MAROKO133 Breaking ai: China launches world’s first dual-tower solar-thermal power plant i

📌 MAROKO133 Update ai: China launches world’s first dual-tower solar-thermal power

China has made a revolutionary breakthrough in renewable energy engineering after it just launched the world’s first solar-thermal power plant that utilizes a dual-tower system to generate electricity in the Gobi Desert.

Developed by the Three Gorges Corporation, a wind and solar energy company headquartered in Guazhou County, China, the new facility combines efficiency, innovation and large-scale clean power production in one of the planet’s harshest environments.

The Gobi Desert, the sixth-largest desert in the world located in north China and southern Mongolia, is extremely dry. It receives an average of two to eight inches of annual precipitation, with some areas receiving less than two inches per year.

This intense dryness, as well as the abundant sunlight of more than 3,000 hours a year, make the Gobi Desert an excellent environment for large-scale solar power generation.

The incredible solar-thermal power station reportedly features two 656-feet-high (200 meters) towers, each surrounded by a vast field of 27,000 mirrors known as heliostats.

Harnessing heat and light

According to the South China Morning Post, the mirrors concentrate sunlight onto the towers, where the intense heat reaching up to 1,058 degrees Fahrenheit (570 degrees Celsius), melts and stores energy in a high-temperature medium.

The stored heat is then utilized to generate steam that drives a turbine and allows electricity production to continue well after sunset or during cloudy weather.

Meanwhile, unlike conventional photovoltaic (PV) panels that convert sunlight directly into electricity, solar-thermal systems harness heat instead of light. This makes them one of the few renewable technologies capable of providing stable, dispatchable energy that can be generated on demand.

The dual-tower design boosts overall efficiency by about 25 percent compared to conventional single-tower systems. This works because each tower captures sunlight at different times of the day. While the east tower collects sunlight in the morning, the west tower takes over in the afternoon.

In addition, the two mirror fields even overlap slightly, reducing the total number of mirrors required and cutting construction costs, as heliostats account for nearly 60 percent of the plant’s total expense.

China’s solar innovation

The facility is part of a broader clean-energy hub that also includes massive solar and wind farms across the region. Together, these installations are expected to supply electricity to around half a million households annually.

For China, the project represents a strategic evolution in the country’s renewable energy landscape. The east Asian country rapidly expanded its solar and wind capacity in the past decade, particularly across its western provinces of Gansu, Xinjiang, and Qinghai.

According to Wang Zhifeng, PhD, a senior researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, solar-thermal power emerged not as a rival but as a complementary technology to PV, capable of bridging the gaps in energy supply.

China currently operates a total of 21 commercial solar-thermal power plants with a combined capacity of 1.57 million kilowatts. Meanwhile, another 30 projects under construction will add roughly 3.1 million kilowatts more. This places China as a global leader in concentrated solar power (CSP) deployment.

🔗 Sumber: interestingengineering.com

📌 MAROKO133 Hot ai: Jake Paul Invites Users to Fake Him on Sora, So They Immediate

OpenAI’s recent launch of its text-to-video AI generator app, Sora 2, has already led to an enormous tidal wave of AI slop hitting internet feeds.

The company made the eyebrow-raising decision of putting deepfakes front and center of the app’s TikTok-like experience, inviting users to offer themselves up for “cameos” created by other users.

“With cameos, you can drop yourself straight into any Sora scene with remarkable fidelity after a short one-time video-and-audio recording in the app to verify your identity and capture your likeness,” the company boasted in its announcement.

And while not everybody was willing to become the butt of the joke, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — whose visage quickly adorned AI-generated and unnerving CCTV footage of him shoplifting or his head popping out of a toilet — some internet personalities were willing to throw themselves at the mercy of meme lords everywhere.

Influencer Jake Paul seemingly was one of them, and the results were as outlandish as you might expect. Seemingly inspired by a deepfake video of him passionately kissing upcoming UFC opponent Gervonta Davis last month, users quickly started sharing clips of him coming out of the closet and giving makeup tutorials.

Paul took the clips in stride, initially putting on a grave voice and decrying that “this AI is getting out of hand,” only to buy into the trend by acting camp in a response video posted to TikTok on Monday.

But his girlfriend, Dutch professional speed skater Jutta Leerdam, wasn’t impressed.

“I don’t like it, it’s not funny!” she told him in a video. “People believe it.”

Problematic undercurrents of homophobia aside, the trend paints a troubling picture of a future filled with photorealistic and eerily believable AI slop. The Sora app is only the latest demonstration that the tech is continuing to blur the lines between reality and a synthetic parallel universe dreamed up by generative AI.

While Paul is basking in the limelight, many netizens have watched in horror as the internet continues to be overtaken by lowbrow slop.

“Please, just stop sending me AI videos of Dad,” Zelda Williams, daughter of the late Hollywood comedy icon Robin Williams, wrote in a recent Instagram Stories post. “Stop believing I wanna see it or that I’ll understand, I don’t and I won’t.”

“AI is just badly recycling and regurgitating the past to be reconsumed,” she added. “You are taking in the Human Centipede of content, and from the very, very end of the line, all while the folks at the front laugh and laugh, consume and consume.”

Other users are finding that their faces are being used even without having opted in, like Paul, suggesting OpenAI’s “cameos” feature isn’t nearly as safe as the company makes it out to be.

“It is scary to think what AI is doing to feed my stalker’s delusions,” journalist Taylor Lorenz tweeted, revealing that her “psychotic stalker” was using Sora to generate videos of her.

Sora has also fanned the flames of a heated debate surrounding the unauthorized use of copyrighted materials, with users generating copious clips of SpongeBob SquarePants and “South Park” characters. OpenAI eventually opted to come down hard on the trend, implementing guardrails that users now say make the app “completely boring and useless.”

In the meantime, Paul’s own position seems a little ambivalent.

“I’ve had it with the AI stuff,” he said in a Wednesday video. “It’s affecting my relationships, businesses.”

“It’s really affecting things, and people really need to get a life,” he added — while haphazardly applying foundation to his cheeks using a makeup brush.

More on OpenAI: Sora 2 Has a Huge Financial Problem

The post Jake Paul Invites Users to Fake Him on Sora, So They Immediately Use It to Make Him Gay and Obsessed With Makeup appeared first on Futurism.

🔗 Sumber: futurism.com