The latest version of OpenAI’s image generation technology has resulted in a flood of users sharing images on social media that have been transformed in the style of Studio Ghibli, the legendary Japanese animation studio.
On Tuesday, OpenAI launched what it called its “most advanced image generator yet,” built into GPT‑4o. That features a “natively multimodal model capable of precise, accurate, photorealistic outputs.” As it turns out, the image generator also is very good at replicating the anime style of Studio Ghibli, the company behind such popular films as “Spirited Away,” “My Neighbor Totoro” and “The Boy and the Heron.”
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, chimed in on the viral trend in a post on X Wednesday — indicating he has himself been Studio Ghibli-fied. Altman wrote, “> be me / > grind for a decade trying to help make superintelligence to cure cancer or whatever / > mostly no one cares for first 7.5 years, then for 2.5 years everyone hates you for everything / > wake up one day to hundreds of messages: ‘look i made you into a twink ghibli style haha.’”
Altman also changed his profile picture on X to a Ghibli-style image:
Reps for Studio Ghibli in North America declined to comment.
However, Hayao Miyazaki, the co-founder of Studio Ghibli, has previously expressed strong disapproval of AI-generated animation. In a 2016 meeting where he was shown an AI animation demo, Miyazaki said, “I am utterly disgusted. If you really want to make creepy stuff you can go ahead and do it. I would never wish to incorporate this technology into my work at all.” He also said, “I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”
More recently, Hollywood actors and other creatives have voiced concerns about efforts by OpenAI and other artificial-intelligence companies to “weaken or eliminate” protections on copyrighted works for training AI systems. In comments filed with the Trump administration‘s Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this month, more than 400 filmmakers, actors, musicians and others objected to what they said was lobbying by OpenAI and Google “for a special government exemption so they can freely exploit America’s creative and knowledge industries.”
On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the New York Times, along with other newspaper groups, are allowed to proceed with a copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in which they seek to force the AI companies to stop using their content to train chatbots like ChatGPT. In a statement, OpenAI said it looked forward to “making it clear that we build our AI models using publicly available data, in a manner grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation.”
In what may aid lakhs of snakebite victims, Indian scientists have come out with a novel diagnostic technique to determine if a person has been bitten by a venomous snake or a non-venomous one within four hours of the snakebite.
The smartphone-based method has been customised to identify the bites of the Indian cobra, Common krait, Russell’s viper, Saw-scaled viper and Indian monocled cobra – the five reptiles that are responsible for the majority of snakebite-related morbidity and mortality in India.
Currently, doctors or health attendants at rural clinics depend on their experience to determine if a particular snakebite has been caused by a poisonous snake. There is no commercial kit available for such detection.
Developed by researchers at Tezpur University and the Institute of Advanced Study in Science and Technology, Guwahati, the new technique involves a minor blood test that can not only tell if the victim was bitten by a poisonous snake but also an approximate amount of venom in the body to help doctors fix the anti-venom dose.
“It takes about 10-15 minutes to get the results. The test can be carried out within four hours of a snakebite,” Ashish Kumar Mukherjee, principal investigator and director of the Guwahati Institute, told DH.
There are two types of snakebites – wet and dry. A snakebite from a venomous serpent can be classified as a ‘wet bite,’ which may cause minor local symptoms to severe systemic toxicity and perhaps death, or a ‘dry bite,’ which presents no local or systemic indications of envenomation.
A recent Million Death Study commissioned by the Registrar General of India has estimated that there are around 46,900 deaths per year due to venomous snakebites in India, though scientists are of the opinion that the magnitude may be far greater.
Indian peninsula hosts 52 deadly species of snakes, but the majority of the snakebites are caused by the Indian cobra (Naja naja), Common krait (Bungarus caeruleus), Russell’s viper (Daboia russelii russelii), and Saw-scaled viper (Echis carinatus) that are collectively referred to as the ‘Big Four.’
The test is also applicable for a fifth snake, the Indian monocled cobra (Naja kaouthia), that is common in the North East.
The detection is done using a colourimetric assay – the colour of the reagent changes from burgundy to blue. An analysis of the image taken by smartphone cameras can also reveal the quantity of venom in the body.
The scientists have filed a patent on the novel technique and are planning to develop an easy-to-use application for smartphones.
Many users shared their image-generation experience on the internet. (Photo Credits: X)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has announced a major update to ChatGPT’s image-generation capabilities after more than a year. With the update, ChatGPT can now natively create and modify images with the help of the company’s GPT-4o model. Prior to this, GPT-4o has been only able to generate and edit text and not images. With the update available now, many users, however, reported that the image generator was unable to draw “sexy women” due to the company’s content policy—something that Altman has also acknowledged.
One of the users shared their experience on the X, which caught the CEO’s attention, seemingly due to the AI-generated stud-muffin in the post. As the user asked the app to create a “sexy woman” and a “sexy man”, he only got a response for the latter. “I couldn’t generate that image because it goes against our content policy,” the AI responded, as shown in the screenshot on X.
The user further went for a detailed reason, for which ChatGPT stated, “The difference comes down to context and how content is interpreted in terms of sexualization and objectification, especially when it involves women. When generating images of men with terms like ‘sexy,’ it’s usually interpreted more in terms of confidence, physique, or fashion — things that tend to be considered stylistic or artistic. With women, they can be more easily interpreted as overly sexual or objectifying, which is where the content policy draws the line.”
In a direct response to the X user, Sam Altman stated that it was a bug and that the company would fix it. “Hguy though!” he added.
The logo of Meta is seen at the entrance of the company’s temporary stand ahead of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland January 18, 2025. REUTERS/Yves Herman/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Italy has handed tax demands to Meta (META.O), opens new tab, X and LinkedIn in an unprecedented VAT claim against the U.S. tech giants that could have repercussions across the European Union, four sources with direct knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.
While it has been reported that Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta and Elon Musk’s social network X were under investigation for alleged tax fraud, it had not been disclosed that Microsoft’s (MSFT.O), opens new tab LinkedIn unit was also caught up in Italy’s pilot VAT case for the tech sector in Europe.
Italy is claiming 887.6 million euros ($961 million) from Meta, 12.5 million euros from X and around 140 million euros from LinkedIn.
These figures refer to the entire period under investigation, from 2015-2016 to 2021-2022, depending on the case, but the tax assessment notice now served only covers the years for which claims are set to expire, namely 2015 and 2016.
The issue is likely to be particularly sensitive given trade tensions between the EU and the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has a good relationship with Musk, who is keen to expand his Starlink communications business in Italy. PILOT CASE
The case is significant as it hinges on the way social networks provide access to their services.
Italian tax authorities argue that user registrations with X, LinkedIn and Meta platforms should be seen as taxable transactions as they imply the exchange of a membership account in return for a user’s personal data.
In a statement to Reuters, Meta said it would not comment on the details of this case, reiterating that it had cooperated “fully with the authorities on our obligations under EU and local law.”
It added that the company “strongly disagrees with the idea that providing access to online platforms to users should be subject to VAT.”
LinkedIn said it had “nothing to share at this time.”
X did not respond to a request for comment from Reuters.
The case could ultimately be extended to the 27-nation European Union since VAT is a harmonised EU tax, and force a rethink of the business model of the tech industry.
According to several experts consulted by Reuters, the Italian approach could affect almost all companies, from airlines to supermarkets to publishers, who link access to free services on their sites to users’ acceptance of profiling cookies. WHAT’S NEXT?
Italy has actively pursued tech companies over tax. Google in February agreed to pay 326 million euros to settle a tax claim relating to the period between 2015 and 2019.
But this is the first time in such cases that a settlement agreement has not been reached, and that the Revenue Agency has handed the companies a formal assessment notice, the last step before the start of a fully-fledged judicial tax dispute.
This happened, according to three of the sources, because the case was not simply about agreeing a settlement figure but accepting a broader approach.
U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday he would be willing to reduce tariffs on China to get a deal done with TikTok’s Chinese parent ByteDance to sell the short video app used by 170 million Americans.
ByteDance has an April 5 deadline to find a non-Chinese buyer for TikTok or face a U.S. ban on national security grounds that was supposed to have taken effect in January under a 2024 law.
The law is the result of concern in Washington that TikTok’s ownership by ByteDance makes it beholden to the Chinese government and that Beijing could use the app to conduct influence operations against the United States and collect data on Americans.Trump said he was willing to extend the April deadline if an agreement over the social media app was not reached.
He acknowledged the role China will play to get any deal done, including giving its approval, saying “maybe I’ll give them a little reduction in tariffs or something to get it done,” Trump told reporters.
TikTok did not immediately comment.
Trump’s comment suggests the sale of TikTok’s is a priority for his administration and important enough to use tariffs as a bargaining chip with Beijing.
In February and earlier this month, Trump added levies totaling 20% to existing tariffs on all imports from China.
TikTok app logo is seen in this illustration taken, August 22, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Getting China to agree to any deal to give up control of a business worth tens of billions of dollars has always been the biggest sticking point to getting any agreement finalized. Trump has used tariffs as a bargaining chip in the TikTok negotiations in the past.
On January 20, his first day in office, he warned that he could impose tariffs on China if Beijing failed to approve a U.S. deal with TikTok.
Vice President JD Vance has said he expects the general terms of an agreement that resolves the ownership of the social media platform to be reached by April 5.
Reuters reported last week that White House-led talks among investors are coalescing around a plan for the biggest non-Chinese backers of ByteDance to increase their stakes and acquire the video app’s U.S. operations, according to two sources familiar with the discussions.
The question has generated controversy among scientists.
(Art: The New York Times/Shira Inbar)
Over the last decade or so, research has revealed a clear pattern: People tend to overeat ultraprocessed foods. This could be one reason they’re linked with weight gain and obesity.
What isn’t clear is why we are so prone to overeating them.
Dr Robert Califf, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, offered one hypothesis at a US Senate hearing in December: “These foods are probably addictive,” he said, adding that they may act on the same brain pathways involved with addiction to opioids and other drugs.
As recently as eight years ago, such a concept was highly controversial, said Ashley Gearhardt, an addiction researcher at the University of Michigan. She described being heckled onstage at a scientific conference in 2017 for suggesting that some ultraprocessed foods may act as addictive substances. Now, she said, more researchers have started coming around to the idea.
But a major question remains: How do you prove it?
A recent study, the largest of its kind, took a big swing at this conundrum. But its results raised more questions than answers. Here’s what we know – and don’t know – so far.
CAN FOOD GIVE YOU A DRUGLIKE DOPAMINE HIT?
One way researchers study addiction is by looking at the brain levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine – a natural signal that helps you learn to seek what you need to survive. When you eat, your brain releases the chemical, said Dana Small, a cognitive neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal. If it’s a food you know and like, she said, just thinking about or seeing it can trigger an increase in dopamine, reminding you that it’s a good source of fuel and nudging you to eat more.
Addictive drugs co-opt this survival system by triggering a larger surge in dopamine and driving people to use them again and again, Dr Small said.
Researchers have wondered if ultraprocessed foods – especially those high in fat and sugar – cause a similarly outsized dopamine response, suggesting they could be addictive in the same way as drugs. Past research in rodents and humans has supported this idea, but the human experiments have been very small.
In the new study, scientists at the National Institutes of Health measured how people’s brains responded to drinking a high-fat ultraprocessed milkshake.
They found that while more than half of the participants had a small dopamine increase after drinking the shake, the rest had a decrease or no change. On average, the researchers concluded, there was no statistical difference in brain dopamine levels before and after drinking the shake.
The authors wrote that this result runs counter to the idea that ultraprocessed foods drive overeating by causing dopamine surges in the brain similar to those of addictive drugs.
But there’s an important caveat: The study measured brain dopamine levels with PET scans, which are commonly used in drug addiction research. These scans can’t measure small dopamine changes very well; it’s likely that the milkshakes did elicit dopamine responses in more participants, and the scans just couldn’t detect them, Kevin Hall and Valerie Darcey, the study’s lead authors who are nutrition and metabolism scientists at the NIH, wrote in a statement to The New York Times.
A few drugs, like cocaine and amphetamines, trigger dramatic surges in dopamine that are obvious on PET scans, but for others, like nicotine or opioids, the dopamine responses are smaller and not always detectable, said Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, a neuroscientist at Virginia Tech who was not involved with the study.
ULTRAPROCESSED FOODS ESPECIALLY PLEASURABLE
Dr Small was most interested in the new study’s participants who did have small increases in dopamine after drinking the shakes. These “responders,” as the study authors called them, rated the shakes as being more pleasant and said they wanted more of them compared with the other participants.
Several days after the brain scans, the researchers found that the “responders” ate nearly twice as many Chips Ahoy! cookies at a buffet lunch as the other participants.
This tracks with past research on nicotine and opioids, DrGearhardt said. People who have measurable dopamine surges after using the drugs tend to find them more pleasurable and want them more than those who don’t.
Outside researchers praised the new study for its size and rigor. But they and the lead authors said that although the main result seems to suggest that ultraprocessed foods may not be addictive, it’s not the end of the story on that question. “It’s just more complicated than we originally thought,” the study authors wrote.
A possibility being discussed involved a relationship between Reliance Jio and OpenAI to distribute ChatGPT, according to The Information, which cited two sources familiar with the matter.
Representative image for AI. Credit: Reuters Photo
A possibility being discussed involved a relationship between Reliance Jio and OpenAI to distribute ChatGPT, according to The Information, which cited two sources familiar with the matter.A possibility being discussed involved a relationship between Reliance Jio and OpenAI to distribute ChatGPT, according to The Information, which cited two sources familiar with the matter.
A possibility being discussed involved a relationship between Reliance Jio and OpenAI to distribute ChatGPT, according to The Information, which cited two sources familiar with the matter.
OpenAI also discussed with employees cutting the ChatGPT subscription price to as low as several dollars instead of $20 a month, according to the report, which added that it is not clear if OpenAI has discussed the idea of price reduction with Reliance.
Reliance has discussed selling OpenAI’s models to its enterprise customers through an application programming interface or API, The Information report added, saying that the Mukesh Ambani-led conglomerate also discussed hosting and running OpenAI models locally, so the data of local customers can be kept within India.
Chandrayaan-3’s Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE) achieved unprecedented in-situ temperature measurements at the Moon’s south pole, revealing higher than expected surface temperatures. These findings are crucial for understanding lunar thermophysics and potential water-ice deposits, which are essential for human habitat and exploration. The research, bridging critical knowledge gaps, was published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment.
The search for water-ice on the Moon could take a significant step forward with new findings from Chandrayaan-3’s Chandra’s Surface Thermophysical Experiment (ChaSTE). The experiment, conducted by the Vikram lander, has provided unprecedented in-situ temperature measurements from a high-latitude lunar regolith (soil), shedding new light on the Moon’s thermal environment and the potential for water-ice deposits.
“Water-ice prospecting is a crucial step in unlocking the Moon’s potential for supporting human habitat and furthering exploration. Lunar temperatures not only dictate water-ice, but also drive other aspects of science and exploration,” K Durga Prasad from Isro’s Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), told TOI.
The new findings from the team, including Prasad, Chandan Kumar, Ambily G, Kalyana Reddy P, Sanjeev K Mishra, Janmejay Kumar, Dinakar Prasad Vajja, Aasik, Tinkal Ladiya, Arpit Patel, Murty SVS, Amitabh and PRL director Anil Bharadwaj, have been published in the journal Nature Communications Earth & Environment. The research led by the PRL team comprises people from multiple Isro centres.
ChaSTE measured surface temperatures of up to 355K (82°C) at the lunar south pole region — 25K higher than the expected 330K. Scientists attribute this increase to the lander’s placement on a sunward-facing local slope of 6°.
“This discovery highlights how small-scale topographical variations at high latitudes can significantly alter surface temperatures, a phenomenon less pronounced in equatorial regions,” Prasad said.
He pointed out that prior to the Chandrayaan-3 mission, global lunar temperatures were mapped through remote sensing, but direct in-situ measurements were limited to the Apollo 15 and 17 missions, which primarily focused on equatorial regions. ChaSTE’s new data bridges this critical knowledge gap, offering insights into the Moon’s thermal behaviour at high latitudes.
Stable conditions for Water-Ice
Using numerical models based on ChaSTE’s observations, the team suggests that larger poleward-facing slopes exceeding 14° may provide stable conditions for water-ice deposits. These areas receive less solar radiation and thus maintain lower temperatures, making them more viable for future lunar exploration and potential human habitation.
“Unlike the extreme polar regions, these sites offer a technically less challenging yet scientifically valuable alternative for resource prospecting… Understanding lunar thermophysics is essential for multiple reasons, including mission safety, resource exploration, and long-term habitat establishment,” Prasad said.
The low thermal conductivity of the lunar regolith acts as a blanket, causing significant temperature variations within just a few centimetres of the surface. “By measuring these temperature gradients, ChaSTE has not only refined our understanding of lunar surface conductivity but has also provided crucial data for future missions seeking sustainable exploration solutions,” he said.
As space agencies around the world set their sights on the Moon for long-term missions, findings from ChaSTE reinforce the importance of selecting optimal landing and resource extraction sites. These discoveries could play a vital role in shaping future lunar colonisation efforts and the potential extraction of vital resources, such as water-ice, to support human exploration beyond Earth.
President Donald Trump on Friday said he was unaware that NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore had not received overtime pay for their unexpectedly extended stay at the International Space Station (ISS). Donald Trump hinted that he might cover the overtime costs for the astronauts, who recently returned from space after staying on the ISS for nine months.
NASA astronaut Sunita Williams is helped out of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft onboard the SpaceX recovery ship MEGAN after she, NASA astronaut Nick Hague, and Butch Wilmore, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov landed in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, March 19, 2025. (NASA)
During a press briefing at the White House, Fox News’ Peter Doocy informed Donald Trump that the astronauts hadn’t received overtime pay for their extended stay at the space station, despite being entitled to $5 per day—totalling $1,430 for 286 days, The Hill reported.
“Nobody ever mentioned this to me. If I have to, I will pay it out of my own pocket? OK, I will get it for them,” Trump said.
“Is that all? That’s not a lot. For what they had to go through,” the US president added.
Trump then thanked SpaceX’s Elon Musk for returning the astronauts – Sunita Williams, Butch Wilmore, Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. They returned to Earth early on Wednesday onboard SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which splashed down in the sea off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida.
