Stack CommerceShareWe may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Learn more While it seems like everyone and their brother is using ClassPass to meet their New Years fitness goals, you mightve set some of a different nature. Making a career change, learning a new language, or picking up a new hobby involves a few more steps than hitting the gym, but we found just the thing.EDU Unlimited is an online learning platform thats basically ClassPass but for e-learning. And they offer a lifetime pass thats incredibly affordable, only $19.97 for a limited time (reg. $600). You only have to pay once to access hundreds of e-courses in almost any subject.A lifetime pass to learn anything you wantWhat was your New Years resolution? Because EDU Unlimited is here to help you learn new skills online now, in five years, and for the rest of your life because youll never lose access to the platform or have to worry about subscription fees lying ahead.Explore the current library of over 1,000 e-courses in whatever interests you. Here are just a few things that caught our eye:Coding with PythonAdobe PhotoshopHow to play guitarRobotics with Raspberry PiSpanish lessonsRemember: As your goals change, your EDU Unlimited lifetime pass will always be there with courses to help you achieve them. And new courses are added each month, so theres always something fresh to explore.Find affordable online courses with EDU Unlimited, now $19.97 (reg. $600) for a limited time. No coupon is needed to get this price.StackSocial prices subject to change.EDU Unlimited by StackSkills: Lifetime Access $19.97See Deal

Extracting hemolymphthe oyster's blood or circulatory fluidduring laboratory experiments Kirsten Benkendorff/Southern Cross UniversityShareIn the future, oysters might help in the global fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. A protein found in the bloodor hemolymphof the Sydney rock oyster (Saccostrea glomerata) appears to kill bacteria, while also increasing the effectiveness of some of the antibiotics.. The findings are detailed in a study published January 21 in the journal PLOS ONE Get the Popular Science newsletter Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. By signing up you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.Over the past half-century, bacteria have developed resistance to many conventional antibiotics used to treat illnesses like pneumonia and strep throat due to their overuse and misuse. A 2024 study predicts that antimicrobial resistance will cause 40 million deaths by 2050. Discovering and developing new antibiotics is a crucial public health and safety measure.Looking to briny bivalves and other organisms for medical help is not without precedent. Oyster components have been used to treat respiratory infections in some traditional medicines. Their blood has also been shown to exhibit anti-viral activity. Over 90 percent of antibiotics that are currently in use are derived from nature in some way, including the life-saving penicillin.Most organisms have natural defence mechanisms to protect themselves against infection, Kirsten Benkendorff, a study co-author and interdisciplinary marine scientist at Southern Cross University in Australia, said in a statement. Oysters are constantly filtering bacteria from the water, so they are a good place to look for potential antibiotics.CREDIT: Southern Cross UniversityA 2024 study by the same team identified a protein found in the hemolymph of the Sydney rock oyster that inhibits Streptococcus pneumoniae. This bacterium causes respiratory infections in humans, including tonsilitis and pneumonia and is a leading cause of death in children under five and hospitalization in older adults.Bacteria like S. pneumoniae that cause infection often escape from antibiotics and the immune system by forming biofilms to protect themselves. These biofilms are communities of microorganisms that attach themselves to surfaces in a sticky, protective matrix. The study found that oyster blood can kill bacterial pathogens in the biofilms.The oyster hemolymph proteins were found to prevent biofilm formation and disrupt biofilms, so the bacteria remain available to antibiotic exposure at lower doses, said Benkendorff. The hemolymph contains a mixture of proteins with known antimicrobial properties. These may act to directly kill the bacteria, as well as preventing them from attaching to the cell surface.Crucially, the oyster hemolymph proteins were not toxic to human lung cells. This means it might be possible to optimize the proteins to create a safe and effective dose. While a new antibiotic developed from oyster blood is still quite some time away, the findings are a next step in developing new methods for treating serious infections.It provides great opportunities for collaboration between researchers, aquaculture and pharmaceutical industries, said Benkendorff. In the meantime, slurping oysters could help keep the respiratory bugs away. Oysters contain zinc which boosts the immune system and they have really good polyunsaturated fatty acids and vitamins that also help modulate immunity.

