Thanks to some not-so-subtle leaking by various celebrities in recent weeks, we know that a Beats Pill speaker is most probably on the way – and new images spotted in the upcoming iOS 17.5 software all but confirm it.
Some digging through the iOS 17.5 test code done by the team at AppleInsider has revealed the rumored speaker in three different colors: black, gold, and red. No other information is attached, so we’re left guessing as to details such as price and release date.
Apple itself has said iOS 17.5 will be out in the very near future – presumably with support for the upcoming speaker – and considering the Beats Pill leaks we’ve seen so far, it shouldn’t be too long before everything is made official.
Only a few days ago we saw a couple of refreshed Beats products break cover, and our full Beats Solo 4 review gives you the rundown on one of those products – the new headphones bring with them spatial audio and up to 50 hours of battery life.
The Beats continue
The last we saw of this particular speaker range was the Beats Pill Plus, which was discontinued back in 2022. It would seem that someone on the Beats team feels it’s time for another attempt at making one of the best Bluetooth speakers in the business.
Unfortunately we can’t give you any idea of the sort of proposition the new Beats Pill speaker might present. The Beats Pill Plus, for reference, weighed in at a little over 1.5lbs / 0.75kg and cost $230 / £190 / AU$360 when it was launched.
Our wishlist for a new and improved model isn’t anything out of the ordinary: superb sound, impressive battery life, and a price that isn’t going to break the bank. Hopefully that’s not too much to ask, Beats?
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This isn’t the only compact portable speaker leak we’ve seen this week either: images purporting to show the Sonos Roam 2 have found their way online, so anyone in the market for a speaker for playing tunes on the move is about to get a couple of notable new options.
Midjourney, the Generative AI platform that you can currently use on Discord just introduced the concept of reusable characters and I am blown away.
It’s a simple idea: Instead of using prompts to create countless generative image variations, you create and reuse a central character to illustrate all your themes, live out your wildest fantasies, and maybe tell a story.
Up until recently, Midjourney, which is trained on a diffusion model (add noise to an original image and have the model de-noise it so it can learn about the image) could create some beautiful and astonishingly realistic images based on prompts you put in the Discord channel (“/imagine: [prompt]”) but unless you were asking it to alter one of its generated images, every image set and character would look different.
Now, Midjourney has cooked up a simple way to reuse your Midjourney AI characters. I tried it out and, for the most part, it works.
Image 1 of 3
I guess I don’t know how to describe myself.(Image credit: Future)
(Image credit: Future)
Things are getting weird(Image credit: Future)
In one prompt, I described someone who looked a little like me, chose my favorite of Midjourney’s four generated image options, upscaled it for more definition, and then, using a new “– cref” prompt and the URL for my generated image (with the character I liked), I forced Midjounrey to generate new images but with the same AI character in them.
Later, I described a character with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts character qualities and, once I had one I liked, reused him in a different prompt scenario where he had his kite stuck in a tree (Midjourney couldn’t or wouldn’t put the kite in the tree branches).
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An homage to Charles Schulz(Image credit: Future)
(Image credit: Future)
It’s far from perfect. Midjourney still tends to over-adjust the art but I contend the characters in the new images are the same ones I created in my initial images. The more descriptive you make your initial character-creation prompts, the better result you’ll get in subsequent images.
Perhaps the most startling thing about Midjourney’s update is the utter simplicity of the creative process. Writing natural language prompts has always been easy but training the system to make your character do something might typically take some programming or even AI model expertise. Here it’s just a simple prompt, one code, and an image reference.
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Got a lot closer with my photo as a reference(Image credit: Future)
(Image credit: Future)
While it’s easier to take one of Midjourney’s own creations and use that as your foundational character, I decided to see what Midjourney would do if I turned myself into a character using the same “cref” prompt. I found an online photo of myself and entered this prompt: “imagine: making a pizza – cref [link to a photo of me]”.
Midjourney quickly spit out an interpretation of me making a pizza. At best, it’s the essence of me. I selected the least objectionable one and then crafted a new prompt using the URL from my favorite me.
Oh, hey, Not Tim Cook (Image credit: Future)
Unfortunately, when I entered this prompt: “interviewing Tim Cook at Apple headquarters”, I got a grizzled-looking Apple CEO eating pizza and another image where he’s holding an iPad that looks like it has pizza for a screen.
When I removed “Tim Cook” from the prompt, Midjourney was able to drop my character into four images. In each, Midjourney Me looks slightly different. There was one, though, where it looked like my favorite me enjoying a pizza with a “CEO” who also looked like me.
Midjourney me enjoying pizza with my doppelgänger CEO (Image credit: Future)
Midjourney’s AI will improve and soon it will be easy to create countless images featuring your favorite character. It could be for comic strips, books, graphic novels, photo series, animations, and, eventually, generative videos.
