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An expert explains what safety features a submersible should have

Eric Fusil, University of Adelaide The oxygen supply of the missing Titan submersible is expected to run out today around 10am GMT, or 8pm AEST. A frantic search continues for the Titan and its five occupants, with sonar buoys having recorded “banging” noises in the search area on Tuesday and Wednesday. With the vessel’s fate yet to be determined, the general public is asking questions about the safety of such touristic endeavours. The context The context in which the Titan has disappeared is disturbing. Reports have come out detailing court documents from a 2018 case that show OceanGate, the company

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Missing Titanic sub: what are submersibles, how do they communicate, and what may have gone wrong?

Stefan B. Williams, University of Sydney An extensive search and rescue operation is underway to locate a commercial submersible that went missing during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck. According to the US Coast Guard, contact with the submersible was lost about one hour and 45 minutes into the dive, with five people onboard. The vessel was reported overdue at 9.13pm local time on Sunday (12.13pm AEST, Monday). The expedition was being run by US company OceanGate as part of an eight-day trip with guests paying US$250,000 per head to visit the wreck site. As of Monday afternoon (Tuesday morning

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Generative AI is a minefield for copyright law

Robert Mahari, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Jessica Fjeld, Harvard Law School, and Ziv Epstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) In 2022, an AI-generated work of art won the Colorado State Fair’s art competition. The artist, Jason Allen, had used Midjourney – a generative AI system trained on art scraped from the internet – to create the piece. The process was far from fully automated: Allen went through some 900 iterations over 80 hours to create and refine his submission. Yet his use of AI to win the art competition triggered a heated backlash online, with one Twitter user claiming,

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Blockchain is a key technology – a computer scientist explains why the post-crypto-crash future is bright

Yu Chen, Binghamton University, State University of New York People hear a lot about blockchain technology in relation to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which rely on blockchain systems to keep records of financial transactions between people and businesses. But a crash in public trust in cryptocurrencies like TerraUSD – and therefore a massive drop in their market value – doesn’t mean their underlying technology is also worthless. In fact, there are plenty of other uses for this type of system, which does not rely on centralized storage and where many people can participate securely, even if they don’t all know each

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