NewsPaleontologyA mysteriously large pterosaur finally has an identityA strange Rhamphorhynchus fossil is actually a supersized adult of a known species As Rhamphorhynchus muensteri (shown in the reconstruction) got older and larger, its needle-like teeth became broader and more bladelike, potentially hinting at a differing diet late in the pterosaurs life.Mark Turner/AlamyBy Jake Buehler12 seconds agoOne pterosaur species gave itself quite the makeover as it grew older and larger.Scientists have spent more than a century wondering if a large and anatomically quirky flying reptile fossil represented a distinct species from its much smaller peers. Not so, researchers report January 2 in PeerJ. The Jurassic giant, they argue, is a superlative for this species. The findings help reveal how the extinct fliers may have warped physically and ecologically over their lives.

Nature, Published online: 22 January 2025; doi:10.1038/d41586-025-00154-8Were here to help.

A rare breed of star recently discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope spins faster by feeding on its stellar siblings.

Conan The Barbarian joined the Mortal Kombat 1 roster earlier this week, but it seems he's not the only new fighter players should keep an eye out for. NetherRealm Studios has snuck a secret fight into the game against a pink ninja named Floyd--a direct reference to the iconic 1970s rock band Pink Floyd.Teases for the rose-tinted ruffian began to appear in the Living Forest stage, with some players like YouTube creator Super reporting seeing the name Floyd in pink font after winning a match there. With Conan now released, players are now encountering Floyd on a brand-new empty-field stage. Another YouTube creator named Dynasty has since released a video indicating that Floyd will randomly appear before matches to give a clue as to how to trigger his fight, with 37 different clues possible as found by dataminers highlighted in the video. Some of the clues are as follows:Continue Reading at GameSpot

In a welcome update for Xbox owners, Microsoft has announced that its consoles will soon support external USB drives that are larger than 16TB in size. This feature is now available for members of the Xbox Insiders program to test--specifically, members who have unlocked the Alpha Skip-Ahead tier--and is expected to roll out to the general public in the weeks to come."We are enabling support for external USB drives larger than 16TB, so you can be sure your favorite games are always ready to play," Microsoft explained in a blog post. "Newly formatted drives that are larger than 16TB will be formatted with multiple partitions to utilize all available space for games and apps. These will appear as multiple devices in the storage devices list."Anyone who already has an external hard drive larger than 16TB that has been formatted will be unaffected by this change, Microsoft added, noting that these storage devices will need to be reformatted to take advantage of the updated support. It's worth noting that games optimized for Xbox Series X|S consoles cannot be played from an external USB drive, but these can be used to store the game data and then moved onto the console's SSD or an NvME SSD expansion card.Continue Reading at GameSpot

The Fallout franchise has been around for decades at the time of writing this article, and many players could argue that Fallout 4 is the title that made it as mainstream as it is now. There are many things to discover in the Boston Commonwealth, including vicious enemies, valuable loot and items, as well as several companions, many of whom can be romanced.

New promotional Pokemon Trading Card Game booster packs from McDonald's are already seeing massive price tags on online marketplaces, with some large-scale collections being offered for up to $1,000. Titled Dragon Discovery, this new set of 15 Pokemon TCG cards seems to have players and collectors in a frenzy to collect them all.