Watch the video here:
REPORTER: “The two astronauts that you just helped save from space, they didn’t get any overtime pay…”
TRUMP: “If I have to, I’ll pay it out of my own pocket… and I want to thank Elon by the way because think if we don’t have him.” pic.twitter.com/Ev5LWkQacB
For Williams and Wilmore, test pilots for Boeing’s new Starliner capsule, an eight-day mission stretched to more than nine months as a series of helium leaks and thruster failures deemed their spacecraft unsafe. The spacecraft returned without them in September last year.
“Think of, if we don’t have him (Musk). You know, there’s only so long — even though they are in the capsule up there — the body starts to deteriorate after nine or 10 months,” Trump said at the briefing.
A humanoid robot developed by Ex-Robots winks at the World Robot Conference in Beijing, China August 21, 2024. REUTERS/Florence Lo/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Nvidia (NVDA.O) CEO Jensen Huang believes humanoid robots are less than five years away from seeing wide use in manufacturing facilities.
Huang on Tuesday gave a keynote address in front of a packed hockey stadium during the nearly $3 trillion company’s annual developer conference in San Jose, California.
Huang unveiled software tools that he said would help humanoid robots navigate the world more easily.
Speaking to a group of journalists after the speech, Huang was asked what signs would show that AI had become ubiquitous.
Among other answers, Huang said it may be “when, literally, humanoid robots are wandering around, which is not five years away. This is not five-years-away problem, this is a few-years-away problem.”
The manufacturing industry would likely adopt humanoid robots first because that industry has well-defined tasks that robots can handle in a controlled environment, he said.
“I think it ought to go to factories first. And the reason for that is because the domain is much more guard-railed, and the use case is much more specific,” Huang said.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote for the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) at the SAP Center in San Jose, California, U.S. March 18, 2025. REUTERS/Brittany Hosea-Small Purchase Licensing Rights
General Motors (GM.N), will use artificial intelligence chips and software from Nvidia (NVDA.O), to develop autonomous vehicle technology for its vehicles and improve workflow at its factories, the companies said on Tuesday.
Traditional automakers have struggled to commercialize autonomous technology that has been more challenging and expensive than expected but has emerged as a way to boost sales and rake in subscription revenue from motorists.
The companies plan to work together to build AI systems using Nvidia’s platforms to train AI manufacturing models for factory planning. GM also plans to use Nvidia’s autonomous tech, for future advanced driver-assistance systems.
Asked about financial terms, a GM spokesperson said the companies have a strategic collaboration on using AI in manufacturing and GM will buy chips from Nvidia for driver-assistance technology.
A slew of automakers and suppliers, including Toyota (7203.T), and Hyundai (005380.KS), have partnered this year with Nvidia to develop their autonomous driving capabilities in the face of competition from Tesla (TSLA.O), which uses proprietary technology to run its Full Self-Driving system.
GM used Nvidia’s chips to power its self-driving Cruise robotaxis. But it started developing custom chips in-house to reduce cost and dependency before it shut down the robotaxi business last year to focus instead on AV technology for personal vehicles.
GM has forecast that its Super Cruise driver-assistance technology would earn about $2 billion in total annual revenue within five years. Super Cruise is free for three years, after which customers are offered subscriptions for $25 a month or $250 a year.
The image was taken in Mare Crisium, a vast lunar basin in the Moon’s northern hemisphere.
Named after a rare species of firefly, Blue Ghost is a compact yet sturdy four-legged lander designed for extra stability. (X/Firefly_Space)
Texas-based private aerospace firm Firefly Aerospace has unveiled a stunning image from the Moon’s surface, captured by its Blue Ghost lunar lander.
The image showcases the rare ‘diamond ring’ effect—a celestial phenomenon created when sunlight streams through lunar valleys during an eclipse.
Firefly Aerospace’s official X account posted the breathtaking photo on March 14, writing, “#BlueGhost got her first diamond ring! Captured at our landing site in the Moon’s Mare Crisium around 3:30 am CDT, the photo shows the sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth. Hope to have more shots to share soon! #BGM1.”
The image was taken in Mare Crisium, a vast lunar basin in the Moon’s northern hemisphere, where Blue Ghost successfully landed as part of its first mission, BGM1, on March 2.
The landing was a major milestone for the startup Firefly and the second by a commercial company after Houston-based Intuitive Machines Inc. landed a robotic spacecraft intact on the lunar surface in 2024, according to Bloomberg.
Google and Meta are clashing over kids’ online safety, blaming each other while evading responsibility.
Google and Meta are clashing over kids’ online safety, blaming each other while evading responsibility.
The ongoing battle between Google and Meta over kids’ online safety has intensified, with both companies accusing each other of evading responsibility. Google recently called out Meta and other social media platforms for backing laws that shift the burden of age verification to app stores. Meanwhile, Meta argues that app stores should take more responsibility. Google Slams Meta
Google’s criticism comes after Utah became the first U.S. state to pass legislation requiring app stores like the Google Play Store and Apple App Store to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent before minors can download apps. While Meta, Snap, and X supported the new law, Google opposed it, calling it “concerning” and claiming it fails to address the actual risks children face online.
The company argues that the responsibility for age verification should fall on social media platforms, not app stores. Kareem Ghanem, Google’s public policy director, stated that the law allows platforms like Meta to escape accountability, despite being the primary space where children engage with online content.
Google’s Alternative Proposal
To counter Utah’s law, Google proposed its own framework, which suggests that age verification should only apply to specific apps deemed risky rather than all apps. It also wants app developers, not app stores, to determine what protections are necessary.
Critics argue that Google’s proposal is simply a way to avoid taking responsibility. By putting the decision in developers’ hands, Google creates a loophole that could allow unsafe apps to slip through the cracks. Apple, in its latest online safety report, raised concerns that this approach could lead to excessive data collection from children, as developers may ask for sensitive identification details to comply with regulations. Meta Shifts Blame to App Stores
Meta, on the other hand, sees things differently. The company welcomed Google’s acknowledgement that app stores can share age data with developers but questioned how Google would decide which apps need this information. Meta argues that the easiest way to protect minors is to put parents in control by making app stores responsible for obtaining parental consent.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully lifted off from Florida on Friday with four crew on board. It means Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams can finally come home after their eight-day mission was extended to nine months because of technical problems.
Watch lift-off of SpaceX rocket crew swap
A long-awaited rocket with a replacement crew for two stranded NASA astronauts has finally launched to the International Space Station (ISS).
US astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams have been stuck on the ISS for nine months, having had their journey home repeatedly pushed back.
The Crew-10 mission was initially scheduled to launch the replacement crew of four astronauts from Florida on Wednesday, but a last-minute issue with the rocket’s ground systems forced a delay.
NASA said on Thursday that SpaceX, headed and founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk, had resolved the issue – flushing a suspected pocket of air out of a hydraulic clamp arm – and that the weather was 95% favourable for a Friday launch.
The crew is now expected to arrive at the ISS on Saturday night. They are NASA’s Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, who are both military pilots, along with Japan’s Takuya Onishi and Russia’s Kirill Peskov, both former airline pilots.
They will spend the next six months at the space station, releasing Mr Wilmore and Ms Williams who have been on the ISS since June 2024.
The pair originally planned to go to space for just eight days but got stuck on the station after their Boeing Starliner spacecraft started experiencing problems.
The mission has become entangled in politics as Donald Trump and his adviser Elon Musk claimed – without evidence – that former President Joe Biden left the astronauts on the station for political reasons.
NASA said the two astronauts have had to remain on the ISS to maintain its minimum staffing level.
Spotify paid the music industry $10bn (£7.7bn) in 2024, which the streaming service said was the highest annual payment from any single retailer in history.
But the figures come as a heated debate continues about how much money artists and songwriters receive in royalties.
Earlier this year, several Grammy-nominated songwriters boycotted an awards event hosted by Spotify in a row about their streaming earnings.
As the new figures were published, a spokesperson for Spotify said the responsibility for distributing the money it pays lay with record labels and publishers.
The company said it pays royalties to rights holders, adding that it does not have “visibility” on where the money ultimately goes because earnings are based on artists’ individual contracts with their labels.
A spokesperson said: “Spotify does not pay artists or songwriters directly. We pay rights-holders, these are typically record labels, music publishers, collection societies.
“These rights-holders then pay artists and songwriters based on their individual agreements.”
The amount of money earned by artists will vary, but a committee of MPs heard in 2021 that the performer ultimately earns about 16% of a stream’s overall value.
That would mean an artist whose music generated £100,000 on Spotify might only receive £16,000 in royalty payments, before tax.
However, Spotify is not the only streaming service to generate revenue for artists, and many pop stars make more money from other income streams such as live tours.
Spotify said more than two-thirds of all music revenue goes “straight to the recording and publishing rights-holders”, and added that, like other streamers, Spotify does not pay on a per-stream basis.
The annual figures were published in Spotify’s Loud and Clear report – part of the company’s aim to provide transparency on how it pays the music industry.
The amount Spotify paid this year was an increase on the more than $9bn (£7bn) it handed over in 2023.
The report highlighted that the number of artists generating annual royalties between $1,000 (£770) and $10m had tripled since 2017.
Taylor Swift was named Spotify’s top artist globally with more than 26 billion streams, in the year she released her double-length album The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology.
Swift herself was part of the debate about streaming royalties in 2014, when she removed her music from Spotify as part of a boycott, eventually re-joining the platform in 2017.
Look, we all know AI has both its advantages (e.g. offering convenient assistance, quick content, and sometimes reliable information) and disadvantages (e.g. stealing our jobs and potentially replacing humans altogether, but I digress).
However, one facet of AI that many people overlook is its impact on our cognitive abilities. A recent paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University explored this exact concern.
“Used improperly, technologies can and do result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved,” the paper states.
The researchers added that “by mechanizing routine tasks and leaving exception-handling to the human user, you deprive the user of the routine opportunities to practice their judgment and strengthen their cognitive musculature, leaving them atrophied and unprepared when the exceptions do arise.”
work harder, not smarter?
In today’s fast-paced world, it’s hard to even find the time to sit and enjoy a simple cup of coffee in the morning. Working smarter rather than harder feels like the only way to keep up and survive sometimes.
Of course, we can cut back on our social media consumption and doomscrolling, but utilizing the tools we have in front of us, like AI, is merely a form of adapting. For example, rather than going to a library and scouring multiple books, spending hours searching for information and resources on a specific topic, we can now access that information almost immediately on the Internet. Could you imagine if that was never an option? I’d rather not.
Just because technology is convenient doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad. However, we do want to acknowledge the impact that it has on our brains and our cognitive abilities. This is especially true when it comes to generative AI, which is arguably the most concerning tech development in recent years.
The paper concluded: “While GenAI can improve worker efficiency, it can inhibit critical engagement with work and can potentially lead to long-term overreliance on the tool and diminished skill for independent problem-solving.”
Additionally, “Higher confidence in GenAI’s ability to perform a task is related to less critical thinking effort. When using GenAI tools, the effort invested in critical thinking shifts from information gathering to information verification; from problem-solving to AI response integration; and from task execution to task stewardship.”
This removes a bulk of our mind’s “dirty work,” so to speak—but is it forming a lazy habit for our brains?
AI could Be Making You Dumb, But That Might Be the Least of Your Worries
One can argue that outsourcing certain parts of our mental workload allows us to invest more energy into other things, like our creativity or emotional intelligence. However, overreliance on such technologies can, of course, have adverse effects.
The researchers concluded that their work “suggests that GenAI tools need to be designed to support knowledge workers’ critical thinking by addressing their awareness, motivation, and ability barriers.”
Look, if the world suddenly went totally off the grid and we had zero access to the Internet, we can pretty much guarantee we’d all be fucked—at least here in the US. But to be honest, our declining mental cognitive habits are really the least of our worries.
Nagarro is leading AI innovation by merging engineering excellence with responsible AI practices.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has undergone a massive transformation over the past decade, evolving from narrow applications in machine vision and predictive modelling to the more complex and versatile world of generative AI (GenAI). The recent popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and the emergence of similar GenAI models since then, has made this space more competitive.
Leading this shift is Nagarro, a global product engineering company that has been at the forefront of AI innovation. In conversations with Anurag Sahay, MD and Head of Data and AI at Nagarro, and Ananda Sengupta, MD, Head of Telecom at the company, we explored how Nagarro is differentiating itself in the competitive AI landscape, tackling challenges, and ensuring responsible AI development.
Evolution into Generative AI
Nagarro embarked on its AI journey in 2016, focusing primarily on machine vision, predictive modelling, and natural language processing (NLP). At the time, AI was largely task-specific, with models trained for singular purposes like object detection or predictive analytics. However, with the advent of GenAI, the paradigm shifted.
“Before GenAI, AI models were trained from scratch for each specific task. Today, we adapt large foundation models to achieve multiple business outcomes, which significantly changes the AI technology stack,” Sahay said.
Unlike traditional AI, which required separate models for different tasks, GenAI enables a single large model to perform multiple functions, increasing efficiency and reducing costs. The shift from “narrow AI” to “foundational AI” means that companies can now leverage fewer models for a wider range of applications.
At its core, Nagarro is a product engineering company, distinguishing itself from traditional IT services firms. “At Nagarro, we emphasise building scalable platforms that integrate AI seamlessly into products,” Sahay explained.
By combining AI with product engineering, Nagarro enhances user experiences, automates software development, and refines decision-making processes within businesses. The company believes in using AI not just as a tool, but as a core element in creating superior technology solutions.
The Cost and Efficiency Debate
A major industry concern is the cost of running large AI models. OpenAI, for example, has frequently highlighted the high expenses associated with maintaining its language models. However, efficiency breakthroughs are beginning to change this landscape.
Sengupta points to DeepSeek, an emerging AI company that has achieved a 575% profit-to-cost efficiency ratio. “These advancements prove that it’s possible to build and operate AI models more affordably,” he said, adding that competition from companies in China and other regions will further drive costs down.
One approach to making AI more cost-effective is developing smaller, specialised models that optimise efficiency without compromising performance. Nagarro recognises this trend and works with clients to implement the most practical solutions tailored to their business needs.
Nagarro’s AI expertise extends across various industries, with notable success stories highlighting the real-world impact of their technology. One such example is a sperm motility tester developed using machine vision. This innovation addresses a critical healthcare gap in regions where men are hesitant to seek medical help for fertility issues.
“We built the entire product for the client, incorporating machine vision, GenAI, and synthetic datasets,” said Sengupta. “It’s a perfect example of how AI can be used to solve real-world problems while maintaining user privacy.”
Ensuring Responsible and Ethical AI
With the growing concerns around AI ethics, particularly regarding data privacy and bias, Nagarro has taken a proactive stance on responsible AI development. “For us, responsible AI is not optional,” Sahay emphasises. “We work with enterprises that demand strict data protection and governance, and we’ve been practicing these principles long before GenAI became mainstream.”
Nagarro employs several key strategies to ensure ethical AI deployment:
Localisation: AI models are trained where the data resides, reducing risks associated with data movement.
Guardrails for AI Behavior: Boundaries are set to prevent AI models from engaging in undesirable behaviors.
Explainability & Observability: AI predictions are made transparent and auditable, which is crucial for industries like finance and healthcare.
Despite all this, one of the most debated topics in AI governance is accountability. If an AI system makes an incorrect decision, who bears the responsibility? Is it the technology provider or the enterprise using the system?
“Our goal is to build AI that operates within defined ethical boundaries, but we also assume responsibility alongside our clients,” Sengupta explained. “If something goes wrong, we work together to fix it rather than shifting the blame. Our success is directly tied to the success of our clients.”
What’s Next for Nagarro’s AI Initiatives?
Looking ahead, Nagarro is focused on leveraging AI to enhance its internal processes and increase efficiency in delivering AI-driven solutions. “Our CEO often says, ‘We should be able to eat our own dog food,’” Sengupta shared. “This means not just building AI for clients, but also transforming our own workflows to be more efficient and cost-effective.”
The Chandrayaan-3 mission achieved a soft landing near the Moon’s south pole on August 23, 2023.
Ice could be present at more locations right beneath the Moon’s surface at the poles than previously thought, a study of data collected by the Chandrayaan-3 mission has suggested.
Large, yet highly local, changes in surface temperatures can directly affect the forming of ice, and looking into these ice particles can reveal “different stories about their origin and history”, lead author, Durga Prasad Karanam, Faculty, Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad told PTI.
This can also tell us about how ice accumulated and moved through the Moon’s surface over time, which can provide insights into the natural satellite’s early geologic processes, he said. The findings are published in the journal Communications Earth and Environment.
The Chandrayaan-3 mission, launched by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) from Bengaluru, achieved a soft landing near the Moon’s south pole on August 23, 2023. The landing site was named the ‘Shiv Shakti Point’ three days later on August 26.
For this study, the researchers analysed temperatures measured at and to a depth of 10 centimetres beneath the lunar surface. Measurements were taken by the ‘ChaSTE’ probe on-board the Chandrayaan-3’s Vikram lander.
The lander touched down at the edge of the Moon’s south pole region, about 69 degrees south latitude.
At this landing site — “a Sun-facing slope angled at six degrees” — the authors found that temperatures peaked at about 82 degrees Celsius and dropped to -170 degrees Celsius in the night.
However, barely a metre away from the landing point — a flat surface — temperatures peaked at about 60 degrees Celsius.
“That slight slope resulted in an increased solar radiation at the ChaSTE penetration point,” Karanam said.
Further, the team developed a model of how slope angle can affect surface temperature at a high lunar latitude, such as the latitude of the landing site.
The model indicated that, for slopes facing away from the Sun and towards the Moon’s nearest pole, a slope inclined at an angle greater than 14 degrees may be cool enough for ice to accumulate close to the surface.
The slope conditions suggested by the model were found to be similar to those of landing points, proposed for NASA’s manned mission to the Moon’s south pole — the ‘Artemis’.
The authors, therefore, suggested that potentially, there could be multiple places on the Moon where ice can form and be accessed more easily than previously thought.
In response to PTI’s question on the chances of ice turning into water on the Moon, Karanam said, “Water in liquid form cannot exist on the lunar surface because of (an) ultra-high vacuum. Therefore, ice cannot transform into liquid, but would rather sublimate to vapour form.” “As of the present understanding, Moon might not have had habitable conditions in the past,” Karanam said.
