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    Paul McCartney is an English singer, songwriter and musician who gained worldwide fame with The Beatles, a rock band formed in Liverpool in 1960. He has collaborated with countless artists over his 60-year career, from Rihanna to Michael Jackson. Now, the former Beatle has teamed up with artificial intelligence (AI). In a recent interview, the 80-year-old revealed that AI has made it possible to release one “last Beatles record.”

    McCartney said that during the creation of the docuseries “The Beatles: Get Back”, produced in 2021 by Peter Jackson, they found an old demo tape that John Lennon had recorded. Through the use of artificial intelligence, they were able to start the process of taking the decades-old recording and turning it into something usable.

    “Peter Jackson was able to extricate John’s voice from an old cassette tape,” McCartney said. “He could tell the machine ‘That’s the voice. This is the guitar. Lose the guitar.’ We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI,” McCartney continued. “Then we could mix the record as you would normally do.”

    Though McCartney called recent uses of AI in music “kind of scary” — in April, a rap song featuring AI-generated voices mimicking Drake and The Weeknd was yanked from streaming services — the “Let It Be” singer admitted that the technology is “exciting, because it’s the future. There’s a good side to it, and then a scary side. And we’ll just have to see where that leads,” he said.

(Nicolas Vega. www.cnbc.com, 14.06.2023. Adaptado.)

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    They power tiny phones and two-tonne electric cars. They form the guts of a growing number of grid-storage systems1 that smooth the flow of electricity from wind and solar power stations. Without them, the electrification needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming would be unimaginable.

    But lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have downsides. Lithium is scarce, for one. And the best Li-ion batteries, those with layered-oxide cathodes, also require cobalt and nickel. These metals are scarce, too — and cobalt is also problematic because a lot of it is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where working conditions leave much to be desired. A second sort of Li-ion battery, a so-called polyanionic design that uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP), does not need nickel or cobalt. However, such batteries cannot store as much energy per kilogram as layered-oxide ones.

    A group of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead. Unlike lithium, sodium is abundant: it makes up most of the salt in the oceans. And chemists have found that layered-oxide cathodes which use sodium rather than lithium can get by without cobalt or nickel to increase their quality. The idea of making sodium-ion (Na-ion) batteries at scale is therefore gaining traction. Engineers are adjusting designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium’s place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged.

(www.economist.com, 25.10.2023. Adaptado.)

¹grid-storage system: sistema de armazenamento de energia elétrica.

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Why libraries may never stop being people places?

As the first winter of the pandemic drew to a close, someone in my Twitter feed enthused about an app called Libby that made it especially easy to borrow and read library books. I downloaded (1) it, input my New York Public Library card number and proceeded to binge. I devoured everything by and about Isaac Babel, who wrote stories based on (2) his life in early-20th-century Odessa, and all of Mick Herron’s Slough House books, about a group of sad, incompetent British spies.

Libby was created by OverDrive, a Cleveland-based company that digitizes books and other publications and distributes (3) them to 90 percent of North American libraries. The app debuted in 2017 but, no surprise, had (4) its biggest bump in growth in 2020, a 33 percent increase in circulation compared with 2019. What distinguishes Libby from other library apps, like the New York Public Library’s SimplyE, is that it allows you to read on a Kindle (instead of, say, your phone). And it has a definite style, minimalist and sweet. Libby suggests, intentionally or not, that public libraries, the actual buildings, are no longer necessary, that libraries have become — like everything and everyone else — place-less purveyors of content. But if during the past couple of years you replaced in-person library visits with an app, you may be missing out.

What many public libraries have done, despite Covid and because of it, is consciously enhance their physical presence on the street and in the neighborhood. Or, as Mrs. Houben, who argues that every library needs a garden, suggested, “A library should be so nice that you bring your own book, right?”

(Fonte: texto adaptado. By Karrie Jacobs. Published on April 21st, 2022. Disponível em: https://www.nytimes. com/2022/04/21/style/libraries-outdoor-public-space.html Acesso em: 1 nov. 2022)