Listening to artificially intelligent podcast hosts is like listening to an episode of your favorite talk show. Google’s NotebookLM, a free online program, creates them instantly, based on whatever you feed it.

The banter between NotebookLM’s AI podcasters is described as “stunningly lifelike” by ZDNet. I agree. They sound like people I know.

To start, I uploaded a fact sheet from FoodRevolution.org called “9 Ways to Lower Blood Pressure,” because I’m big on prevention (and nagging). When I clicked the “play” button, my AI co-hosts took “a deep dive” into the wonders of broccoli and other veggies. The male co-host even made a bean joke, provoking laughter from his female counterpart.

When I fed Notebook LM an issue of the Wall Street Journal, I got a nice conversation about the Fed’s rate cut, the election and more. The hosts made comments like, “I know, right?”  Or: “That’s a nail biter for sure.” They did even better on shorter files, like a book review on the relevancy of Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom,” by Economist David Henderson. When I asked Henderson what he thought of the AI version, he said: “Wow! I had no idea it could be this good.”

To create your own, visit the NotebookLM website, upload a file, click “generate,” and voilà, your podcast is born. Your uploaded file could be the whole PDF of a newspaper, or a file in almost any other format except “docx.” It’s best to save Word documents as a PDF or “txt” file before uploading.

Train It

I’ll never forget Amtrak’s bumpy ride from Chicago to Florida, where I was nearly hurled from my bunk bed at regular intervals. But taking the train reduced my carbon footprint by up to 72% compared to flying, and now it’s even easier to book those rides.

Thanks to a partnership between Google and Amtrak, when you Google “flights from Boston to Philadelphia,” and other routes, you get train info too. I love those shorter journeys.

If you search directly for rail rides, such as “train from Portland to Seattle,” you get a list of the times and fares. Clicking on the arrow next to a fare, you get full details. Click the Amtrak link to go directly to the bookings page.

Slower Aging

A new epigenetic clock called “CheekAge,” from TallyHealth, uses a swab of your cheek cells to predict aging. Like TruAge Diagnostics, CheekAge looks at hundreds of thousands of sites in your DNA to find changes that modify gene function and expression.

When 1513 men and women, born in 1921 and 1936, were tested every three years by CheekAge, the results were published in the journal “Frontiers in Aging.” Although a few test subjects lived healthily into old age by winning the genetics lottery, the vast majority had lifestyle factors in common, including excellent nutrition, good stress management and adequate sleep. All drank little or no alcohol and didn’t smoke.

To see how you’re doing without having your cheek swabbed, go to TallyHealth.com and click “quiz.”  (There’s a similar quiz at TruDiagnostics.) Utilizing the results from a test involving 8000 people, the quiz concludes that those aging the fastest suffer from chronic inflammation, which can be significantly reduced by a plant-rich diet.

New Video Tools

You don’t have to have the latest iPhone to automatically add slow motion or speed up certain scenes in your videos. Google is rolling out these new features in the free Google Photos app for Android and iOS. If you don’t see it now, you will soon.

Check out the video of a skateboarder in the article titled “Google Photos is getting a redesigned video editor,” from The Verge. It shows the user clicking “slow motion” after selecting a few key frames, to highlight the skateboarder’s leap into the air. You can also click “Zoom,” to zoom in on a scene, or use the new tools to enhance colors, trim a scene, or improve lighting.

Selling That Old Phone

Instead of trading your phone in, consider selling it on Flipsy. It’s less of a hassle than eBay. When last I looked, you could get $366 for an iPhone 13 Pro and $160 for a Samsung Galaxy S23. Besides phones, you can sell watches, tablets, gaming consoles, Macbooks, VR headsets and digital cameras.

Kindle Trick

Here’s how you can share that delightful passage in a book you’re reading in your Kindle app on a tablet, phone or e-reader. Highlight the passage with your finger and tap “share.” From there, choose between emailing, texting or launching any other app you’ve installed, such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp or LinkedIn.

Robot News

Remember “The Thing” on the Addams Family TV show? It was a hand that could crawl around on its own. Now there’s a robotic hand that can detach itself from its robotic arm and crawl towards an object it wants to grasp, without dropping the item it’s already holding. See it in action by searching on the phrase “This robot arm can detach its hand to grab things.”

Internut

“Meet the Winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes.” Search on that phrase to get info on “ignoble” experiments. For example, B.F. Skinner won one for teaching pigeons to guide missiles. Another experimenter revealed that real plants imitate the shapes of plastic versions placed next to them.

Filed under: AI, apps, business, health, Internuts, robots, video