However, ice is a potential resource for future on-site exploration and habitability of the Moon, and that more measurements, such as those from ChaSTE, are needed to gain a comprehensive picture, he added.
“Techniques and strategies need to be developed for extraction and usage of ice for long term sustainability on the Moon,” the lead author said.
The new hybrid robotic hand blends soft and rigid parts with touch-sensitive technology, allowing for precise and flexible object handling. (Credit: Sriramana Sankar/Johns Hopkins University)
When someone loses a hand, today’s prosthetic options force painful compromises. Rigid prosthetics offer strength but can’t handle delicate objects gently. Soft robotic alternatives provide gentleness but lack gripping power. And neither option lets users actually feel what they’re touching.
A breakthrough from Johns Hopkins University researchers aims to finally solve these problems. In a newly published study in Science Advances, the research team has developed what they’re calling a “natural biomimetic prosthetic hand” that blends rigid and soft materials while adding touch-sensing abilities based on human skin.
“The goal from the beginning has been to create a prosthetic hand that we model based on the human hand’s physical and sensing capabilities—a more natural prosthetic that functions and feels like a lost limb,” says lead study author Sriramana Sankar, a Johns Hopkins biomedical engineer, in a statement. “We want to give people with upper-limb loss the ability to safely and freely interact with their environment, to feel and hold their loved ones without concern of hurting them.”
Best of Both Worlds
Instead of choosing between rigid or soft designs, the research team took inspiration from human anatomy. Our hands combine rigid bone structures with soft tissues and joints, so why not do the same with prosthetics?
The Johns Hopkins team built a hand with a hard 3D-printed internal skeleton surrounded by soft, independently controlled joints made of silicone. But their biggest innovation might be the touch-sensing system built into the fingertips.
The researchers embedded three different types of sensors within the prosthetic fingertips to mimic how human skin works. Our skin contains specialized cells called mechanoreceptors that detect different aspects of touch, from light pressure to vibrations to skin stretching. The artificial version includes layers of sensors that work together to create a rich picture of whatever the hand is touching. The system converts touch data into patterns similar to the electrical signals our nerves would normally send to our brains.
Putting It to the Test
In lab tests, the hybrid hand showed remarkable abilities. When asked to identify 26 different textured surfaces, from smooth plates to various ridged patterns, it achieved 98.38% accuracy, far outperforming both purely soft robotic fingers (82.31%) and rigid prosthetic fingers (83.02%) tested with the same surfaces.
The hand was also tested with 15 everyday objects including stuffed toys, fruit, dishes, and water bottles. It correctly identified these items with 99.69% accuracy while handling them appropriately; gentle with delicate items, firm with heavier ones.
Perhaps most impressive was when the hand picked up a thin plastic cup filled with water using just three fingers without crushing or denting it, a task that would be nearly impossible for conventional prosthetics.
“We’re combining the strengths of both rigid and soft robotics to mimic the human hand,” says Sankar. “The human hand isn’t completely rigid or purely soft—it’s a hybrid system, with bones, soft joints, and tissue working together. That’s what we want our prosthetic hand to achieve. This is new territory for robotics and prosthetics.”
How It Works
The prosthetic uses electromyography (EMG), the same control method used in many modern prosthetic hands. EMG sensors detect electrical signals from remaining muscles in the user’s arm, allowing them to control the hand’s movements by intentionally flexing those muscles.
“This hybrid dexterity isn’t just essential for next-generation prostheses,” says study author Nitish Thakor, a Johns Hopkins biomedical engineering professor. “It’s what the robotic hands of the future need because they won’t just be handling large, heavy objects. They’ll need to work with delicate materials such as glass, fabric, or soft toys.”
A key benefit of the hybrid design is efficiency. It generates three times more gripping force than a purely soft robotic hand while needing only a quarter of the air pressure to operate. The hybrid hand produced 1.8 Newtons of force at just 7 psi (pounds per square inch), compared to 0.55 Newtons at 28 psi for a soft robotic hand.
Restoring the Sense of Touch
Beyond just improving grasping abilities, this technology might eventually restore the sensation of touch to prosthetic users. While the current study focused on demonstrating the hand’s physical capabilities, the researchers designed the system with sensory feedback in mind.
“If you’re holding a cup of coffee, how do you know you’re about to drop it? Your palm and fingertips send signals to your brain that the cup is slipping,” says Thakor. “Our system is neurally inspired—it models the hand’s touch receptors to produce nerve-like messages so the prosthetics’ ‘brain,’ or its computer, understands if something is hot or cold, soft or hard, or slipping from the grip.”
This technology builds on the lab’s previous work, which included creating the world’s first electronic “skin” with human-like pain sensing in 2018. While the system is designed to provide sensory feedback, it has not yet been tested on amputees to determine how effectively users perceive and respond to the touch signals.
Looking Forward
The current prototype’s 1.8 Newtons of gripping force, while an improvement over soft robotic hands, falls well short of a human finger’s capability (around 32 Newtons) or traditional rigid prosthetics (about 34 Newtons). It also relies on an air compressor to function, which would be impractical for everyday portable use.
For people who’ve lost hands, this research offers a glimpse of prosthetics that might one day feel like a genuine replacement that is able to handle both fragile and heavy objects, sense textures and shapes, and respond naturally to the user’s intentions. Prosthetic technology has long focused on looks and basic functionality, but this approach aims to restore what matters most: the hand’s remarkable ability to both act and feel.
We’ve all been there. You’re in a meeting, your phone buzzes with an Instagram notification, and suddenly your fingers itch to check it. But what’s actually happening inside your body during that moment of craving? A new study from Durham University has finally mapped the physiological rollercoaster we experience during those quick Instagram checks—and more importantly, what happens when we’re forced to resist the urge to scroll.
Checking social media has become engrained in the daily routines of billions worldwide. Despite the ubiquity of this behavior, surprisingly little was known about its immediate impact on our bodies and minds until now. Unlike previous research focusing on internet use broadly, this investigation zeroed in specifically on Instagram—one of the most visually-oriented and popular platforms among young adults.
Dr. Michael Wadsley and Dr. Niklas Ihssen’s study, titled “The psychophysiology of Instagram,” tracked what happens inside our bodies during typical Instagram sessions and subsequent periods when usage is halted. Their findings reveal a troubling pattern: brief Instagram engagement triggers reward-based arousal and deep attentional immersion, while stopping triggers stress responses—regardless of whether someone exhibits problematic social media habits or not.
In a commentary on The Conversation, Dr. Ihssen himself explains the significance: “What we found was that, relative to the news reading condition, scrolling away on Instagram led to a marked slowing of participants’ heart rate while, at the same time, increasing their sweating response.” He adds, “From other research we know that such a pattern of bodily responses shows that someone’s attention is fully absorbed by a highly significant or emotional stimulus in their environment – it’s a state of simultaneous excitement and deep immersion into something very meaningful to us.”
Instagram’s Insta-effects
The research team monitored heart rate, skin conductance (which measures emotional arousal through tiny changes in sweat gland activity), and subjective feelings across three 15-minute phases with 54 Instagram users. Participants first completed a baseline reading phase, followed by an Instagram browsing phase, and finally a phase where they were forced to stop using Instagram while receiving notifications.
During Instagram use, participants experienced a significant decrease in heart rate compared to baseline—a sign of deep attentional focus similar to what happens when we’re completely absorbed in a task. This heart rate slowdown occurred alongside increased skin conductance, indicating heightened pleasurable arousal—essentially, the reward center of the brain activating.
This combination reveals users enter a distinctive mental state characterized by profound immersive engagement while simultaneously experiencing heightened arousal—a potent mixture that likely contributes to social media’s powerful appeal.
“Importantly, from the control condition we knew that it was not just being on the phone or reading that caused this bodily response,” writes Dr. Ihssen. “So there seems to be something special about social media that can easily engross us.”
What Happens When We Stop Scrolling?
Perhaps most revealing was the body’s response when participants were forced to stop using Instagram, especially while receiving notifications they couldn’t check. Heart rates increased, skin conductance readings climbed even higher, and participants reported significant increases in stress, anxiety, and social media cravings.
“The most intriguing effect in our study happened when we interrupted participants at the end of their Instagram stint and asked them to go back to reading another news article,” Dr. Ihssen explains in his Conversation post. “Rather than snapping out of the excitement and returning to a calmer state, participants’ sweating response increased further, while heart rate also increased rather than slowed down further.”
These bodily changes paint a picture of what might be happening inside billions of people multiple times throughout their day: cycles of immersion, reward, and subsequent stress when usage stops. The fact that these responses occurred regardless of whether someone scored high or low on problematic social media use measures raises important questions about how these platforms affect us all.
What makes social media so compelling isn’t just its addictive design features but something more fundamental to human nature. “Our previous study shows that it is primarily the social aspect of social media that drives most people to use it so intensively,” writes Ihssen. “This also means that – in contrast to drugs – social media taps into basic human needs: we all want to belong and to be liked. So if we recognize the existence of ‘social media addiction’, we might also need to recognize a ‘friendship addiction.’”
Beyond ‘Addiction’: A Universal Response
With more parents, educators, doctors, and users themselves becoming aware of the impacts from social media “addiction,” this research offers valuable physiological evidence of its power. While stopping short of confirming social media addiction as a formal diagnosis (none currently exists), the study demonstrates that even brief social media sessions trigger measurable changes in our bodies similar to patterns seen in reward-seeking behaviors.
The discovery that Instagram usage creates a state comparable to what psychologists call “motivated attention”—a heightened focus toward emotionally significant information—helps explain why scrolling through Instagram can feel so absorbing. The platform delivers an endless stream of novel, emotionally significant, and personally relevant content—perfect for continuously capturing our attention.
The Stress-Relief Paradox
Interestingly, previous research found that using social media before or after stressful events can actually buffer physiological stress responses. The heart rate deceleration observed during Instagram use in this study helps explain this phenomenon—social media may temporarily induce a state of attentional immersion that counteracts stress-related physiological arousal.
However, this comes with a significant downside: when usage stops, users experience this powerful rebound of stress-related physiological activation and subjective distress. This creates a potentially problematic cycle—social media temporarily reduces stress, but stopping usage increases it, potentially driving people back to the platform for relief.
Most concerning are the implications for the billions of brief social media sessions occurring worldwide each day. If each session involves cycles of reward-driven immersion followed by stress when usage stops, we might be subjecting ourselves to numerous micro-cycles of physiological and psychological stress daily.
For the average Instagram user who checks the app ten times daily, this could mean ten daily cycles of immersion and withdrawal—each one potentially contributing to accumulated stress. Moreover, if each cycle reinforces the association between Instagram use and stress relief, it could strengthen habitual usage patterns over time.
Engineered for Engagement
The research methodology cleverly mimicked natural usage patterns by examining brief 15-minute windows—much closer to how people actually use these platforms in everyday life, with the average session lasting 10-20 minutes.
Even more ingenious was the cessation phase design, where participants received notifications on their phones but were prohibited from checking them—a common real-world scenario many people experience during meetings, classes, or other situations where checking social media is inappropriate or impossible.
A picture emerges of social media platforms expertly designed to exploit fundamental attentional and reward mechanisms in the human brain. The content—friends’ photos, entertaining videos, personally relevant information—naturally triggers attention and reward anticipation, creating a deeply immersive experience that temporarily reduces stress.
Scientists trying to bring back the woolly mammoth have created a woolly mouse.
Colossal Biosciences unveiled plans in 2021 to revive the woolly mammoth – and later the dodo bird – attracting investors, headlines and critics alike.
The Texas-based biotech company has since focused on identifying the key traits of extinct animals with the goal of genetically engineering them into living animals, according to chief executive Ben Lamm.
Alongside bringing back species that went extinct, the company hopes their work can be used to help with conservation efforts.
But other scientists have mixed views of their work and whether it will be helpful.
On Tuesday, Colossal Biosciences said its researchers had edited seven genes in mice embryos to create a mouse with long, thick, woolly hair.
They nicknamed the extra-furry rodent a “colossal woolly mouse.”
The company now plans to genetically modify Asian elephants to give them woolly mammoth traits – but critics have argued that this is different from actually bringing a species back from extinction.
“You’re not actually resurrecting anything – you’re not bringing back the ancient past,” said Christopher Preston, a wildlife and environment expert at the University of Montana, who was not involved in the research.
He added: “You might be able to alter the hair pattern of an Asian elephant or adapt it to the cold, but it’s not bringing back a woolly mammoth. It’s changing an Asian elephant.”
The results have not yet been published in a journal or vetted by independent scientists.
The feat “is technologically pretty cool,” said Vincent Lynch, a biologist at the University of Buffalo, who was not involved in the research.
Alongside the mouse being given different hair, in a press release, Colossal Biosciences said the rodent had also gained the woolly mammoth’s accelerated fat metabolism.
Both were said to be likely related to cold tolerance.
These genetic variations were already present in some living mice, the company’s chief scientist Beth Shapiro said, adding: “We put them all together in a single mouse.”
Computers are hungry beasts. They devour vast amounts of power, especially when writing data to memory—a process that traditionally uses electric currents and generates wasteful heat. But what if we could control magnetic information storage with voltage instead? This approach is gaining traction as researchers seek more energy-efficient computing solutions for our data-hungry world.
In a paper published in Nature Communications, researchers from The Autonomous University of Barcelona have unveiled a novel nanoscale magnetic state they’ve dubbed a “vortion” (short for magneto-ionic vortex). This innovative approach uses voltage-controlled ion movement to create and manipulate swirling magnetic patterns at the nanoscale, potentially transforming how computers store and process information.
“This is a so far unexplored object at the nanoscale,” explains Jordi Sort, an ICREA researcher in the UAB Department of Physics and director of the research, in a statement. “There is a great demand for controlling magnetic states at the nanoscale but, surprisingly, most of the research in magneto-ionics has so far focused on the study of films of continuous materials. If we look at the effects of ion displacement in discrete structures of nanometer dimensions, the ‘nanodots’ we have analyzed, we see that very interesting dynamically evolving spin configurations appear, which are unique to these types of structures.”
The research team, led by scientists from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has discovered a way to precisely control the magnetic properties of tiny dots of metal with extremely low power consumption. Their method allows for continuous, analog adjustment of magnetization—similar to turning a dimmer switch rather than flipping a binary on/off toggle—opening exciting possibilities for brain-inspired computing technologies.
How Vortions Work
At the heart of this innovation is a clever manipulation of nitrogen ions within specially engineered iron-cobalt-nitrogen (FeCoN) nanomagnets. By applying voltage, researchers can extract nitrogen ions from these tiny dots, transforming them from magnetically inert to magnetically active in controlled, gradual ways. This creates distinctive swirling magnetic patterns—vortices that can be precisely tuned and manipulated.
“With the ‘vortions’ we developed, we can have unprecedented control of magnetic properties such as magnetization, coercivity, remanence, anisotropy or the critical fields at which vortions are formed or annihilated. These are fundamental properties for storing information in magnetic memories, which we are now able to control and tune in an analog and reversible manner by a voltage-activated process with very low energy consumption,” explains Irena Spasojević, postdoctoral researcher in the UAB Department of Physics and first author of the paper.
Unlike traditional magnetic vortices, which are typically fixed in their properties once manufactured, these voltage-controlled vortions offer unprecedented flexibility. Their magnetic strength, stability, and behavior can all be adjusted after fabrication, eliminating the need for energy-intensive techniques like laser pulses or electrical currents to manipulate magnetic states.
“The voltage actuation procedure, instead of using electric current, prevents heating in devices such as laptops, servers and data centers, and it drastically reduces energy loss,” Spasojević adds.
The Brain-Computer Connection
Traditional computing relies on binary states—ones and zeros—but the human brain processes information in a much more nuanced, analog fashion with varying connection strengths between neurons. This new technology moves closer to brain-like computing by enabling analog states with continuous degrees of magnetization that can be adjusted with voltage, potentially leading to more efficient and sophisticated computing architectures.
By controlling how long voltage is applied, researchers can precisely adjust the thickness of the ferromagnetic layer, enabling transitions between different magnetic states—from nonmagnetic to single-domain to vortex states.
Researchers have shown that by precisely controlling the thickness of the voltage-generated magnetic layer, the magnetic state of the material can be varied at will, in a controlled and reversible manner, between a non-magnetic state, a state with a uniform magnetic orientation (such as that found in a magnet), and the new magneto-ionic vortex state.
From Lab to Applications
“We envision, for example, the integration of reconfigurable magneto-ionic vortices in neural networks as dynamic synapses, capable of mimicking the behavior of biological synapses,” Sort explains.
In the brain, the connections between neurons, the synapses, have different weights (intensities) that adapt dynamically according to the activity and learning process. Similarly, “vortions” could provide tuneable neuronal synaptic weights, reflected in reconfigurable magnetization or anisotropy values, for brain-inspired spintronic devices.
“The activity of biological neurons and synapses is also controlled by electrical signals and ion migration, analogous to our magneto-ionic units,” says Spasojević.
In current neuromorphic systems, one challenging aspect is creating and adjusting synaptic weights—the strength of connections between artificial neurons. Vortions could serve this function, with their magnetization strength controlled by voltage to represent different connection strengths.
The energy efficiency of this approach is particularly noteworthy. Conventional methods for manipulating magnetic states often require substantial energy input through electrical currents or laser pulses. The voltage-based control of vortions consumes minimal power, aligning with the urgent need to reduce energy consumption in information technologies as data processing demands continue to grow.
Researchers believe that, besides their impact in brain-inspired devices, analog computing or multi-state data storage systems, vortions may have other potential applications, including medical therapy techniques, data security, magnetic spin computing devices, and the generation of spin waves.
In a world increasingly dominated by data-hungry technologies from artificial intelligence to the Internet of Things, innovations that increase computational efficiency while reducing energy consumption have never been more important. Voltage-controlled vortions may soon join the arsenal of technologies helping to meet these challenges, swirling their way into the future of computing with an energy-efficient spin.
Blue Ghost Mission has become the second commercial spaceship to land on the moonImage: NASA/Firefly Aerospace/AP Photo/picture alliance
A US private spacecraft achieved its first-ever uncrewed lunar landing on Sunday, marking the second commercial moon landing.
