All posts tagged: Clone

Could we ever clone Neanderthals?

Could we ever clone Neanderthals?

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy. You may unsubscribe at any time. Almost a decade ago, I finished my doctoral degree in archaeology with a thesis that investigated the hunting and gathering behavior of early Homo sapiens and our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals.  To my non-archaeologist family members and friends, I was the Stone Age Expert, to whom all questions about anything Paleolithic should be directed. I developed some strong opinions about the viral “ancestral” or “Paleo” diet. I did my part to contribute to the rebranding of the Neanderthals’ image as a type of human and not a bunch of backwards, hairy brutes. To this day, my mom still emails me a link to any news article she finds on Neanderthals, Denisovans (another Paleolithic relative), or other ancient humans.  When I explain my research …

I get what Claude Design offers for free, thanks to this open-source clone

I get what Claude Design offers for free, thanks to this open-source clone

Published by skeptic

Up until a few months ago, my biggest complaint with AI tools was the fact that they were getting more and more expensive to use, and the free tiers simply didn’t cut it anymore. I’ve since accepted that there’s no escaping paying for these tools now, and I’ve begun to write them off as a work expense. Girl math, I know. My current complaint, though, is the fact that even the higher-tier plans come with absurd limits. Anthropic, as you’d imagine, is at the top of my hit list. I’m on Claude Max, and I’m constantly hitting my session limits. Claude Design, which the company launched a couple of weeks back, was particularly greedy when it came to consuming my usage. What’s funny is I’d burn through my weekly limit for the product before I had anything I would actually be able to use! That’s when I went looking for a way out, and I fortunately landed on an open-source Claude Design clone that has me convinced I’ll never need to open the real thing …

‘Clone Wars’, ‘Powerpuff Girls’ Voice Actor Was 64

‘Clone Wars’, ‘Powerpuff Girls’ Voice Actor Was 64

Published by Daniella Wilson

Tom Kane, the prolific voice actor whose body of work included popular turns as Yoda on Star Wars: The Clone Wars and as Prof. Utonium on The Powerpuff Girls, died Monday. He was 64. Kane’s death from stroke complications at a hospital in Kansas City, Missouri, was announced by his talent agency, Galactic Productions. “From his unforgettable performances in Star Wars to countless animated series, documentaries and games, Tom brought wisdom, strength, humor and heart to every role he touched,” it said in a statement. “His voice became part of our lives, our memories and the stories we carry with us.” Kane suffered a stroke in 2020 that left him unable to speak or write. He retired in 2021 but did manage to attend the Lexington Comic and Toy Convention in Kentucky in March, reuniting with the Powerpuff Girls cast in his first public appearance in years. Kane provided the mellifluous voice for the long-suffering valet Woodhouse on the FX animated series Archer, taking the role over from the late George Coe in 2014; played …

Instagram’s New Instants App Is a Snapchat Clone for Thirst Traps

Instagram’s New Instants App Is a Snapchat Clone for Thirst Traps

Published by skeptic

Meta launched a new app on Wednesday, called Instants, that integrates with existing Instagram accounts and allows users to send unedited, disappearing photos. Instants leans into the popularity of Instagram’s Stories feature and Close Friends lists, where users can selectively share images with a smaller audience. Instants is available as a standalone app on iOS and Android in select countries, and it’s accessible through Instagram’s direct messaging tab. The core of Instants, from its name to the bare-bones layout, is designed to evoke a sense of ephemerality. Yes, it’s a conceptual clone of Snapchat, with images that disappear after viewing, which can also be unsent before the person on the other end views them. (Instagram’s Stories feature, launched a decade ago, was also influenced by Snapchat.) Unlike Snapchat, Instants is much more focused on capturing raw moments, like the once-viral BeReal app, and doesn’t allow any filters or retouching. That’s striking for the company that helped make sepia-toned filters, like Valencia, household names, and is hell-bent on adding generative AI to every other corner of …

New Wikipedia Clone Made Entirely of AI Hallucinations

New Wikipedia Clone Made Entirely of AI Hallucinations

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A new Wikipedia-style site is purportedly made entirely of AI-hallucinations, treating visitors to preposterous insights beamed from a nonexistent reality. Called “Halupedia,” its creators say that the “infinite” encyclopedia invents everything it contains on the fly, with each search term — or link click — becoming a prompt for an AI model on the backend, which relates information “in the deadpan register of a 19th-century scholarly press.” “Every link leads to an entry that does not exist yet — until you click it,” reads the description on GitHub. The site’s homepage is upfront that it’s an exercise in AI fabulation, but once you dive into one of its countless entries, it begins to feel like a real knowledge database, at least if you suspend your disbelief for the many absurdities hurled your way. There’re links, citations, and quotes from academic journals. Some even have footnotes — which, of course, are also made up. One of the top articles is about …

