All posts tagged: Visual

Last chance to score the latest Visual Studio Pro for just

Last chance to score the latest Visual Studio Pro for just $43

Published by skeptic

TL;DR: Visual Studio 2026 brings AI-assisted coding, real-time collaboration, and cross-platform development into one powerful IDE, and it’s on sale only through today. $42.97 $499.99 Save $457.02   Modern development demands more than just a code editor — it calls for a smarter, faster, and more collaborative environment. And Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2026 is designed to simplify things in a very real way. This latest version leans heavily into what modern developers actually need: speed, flexibility, and smarter tooling. Built as a fully 64-bit IDE, it handles large solutions and complex workloads without the usual slowdowns, which is especially noticeable when you’re working across multiple projects or environments. Mashable Deals By signing up, you agree to receive recurring automated SMS marketing messages from Mashable Deals at the number provided. Msg and data rates may apply. Up to 2 messages/day. Reply STOP to opt out, HELP for help. Consent is not a condition of purchase. See our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. One of the biggest upgrades here is how seamlessly AI is integrated …

Max Cooper’s show at the Royal Albert Hall was a visual spectacle

Max Cooper’s show at the Royal Albert Hall was a visual spectacle

Published by Sam Flores

The former computational biologist has long been a proponent of audio-visual art (he even runs his own company, Mesh, dedicated to the same), and that experience was on show here. In terms of sheer sensory overload, this was it: as music played, audiences watched as the massive screen raced to keep up, displaying neon cityscapes one minute, and migrating birds the next, all of it soundtracked by Cooper’s own music. Source link

A visual guide to Artemis II and previous missions to the moon | Space News

A visual guide to Artemis II and previous missions to the moon | Space News

Published by Sam Flores

Monday, April 6, 2026, is one of the most significant days for human spaceflight in more than 50 years. At 13:56 EDT (17:56 GMT) Artemis II mission is expected to break the record for the farthest distance humans have travelled from Earth, originally set by Apollo 13 at 400,171km (248,655 miles). The crew is expected to eventually reach a maximum distance of 406,773 km (252,760 miles) from Earth at 19:07 EDT (23:07 GMT) as they perform a lunar flyby aboard the Orion spacecraft. This means Artemis II will travel about 6,602km (4,105 miles) further into space than any human in history. What is NASA’s Artemis programme? The Artemis programme is NASA’s multi-decade mission to return men and women to the moon for the first time since 1972, establish a long-term base there and eventually enable future missions to Mars by crews. The programme is currently divided into five missions: Artemis I, II, III, IV and V. Artemis I was the inaugural uncrewed test flight, which launched on November 16, 2022, and lasted 25 days. It …

When made to feel sad, men with psychopathic traits shift their visual focus to anger

When made to feel sad, men with psychopathic traits shift their visual focus to anger

Published by José Betancourt

A study involving incarcerated men found that those with pronounced psychopathic traits tend to subconsciously divert their attention away from sad faces when they are experimentally induced to feel sad. In the same situation, their attention toward angry faces increased. The paper was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology. Psychopathy is a stable pattern of personality characteristics involving low empathy, shallow emotions, and a tendency toward manipulative or antisocial behavior. Core features of psychopathy include callousness, lack of guilt or remorse, superficial charm, and impulsivity. While psychopathy is associated with an increased risk of antisocial and criminal behavior, it does not inevitably lead to criminality. As a trait, psychopathy can be present in both clinical and non-clinical populations, with subclinical levels sometimes providing advantages in competitive or high-risk environments. Individuals high in psychopathy tend to show specificities in emotional processing, particularly a reduced responsiveness to others’ distress. For decades, the dominant scientific theory has been the Emotion Deficit Perspective (EDP), which posits that people with psychopathy are simply born “numb” to emotions like sadness …

‘Food security timebomb’: a visual guide to the Gulf fertiliser blockade | Strait of Hormuz

‘Food security timebomb’: a visual guide to the Gulf fertiliser blockade | Strait of Hormuz

Published by Sam Flores

The world has become well versed in the importance of the strait of Hormuz to the world’s energy flows, but attention is increasingly turning to its vital role in another market – the fertiliser on which harvests depend. A third of the global trade in raw materials for fertiliser passes through the maritime choke point, which is also the route for 20% of shipments of natural gas, which is required to make it. The waterway’s near-total shipping blockade is a “food security timebomb”, the head of the International Rescue Committee, David Miliband, said this week, adding: “The window to avert a massive global hunger crisis is rapidly closing.” “Fertilisers are the No 1 issue of concern today,” according to the World Trade Organization, while the UN World Food Programme says the total number of people facing acute levels of hunger could hit record numbers this year if the destabilising conflict continues. So how worried should we be? Fertiliser production in the Gulf The Gulf is also home to some of the world’s largest fertiliser factory …