Firefly Aerospace’s lunar lander Blue Ghost touched down near an ancient volcanic vent on Mare Crisium, a large basin in the northeast corner of the moon’s Earth-facing side.
“We’re on the moon,” Mission Control reported, adding the lander was “stable.”
The mission is part of a NASA partnership with industry to cut costs and support the Artemis program, which strives to return astronauts to the moon.
“We’re going to be putting America first, we’re making America proud, we’re doing this for the US citizens,” said acting NASA director Janet Petro.
What do we know about the mission?
Blue Ghost was launched in mid-January from Florida, carrying 10 experiments from NASA to the lunar surface. The space agency paid $101 million (roughly €97.3 million) for the delivery, and $44 million more for the science.
The four-legged lunar lander is roughly the size of a compact car.
The lander is carrying a vacuum that would suck up moon dirt for analysis. There is also a drill on board that can measure temperature at depths of up to 10 feet (3 meters) below the surface.
The demos should run for roughly two weeks before lunar daytime is up and the lander shuts down.
The lander captured stunning footage of Earth and the moon along its journey.
It is due to capture high-definition imagery of a total eclipse on March 14, when Earth blocks the sun from the moon’s horizon. It will then record a lunar sunset on March 16, in an effort to provide insight into how dust levitates above the surface under solar influence.
Of course, we all need to be concerned about young people’s exposure to social media, and recent research adds another concern – a link to eating disorders.
A study published in Eating and Weight Disorders in September 2024 found that each additional hour of total screen time and social media use was associated with a greater incidence of fear of weight gain and self-worth tied to weight. Data came from more than 10,000 children, aged 9 to 14 years. With increases in screen time, the participants also showed increases in compensatory behaviors to prevent weight gain (such as compulsive over-exercising), binge eating, and distress with binge eating two years later. Both problematic social media and mobile phone use were associated with higher odds of all eating disorder symptoms.
The scientists concluded that greater total screen time, social media use, and problematic screen use are associated with more eating disorder symptoms in early adolescence. They suggested that healthcare providers consider assessing children for problematic levels of screen use, and for disordered eating with high screen use.
It shouldn’t be construed from these results that this concerning association between screen time and disordered eating is isolated to 9- to 14-year-olds. That’s simply the age group covered in this study.
An increase in screen time has also been linked to an increase in being the recipient of cyberbullying. A study in the International Journal of Eating Disorders, September 2023, showed cyberbullying victimization was also associated with worry about weight gain, self-worth tied to weight, inappropriate compensatory behavior to prevent weight gain, and distress with binge eating. Interestingly, the perpetrators of cyberbullying had the same associations with the same unhealthy behaviors.
This study involved the same group of children as the 2024 study, with the ages limited to 10—to 14-year-olds. The scientists also suggested that healthcare providers consider assessing for cyberbullying and eating disorder symptoms in early adolescence and providing anticipatory guidance to parents and adolescents.
Binge-watching and binge-scrolling may also influence binge eating, according to Dr. Jason Nagata, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California—San Francisco. His 2021 study in the International Journal of Eating Disorders showed that each additional hour of screen time per day was associated with higher odds of binge-eating disorder one year later. Data was collected on more than 11,000 children between the ages of 9 and 10.
What’s the connection?
The strong connection between social media and eating disorders is multifactorial, including comparisons, exposure to impossible body ideals, and the constant repetition of compulsive behaviors. It exposes teens to greater numbers of different ideas. That can be both good and bad. Obviously, not everyone has healthy ideas about food and body image. They can share dangerous behaviors and those can start to seem normal.
Some advertisements aim to make people feel bad about themselves, especially their appearance, and to make consumers believe that the marketers’ products will bring about favorable change. It isn’t just what teens see—they know that others can see them, whether they are being bullied or receiving compliments.
Some of the problematic content is difficult to spot because diet culture has become so normalized that negative content with significant impact passes under parents’ radar. Social media feeds with people who are trying to persuade others to lose weight can feature one body type that may be unhealthfully thin and out of reach.
Check your adolescents’ social feeds for a range of body types, or content not related to personal image, such as hobbies, travel, or experiences. Adding accounts with a diversity of bodies and experiences to a social media feed can be protective against eating disorders.
Singer Katy Perry performs during the opening ceremony of the Invictus Games, founded by Britain’s Prince Harry, at BC Place stadium in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada February 8, 2025. REUTERS/Chris Helgren/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Pop star Katy Perry and journalists Gayle King and Lauren Sanchez, who is also billionaire Jeff Bezos’ fiancée, are set to blast off into space on a Blue Origin rocket, marking the first all-female flight crew in more than six decades.
The New Shepard rocket, a 59-foot tall (18-meter) suborbital spacecraft, will carry the crew to the Kármán line, the internationally recognized boundary of space, Bezos-owned Blue Origin said in a statement.
Passengers will experience a few minutes of microgravity before returning to Earth via parachute-assisted landing in the West Texas desert.
NASA rocket scientist Aisha Bowe, bioastronautics researcher Amanda Nguyen and movie producer Kerianne Flynn will make up the rest of the crew.
The company has not disclosed a date for the mission.
“Missions like this can be an effective PR tactic to bring in the private money needed to reduce costs in the long run,” said Professor Ehud Behar, astrophysicist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.
“Ultimately, these investments also support the launch of scientific and commercial instruments into space as well – not just people.”
This is the 11th human flight for the rocket and its 31st overall. The last recorded all-female spaceflight was the 1963 solo mission of Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.
New Shepard’s first crewed flight in July 2021 carried Jeff Bezos and his brother Mark.
The rocket has since taken former NFL player Michael Strahan and Star Trek actor William Shatner, who became the oldest person in space at the age to 90.
The company’s giant New Glenn rocket blasted off from Florida last month on its first mission to space, an inaugural step into Earth’s orbit for Jeff Bezos’ space company as it aims to rival SpaceX in the satellite launch business.
The Deepseek logo is seen in this illustration taken Jan. 27, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
DeepSeek is looking to press home its advantage.
The Chinese startup triggered a $1 trillion-plus sell-off in global equities markets last month with a cut-price AI reasoning model that outperformed many Western competitors.
Now, the Hangzhou-based firm is accelerating the launch of the successor to January’s R1 model, according to three people familiar with the company.
Deepseek had planned to release R2 in early May but now wants it out as early as possible, two of them said, without providing specifics.
The company says it hopes the new model will produce better coding and be able to reason in languages beyond English. Details of the accelerated timeline for R2’s release have not been previously reported.
DeepSeek did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Rivals are still digesting the implications of R1, which was built with less-powerful Nvidia chips but is competitive with those developed at the costs of hundreds of billions of dollars by U.S. tech giants.
“The launch of DeepSeek’s R2 model could be a pivotal moment in the AI industry,” said Vijayasimha Alilughatta, chief operating officer of Indian tech services provider Zensar. DeepSeek’s success at creating cost-effective AI models “would likely spur companies worldwide to accelerate their own efforts … breaking the stranglehold of the few dominant players in the field,” he said.
R2 is likely to worry the U.S. government, which has identified leadership of AI as a national priority. Its release may further galvanize Chinese authorities and companies, dozens of which say they have started integrating DeepSeek models into their products.
Little is known about DeepSeek, whose founder Liang Wenfeng became a billionaire through his quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer. Liang, who was described by a former employer as “low-key and introverted,” has not spoken to any media since July 2024.
Reuters interviewed a dozen former employees, as well as quant fund professionals knowledgeable about the operations of DeepSeek and its parent company High-Flyer. It also reviewed state media articles, social-media posts from the companies and research papers dating back to 2019.
They told a story of a company that functioned more like a research lab than a for-profit enterprise and was unencumbered by the hierarchical traditions of China’s high-pressure tech industry, even as it became responsible for what many investors see as the latest breakthrough in AI.
DIFFERENT PATH
Liang was born in 1985 in a rural village in the southern province of Guangdong. He later obtained communication engineering degrees at the elite Zhejiang University.
One of his first jobs was running a research department at a smart imaging firm in Shanghai. His then-boss, Zhou Chaoen, told state media on Feb. 9 that Liang had hired prize-winning algorithm engineers and operated with a “flat management style.”
At DeepSeek and High-Flyer, Liang has similarly shunned the practices of Chinese tech giants known for rigid top-down management, low pay for young employees and “996” – working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week.
Liang opened his Beijing office within walking distance of Tsinghua University and Peking University, China’s two most prestigious education institutions. He regularly delved into technical details and was happy to work alongside Gen-Z interns and recent graduates that comprised the bulk of its workforce, according to two former employees. They also described usually working eight-hour days in a collaborative atmosphere.
“Liang gave us control and treated us as experts. He constantly asked questions and learned alongside us,” said 26-year-old researcher Benjamin Liu, who left the company in September. “DeepSeek allowed me to take ownership of critical parts of the pipeline, which was very exciting.”
Liang did not respond to questions sent via DeepSeek.
While Baidu and other Chinese tech giants were racing to build their consumer-facing versions of ChatGPT in 2023 and profit off of the global AI boom, Liang told Chinese media outlet Waves last year that he deliberately avoided spending heavily on app development, focusing instead on refining the AI model’s quality.
Both DeepSeek and High-Flyer are known for paying generously, according to three people familiar with its compensation practices. At High-Flyer, it is not uncommon for a senior data scientist to make 1.5 million yuan annually, while competitors rarely pay more than 800,000, said one of the people, a rival quant fund manager who knows Liang.
The largesse was funded by High-Flyer, which became one of China’s most successful quant funds and, even after a government crackdown on the sector, still manages tens of billions of yuan, according to two people in the industry.
COMPUTING POWER
DeepSeek’s success with a low-cost AI model is based on High-Flyer’s decade-long and substantial investment in research and computing power, three people said.
The quant fund was an earlier pioneer in AI trading and a top executive said in 2020 that High-Flyer was going “all in” on AI by re-investing 70% of its revenue, mostly into AI research.
High-Flyer spent 1.2 billion yuan on two supercomputing AI clusters in 2020 and 2021. The second cluster, Fire-Flyer II, was made up of around 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips, used for training AI models.
DeepSeek had not been established at that time, so the accumulation of computing power caught the attention of Chinese securities regulators, said a person with direct knowledge of officials’ thinking.
“Regulators wanted to know why they need so many chips?” the person said. “How they were going to use it? What kind of impact would that have on the market?”
Authorities decided not to intervene, in a move that would prove crucial for DeepSeek’s fortunes: the U.S. banned the export of A100 chips to China in 2022, at which point Fire-Flyer II was already in operation.
Beijing now celebrates DeepSeek, but has instructed it not to engage with the media without approval, according to a person familiar with Chinese official thinking.
Authorities had asked Liang to keep a low-profile because they were worried that too much hype in the media would draw unnecessary attention, the person said.
China’s cabinet and commerce ministry, as well as China’s securities regulator, did not respond to requests for comment.
As one of the few companies with a large A100 cluster, High-Flyer and DeepSeek were able to attract some of China’s best research talent, two former employees said.
“The key advantage of vast (computing) resources is that it allows for large-scale experimentation,” said Liu, the former employee.
Some Western AI entrepreneurs, like Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, have claimed that DeepSeek had as many as 50,000 higher-end Nvidia chips that are banned for export to China. He has not produced evidence for the allegation or responded to Reuters’ requests to provide proof.
DeepSeek has not responded to Wang’s claims. Two former employees attributed the company’s success to Liang’s focus on more cost-effective AI architecture.
The startup used techniques like Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) and multihead latent attention (MLA), which incur far lower computing costs, its research papers show.
The MoE technique divides an AI model into different areas of expertise and activates only those related to a query, as opposed to more common architectures that use the entire model.
MLA architecture allows a model to process different aspects of one piece of information simultaneously, helping it detect key details more effectively.
While competitors like France’s Mistral have developed models based on MoE, DeepSeek was the first firm to depend heavily on this architecture while achieving parity with more expensively built models.
DeepSeek’s pricing was 20 to 40 times cheaper than what OpenAI charged for equivalent models, analysts at Bernstein brokerage estimated in early February.
For now, Western and Chinese tech giants have signaled plans to continue heavy AI spending, but DeepSeek’s success with R1 and its earlier V3 model has prompted some to alter strategies.
OpenAI cut prices this month, while Google’s Gemini has introduced discounted tiers of access. Since R1’s launch, OpenAI has also released an O3-Mini model that relies on less computing power.
Adnan Masood of U.S. tech services provider UST told Reuters that his laboratory had run benchmarks that found R1 often used three times as many tokens, or units of data processed by the AI model, for reasoning as OpenAI’s scaled-down model.
STATE EMBRACE
Even before R1 gripped global attention, there were signs that DeepSeek had caught Beijing’s favor. In January, state media reported that Liang attended a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing as the designated representative of the AI sector, ahead of the leaders of better-known firms.
The subsequent fanfare over the cost competitiveness of its models has buoyed Beijing’s belief that it can out-innovate the U.S., with Chinese companies and government bodies embracing DeepSeek models at a pace that has not been offered to other firms.
At least 13 Chinese city governments and 10 state-owned energy companies say they have deployed DeepSeek into their systems, while tech giants Lenovo (0992.HK), opens new tab, Baidu (9888.HK), opens new tab and Tencent (0700.HK), opens new tab – owner of China’s largest social media app WeChat – have integrated DeepSeek’s models into their products.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Li “have signalled they endorse DeepSeek,” said Alfred Wu, an expert on Chinese policymaking at Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. “Now everyone just endorses it.”
The Chinese embrace comes as governments from South Korea to Italy remove DeepSeek from national app stores, citing privacy concerns.
NASA has issued a huge update on the “city-killer” asteroid hurtling in Earth’s direction – and the odds of a collision have changed drastically.
After being discovered in December, YR4 shot to the top of Nasa’s asteroid risk list – and was judged to have an alarming 1-in-32 chance of smashing into us.
The chance of YR4 smashing into Earth has been adjusted majorlyCredit: Getty
But the odds constantly changed as scientists analysed the rock – and have done again.
Nasa now believes YR4 has just a 1-in-26,000 chance of striking Earth – meaning there is a 99.9961 per cent chance the rock will sail on past.
It will still shoot by near Earth in 2028 – around 5 million miles away – and then again in December 2032, which was the approach causing such alarm.
However, scientists now think there will be 167,000 miles of clear sky between the rock and our planet – and no Christmas collision.
If YR4 – estimated between 40m and 90m wide – did strike Earth, it would pack a punch equivalent to eight billion kilos of TNT, scientists calculated.
It would blow a 1.2mile-across crater into the Earth’s crust, and a terrifying simulation showed what the impact might look like.
YR4 had been graded as level three on the Torino scale – the system used since 1999 to categorize potential Earth impact events.
This emergency level means: “A close encounter, meriting attention buy astronomers. Current calculations give a one per cent or greater chance of collision capable of localised destruction.”
However, the new, much lower chance of collision means YR4 slides back down to level zero.
Any event with a less than 1-in-1000 chance of occurring falls within this band.
Richard Binzel, Professor of Planetary Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who created the Torino scale, said: “The NASA JPL Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) now lists the 2024 YR4 impact probability as 0.00005 (0.005%) or 1-in-20,000 for its passage by Earth in 2032.
“That’s impact probability zero folks.”
Another part of the level three description says: “Most likely, new telescopic observations will lead to re-assignment to level zero.
“Attention by public and public officials is merited if the encounter is less than a decade away.”
So, YR4’s descent to level zero has conformed with the Torino scale’s predictions.
The odds for YR4 striking Earth began at 1-in-83, before steadily reducing to a trough of 1-in-32.
The projected odds have moved around as scientists gathered more data on the speeding asteroid.
The calculations mapping the rock’s path include a lot of mathematical uncertainty, but this is reduced as more data is collected – allowing for more accurate predictions.
Asteroid hunter David Rankin, of the Catalina Sky Survey, knew from the outset the odds of a collision would rise and then fall, and explained why the figures change.
He told Space.com: “Imagine holding a stick that is a few feet long. If you move the stick in your hand a fraction of an inch, you hardly notice any movement on the other end.
“Now imagine that stick is many millions of miles long. Moving your hand a fraction of an inch will cause dramatic changes on the other end.”
The near-certainty that YR4 will pass by without incident will push it out of public conversation, Binzel said, but there are some lessons to take away from the debacle.
He told the website: “As 2024 YR4 fades away from the news cycle, I think there is an overall context that is the most important takeaway news.
“An object the size of YR4 passes harmlessly through the Earth-moon neighbourhood as frequently as a few times per year.
“The YR4 episode is just the beginning for astronomers gaining the capability to see these objects before they come calling through our neck of the woods.”
He warned there will be future asteroids that, initially, will be calculated as having a high chance of smashing into Earth.
Binzel added: “But, just like YR4, with a little time and patient tracking, we will be able to rule out entirely any hazard.
People who block the internet from their smartphones spend more time on other activities that improve their wellbeing. Rob Dobi/Getty Images
If you order up coffee on a mobile app while scrolling your social feeds, or can’t stop watching videos and reading news articles on your phone at bedtime, listen up!
Researchers studied what happened when people agreed to block the internet from their smartphones for just two weeks. And turns out, 91% felt better after the break.
“What we found was that people had better mental health, better subjective well-being and better sustained attention,” says Adrian Ward, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin.
The researchers included 467 participants, ages 18 to 74, who agreed to the month-long study aimed at testing the theory that constant connection to everything, all the time, has unintended consequences.
At a time when more then 90% of Americans have a smartphone, we forget that having an internet-enabled supercomputer at our fingertips 24/7 is a new phenomenon.
Ward, who is 38, remembers a dial-up connection in his home as a kid. In those days, the internet lived in a room in your home. “You used it at specific times because you had limited minutes and had to make sure nobody else was using the phone line,” Ward recalls.
So, what would it be like to go back to those days? No social media scrolling, no mobile-app shopping, no streaming shows or media on your phone?
The researchers measured three different outcomes of well-being, mood and attention at the beginning, middle and end of the four-week study. While 91% of participants improved their scores in at least one category, 71% reported better mental health after the break, compared to before, and 73% reported better subjective well-being.
