trained on a data set of millions of videos and then “fine-tuned” on a much smaller set of hundreds of thousands to about 1 million clips. it was done. It’s not immediately clear where these videos come from, and the paper suggests that many come from public research datasets, so determining if any are under copyright It’s impossible to do. If so, users of Stability and Stable Video Diffusion could be exposed to legal and ethical challenges over usage rights. Time will tell.
Image credits: Stability AI
Whatever the source of the training data, the models (both SVD and SVD-XT) produce fairly high-quality 4-second clips. My guess is that the selected samples on Stability’s blog perfectly match the output from Meta’s recent video generation model, as well as the AI generation examples we’ve seen from Google and AI startups Runway and AI. There is likely to be. pika research institute.
However, there are limits to the spread of stable videos. Stability has been transparent about this, writing on the model’s “Hug Face” page — ofpage From where researchers can apply for access to stable video dissemination, models can generate video without movement or slow camera pans, control it with text, render text (at least not readable), It is not possible to consistently generate faces or people “properly.”
Although still in its early stages, Stability says the model is highly extensible and can be adapted to use cases such as generating 360-degree views of objects.
So how does Stable Video Diffusion evolve? Stability offers a variety of models that “build and extend” SVD and SVD-XT, and a “text-” model that “builds and extends” SVD and SVD-XT, as well as a “text- to-video” tool. The ultimate goal appears to be commercialization. Stability rightly points out that Stable Video Diffusion has potential applications in “advertising, education, entertainment, and more.”
Indeed, Stability is poised to be a hit as startup investors ramp up the pressure.
April, Semaphor report Stability AI has run out of cash and spurred an executive hunt to boost sales. According to Forbes, the company repeatedly delayed paying wages and payroll taxes or didn’t pay them at all, and his AWS, which Stability uses for calculations to train its models, gave up access to Stability’s GPU instances. He is threatening to cancel it.
Image credits: Stability AI
Recent stability AI raised The company raised $25 million through convertible debt (i.e., debt that converts into equity), bringing total funding to more than $125 million. However, it has not completed new financing at a higher valuation. The startup was last valued at $1 billion. Stability is said to quadruple in the coming months, even though revenues remain low and burn rates are high.
Recently, stability has taken a new hit. departure Ed Newton-Rex served as VP of audio at the startup for just over a year, and played a key role in launching Stable Audio, Stability’s music generation tool. In his open letter, Newton-Rex cited disagreements over copyright and how copyrighted data should and should not be used to train AI models. He said he retired from Stability.
for many startups, qualifying for an accelerator program like Y Combinator or TechStars is like winning the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. Accelerators offer a wealth of opportunities that can make the difference between a great idea that fails to reach its potential and a great idea that leads to an IPO.
We’re used to seeing accelerators work for companies that disrupt travel, payment processing, and cloud storage, but what if that model could work outside the confines of the VC factory? Artists What if you could use a little investment, a lot of mentoring and hands-on support, a ton of referrals, and a ton of faith to help you in your career?
“Y Combinator changed my life,” Inversion Art co-founder Joey Flores told TechCrunch. “I am very grateful for this program and thought it would be great to do something like that for artists.”
Mr. Flores is a Y Combinator alumnus. Music Marketing Platform EarBits It graduated from the program in 2010 and was sold in 2015. Although Flores is not a professional artist, art is a very important part of his life, and a chance comment by a VC in a 2020 conversation set him on the path to finding an artist. It’s his way of supporting artists who have the drive and passion to make art a lifelong career, but need help to achieve it. As part of his research, he connected with co-founder Jonathan Neal and together they seek to change the way artists find success and recognition.
“Artists have always relied on others, such as collectors, museums and galleries, to build their careers and define success,” Neal said. “In our opinion, we are the first organization to actually sit at the same table with artists in all of their negotiations and activities and truly help them define success for themselves.”
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