apocalypse

Artificial intelligence has been a theoretical concept for a long time for people until the rise in popularity of AI tools such as OpenAI's ChatGPT. Since the beginning of this year, AI has been a hot topic with analysts and influential business figures weighing in on the same. With the emergence of ChatGPT, Dall-E, Bard, and many more such tools, AI has come into applicability for most people in day-to-day life. However, there is growing apprehensions about AI chatbots' potential misuse and also that it will lead to the…

Get our free weekly email for all the latest cinematic news from our film critic Clarisse LoughreyGet our The Life Cinematic email for freeEmilio Estevez has recounted the time Laurence Fishburne saved him from drowning in quicksand.Appearing on The Jennifer Hudson Show this week alongside his father Martin Sheen, Estevez recalled the incident which happened in the Philippines.Estevez had been visiting his dad on the set of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now, when he and actor Fishburne were both…

Astronomers have witnessed an apocalypse from across the galaxy, as a planet crashed into its host star. It’s an event that’s long been assumed to happen in many star systems – including our own someday – but this is the first time it’s ever been seen directly.Earth has an expiry date: about 5 billion years from now, the Sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel supply and swell up into a red giant, engulfing Mercury, Venus and probably Earth in the process. It’s a normal stage in the life-cycle of many stars, and given how…

Did you know that most of the asteroids can be found in a specific region in space? Yes, this region is called the asteroid belt – a region between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. These space rocks are usually made up of rocks, but they can also be made of metals such as nickel and iron, or even clay and one was responsible for triggering the extinction of dinosaurs when it crashed on Earth near the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico more than 65 million years ago.Although it is not expected to be a planet-killer, NASA has…

Screenshot: Gizmodo / TwitterSince the beginning of Elon Musk’s reign at Twitter, he’s threatened to remove the legacy verification—signified by a white check in a blue circle beside the account name—that predated his tenure. Musk even set April 1st as the date for the purge, which came and went without any changes, either because of ineptitude or a half-effort April Fools joke. But on April 20th—4/20, lol, ugh—he actually did it.Nearly all of the estimated 407k legacy verified Twitter accounts lost their check marks. The…

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. The app economy in 2023 hit a few snags, as consumer spending last year dropped for the first time by 2% to $167 billion, according to data.ai’s “State of Mobile” report. However, downloads are continuing to grow, up 11% year-over-year in 2022, to reach 255 billion. Consumers are also spending more time in mobile apps than ever before. On Android devices alone,…

In 2015, novelist Claire Fuller debuted with Our Endless Numbered Days, the story of a girl kidnapped by her survivalist father and raised in the wilderness, where she’s led to believe they are the only two people left alive after a nuclear apocalypse. She has gone on to create other such potently enclosed worlds in books including Bitter Orange and the Costa novel prize-winning Unsettled Ground, often using that same rural remoteness to enhance the feeling of isolation and its accompanying sense of slow-burn jeopardy.Her…

Alright, here we are. Lucky number seven. And we’ve saved the most radioresistant for last. As its name suggests, Thermococcus gammatolerans is good at handling gamma radiation, both in reducing the extent of DNA damage induced by radiation and in its ability to repair damaged chromosomes. (It’s fitting, perhaps, that it’s a select few single-celled organisms that would fare best in a nuclear apocalypse, rather than the sort of complex lifeforms that would invent such bombs in the first place.)In 2016, researchers dosed…

Leon Bennett/Getty Images James Cameron has been on the cutting edge of technology for more than three decades, whether it be making early strides in CGI with The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgement Day or digital performance capture and 3D with the Avatar movies. So it’s not surprising that he’s got an opinion on the rapid rise of AI. The last few years alone have seen AI image and text generation take quantum leaps forward, and we’re just beginning to see the first examples of completely AI-generated videos.…

via Sony It helps to have friends in high places, and rarely has that been proven truer than in the case of co-writer and directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s feature-length directorial debut This is the End. Despite being an effects-heavy studio production packed with visual effects that rung up a budgetary tab of around $40 million, the longtime buddies and regular collaborators called in no shortage of favors to ensure that the ensemble cast was overflowing with recognizable stars, giving it the…