The participants completed a survey often used by doctors to assess symptoms of depression and anxiety. It includes questions such as: How often in the past week have you felt little interest or pleasure in doing things you typically enjoy? The participants’ responses pointed to a significant lift in mood.
One of the surprising findings is that the decrease in depressive symptoms was on par — or even greater than — reductions documented in studies of people taking antidepressant medications.
“The size of these effects are larger than we anticipated,” says the study’s first author, Noah Castelo, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta in Canada.
Of course for some people, medications and/or talk therapy are key to managing mental health, and the researchers are not suggesting less internet time is a replacement for that kind of care.
A break from the internet on their phones also improved participants’ attention spans, which was measured by a computer task. They tracked images that alternated between mountain scenes and cities. Prior research has shown that performance tends to drop off as people age, but to the researchers’ surprise, after the internet break, there was a significant boost in scores. “The effects on attention were about as large as if participants had become 10 years younger,” Castelo says.
It’s not clear how long-lasting the effect of less time online would be, but this study validates what has been found in observational studies. “It’s one of the first experiments that does provide causal evidence that reducing time spent on your phone has all these significant benefits,” Castelo said.
When the participants agreed to block the internet on their phones, they were permitted to continue to use laptops or iPads at work or home, and they could also continue to use their phones to talk or text. So, researchers weren’t sure if participants would swap phones for another form of screen time.
But, as it turns out, breaking the habit of scrolling on their phones led to significant changes in how they spent their time. And, interestingly, each day the break went on, the benefits increased, almost like a positive feedback loop.
“It’s not that you stop using the internet and magically you just feel better,” Ward says. What happened is that people spent more time engaged in healthy behaviors.
“People reported that they spent more time in nature, more time socializing, more time doing hobbies,” he explains. They also got more sleep and felt more socially connected to other people.
“I’m not surprised by the findings,” says Dr. Judith Joseph, a psychiatrist at New York University Langone Medical Center and the author of High Functioning: Overcome Hidden Depression and Reclaim Your Joy. She says surveys show that most people don’t want to be tethered to their devices.
“They know their phones are a problem, but they just can’t stop,” she says. And she says when they start to engage in behaviors such as those seen in study — more exercise, time outdoors, good sleep, more social interactions — it’s not surprising that they start to feel better.
“Helping people to retrain their brain to derive joy from healthy activities has an antidepressant effect,” she says, so she says the findings pointing to a decrease in symptoms of depression and anxiety makes sense.
“If [people] see this improvement in joy in such a short period of time, then that gives us hope,” she says, adding that simple changes can be beneficial.
Try it: Tips for scaling back your own smartphone use
During the study, many participants had to break the rules, just to accomplish things that their jobs or families required them to do, such as turning on a map app to navigate in the car or logging onto a Zoom meeting from their phone. It’s a reminder of how dependent we’ve become on our mobile devices.
It’s nearly impossible to go cold turkey, given the demands of our society. So what to do if you want to try this? “If we’re expected to be accessible at all moments, then how can we just decide that we’re going to disconnect?” Ward asks. It’s a societal struggle.
Here are a few ways to ease up on your screen time.
Take short breaks. Since most of us can’t turn off the internet and still function, Joseph recommends taking little breaks, beginning with baby steps. “If you can start with 30 minutes here, or 20 minutes there, try to see if you can increase these increments on a weekly basis,” she says
Consider a digital detox. Choose one day a week where you and your family power down, except what’s needed for communication. Or set a time, either at mealtime, or in the evenings when work is over, to connect face to face with family or friends, making a commitment to be “present” and in the moment.
Manage notification and add “friction.” Experts also advise turning off notifications and using apps to limit your time on certain social media. Some tools can help you reduce screen time by adding friction, i.e., making it just a little harder to start using whatever app you’re hooked to.
Try a dumb phone. If you’re really fed up and want to try something new, consider switching to a “boring” phone, like the old flip phones many of us used to rely on. That way you still have calling and texting (and some other tools, depending on the phone) but scrolling is a lot less compelling.
Bladder with prostate and stethoscope or phonedoscope. (Photo by Shidlovski on Shutterstock)
Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer for men living in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society. Because of poor reporting, most cases are under-reported until they reach more advanced states. A new at-home urine test developed by Michigan researchers aims to encourage more men to undergo diagnostic testing.
Testing for prostate cancer, while necessary, traditionally involves uncomfortable and invasive procedures. Current screening methods rely on blood tests, MRIs, and biopsies. Additionally, these diagnostic tools often overdiagnose low-grade cancers while struggling to accurately determine how aggressive a tumor might be.
A study published in The Journal of Urology validates a urine test called MyProstateScore 2.0 (MPS2) that searches for 18 different genes associated with prostate cancer. Some of these genes specifically indicate more aggressive forms of the disease.
Prostate cancers are normally scored based on the Gleason Grade or Grade Group. “Gleason 3+4=7,” also called Grade Group 2, are aggressive tumors. They are more likely to grow and cause harm to the body than non-aggressive prostate cancers rated as “Gleason 6” or Grade Group 1.
“Its primary benefit is that the test can accurately predict your probability of developing aggressive prostate cancer, putting both the patient and physician at ease,” says Dr. Ganesh Palapattu, the department chair of urology at Michigan Medicine and study co-author, in a statement.
The researchers noted that previous research had collected urine samples from a digital rectal exam, which would not be practical or comfortable for many people. “The process requires the prostate to be compressed, causing the release of cellular debris into a urine sample that the patient provides after the rectal exam,” explains Dr. Palapattu, who is also a professor of urology.
The new research examined whether the MPS2 test could detect cancer markers without this examination. Using urine samples from 266 men who did not undergo a rectal exam, researchers found the test could identify more than 92% of aggressive prostate cancers (Grade Group 2 or higher) while showing better accuracy than standard blood tests.
The study’s calculations suggest this approach could help 36-42% of men avoid unnecessary biopsies. For men who previously had a negative biopsy but still showed concerning PSA levels, the test could prevent 44-53% of repeat biopsies while maintaining high accuracy for detecting aggressive cancers.
It is also a cost-effective test compared to an MRI, and Dr. Palapattu says it has high potential as an at-home test.
A small group of 47 patients received both MPS2 testing and MRI scans. While this sample was limited, the results suggested the two methods might complement each other, with each test catching some significant cancers the other missed.
To confirm the findings, the team plans to repeat the study with a more diverse and numerous group of male participants. They are also looking to see how effective the urine test is at detecting low-state, non-aggressive prostate cancer.
“MPS2 could potentially improve the health of our patients by avoiding overdiagnosis and overtreatment and allowing us to focus on those who are most likely to have aggressive cancers,” Dr. Palapattu explains. MPS2 is currently available through Lynx Dx, a University of Michigan spin-off company.
Another threat to American teens has been identified: protein shakes, pre-workout concoctions and other supplements. These so-called muscle and body-building products are associated with muscle dysmorphia, according to a new study.
Led by Dr. Kyle Ganson, assistant professor in the Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work at the University of Toronto, the study included mainstream staples found in virtually any nutrition shop: whey protein powders, creatine monohydrate, pre-workout drinks, protein bars, amino acids/branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs), and weight/mass gainers. These products are legal, widely available, and heavily marketed to fitness enthusiasts of all ages.
Ganson previously headed the Canadian Study of Adolescent Health behaviors, designed to examine disordered eating, muscle-building behavior, body image and social health. The goal of the study was to develop research-informed recommendations for public health, healthcare, and policymaking experts to protect the health and well-being of Canada’s young people. Researchers analyzed reports of supplement use and symptoms of muscle dysmorphia in more than 2,700 participants, aged 16 to 30 years. Responses were elicited using the Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder Inventory.
Published last week in the journal PLOS Mental Health, the paper found the association was especially strong between supplements marketed for gaining weight or mass and symptoms of muscle dysmorphic disorder. The symptoms, such as excessive workout time and obsession with food intake increased along with the number of supplements an individual used.
The study also showed that younger people who may not use harmful anabolic steroids may be using other substances to treat their muscle dysmorphic disorder. Contributing to the problem is the belief that supplements are safe, which may not be true.
What is muscle dysmorphic disorder?
Muscle dysmorphia is a mental health condition in which an individual believes that their muscles are too small and underdeveloped. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th edition (DSM-5) places muscle dysmorphia in the obsessive-compulsive category.
As a result, people with the disorder obsess about increasing their muscle size, no matter the true state of their physique. A person of any size, even those with well-developed muscles, can have muscle dysmorphia. They fixate on diet and exercise for muscle building at the expense of important aspects of life, such as relationships, work, and education. They may exercise excessively, use dietary supplements to an extreme, and use anabolic steroids.
A 2022 study of more than 3,800 participants aged 11 to 19 years found that 1.4% of girls and 2.2% of boys experience muscle dysmorphia. There is no specific cause of the condition, but some potential contributors include cultural or media influence, low self-esteem, childhood bullying, social isolation, and loneliness.
Symptoms
There’s an extensive list of symptoms. Some of these include:
Excessive exercise, despite risk of injury or pain.
Sacrificing career, relationships, financial stability, and personal interests for exercise.
Fixation on food intake with rigid dietary rules.
Obsessing about or avoiding mirrors.
Using excessive dietary supplements marketed as muscle-building products.
Using anabolic steroids.
Risk Factors
Participants in sports that emphasize appearance are at greater risk of muscle dysmorphia, especially bodybuilders. Other factors include social anxiety, anorexia, and perfectionism. These mental health conditions are commonly associated with muscle dysmorphia:
Substance use disorder
Obsessive-compulsive disorder
Eating disorders
Mood disorders
Social anxiety disorder
Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
Diagnosis
Muscle dysmorphia is a subtype of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD), so assessment starts with focusing on BDD.
A healthcare professional asks a patient how they feel about their appearance, whether those feelings adversely affect their quality of life, and if they experience repetitive or compulsive thoughts and disorders.
If signs of BDD are present, the doctor may use the Muscle Dysmorphic Disorder Inventory (MDDI) to assess muscle dysmorphia symptoms. These are categorized into three groups: drive for size; appearance intolerance; and functional impairment.
Treatment
Treatment involves:
Psychotherapy: usually cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is a therapy technique that helps people find new ways to behave by changing their thought patterns. Therapy sessions focus on exploring and developing methods to deal with challenges and behavior in day-to-day life.
Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs): these are antidepressant medications like Prozac and Celexa.
Surgical treatment to alter the perceived imperfections is not effective and can worsen the symptoms of muscle dysmorphia.
If a person is showing signs of MD, they may benefit from seeing a healthcare provider who specializes in body image disorders or OCD.
People with BDD may have an increased risk of suicide. A study in 2021 suggests that extends to MD. If you have thoughts about suicide, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline 24 hours a day simply by dialing 988.
Volvo has teased its upcoming ES90 sedan in the international market. The Volvo ES90 will make its debut on March 5 integrating advanced core computing and AI-driven safety features. The new all-electric sedan, built on the SPA2 architecture, is designed to evolve through software updates enhancing performance and safety over time.
Volvo ES90: AI integration
The ES90 will feature a dual NVIDIA DRIVE AGX Orin configuration, providing substantial computing power. The Orin processor can handle up to 508 trillion operations per second (TOPS), supporting various functions such as AI-driven safety measures, sensor management and battery optimisation.
The ES90’s AI capabilities are expected to grow over time with its deep learning model expanding from 40 million to 200 million parameters through data collection and software development.
Volvo ES90: Safety
The ES90 incorporates Volvo’s Safe Space Technology, utilising lidar, radars, cameras and ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles and enhance safety. These systems work together to provide proactive safety measures such as collision avoidance and improved night-time detection.
A new nationwide study suggests that a young woman’s location may play a significant role in breast cancer risk, with geographic differences comparable in magnitude to genetic risk scores. The research, examining data from all 50 states over two decades, shows that early breast cancer rates in women under 40 vary significantly depending on where they live.
“Breast cancer incidence is increasing in U.S. women under 40, but until now, it was unknown if incidence trends varied by U.S. geographic region,” says Rebecca Kehm, PhD, assistant professor of Epidemiology at Columbia Mailman School and lead author of the study, in a statement.
The numbers tell a striking story. From 2001 to 2020, breast cancer rates in young women increased by more than half a percent each year in 21 states. However, only 12 of these states showed statistically significant increases. The five states with the highest early breast cancer rates had 32% more cases than the five states with the lowest rates—a difference comparable to established genetic risk measures.
Maryland, New York, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Connecticut had the highest early breast cancer rates. At the other end of the spectrum, Idaho, North Dakota, Arizona, Utah, and Wyoming had the lowest rates. Connecticut had about 40.8 cases per 100,000, while Wyoming reported 28.6 cases per 100,000.
Regional patterns emerged as well. The Western states, despite having the lowest overall rates, showed the fastest increase at about 0.76% per year. The Northeast maintained the highest total numbers and continued to see significant growth. Meanwhile, the South stood out as the only region where early breast cancer rates remained stable rather than rising between 2001 and 2020.
The study also found clear differences between urban and rural areas. Cities across all regions saw increases in early breast cancer rates. However, only the Northeast and West showed significant increases in their rural areas, suggesting that urban-rural differences play a role in these trends.
Race and ethnicity factored significantly into the geographic picture. Non-Hispanic Black women consistently showed the highest early breast cancer rates across all regions, ranging from 39.3 cases per 100,000 in the West to 44.3 per 100,000 in the South. Hispanic women had the lowest rates, varying from 25.8 per 100,000 in the Midwest to 32.6 per 100,000 in the Northeast.
“The increase in incidence we are seeing is alarming and cannot be explained by genetic factors alone,” notes Kehm. She also points out that these trends can’t be attributed to changes in screening practices, since women under 40 aren’t typically recommended for routine mammograms.
So what might explain these geographic differences? The researchers suggest several possibilities, including environmental factors like air pollution, differences in behaviors such as breastfeeding and alcohol consumption—an established breast cancer risk factor that varies by state policy—access to healthcare, and state-level policies, such as paid leave for new mothers.
“While the causes behind the rising incidence of early-onset breast cancer are not yet fully understood, studying how trends vary across different population subgroups can offer valuable insights and help generate hypotheses for future research,” says Mary Beth Terry, PhD, the study’s senior author.
WATCH the haunting moment the world’s first humanoid robot Protoclone – complete with muscles and bones – twitches and spasms into life.
The robot is a “clone” designed to look as human as possible – gristle, sinew and all – and its creators hope it’ll soon be lurking around our homes.
This is Protoclone – touted as the world’s first ‘bipedal, musculoskeletal android’Credit: clonerobotics
The tech start-up behind the creation, Clone Robotics, hail it as the world’s first “musculoskeletal android”, and released this disturbing footage of the bot jerking around like a half-dead puppet.
The video shows Protoclone hanging lifeless, head bowed, suspended from a trapeze.
Then, it begins to twitch into life with the legs kicking around.
You can even see the synthetic muscles contracting beneath the translucent skin.
Soon all four limbs are in motion, with the bot holding itself upright with remarkably human poise.
Spasmodic movements from different joints are demonstrated – including the ankles, neck, hips, knees and elbows.
Structures press through the skin to give the eerie impression of a rib cage and other bones.
The robotics company, operating out of Poland and the US, describes Protoclone V1 as “faceless” but otherwise “anatomically correct”.
The body is a mesh of over 1,000 synthetics muscles and 500 sensors.
It boasts a staggering 200 degrees of freedom, meaning it can make 200 independent movements.
The bot is marketed as an “android”, so it aims to look as human-like as possible – hence the horrific attention to detail.
Clone is going a step further than most robot manufacturers by aiming for “synthetic humans” which, if they pull it off, will be almost indistinguishable from real people.
Dhanush Radhakrishna, Clone co-founder, said on X that the launch of Protoclone is “ground zero for the age of androids”.
Their claim to have created the “world’s first” musculoskeletal robot is debatable, with other models – such as Tokyo JSK Lab’s 2017 Kengoro – recognised under that label.
However, Kengoro was intended as a research project, whereas Clone has its sights set on commercial, domestic androids placed in homes around the world.
Clone previously threw down the metallic gauntlet to Elon Musk, by suggesting their own robo-tech is superior to Tesla’s.
Earlier this month, Musk said: “The Tesla Optimus [Tesla’s robot model] hand is so sophisticated that it makes a Fabergé seem simple.”
Clone responded by saying: “The Hand of Clone has the same number of degrees of freedom and is just as fast or fast, but is:
The atmosphere of the exoplanet Tylos (or WASP-121b), a gaseous, giant planet located some 900 light-years away from Earth in the constellation Puppis, is seen in this illustration image released by the European Southern Observatory on February 18, 2025. The atmosphere of Tylos is divided into three layers. ESO/M. Kornmesser/Handout via REUTERS Purchase Licensing Rights
Astronomers for the first time have deciphered the three-dimensional structure of the atmosphere of a planet beyond our solar system, revealing three layers like a wedding cake on a ferociously hot gas planet that orbits close to a star bigger and hotter than our sun.
The researchers peered through the atmosphere of WASP-121b, a planet also called Tylos, by combining all four telescope units of the European Southern Observatory’s Chile-based Very Large Telescope, discerning a stratification of layers with different chemical compositions and intense winds.
Until now, researchers have been able to determine the atmospheric chemical composition for some planets outside our solar system – called exoplanets – but without mapping the vertical structure or how the chemical elements were distributed.
WASP-121b is an “ultra-hot Jupiter,” a class of large gas planets that orbit close to their host star, making them extremely hot. Its atmosphere is mainly composed of hydrogen and helium, like that of Jupiter, our solar system’s largest planet. But WASP-121b’s atmosphere is not like anything ever seen before.
The researchers differentiated three layers by looking for the presence of specific elements. WASP-121b’s bottom layer was characterized by the presence of iron – a metal in gaseous form because of the incredible heat of the atmosphere. Winds move gas from the planet’s eternal hot side to its cooler side.
The middle layer was characterized by the presence of sodium, with a jet stream blowing circularly around the planet at about 43,500 miles (70,000 km) per hour – stronger than any winds in our solar system. The upper layer was characterized based on its hydrogen, with some of this layer being lost into space.