Brief mindfulness practice accelerates visual processing speeds in adults

Brief mindfulness practice accelerates visual processing speeds in adults

Published by José Betancourt

Practicing mindfulness meditation using a mobile application for a month can help people process visual information and initiate localized eye movements faster. The visual attention benefits apply to young, middle-aged, and older adults alike, without distinct differences across age categories. These initial findings were published in the journal eNeuro and suggest that brief daily meditation can successfully alter basic cognitive functions. The human brain relies on a small region called the locus coeruleus to maintain mental focus and process incoming sensory information. This deep brain structure acts as the primary source of noradrenaline. Noradrenaline operates as a chemical messenger that helps regulate general attention, stress, and physical arousal states. Studies in animal models provide clues about how this part of the brain operates. When researchers artificially stimulate the locus coeruleus in monkeys, the animals show better visual attention. Blocking the release of noradrenaline has the opposite effect, leaving animals easily distracted. These findings confirm that this brain region directly dictates attention spans. As people age, the locus coeruleus often undergoes structural degradation and loses some …

Ai2 releases MolmoWeb, an open-weight visual web agent with 30K human task trajectories and a full training stack

Ai2 releases MolmoWeb, an open-weight visual web agent with 30K human task trajectories and a full training stack

Published by skeptic

Engineers building browser agents today face a choice between closed APIs they cannot inspect and open-weight frameworks with no trained model underneath them. Ai2 is now offering a third option. The Seattle-based nonprofit behind the open-source OLMo language models and Molmo vision-language family today is releasing MolmoWeb, an open-weight visual web agent available in 4 billion and 8 billion parameter sizes. Until now, no open-weight visual web agent shipped with the training data and pipeline needed to audit or reproduce it. MolmoWeb does. MolmoWebMix, the accompanying dataset, includes 30,000 human task trajectories across more than 1,100 websites, 590,000 individual subtask demonstrations and 2.2 million screenshot question-answer pairs — which Ai2 describes as the largest publicly released collection of human web-task execution ever assembled. “Can you go from just passively understanding images, describing them and captioning them, to actually making them take action in some environment?” Tanmay Gupta, senior research scientist at Ai2, told VentureBeat. “That is exactly what MolmoWeb is.” How it works: It sees what you see MolmoWeb operates entirely from browser screenshots. It …

LA28 unveils floral-inspired visual identity for 2028 Olympics

LA28 unveils floral-inspired visual identity for 2028 Olympics

Published by Sam Flores

LOS ANGELES, March 23 : Organizers of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Games unveiled the event’s official visual identity on Monday, a floral-themed design system meant to reflect the city’s landscape, neighbourhoods and cultural character. The branding will appear across competition venues, fan areas, citywide installations, signage, digital platforms and broadcast presentations during the Games, LA28 said. At the centre of the design is the “Superbloom,” a reference to the bursts of wildflowers that can blanket parts of Southern California after periods of rain. LA28 said the concept was intended as a metaphor for the Games, with years of preparation culminating in a short, high-profile global event. The core graphic is built around 13 individual blooms, which organizers said represent different elements of Los Angeles, from its entertainment culture to its neighbourhoods, people and native landscape. The colour palette draws on the Bird of Paradise, the official flower of Los Angeles, and is grouped into four families – Poppy, Scarlet Flax, Bluebell and Sagebrush – to evoke the region’s terrain and vegetation. Organizers …

How to Rescue a Wet, Damaged Book: A Handy Visual Primer

How to Rescue a Wet, Damaged Book: A Handy Visual Primer

Published by José Betancourt

How to save those wet, dam­aged books? The ques­tion has to be asked. Above, you can watch a visu­al primer from the Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty Libraries—peo­ple who know some­thing about tak­ing care of books. It con­tains a series of tips, some intu­itive, some less so, that will give you a clear action plan the next time water and paper meet. If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day. If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks! Relat­ed Con­tent: How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary Watch a 106-Year-Old Wiz­ard of Oz Book Get Mag­i­cal­ly Restored … By Cut­ting the Book’s Spine, Wash­ing Pages & …

NotebookLM Cinematic Videos vs Slideshow : Visual Gains & Glitches

NotebookLM Cinematic Videos vs Slideshow : Visual Gains & Glitches

Published by skeptic

NotebookLM’s cinematic video overviews offer a new way to convert text-based content into visually rich summaries. By integrating motion graphics, animations and text overlays, these videos aim to simplify complex topics for personal and educational use. Paul Lipsky highlights creative applications, such as adapting content into styles like Japanese manga or children’s television. However, early feedback has pointed out occasional mismatches in visual elements, reflecting some current limitations of the feature. Learn how to customize these video overviews using tailored prompts and stylistic options to suit different needs. You’ll also explore their strengths in storytelling and audience engagement, along with examples of scenarios where they are most effective. This guide provides practical insights for students, educators and anyone looking to enhance their content with visual summaries. What Are Cinematic Video Overviews? TL;DR Key Takeaways : NotebookLM has introduced “cinematic video overviews,” an AI-powered feature that transforms text-based content into dynamic, visually engaging video summaries. The feature offers extensive customization options, including creative styles like Japanese manga, American comic books and children’s TV aesthetics, allowing users …