Editors note: This post is part of Into the Omniverse, a series focused on how developers, 3D practitioners and enterprises can transform their workflows using the latest advances in Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD) and NVIDIA Omniverse.The next frontier of AI is physical AI. Physical AI models can understand instructions and perceive, interact and perform complex actions in the real world to power autonomous machines like robots and self-driving cars.Similar to how large language models can process and generate text, physical AI models can understand the world and generate actions. To do this, these models must be trained in simulation environments to comprehend physical dynamics, like gravity, friction or inertia and understand geometric and spatial relationships, as well as the principles of cause and effect.Global leaders in software development and professional services are using NVIDIA Omniverse, powered by OpenUSD, to build new products and services that will accelerate the development of AI and controllable simulations to enable the creation of true-to-reality virtual worlds, known as digital twins, that can be used to train physical AI with unprecedented accuracy and detail.Generate Exponentially More Synthetic Data With Omniverse and NVIDIA CosmosAt CES, NVIDIA announced generative AI models and blueprints that expand Omniverse integration further into physical AI applications such as robotics, autonomous vehicles and vision AI.Among these announcements was NVIDIA Cosmos, a platform of state-of-the-art generative world foundation models, advanced tokenizers, guardrails and an accelerated video processing pipeline all designed to accelerate physical AI development.Developing physical AI models is a costly, resource- and time-intensive process that requires vast amounts of real-world data and testing. Cosmos world foundation models (WFM), which predict future world states as videos based on multimodal inputs, provide an easy way for developers to generate massive amounts of photoreal, physics-based synthetic data to train and evaluate AI for robotics, autonomous vehicles and machines. Developers can also fine-tune Cosmos WFMs to build downstream world models or improve quality and efficiency for specific physical AI use cases.When paired with Omniverse, Cosmos creates a powerful synthetic data multiplication engine. Developers can use Omniverse to create 3D scenarios, then feed the outputs into Cosmos to generate controlled videos and variations. This can drastically accelerate the development of physical AI systems such as autonomous vehicles and robots by rapidly generating exponentially more training data covering a variety of environments and interactions.OpenUSD ensures the data in these scenarios is seamlessly integrated and consistently represented, enhancing the realism and effectiveness of the simulations.Leading robotics and automotive companies, including 1X, Agile Robots, Agility Robotics, Figure AI, Foretellix, Fourier, Galbot, Hillbot, IntBot, Neura Robotics, Skild AI, Virtual Incision, Waabi and XPENG, along with ridesharing giant Uber, are among the first to adopt Cosmos.Learn more about how world foundation models will advance physical AI by listening to the NVIDIA AI Podcast episode with Ming-Yu Liu, vice president of research at NVIDIA.See Cosmos in Action for Physical AI Use CasesCosmos WFMs are revolutionizing industries by providing a unified framework for developing, training and deploying large-scale AI models across various applications. Enterprises in the automotive, industrial and robotics sectors can harness the power of generative physical AI and simulation to accelerate innovation and operational efficiency.Humanoid robots: The NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Blueprint for synthetic motion generation helps developers generate massive synthetic motion datasets to train humanoid robots using imitation learning. With GR00T workflows, users can capture human actions and use Cosmos to exponentially increase the size and variety of the dataset, making it more robust for training physical AI systems.Autonomous vehicles: Autonomous vehicle (AV) simulation powered by Omniverse Sensor RTX application programming interfaces lets AV developers replay driving data, generate new ground-truth data and perform closed-loop testing to accelerate their pipelines. With Cosmos, developers can generate synthetic driving scenarios to amplify training data by orders of magnitude, accelerating physical AI model development for autonomous vehicles. Global ridesharing giant Uber is partnering with NVIDIA to accelerate autonomous mobility. Rich driving datasets from Uber, combined with Cosmos and NVIDIA DGX Cloud, can help AV partners build stronger AI models more efficiently.Industrial settings: Mega is an Omniverse Blueprint for developing, testing and optimizing physical AI and robot fleets at scale in a USD-based digital twin before deployment in factories and warehouses. The blueprint uses Omniverse Cloud Sensor RTX APIs to simultaneously render multisensor data from any type of intelligent machine, enabling high-fidelity sensor simulation at scale. Cosmos can enhance Mega by generating synthetic edge case scenarios to amplify training data, significantly improving the robustness and efficiency of training robots in simulation. KION Group, a supply chain solutions company, is among the first to adopt Mega to drive warehouse automation in retail, consumer packaged goods, parcel services and more.Get Plugged Into the World of OpenUSDFor more on Cosmos, watch the replay of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huangs CES keynote, and get started with Cosmos WFMs available now under an open model license on Hugging Face and the NVIDIA NGC catalog. Join the upcoming livestream on Wednesday, February 5 for a deep dive into Cosmos WFMs and physical AI workflows.Continue to optimize OpenUSD workflows with the new self-paced Learn OpenUSD curriculum for 3D developers and practitioners, available at no cost through the NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute. For more resources on OpenUSD, explore the Alliance for OpenUSD forum and the AOUSD website.Meet Cosmos, OpenUSD and physical AI experts at NVIDIA GTC, the conference for the era of AI, taking place March 17-21 at the San Jose Convention Center.Stay up to date by subscribing to NVIDIA news, joining the community, and following NVIDIA Omniverse on Instagram, LinkedIn, Medium and X.