“This structure has never been observed before and defies current predictions as to how atmospheres should behave,” said astronomer Julia Victoria Seidel of the European Southern Observatory and the Lagrange Laboratory at the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur in France, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Nature
The researchers also detected titanium in gaseous form in WASP-121b’s atmosphere. On Earth, neither iron nor titanium exist in the atmosphere because they are solid metal owing to our planet’s lower temperatures, relative to WASP-121b. Earth does have a sodium layer in the upper atmosphere.
“For me, the most exciting part of this study is that it operates at the very limits of what is possible with current telescopes and instruments,” said study co-author Bibiana Prinoth, a doctoral student in astronomy at Lund University in Sweden.
WASP-121b has roughly the same mass as Jupiter but twice the diameter, making it puffier. It is located about 900 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Puppis. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion km).
WASP-121b is tidally locked, meaning that one side of it perpetually faces its star and the other side faces away, like the moon is to Earth. The side facing the star has a temperature around 4,900 degrees Fahrenheit (2,700 degrees Celsius/3,000 degrees Kelvin). The other side is at about 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit (1,250 degrees Celsius/1,500 degrees Kelvin).
The planet orbits its star at about 2.5% of the distance of Earth to the sun. It is about a third closer to its star than our solar system’s innermost planet Mercury is to the sun – so close that it completes an orbit in 1.3 days.
Its host star, called WASP-121, is roughly 1-1/2 times the mass and diameter of the sun, and hotter.
Being able to make out the structure of an exoplanet’s atmosphere could be helpful as astronomers search for smaller rocky planets capable of harboring life.
“In the future, we will likely be able to provide similar observations for smaller and cooler planets and thus more similar to Earth,” Prinoth said, especially with the European Southern Observatory’s Extremely Large Telescope due to be completed in Chile by the end of the decade as the world’s largest optical telescope.
Multiple iPhone 16e phones with the new C1 cellular modem are stress tested at an Apple lab, where hundreds of devices go through thousands of hours of continuous, repetitive testing, in Sunnyvale, California, U.S., February 18, 2025. REUTERS/Stephen Nellis Purchase Licensing Rights
Apple (AAPL.O) launched on Wednesday a budget-minded phone with artificial intelligence, the iPhone 16e, designed to win back mid-market customers at home and in crucial growth markets China and India.
The new phone, which drops the SE naming convention for Apple’s budget series, will take on popular Android smartphones at a time when rivals Samsung (005930.KS) and China’s Huawei are adding AI tools to their devices.
Sales of Apple phones dropped last quarter, and sales of its budget line of phones have plummeted as a proportion of iPhone revenue over the last decade.
The 16e will cost $599, a $170 boost from the previous entry level phone, the SE, although its features are closer to Apple’s flagships and include a powerful chip to run Apple Intelligence, a set of features with access to ChatGPT. Aside from having no wide-angle camera lens, one missing button and a slightly different display, the 16e looks much like its pricier siblings.
Apple stock was barely changed in midafternoon trade.
Late last month, Apple forecast strong sales growth, signaling iPhone sales would recover from a dip as it rolls out artificial intelligence features to more regions and languages. Analysts have cautioned that the roll-out is slow and Apple has not yet announced a data partner in China for the AI features.
“We’ve seen a limited appetite among many of the installed base to upgrade from previous versions, but the new phone reduces the cost hurdle of joining the Apple Intelligence bandwagon,” said Forrester principal analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee.
Sales of SE model as a share of total revenue for iPhones has dropped from 10% at its introduction in 2016 to about 1% last year, according to Counterpoint Research.
The 16e will likely help Apple in cost-sensitive markets such as Europe and China where buyers tend to pay for phones upfront, said Ben Bajarin, principal analyst at consulting firm Creative Strategies.
The iPhone 16e will be powered by the A18 chip used in more expensive models launched in September 2024 and will support Apple Intelligence out of the box.
It will be about $200 less expensive than the cheapest version of iPhone 16 launched in September and will be available only in black and white colors, while the more expensive iPhone 16 models come in a slew of bright shades.
The 16e will also be the first device from Apple to feature the C1 chip, its first in-house modem designed for cellular connectivity and a shift from chips made by Qualcomm (QCOM.O).
NO WIDE-ANGLE LENS
Its camera system will have a 48-megapixel sensor and two lenses, one of which will be a two times zoom lens integrated into the primary camera, but it will miss out on a wide-angle lens seen in more expensive models.
The 16e will have a notch at the top of its screen for the front-facing camera, while more advanced models have a screen that surrounds the camera.
It also leaves out a camera control button that can tweak camera settings and is available on the main iPhone 16 series.
SE models were known for their smaller screen size, but the 16e comes with a 6.1 inch display, the same as the least expensive iPhone 16 model.
This year’s much-anticipated update brings a change to its slab-design, nixing the SE’s physical home button and introducing Apple’s Face ID feature.
The iPhone 16e will be available for pre-order in 59 countries, including the U.S., China and India from February 21, with shipments starting from February 28.
xAI and Grok logos are seen in this illustration taken, February 16, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI has introduced Grok-3, the latest iteration of its chatbot, as it looks to compete with Chinese AI firm DeepSeek, Microsoft-backed (MSFT.O), opens new tab OpenAI, and Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O), Google.
Grok-3 debut comes at a critical moment in the AI arms race, just days after DeepSeek unveiled its powerful open-source model and as Musk moves aggressively to expand xAI’s influence.
The chatbot is being rolled out immediately to Premium+ subscribers on X, the social media platform owned by Musk. xAI is also launching a new subscription tier, SuperGrok, for users accessing the chatbot via its mobile app and Grok.com website.
“Grok-3 across the board is in a league of its own,” Musk said during a livestream alongside three xAI engineers late on Monday, adding the model outperforms its predecessor, Grok-2.
“The introduction of Grok-3 puts xAI back in the race for leadership in open-source LLMs. It outperforms the current state-of-the-art models on some benchmarks, which makes xAI relevant again” said Gil Luria, managing director at D.A. Davidson.
As competition in AI intensifies, xAI is ramping up its data center capacity to train more advanced models, by raising billions of dollars. Its supercomputer cluster in Memphis, Tennessee, called “Colossus”, is touted as the largest in the world.
However, Luria said improvements over the Grok-2 model appear to be too small to justify the enormous resources used to train it.
The latest release introduces a smart search engine, called DeepSearch, which xAI describes as a reasoning-based chatbot capable of articulating its thought process when responding to user queries.
These simulated views of the ultrahot Jupiter WASP-121b show what the planet might look like to the human eye from five different vantage points, illuminated to different degrees by its parent star. The images were created using a computer simulation being used to help scientists understand the atmospheres of these ultra-hot planets. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Vivien Parmentier/Aix-Marseille University (AMU))
Forget hurricanes and heat waves—on WASP-121b, the weather is on another level. Astronomers have mapped, for the first time, the three-dimensional structure of an exoplanet’s atmosphere, revealing ferocious winds that accelerate to record-breaking speeds as they cross the planet’s scorching-hot dayside.
Located about 900 light-years away in the constellation Puppis, the planet WASP-121b (nicknamed Tylos) experiences weather patterns unlike anything seen before in our cosmic neighborhood. This massive gas giant orbits so close to its star that a year there lasts only about 30 Earth hours, creating extreme conditions that have fascinated astronomers.
Zooming in on WASP-121b’s atmosphere
The study, conducted with the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope, uncovered an atmosphere so extreme that it challenges current models of planetary weather.
“This planet’s atmosphere behaves in ways that challenge our understanding of how weather works — not just on Earth, but on all planets. It feels like something out of science fiction,” says lead author Julia Victoria Seidel, from the ESO in Chile, in a statement.
Published in Astronomy & Astrophysics, the study shows that WASP-121b’s atmospheric structure exists in distinct layers. In the deepest observable layer, iron-rich gases flow from the scorching hot dayside to the cooler nightside. Above this flows a powerful equatorial jet stream that accelerates as it crosses the dayside of the planet. The uppermost layer contains hydrogen gas influenced by both the jet stream below and the natural outward flow of the planet’s escaping atmosphere.
The jet stream’s behavior proved particularly dramatic. As gases in this atmospheric river cross from the planet’s morning side to its evening side, they heat up by nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius and almost double their speed from 13.7 to 26.8 kilometers per second. For comparison, Earth’s most powerful jet streams reach speeds of only about 100 meters per second. “Even the strongest hurricanes in the Solar System seem calm in comparison,” notes Seidel.
The international research team achieved this breakthrough by combining the light-gathering power of four large telescope units into a single signal using an instrument called ESPRESSO. This sophisticated setup allowed them to detect the signatures of multiple chemical elements as they moved through different layers of the planet’s atmosphere.
“The VLT enabled us to probe three different layers of the exoplanet’s atmosphere in one fell swoop,” says study co-author Leonardo A. dos Santos, an assistant astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. “It’s the kind of observation that is very challenging to do with space telescopes, highlighting the importance of ground-based observations of exoplanets.”
A companion study published alongside this research revealed another surprise: the presence of titanium just below the jet stream. This discovery was particularly intriguing since previous observations had shown this element to be absent, suggesting it might be hidden deep in the atmosphere where it’s harder to detect.
‘Climate never seen before on any planet’
Ultra-hot Jupiters like WASP-121b serve as natural laboratories for studying extreme atmospheric conditions that don’t exist anywhere in our solar system. Unlike Earth’s relatively mild temperature variations, these planets experience such extreme temperature contrasts between their day and night sides that they create powerful atmospheric dynamics scientists are only beginning to understand.
The research team observed the planet during what’s known as a transit, which is when it passes between its star and Earth. This positioning allowed them to study how different chemicals in the atmosphere affected the starlight passing through it. By analyzing these effects at different heights in the atmosphere, they could map out the complex wind patterns and temperature variations.
Current theoretical models struggle to fully explain the observed circulation patterns on WASP-121b. While scientists have used computer simulations to model atmospheric circulation on ultra-hot Jupiters, none have fully captured the complex patterns observed in this study. This discovery highlights how much we still have to learn about the physics governing these extreme worlds.
“What we found was surprising: a jet stream rotates material around the planet’s equator, while a separate flow at lower levels of the atmosphere moves gas from the hot side to the cooler side. This kind of climate has never been seen before on any planet,” Seidel explains.
Looking ahead, the European Southern Observatory is currently constructing the Extremely Large Telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert, which will significantly advance our ability to study other worlds.
“It’s truly mind-blowing that we’re able to study details like the chemical makeup and weather patterns of a planet at such a vast distance,” says Bibiana Prinoth, who led the companion study. “The next generation of telescopes will be game-changers for studying these distant worlds. We’re on the verge of uncovering incredible things we can only dream about now.”
xAI Grok chatbot and ChatGPT logos are seen in this illustration taken, Mar 11, 2024. (PHOTO: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic)
Elon Musk said his startup xAI will release its Grok 3 chatbot on Monday (Feb 16) and billed it as the “smartest AI on Earth” in a fiercely competitive market.
The company’s flagship artificial intelligence product will go live with a demonstration on Monday night at 8:00pm Pacific time (0400 GMT), the tech billionaire wrote Saturday on his social media platform X.
Grok 3 was trained on synthetic data and is capable of reflecting on errors it makes by going over data in order to reach logical consistency.
“Will be honing product with the team all weekend, so offline until then,” said Musk, the world’s richest person and a top advisor to President Donald Trump who is tasked with slashing government spending.
Musk said last week that Grok 3 was in the final stages of development and would be released to the world in a matter of weeks.
xAI is seeking a competitive edge in a market teeming with products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT as artificial intelligence spreads through contemporary life.
Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the global AI industry last month with the launch of its low-cost, high-quality chatbot – a challenge to US ambitions to lead the world in developing the technology.
DeepSeek quickly overtook ChatGPT in downloads on the Apple app store.
Musk has repeatedly warned that AI poses a risk to human civilization, but he is nonetheless pushing hard for a bigger slice of investment in the sector.
xAI said in December it raised US$6 billion in its latest funding round from investors that included US venture capitalists, chipmakers Nvidia and AMD, and investment funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, among others. It raised an initial US$6 billion in May.
The company is now one of the world’s most valuable startups, though still dwarfed by OpenAI.
OpenAI logo is seen in front of Elon Musk photo in this illustration taken March 11, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Billionaire Elon Musk’s bid to buy OpenAI, which wants to be a for-profit entity, clashes with his lawsuit arguing that assets of the ChatGPT maker should not be for private gain, OpenAI wrote in a letter it submitted to a federal court on Wednesday.
On Monday, a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk offered $97.4 billion to buy the assets of OpenAI’s nonprofit, in another salvo from the world’s richest man against the artificial intelligence startup.
Musk sued OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and others in August and has asked a U.S. district judge to block OpenAI’s attempt to transition to a for-profit entity.
OpenAI in its letter said Musk had contradicted himself when making “an improper bid to undermine a competitor.”
Musk’s court filings assert that OpenAI’s assets must remain within a charitable trust and should not be transferred for private gain. That contrasts with his proposed acquisition which seeks to transfer all OpenAI assets to him and his private investors, OpenAI said.
Representatives for Musk did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Musk co-founded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 as a nonprofit but left before ChatGPT went viral at the end of 2022. He founded the competing AI startup xAI in 2023.
Loggerhead turtle photographed underwater. uShaka Marine World, South Africa.. (Credit: Jurie Maree on Shutterstock)
Scientists have long wondered how sea turtles navigate vast ocean distances with remarkable precision. Now, research shows these ancient mariners can actually learn and remember magnetic “signatures” of specific geographic locations, essentially creating their own internal GPS system using Earth’s magnetic field.
Recently published findings from researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill demonstrate that loggerhead sea turtles possess not just one, but two distinct mechanisms for sensing magnetic fields. This discovery helps explain how these remarkable creatures manage to traverse thousands of miles of featureless ocean to return to specific feeding grounds and nesting beaches year after year.
Working with juvenile loggerhead turtles in controlled experiments, researchers discovered the turtles could learn to associate specific magnetic field signatures with food rewards. When exposed to magnetic conditions matching those found in locations like the Gulf of Mexico or off the coast of Maine, turtles that had been fed in those specific magnetic environments would display excited “turtle dance” behavior, raising their heads, paddling frantically, and spinning in place in anticipation of food.
This learned response persisted even when tested four months later, suggesting turtles maintain a long-term memory of magnetic locations. The finding provides strong evidence that turtles can build a mental map of magnetic signatures corresponding to favorable locations they encounter during their oceanic wanderings.
But the most surprising revelation came when researchers investigated exactly how turtles detect these magnetic fields. By exposing the turtles to oscillating radio frequency fields — which are known to disrupt certain types of magnetic sensing — they found evidence for two separate magnetic detection systems working in parallel.
The turtles’ ability to recognize learned magnetic locations remained unaffected by the radio frequency fields. However, their ability to orient themselves using Earth’s magnetic field as a compass was completely disrupted. This suggests turtles have one mechanism for detecting their position (the magnetic “map” sense) and a separate system for determining direction (the magnetic “compass” sense).
This dual system makes good biological sense. Detecting precise location requires sensing subtle variations in both the strength and angle of magnetic field lines, similar to how GPS determines position using multiple satellite signals. Meanwhile, simple directional orientation only requires detecting the overall alignment of the magnetic field, much like a basic compass needle.
“Our study investigated for the first time whether a migratory animal can learn to recognize the magnetic signatures of different geographic areas,” said Kayla Goforth, first author of the study, in a statement. “Researchers have speculated for decades that animals can learn magnetic signatures, but this is the first empirical demonstration of that ability, so it fills in an important gap in our knowledge.”
The discovery helps explain how sea turtles accomplish their remarkable navigational feats. Young turtles appear to learn the magnetic signatures of favorable locations as they drift with ocean currents during their early “lost years.” Later, they can use this mental magnetic map to recognize these locations again, while their magnetic compass helps them actively swim in the right direction to reach their targets.
This built-in navigation system likely plays a crucial role in the turtles’ ability to maintain strong fidelity to specific feeding grounds. Individual turtles often return repeatedly to the same foraging areas even after being experimentally displaced hundreds of miles away.
The findings, published in Nature, also suggest turtles can update their magnetic maps throughout their lives as they encounter new favorable areas. This flexibility would allow them to adapt to changing conditions and find new feeding grounds if their usual spots become uninhabitable due to environmental changes.
“We’ve known for 20 years that sea turtles have magnetic maps and now, by showing that they can learn new locations, we have learned how the maps might be built and modified,” said Catherine Lohmann, a biology professor at UNC-Chapel Hill. “It is amazing that sea turtles have access to a wealth of invisible information that they use to navigate in ways that are hard for us to even imagine.”
Beyond advancing our understanding of these ancient mariners, the research provides some of the first direct evidence for how animals learn to use Earth’s magnetic field for navigation, a capability that has also been suggested in other long-distance migrants like salmon and birds.
In life-or-death situations, do military personnel rely more on their judgment or artificial intelligence? (YAKOBCHUK VIACHESLAV/Shutterstock)
Humans appear to have a dangerous blind spot when it comes to trusting artificial intelligence. New research from UC Merced and Penn State shows that people are highly susceptible to AI influence even in life-or-death situations where the AI openly acknowledges its own limitations. A series of experiments simulating drone warfare scenarios suggests we may be falling too far on the side of machine deference, with potentially dangerous consequences.
The study, published in Scientific Reports, included two experiments examining how people interact with AI systems in simulated military drone operations. The findings paint a concerning picture of human susceptibility to AI influence, particularly in situations of uncertainty. The two experiments involved 558 participants (135 in the first study and 423 in the second), and researchers found remarkably consistent patterns of overtrust.
“As a society, with AI accelerating so quickly, we need to be concerned about the potential for overtrust,” says study author professor Colin Holbrook, a member of UC Merced’s Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, in a statement.
The research team designed their experiments to simulate the uncertainty and pressure of real-world military decisions. To create a sense of gravity around their simulated decisions, researchers first showed participants images of innocent civilians, including children, alongside the devastation left in the aftermath of a drone strike. They framed the task as a zero-sum dilemma: failure to identify and eliminate enemy targets could result in civilian casualties, but misidentifying civilians as enemies would mean killing innocent people.
Participants viewed rapid sequences of eight aerial images, each shown for just 650 milliseconds, marked with either enemy or civilian symbols. After making their initial identification, the AI would respond conversationally. “Yes, I think I saw an enemy check mark, too,” it might say. Or “I don’t agree. I think this image had an ally symbol.” Participants then had two chances to confirm or change their choice as the robot added commentary like “I hope you are right” or “Thank you for changing your mind.”