Bank CEO Brags He Used AI Clone of Himself to Host Conference Call

Bank CEO Brags He Used AI Clone of Himself to Host Conference Call

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech If you decided to blow off a Zoom meeting by sending an AI dummy instead, you might find yourself out of a job. But when a head honcho does it, it’s a masterfully executed stunt, a sign of a business genius who’s got his finger on the pulse. Take Sam Sidhu, the CEO of Customers Bank. During a conference call discussing the company’s latest earnings reports, he waited nearly an hour before revealing that it was actually an AI that had been speaking all along, CNBC reports — which, to be honest, feels like a huge waste of everyone’s time. “The prepared remarks you heard on my behalf today were delivered by my AI clone, not read by me,” Sidhu said, bragging that it was a potential first for a public company earnings call. (Whether anyone was actually fooled is unclear.) As it turns out, Customers Bank recently signed a multiyear partnership with OpenAI to deploy its AI …

Scientists Say: Clone

Scientists Say: Clone

Published by skeptic

birds: Warm-blooded dinosaurs with wings that first showed up at least 150 million years ago. Birds are jacketed in feathers and produce young from the eggs they deposit in some sort of nest. Most birds fly, but throughout history there have been the occasional species that don’t. cell: (in biology) The smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. Typically too small to see with the unaided eye, it consists of a watery fluid surrounded by a membrane or wall. Depending on their size, animals are made of anywhere from thousands to trillions of cells. Most organisms, such as yeasts, molds, bacteria and some algae, are composed of only one cell. chemistry: The field of science that deals with the composition, structure and properties of substances and how they interact. Scientists use this knowledge to study unfamiliar substances, to reproduce large quantities of useful substances or to design and create new and useful substances. (about compounds) Chemistry also is used as a term to refer to the recipe of a compound, the way it’s produced …

Meta Secretly Building a Photorealistic AI Clone of Mark Zuckerberg so No Employee Can Ever Escape His Watchful Eye

Meta Secretly Building a Photorealistic AI Clone of Mark Zuckerberg so No Employee Can Ever Escape His Watchful Eye

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Even for an executive long known by employees as the “Eye of Sauron,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is taking the concept of micromanagement to its final form, the Financial Times reports, by using AI to develop a “photorealistic, AI-powered 3D” version of himself to converse with and offer feedback to employees. The dystopian effort is part of a broader push to create avatars, based on public figures, that Meta’s customers can interact with in real time. It’s a concept that has struggled to catch on with the public, if the company’s previous forays into character chatbots are anything to go by. It could also quickly turn into a massive resource hog, as inside sources told the FT, putting even more strain on already-hard-to-come-by computing power. That’s not to mention widespread concerns over access to sexualized AI avatars landing in the wrong hands. The faux Zuckerberg AI will be trained on a wealth of imagery of the executive and …

You Can Now Clone Yourself on YouTube With an AI Avatar Tool

You Can Now Clone Yourself on YouTube With an AI Avatar Tool

Published by skeptic

If you’re a YouTube creator, you can now create a digital twin with YouTube’s new avatar clone tool. It uses your likeness to create an avatar that can be featured in YouTube Shorts without you ever setting foot in front of the camera again.  “Avatars create a digital version of yourself so you can generate videos that look and sound like you, safely and securely,” Google writes in a post.  When asked about safeguards the app has in place to protect your likeness when using the feature, a Google spokesperson said: “Only the user themselves can create and control their avatar. No one else can use it. If videos are opt-ed in to remix, then other users can remix a video with the avatar but they cannot control or change the avatar itself.” If you delete the avatar, your selfie video and voice recording data for that avatar is permanently removed from YouTube.  “Only you can use your avatar to create original videos, you can delete it at any time, and all output is labeled as …

Scientists Cloned a Mouse, Then Cloned the Clone, Et Cetera. The Results Were Horrific

Scientists Cloned a Mouse, Then Cloned the Clone, Et Cetera. The Results Were Horrific

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Here’s the cautionary tale you didn’t know you needed: cloning the same mouse in perpetuity will produce horrific affronts to mammalian biology. A team of researchers in Japan discovered this firsthand. In a stunning experiment lasting two decades, they cloned a female mouse, and then cloned its clones, for 58 successive generations. But over 1,200 clones later, the experiment stopped, because by that last generation the mice kept dying immediately after being born, despite displaying no outward physical abnormalities. The findings, published in a new study in the journal Nature Communications, suggest there’s a hard limit to duplicating mammals. And to scientists hoping for “infinite” cloning, this came as a major let down. “We had believed that we could create an infinite number of clones. That is why these results are so disappointing,” study senior author Teruhiko Wakayama, of the University of Yamanashi, told Reuters.   “At this point, we have no ideas for overcoming this limitation. I believe …