Such a tool could speed storyboarding but also make character animators very nervous.
If it’s any consolation, I’m not sure Midjourney understands the difference between me and a pizza and pizza and an iPad – at least not yet.
Roger Guillemin identified the molecules in the brain that control the production of hormones in endocrine glands such as the pituitary and thyroid. His work led to a torrent of advances in neuroendocrinology, with far-reaching effects on studies of metabolism, reproduction and growth. For his discoveries on peptide-hormone production in the brain, Guillemin shared the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Andrew Schally and Rosalyn Yalow. He has died at the age of 100.
In the autumn of 1969, after analysing millions of sheep brains for more than a decade, Guillemin and his colleagues determined the structure of thyrotropin-releasing factor (TRF). This small peptide is produced in the hypothalamus, a small region at the base of the brain, and is transported to the anterior lobe of the nearby pituitary gland, where it triggers the release of the hormone thyrotropin. Thyrotropin, in turn, stimulates the thyroid gland to produce the hormone thyroxine, which regulates metabolic activity in nearly every tissue of the body. More than two dozen drugs use such hypothalamic hormones to treat endocrine disorders and cancers, and the worldwide market for these drugs is worth several billion dollars.
Guillemin was born in Dijon, France, and came of age at the end of the Second World War. He graduated from medical school in the University of Lyon, France, in 1949 and worked as a country doctor in the small commune of Saint-Seine-l’Abbaye in Burgundy. He found the work satisfying but intellectually limiting, noting that “in those days I could take care of all my patients with three prescriptions, including aspirin”. Fascinated by how the brain and pituitary gland control the body’s response to stress, he attended lectures in Paris by the Hungarian–Canadian endocrinologist Hans Selye, after which Selye accepted Guillemin’s request to spend a year doing research in his laboratory at the University of Montreal, Canada.
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This turned into a four-year project, for which Guillemin was awarded a PhD in 1953. His studies with Selye were impactful, but it was meeting the UK physiologist Geoffrey Harris in Canada that would shape Guillemin’s subsequent science. Harris argued that the hypothalamus controls the anterior pituitary not through nerve signals, but rather through blood-borne factors that reach the pituitary through the capillaries of an interconnecting stalk. Recruited to the faculty of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, Guillemin decided to tackle Harris’s hypothesis head on. His initial aim was to purify and determine the structure of corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF), the hypothalamic hormone that stimulates the anterior pituitary to produce adrenocorticotropic hormone, the driver of the stress response described by Seyle. Progress towards this goal was slow, so Guillemin turned his attention to other putative releasing factors, including TRF.
The scale of his efforts at purification in the late 1950s and 1960s was enormous. These releasing factors were peptides — short chains of amino acids — present in only tiny amounts in the hypothalamus. Together with the fact that the hypothalamus is itself a small part of the brain, this meant that purification began with extracts prepared from millions of sheep hypothalami obtained from slaughterhouses. Peptides were separated on 3-metre-tall chromatography columns that extended through the lab’s ceiling. One set of columns was packed with the then-new resin Sephadex, released by the Stockholm-based biotechnology company Pharmacia in 1959. Guillemin sent a postdoc in his lab, Andrew Schally, that year to Sweden to procure much of the world’s supply of Sephadex.
Schally, who had worked on releasing factors for his PhD, joined the expanding team in Houston in 1957. He chafed under Guillemin’s leadership, however, viewing his years in Houston as a struggle in which he and Guillemin had a “very bitter, unpleasant relationship”. Guillemin suggested that Schally should move on, and himself accepted a simultaneous appointment at the Collège de France in Paris in 1960. Schally established his own competing research operation at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. Guillemin and Schally would remain competitors for more than two decades, a state of affairs not changed by their shared Nobel Prize.
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The Houston and New Orleans teams succeeded in purifying TRF and determining its amino-acid sequence at around the same time. Immediately thereafter, Guillemin moved his lab to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. There, his team identified a raft of hypothalamic releasing factors, now referred to as hormones. These included gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which drives the release of hormones that stimulate the reproductive organs; somatostatin, which inhibits the release of growth hormones; and growth-hormone-releasing hormone. In 1981, a Salk Institute team headed by US endocrinologist Wylie Vale, who was a student of Guillemin, finally purified and sequenced the elusive CRF, Selye’s obsession and Guillemin’s initial target from the 1950s. Drugs built on these discoveries have proved to be among the farthest-reaching medical translations of research from the institute.
Guillemin was the recipient of multiple honours and awards as well as the Nobel Prize. He was a connoisseur of the wines of Burgundy, and during his tenure as president of the Salk Institute in 2007–09, white wine was served at lunchtime faculty meetings. Roger lived an art- and music-filled life, and was close to the artists Françoise Gilot and Niki de Saint Phalle. He cherished his ties to family, students, postdocs, colleagues and friends. He leaves a vibrant scientific legacy.