The first experiment, conducted in a laboratory setting with university students, explored whether a physical robot presence would influence trust levels differently than a virtual one. In one scenario, participants were joined in the lab by a full-size, human-like android that could pivot at the waist and gesture to the screen. Standing 1.75 meters tall (about 5 feet 7 inches), this robot used facial expressions, body language, and conversational responses to engage with participants. The comparison group interacted with the same robot projected on a screen. Surprisingly, the physical presence of the robot made little difference in participants’ tendency to trust its advice.
The second experiment moved online with a larger, more demographically diverse group of participants to test whether different levels of robot sophistication would affect trust. Some participants interacted with a highly anthropomorphic virtual robot that displayed human-like behaviors, while others worked with a basic computer interface that simply displayed text responses. Even in its simplest form, the AI maintained remarkable influence over human decision-making.
When an AI disagreed with a person’s initial target identification, participants reversed their decisions 58.3% of the time in the first experiment and 67.3% in the second, even though the AI’s advice was entirely random. More troublingly, while participants’ initial choices were correct about 70% of the time, their final accuracy dropped to around 50% after following the AI’s unreliable advice.
When the AI agreed with their initial assessment, participants reported a 16% boost in confidence. However, when facing AI disagreement, those who stuck to their original decisions reported an average 9.48% drop in confidence, even when their initial assessment had been correct. Even more striking, participants who changed their minds to agree with the AI showed no significant increase in confidence, suggesting they deferred to the machine despite maintaining uncertainty about the correct choice.
While the human-like interfaces generated slightly higher trust levels (67.9% versus 65.1% for basic interfaces), the more crucial factor appeared to be the AI’s perceived intelligence. Participants who rated their AI partner as more intelligent were more likely to defer to its judgment and report higher confidence when agreeing with it, regardless of its physical or virtual presentation.
The U.S. Air Force has already tested AI co-pilots for missile launcher identification during simulated missions, while the Army is developing AI-assisted targeting systems for unmanned vehicles. Israel has reportedly deployed AI systems to help identify bombing targets in densely populated areas. As AI increasingly influences lethal military decisions, understanding and mitigating harmful overtrust becomes crucial.
Although this study focused on high-risk military decisions, the findings could apply to scenarios ranging from police use of lethal force to paramedic triage decisions in emergencies, and even to significant life changes like buying a home. In each case, the human tendency to defer to AI guidance, even when explicitly warned about its limitations, raises serious concerns about implementation.
The research also revealed that participants were less likely to reverse their decisions when they had initially identified a target as a civilian rather than an enemy. This suggests that in real-world applications, humans might be more resistant to AI influence when it comes to actions that could harm innocent people. However, this protective instinct wasn’t strong enough to prevent significant degradation in overall decision accuracy when following AI advice.
“We see AI doing extraordinary things and we think that because it’s amazing in this domain, it will be amazing in another,” says Holbrook. “We can’t assume that. These are still devices with limited abilities.”
Our readiness to trust AI may be outpacing our wisdom in doing so. According to researchers, the solution lies in maintaining consistent skepticism. Holbrook emphasizes that having healthy skepticism about AI is essential, especially when making such weighted decisions. As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly integrated into consequential decision-making processes, understanding and mitigating our tendency to overtrust them becomes crucial for preventing potentially catastrophic outcomes.
In the Second World War, the physician Henry Beecher observed that some of his soldier patients, despite being injured on the battlefield, required no strong painkillers to manage their pain. In some cases, the injury was as severe as losing part of a limb.
A truly remarkable phenomenon had come into play – the effects of fear, stress and emotion on the brain had switched off their pain. But how does this work – and how can we use it to our advantage?
We all struggle with pain at times. The burning of indigestion, the wince of a scald from the kettle. The sharp stabbing of a sliced finger.
But despite its unpleasantness, pain has a critically important purpose, designed to protect the body rather than harm it. A fundamental concept to first understand is that you do not detect pain – it is a sensation. A sensation that your brain has created – from information it receives from the countless neurons (nerve cells) which supply your skin.
These specialized neurons are called nociceptors – they detect stimuli which are noxious, or potentially damaging to the body. This stimulation might range from a mechanical cut or crush injury to extreme hot or cold temperatures.
So, if you touch a hot iron, or stand on a sharp nail, the correct reaction is to move your hand or foot away from it. The brain responds to pain by initiating muscle contractions in your arm or leg. In doing so, any further damage is averted.
The course of information, rushing along one neuron to another in a relay, is carried as electrical currents called action potentials. These begin at the skin, travel along nerve highways and into the spinal cord. When the information reaches the uppermost level of the brain – the cerebral cortex – a sensation of pain is generated.
Blocking pain signals
Many different factors can interfere with this transmission of information – we don’t perceive pain if the route to the cortex is blocked. Take the use of anesthetics, for instance.
Local anesthetics are injected directly into the skin to deactivate nociceptors (like lidocaine) – perhaps in A+E to perform stitches. Other agents induce a loss of consciousness – these are general anesthetics, for more extensive surgical operations.
Pain is also a very variable experience. Commonly, we ask patients to quantify their pain by giving a value along a scale of nought to ten. What one person would consider a five out of ten pain, another might consider a seven – and another a two.
Some patients are born without the ability to sense pain – this rare condition is called congenital analgesia. You might think this confers an advantage, but the truth is quite the opposite. These individuals will be unaware of circumstances where their bodies are being damaged, and can end up sustaining more profound injuries, or missing them entirely and suffering the consequences.
How to trick your brain
What is more extraordinary is that we all possess an innate ability to control our pain levels. In fact, a natural painkiller is found deep within the nervous system itself.
The secret lies in a structure located in the very middle of your brain: the periaqueductal grey (PAG). This small, heart-shaped region contains neurons whose role is to alter incoming pain signals reaching the cerebral cortex. In doing so, it is able to dampen down any pain that would otherwise be experienced.
Let’s consider this in practice using the extreme example of the battlefield. This is an instance where sensing pain might actually prove more of a hindrance than of help. It might hamper a soldier’s ability to run, or assist comrades. In temporarily numbing the pain, the soldier becomes able to escape the dangerous environment and seek refuge.
But we encounter many examples of this ability coming into action in our everyday routines. Ever picked something in the kitchen that you suddenly realized is extremely hot? Sometimes that casserole dish or saucepan descends to the floor, but sometimes we are able to hold on just long enough to transfer it to the stovetop. This action may be underpinned by the PAG shutting off the sensation of clasping something too hot to handle, just long enough to prevent dropping it.
The substances which generate this effect are called enkephalins. They are produced in many different areas of the brain (including the PAG) and spinal cord, and may have similar actions to strong analgesics such as morphine. It has also been suggested that long-term or chronic pain – which is persistent and not useful to the body – might arise as a result of abnormalities within this natural analgesic system.
This begs the question: how might you go about hacking your own nervous system to produce an analgesic effect?
There is growing evidence to suggest that the release of painkilling enkephalins can be enhanced in a variety of different ways. Exercise is one example – one of the reasons why prescribed exercise might be able to work wonders for aches and pains (backache for instance) instead of popping Tylenols.
Besides this, stressful situations, feeding and sex might also affect the activity of enkephalins and other related compounds.
So, how could we go about it? Take up strength or endurance training? Alleviate our stress? Good food? Good sex? While more work is needed to clarify a role for these options in pain management, their reward might be greater than we thought.
Pain remains a complex, poorly understood experience, but the future is bright. Only last month, the FDA approved the use of a new medication Journavx for managing acute pain.
Microsoft-owned LinkedIn is reportedly down for thousands of users worldwide. Tracking website DownDetector started noting reports of problems after 11:35 pm. Users are getting errors when trying to log in, which is causing frustration.
According to Downdetector, 82 per cent of LinkedIn users are having issues with the website, 17 per cent are facing problems with the app, and just 1 per cent are reporting issues with their profiles. This shows that most of the disruptions are happening on the website and app, with only a small number of users affected by profile issues.
As of now, Downdetector has registered over 1,100 complaints on its website, as users continue to face issues with the Microsoft-owned professional platform. LinkedIn has not yet released an official statement about what caused the outage or when it will be fixed.
“Woke up to LinkedIn this morning to a message on the log in screen: ‘You have reached the maximum number of attempts. Please try again at a later date.’ and I am unable to log in,” a user wrote on Downdetector.
OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
A consortium led by Elon Musk said on Monday it has offered $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, another salvo in the billionaire’s fight to block the artificial intelligence startup from transitioning to a for-profit firm.
Musk’s bid is likely to ratchet up longstanding tensions with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman over the future of the ChatGPT maker at the heart of a boom in generative AI technology. Altman on Monday promptly posted on X: “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want.”
Musk cofounded OpenAI with Altman in 2015 as a nonprofit, but left before the company took off. He founded the competing AI startup xAI in 2023.
Musk, the CEO of Tesla (TSLA.O), and owner of tech and social media company X, is a close ally of President Donald Trump. He spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to help elect Trump, and leads the Department of Government Efficiency, a new arm of the White House tasked with radically shrinking the federal bureaucracy. Musk recently criticized a $500 billion OpenAI-led project announced by Trump at the White House.
OpenAI is now trying to transition into a for-profit from a nonprofit entity, which it says is required to secure the capital needed for developing the best AI models.
Musk sued Altman and others in August last year, claiming they violated contract provisions by putting profit ahead of the public good in the push to advance AI. In November, he asked a U.S. district judge for a preliminary injunction blocking OpenAI from converting to a for-profit structure.
Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman says the founders originally approached him to fund a nonprofit focused on developing AI to benefit humanity, but that it was now focused on making money.
“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement on Monday. “We will make sure that happens.”
Altman told staff in a message that the company’s board of directors intends to make clear it has no interest in Musk’s “supposed bid”, according to a report by The Information on Monday.
Musk and OpenAI backer Microsoft (MSFT.O) did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The consortium led by Musk includes his AI startup xAI, Baron Capital Group, Emanuel Capital and others.
xAI could merge with OpenAI following a deal, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported Musk’s offer earlier on Monday. xAI recently raised $6 billion from investors at a valuation of $40 billion, sources have told Reuters.
‘THROWING A WRENCH’
“This (bid) is definitely throwing a wrench in things,” said Jonathan Macey, a Yale Law School professor specializing in corporate governance.
“The nonprofit is supposed to take money to do whatever good deeds, and if OpenAI prefers to sell it to somebody else for less money, it’s a concern for protecting the interests of the beneficiaries of the not-for-profit.”
OpenAI was valued at $157 billion in its last funding round, cementing its status as one of the most valuable private companies in the world. SoftBank Group (9984.T) is in talks to lead a funding round of up to $40 billion in OpenAI at a valuation of $300 billion, including the new funds, Reuters reported in January.
Aside from any antitrust implications, a deal this size would need Musk and his consortium to raise enormous funds.
Musk’s stock in Tesla is valued at roughly $165 billion, according to LSEG data, but his leverage with banks is likely to be thin after his $44 billion buyout of X, which was then called Twitter, in 2022.
To finance such a bid, Musk could sell part of his stake in Tesla or take a loan against his stake, or use his stake in rocket company SpaceX that is worth tens of billions of dollars as collateral, according to an uninvolved investment banker, who requested anonymity.
“Musk’s offer to buy OpenAI’s nonprofit should significantly complicate OpenAI’s current fundraising and the process of converting into a for-profit corporation,” said Gil Luria, analyst at D.A. Davidson.
This mosaic image of asteroid Bennu, composed of 12 PolyCam images collected on December 2, 2018 by the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft from a range of 15 miles (24 km). NASA/Goddard/University of Arizona/Handout via REUTERS Purchase Licensing Rights
The rocky object called Bennu is classified as a near-Earth asteroid, currently making its closest approach to Earth every six years at about 186,000 miles (299,000 km) away. It might come even closer in the future, with scientists estimating a one-in-2,700 chance of a collision with Earth in September 2182.
So what would happen should Bennu strike our planet? Well, it would not be pretty, according to new research based on computer simulations of an impact by an asteroid with a diameter of roughly three-tenths of a mile (500 meters) like Bennu.
Aside from the immediate devastation, it estimated that such an impact would inject 100-400 million tons of dust into the atmosphere, causing disruptions in climate, atmospheric chemistry and global photosynthesis lasting three to four years.
“The solar dimming due to dust would cause an abrupt global ‘impact winter’ characterized by reduced sunlight, cold temperature and decreased precipitation at the surface,” said Lan Dai, a postdoctoral research fellow at the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea and lead author of the study published this week in the journal Science Advances.
In the worst-case scenario, the researchers found that Earth’s average surface temperature would decrease by about 7 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius), average rainfall would fall by 15%, there would be a reduction of up to 20-30% in plant photosynthesis and a 32% depletion in the planet’s ozone layer that protects against harmful solar ultraviolet radiation.
The impact of a Bennu-sized object – a medium-sized asteroid – on Earth’s land surface would generate a powerful shockwave, earthquakes, wildfires and thermal radiation, leave a gaping crater and eject huge amounts of debris upward, the researchers said.
Large quantities of aerosols and gases would reach the upper atmosphere, causing years-long effects on climate and ecosystems, according to Dai and study senior author Axel Timmermann, a climate physicist and ICCP director.
The unfavorable climate conditions would inhibit plant growth on land and in the ocean, they said.
“In contrast to the rapid reduction and slow two-year-long recovery of plants on land, plankton in the ocean would recover within six months – and even increase afterward with unprecedented diatom (a type of algae) blooms triggered by iron-rich dust deposition into the ocean,” Dai said.
Severe ozone depletion would occur in the stratosphere – the second atmospheric layer as you go upward – due to strong warming caused by the solar absorption of dust particles, the researchers said.
An asteroid collision of this magnitude could cause massive loss of human life, but that calculation was outside the study’s scope. Dai said the potential death toll “mainly depends on where the asteroid impact occurs.”
Scientists know a great deal about Bennu, considered a “rubble pile” asteroid – a loose amalgamation of rocky material rather than a solid object. It is a rocky remnant of a larger celestial body that had formed near the dawn of the solar system roughly 4.5 billion years ago. NASA’s robotic OSIRIS-REx spacecraft journeyed to Bennu and in 2020 collected samples of rock and dust for analysis.
A study published in January showed that Bennu’s samples bore some of the chemical building blocks of life, strong evidence that asteroids may have seeded early Earth with the raw ingredients that fostered the emergence of living organisms.
Asteroids have struck Earth occasionally over its long history, often with cataclysmic results. An asteroid estimated at 6-9 miles (10-15 km) wide hit off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago, eradicating about three-quarters of the world’s species and ending the age of dinosaurs.
NASA in 2022 carried out a proof-of-principle planetary defense mission by using its robotic DART spacecraft to change the trajectory of the asteroid Dimorphos, with an eye toward doing this in the future if one appears on a collision course with Earth.
Google is ending its diversity hiring goals, shifting its approach to workforce representation. Photo : iStock
Google is ending its previous goals for increasing diversity in hiring, marking a major shift in the company’s approach to workforce representation. In an internal memo, Google-parent Alphabet’s Chief People Officer, Fiona Cicconi, informed employees that the company will no longer set aspirational hiring goals for underrepresented groups. “In 2020, we set ambitious hiring goals and aimed to expand representation by growing offices outside California and New York,” Cicconi wrote. “However, moving forward, we will no longer set aspirational goals.” This decision comes as Google reevaluates its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, citing compliance with recent U.S. Executive Orders and court rulings.
No More Aspirational Hiring Goals
In 2020, Google set ambitious hiring goals to improve representation, particularly by expanding its workforce beyond major tech hubs like California and New York. However, in the recent memo, Cicconi made it clear that such goals are no longer part of Google’s strategy. “Every year, we review the programs designed to help us get there and make changes,” she stated. “And because we are a federal contractor, our teams are also evaluating changes to our programs required to comply with recent court decisions and U.S. Executive Orders on this topic.”
The move aligns with broader shifts in corporate America, as several major companies adjust or scale back DEI initiatives. Google’s decision follows increasing scrutiny of diversity-focused hiring practices, especially for federal contractors. The company emphasised that while hiring targets are being removed, efforts to create a fair and supportive work environment will continue.
Google’s DEI Programs Under Review
Melonie Parker, Google’s Chief Diversity Officer, has been tasked with evaluating the company’s DEI programs, training, and initiatives. The review will determine which programs are effective and which may pose risks under changing legal frameworks. “Melonie Parker and her team will lead on closely and carefully evaluating programs, trainings, and initiatives, and will update them as needed – including those that raise risk or that aren’t as impactful as we’d hoped,” Cicconi wrote in the memo.
Meanwhile, Google confirmed that its Employee Resource Groups (ERGs), such as the “Black Googler Network” and “Trans at Google,” will remain. These groups play a key role in shaping company policies and product development. Additionally, the company’s partnerships with colleges and universities for talent development will continue.
DEI Language Removed from SEC Filing
In a separate move, Google also removed a long-standing DEI commitment from its annual U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing. Previously, the filing stated Google was “committed to making diversity, equity, and inclusion part of everything we do and to growing a workforce that is representative of the users we serve.” A spokesperson explained that the decision was part of the company’s overall review of DEI initiatives.
At any given moment, thousands of pieces of space debris orbit Earth, and some are heading back toward us. According to new research from the University of British Columbia, there’s a 26% annual probability that one of these massive objects will reenter Earth’s atmosphere over a region with high air traffic density, potentially disrupting hundreds of flights and thousands of travelers.
This risk was dramatically illustrated in November 2022 when Spanish and French authorities closed parts of their airspace due to a falling 20-tonne Chinese rocket body, affecting 645 flights and delaying passengers by an average of 29 minutes. Some aircraft already in flight had to turn around or divert their paths, creating cascading disruptions throughout European airspace.
“The recent explosion of a SpaceX Starship shortly after launch demonstrated the challenges of having to suddenly close airspace,” explains Ewan Wright, the study’s lead author and an interdisciplinary studies doctoral student at UBC, in a statement. “The authorities set up a ‘keep out’ zone for aircraft, many of which had to turn around or divert their flight path. And this was a situation where we had good information about where the rocket debris was likely to come down, which is not the case for uncontrolled debris re-entering the atmosphere from orbit.”
Why is rocket debris such a big problem?
The problem stems from how modern spaceflight operates. When rockets launch satellites into orbit, large portions of these rockets are often abandoned in space. If these leftover rocket stages have a low enough orbit, they eventually fall back to Earth in an uncontrolled manner. While most materials burn up during reentry, significant pieces can survive the descent.
The study, published in Scientific Reports, reveals concerning statistics about high-traffic airspace. Using Denver, Colorado, as a reference point—which had the highest air traffic density in the dataset at approximately one aircraft every 18 square kilometers—researchers calculated the probability of rocket debris reentering the atmosphere over different traffic density thresholds.
For regions with air traffic similar to that found in major transit corridors like the northeastern United States, northern Europe, or parts of the Asia-Pacific, the probability of a rocket body reentering busy airspace is 26% per year. However, this probability does not mean that reentry will occur over the same location every four years—only that such an event is likely somewhere within airspace that meets these traffic conditions.
Rocket launches are increasing, as is the risk
The situation appears even more pressing when considering current trends. In 2023, there were 212 successful rocket launches, with 128 uncontrolled rocket body reentries. The number of rocket bodies still in orbit exceeds 2,300, each one destined to eventually fall back to Earth. Meanwhile, air passenger numbers are projected to increase by almost 7% in 2025, according to the International Air Transport Association.
“The space industry is effectively exporting its risk to airlines and passengers,” says Dr. Aaron Boley, associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UBC and co-author of the study.
This risk transfer occurs because when space debris threatens busy airspace, aviation authorities must either take preventive action—by diverting flights or closing airspace—or gamble by allowing flights to continue.
The annual probability of space rocket debris actually colliding with an aircraft stands at 1 in 430,000—a relatively low number, but one that still carries catastrophic potential. Even small pieces of debris pose significant risks due to their high velocity and the speed at which aircraft cruise.
Solutions and future outlook
The researchers emphasize that these risks are not inevitable. “Uncontrolled rocket body reentries are a design choice, not a necessity,” explains Dr. Boley. The industry could instead use rockets designed to reenter the atmosphere in a controlled way after use, directing them to crash harmlessly into remote ocean areas.
However, implementing this solution requires international cooperation, according to co-author Dr. Michael Byers, a UBC political science professor. “Countries and companies that launch satellites won’t spend the money to improve their rockets designs unless all of them are required to do so,” he explains. “So, we need governments to come together and adopt some new standards here.”
Until such standards are implemented, aviation authorities worldwide will continue facing difficult decisions about managing airspace safety while minimizing disruptions to air travel, all while the number of both flights and space debris continues to grow.
The findings also highlight how researchers are harnessing AI to improve planetary science by making better use of all the data. (Photo: Nasa)
Artificial Intelligence has just helped astronomers discover a new crater on the surface of Mars that has revealed a long-hidden secret.
New findings reveal that meteoroids striking Mars produce seismic signals that can reach deeper than previously known. The details are the result of joint work by Nasa Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) and the now-dead InSight lander, which had its ears to the ground listening for aftershocks.
In a series of two papers, published in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL), scientists observed how seismic waves from those quakes change as they travel through the planet’s crust, mantle, and core.
Scientists have now got a glimpse into Mars’ interior, as well as a better understanding of how all rocky worlds form, including Earth and its Moon.
“We used to think the energy detected from the vast majority of seismic events was stuck travelling within the Martian crust. This finding shows a deeper, faster path — call it a seismic highway — through the mantle, allowing quakes to reach more distant regions of the planet,” InSight team member Constantinos Charalambous said.
The meteor crash was detected in Cerberus Fossae, an especially quake-prone region of Mars that is 1,640 kilometres away from the InSight lander. The impact crater is 71 feet in diameter and much farther from InSight than scientists expected, based on the quake’s seismic energy.
Nasa said that the Martian crust has unique properties thought to dampen seismic waves produced by impacts, and researchers’ analysis of the Cerberus Fossae impact led them to conclude that the waves it produced took a more direct route through the planet’s mantle.
The team then used an AI model to analyse pictures and search for craters within roughly 3,000 kilometers of InSight’s location. By comparing before-and-after images from the Context Camera over a range of time, they found 123 fresh craters to cross-reference with InSight’s data; 49 of those were potential matches with quakes detected by the lander’s seismometer.
The plastic pollution crisis just got personal. A new study from the University of New Mexico reveals an unsettling truth: microscopic plastic particles are accumulating in human brains at significantly higher concentrations than in other organs – and these levels have surged 50% in just eight years.
Scientists examining postmortem brain tissue found microplastic concentrations were about 12 times higher than those in the liver or kidney. Even more concerning, brain samples from individuals with dementia contained up to ten times more plastic than those without the condition, though researchers emphasize it’s too early to determine if microplastics contribute to the disease.
“This really changes the landscape. It makes it so much more personal,” says lead researcher Matthew Campen, Distinguished and Regents’ Professor at UNM’s College of Pharmacy, in a statement.
The Microplastic Problem
Microplastics come from the breakdown of everyday items like water bottles, food containers, and synthetic clothing. As these products degrade, they create tiny fragments smaller than 5 millimeters – about the size of a sesame seed at their largest. But many particles are much smaller, invisible to the naked eye.
Previous studies have detected microplastics in human blood, placentas, and various organs, but this new research shows an unprecedented concentration in brain tissue. In samples collected between January and March 2024, the median level reached 4,917 micrograms per gram—roughly the weight of four to five paper clips of plastic per kilogram of brain tissue.
Most particles consisted of polyethylene, the same material used in plastic bottles and food packaging. Using advanced microscopy, researchers identified clusters of sharp plastic shards measuring 200 nanometers or less—about twice the size of a typical virus. These tiny fragments are small enough to cross the blood-brain barrier, the brain’s natural defense system against harmful substances.
Rather than chemical toxicity, researchers are particularly concerned about potential physical interference in brain function. “We start thinking that maybe these plastics obstruct blood flow in capillaries,” Campen explains. “There’s the potential that these nanomaterials interfere with the connections between axons in the brain. They could also be a seed for aggregation of proteins involved in dementia. We just don’t know.”
How Are These Plastics Getting Into the Brain?
The research team analyzed brain tissue samples from early 2016 and 2024, revealing a stark increase in plastic levels over just eight years. To establish a longer historical perspective, they also examined older brain samples from 1997 to 2013, obtained from brain banks on the East Coast. These earlier samples showed significantly lower plastic concentrations, suggesting a steady rise that parallels the global increase in plastic production and environmental contamination.
The study, published in Nature Medicine, investigated potential pathways for microplastics to enter our bodies. Researchers hypothesize that food, particularly meat, may be a major source. Commercial meat production can concentrate plastics through a cycle of contamination: farms use plastic-contaminated water for irrigation, feed crops to livestock, then use manure from those animals as fertilizer, potentially amplifying plastic levels at each step.
Another recent study revealed that commercial seafood caught off the shores of western U.S. states showed high levels of microplastic contamination.
Once inside the body, these particles show a striking tendency to accumulate in fat-rich tissues, including the brain’s myelin sheath—the fatty insulating layer that wraps around nerve cells and enables them to communicate effectively. This affinity for fatty tissue might explain why the brain harbors higher plastic levels than other organs.
The findings raise particular concerns about dementia. While the study cannot establish cause and effect, brain samples from individuals with various forms of dementia—including Alzheimer’s and vascular dementia—showed dramatically higher plastic concentrations. These particles appeared especially concentrated around blood vessels and in areas with clusters of immune cells, suggesting possible interference with brain function.
A Growing Concern with No Quick Fix
Even if plastic production stopped immediately, existing polymers would continue to break down into microscopic particles for decades, contributing to rising contamination levels. Campen warns this could become a “ticking time bomb” for human health.
To ensure accuracy, researchers used multiple verification methods, including chemical breakdown techniques and advanced microscopy, to confirm their findings. Their research indicates that microplastics are accumulating at increasing rates, raising urgent questions about potential health effects.
These findings mark a turning point in our understanding of plastic pollution’s impact on human health. With microplastic levels in brain tissue rising steadily, the question isn’t just about what these particles are doing in our brains — it’s about what we’re going to do about it.
Many people dismiss concerns about environmental contaminants measured in trace amounts. But, as Campen puts it, “I have yet to encounter a single human being who says, ‘There’s a bunch of plastic in my brain and I’m totally cool with that.’”
OpenAI boss Sam Altman was in Delhi on Wednesday and said India was a major market for his firm
India’s biggest news organisations are seeking to join a lawsuit against OpenAI, the US startup behind ChatGPT, for alleged unauthorised use of their content.
The news organisations include some of India’s oldest publications like The Indian Express, The Hindu, The India Today group, billionaire Gautam Adani-owned NDTV, and over a dozen others.
OpenAI denies the allegations and told the BBC that it uses “publicly available data” that are in line with “widely accepted legal precedents”.
On Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was in Delhi to discuss India’s plan for a low-cost AI ecosystem with IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.
He said India “should be one of the leaders of the AI revolution” and said earlier comments from 2023, when he said Indian firms would struggle to compete, had been taken out of context.
“India is an incredibly important market for AI in general and for OpenAI in particular,” local media quoted him as saying at the event.
The legal case filed against OpenAI in November by Asian News International (ANI), India’s largest news agency, is the first of its kind in India.
ANI accuses ChatGPT of using its copyrighted material illegally – which OpenAI denies – and is seeking damages of 20m rupees ($230,000; £185,000).
The case holds significance for ChatGPT given its plans to expand in the country. According to a survey, India already has the largest user base of ChatGPT.
Chatbots like ChatGPT are trained on massive datasets collected by crawling through the internet. The content produced by nearly 450 news channels and 17,000 newspapers in India holds huge potential for this.
There is, however, no clarity on what material ChatGPT can legally collect and use for this purpose.
OpenAI is facing at least a dozen lawsuits across the world filed by publishers, artists and news organisations, who have all accused ChatGPT of using their content without permission.
The most prominent of them was filed by The New York Times in December 2023, in which the newspaper demanded “billions of dollars” in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft, its backer.
“A decision by any court would also hold some persuasive value for other similar cases around the world,” says Vibhav Mithal, a lawyer specialising in artificial intelligence at the Indian law firm Anand and Anand.
Mr Mithal said the verdict in the lawsuit filed by ANI could “define how these AI models will operate in the future” and “what copyrighted news content can be used to train AI generative models [like ChatGPT]”.
A court ruling in ANI’s favour could spark further legal cases as well as opening the possibility of AI companies entering into license sharing agreements with content creators, which some companies have already started doing.
“But a ruling in OpenAI’s favour will lead to more freedom to use copyrighted protected data to train AI models,” he said.
What is ANI’s case?
ANI provides news to its paying subscribers and owns exclusive copyright over a large archive of text, images and videos.
In its suit filed in the Delhi High Court, ANI says that OpenAI used its content to train ChatGPT without permission. ANI has argued that this led to the chatbot getting better and has profited OpenAI.
The news agency said that before filing the suit, it had told OpenAI its content was being used unlawfully and offered to grant the company a license to use its data.
ANI says OpenAI declined the offer and put the news agency on an internal blocklist so that its data is no longer collected. It also asked ANI to disable certain web crawlers to ensure that its content was not picked up by ChatGPT.
The news agency says that despite these measures, ChatGPT picks up its content from websites of its subscribers. This has enriched OpenAI “unjustly”, it says.
ANI also says in its suit that the chatbot produces its content verbatim for certain prompts. In some instances, ANI says, ChatGPT has falsely attributed statements to the news agency, hampering its credibility and misleading the public.
Apart from seeking compensation for damages, ANI has asked the court to direct OpenAI to stop storing and using its work.
In its response, OpenAI says it opposes the case being filed in India since the company and its servers are not located in the country and the chatbot has also not been trained there.
News organisations seek to join lawsuit
In December, the Federation of Indian Publishers, which claims to represent 80% of Indian publishers including the Indian offices of Penguin Random House and Oxford University Press, filed an application in court saying that they were “directly affected” by this case and should be allowed to present their arguments as well.
A month later, Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), which represents leading Indian news outlets, and three other media outlets filed a similar application. They argued that while OpenAI had entered into licensing agreements with international news publishers such as the Associated Press and Financial Times, a similar model had not been followed in India.
DNPA told the court the case would affect the livelihood of journalists and the country’s entire news industry. OpenAI has, however, argued that chatbots are not a “substitute” for news subscriptions and are not used for such purposes.
The court has not admitted these applications by the publishers yet and OpenAI has argued that the court should not hear them.
But the judge clarified that even if these associations are allowed to argue, the court will restrict itself to ANI’s claims since the other parties had not filed their own lawsuits.
Meanwhile, OpenAI told the BBC it is engaging in “constructive partnerships and conversations” with news organisations around the world, including India, to “work collaboratively”.
Where AI regulation in India stands
Analysts say the lawsuits filed against ChatGPT across the world could bring into focus aspects of chatbots that have escaped scrutiny so far.
Dr Sivaramakrishnan R Guruvayur, whose research focuses on responsible use of artificial intelligence, says that the data used to train chatbots is one such aspect.
The ANI-OpenAI case will lead the court “to evaluate the data sources” of chatbots, he said.
Phantom, a robot designed by the San Francisco-based Foundation Robotics Labs, made its public debut as a DJ on Jan. 31, 2025. Timothy Karoff/SFGATE
Something is off with tonight’s talent at Temple Nightclub. Blue lights obscure the DJ’s face, but from the back of the crowded dance floor, you can make out an uncanny silhouette of an almost impossibly thin neck and unusually small, square head.
The DJ’s arms move in smooth, steady arcs. Although the transitions are precise, the fist pumps are almost out of time with the propulsive tech-house beats blaring out of the speakers.
If those motions sound robotic, they are. Phantom is the first humanoid robot developed by San Francisco-based startup Foundation Robotics Labs. In the near future, the company’s line of humanoid robots could manufacture cars, rove warehouses, and even be deployed by the U.S. military to combat zones. But on Friday, Phantom made his first public appearance — not as a weapon of war but as a DJ. (Phantom’s creators are emphatic that the robot is a “he.”)
Co-founder Mike LeBlanc said that the company’s customers include auto manufacturers, warehouses and logistics firms, as well as the Department of Defense. That makes it hard not to see a double meaning in the generic finger gun gestures Phantom performs on stage.
LeBlanc, who served 13 years in the Marines, said that while the company’s competitors promised to never place robots in military roles, Foundation is the only American robotics company building humanoids for national defense. Famed robotics company Boston Dynamics has prohibited the “weaponization” of its general purpose bots and has made a pledge with five other leading robotics companies to never use their technology as weapons.
“We’re the opposite,” LeBlanc told SFGATE. “We believe that humanoids are going to be critical to the future of warfare. Hence, designing robots that are bigger, faster, stronger.” (Currently, the company’s robots are not in combat, and mainly help with the maintenance and refueling of aircraft in remote areas for the military, according to LeBlanc.)
This DJ set, then, is a bit of cultural diplomacy for the company — a demonstration that a literal war machine can be fun, too. “We are not trying to apologize for the strength of robots,” LeBlanc said. “So for us, this is the perfect unveiling because this is what our robot is. This is a fun moment.”
By that metric, Phantom’s debut DJ set was a success. On Friday, the robot gave a 30-minute set on the main stage at Temple Nightclub to cap off an event billed as a “Tech GigaParty” — part AI trade expo, part networking event, part club night. He received a warm welcome from San Francisco.
As Phantom takes the stage at 9:45 p.m. following a human DJ, LeBlanc’s fellow co-founder, Sankaet Pathak, stands beside him holding a microphone. A man wearing a ruby-colored, “Big Lebowski” robe yells “Bot DJ!” at the stage from below.
Pathak asks the dance floor, which is crowded with techies in vests, chino pants and blouses, to raise their hands if they like robots. The audience hoots; hands go up. “I like robots,” a guy near me murmurs, maybe to himself.
A few quiet minutes pass. “It’s time for the robot rager,” someone unseen declares from onstage. “Robot rager!” tech-Lebowski yells in agreement. And the robot rager begins.
Standing over the room, Phantom is completely expressionless. He has to be, since his face is a round-edged, featureless black box. He’s shaped like a human: broad shoulders, a torso, a narrow midriff and arms with elbow joints. At times, Phantom raises his hand straight up and down, silvery digits upright, thumb askew.
Phantom’s motions are uncannily smooth. A human DJ would’ve bounced up and down, jabbing at buttons on the DJ board. Phantom’s head stays perfectly level, and instead of jerking his hands, he brings them down in perfectly timed arcs. Phantom doesn’t pick tracks out in real time, Pathak explains to me. Humans selected the music in advance, and Foundation Robotics Lab spent a few weeks training the robot’s every motion.
“I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is probably the best DJ set you will have ever seen in your life,” Pathak says.
I have to press. “The best I’ll have ever seen in my life?”
“I’m pretty sure of that,” he says. Pathak explains that the DJ set will tell the story of human history, from the distant past to the future, with the help of AI-generated visuals.
(I ask Pathak if he likes electronic music. He replies that yes, he enjoys Daft Punk and Skrillex.)
On the spectrum from frat house DJ to A. G. Cook, Phantom falls somewhere in the middle. He plays at least two Gesaffelstein tracks and succeeds in moving bodies near the front of the room, where tech-Lebowski and company bust what can best be described as Burning Man dance moves. The back of the room is a bit dead, which is no fault of Phantom’s. It is a tech party, after all.
One young woman in a blue lanyard wears an Apple Vision Pro around her neck. I watch a man in a suit approach her and strike up a conversation, presumably flirtatious. When I look again, they already have their phones out. Not exchanging numbers, just adding each other on LinkedIn.
“I think you’re going to be seeing a lot more of Phantom with music,” LeBlanc told me near the end of our interview. Foundation Robotics Lab has been fielding requests for the robot’s appearances, and the company is considering hiring an agent to handle them all. “People just love this thing,” he said.
I recall this exchange as I watch a sharply dressed couple sway their hips in front of the DJ stand, which bears a car-length LED display of Foundation’s logo. Call it a military-industrial middle school dance.
Thought experiment: If one of the military drones Barack Obama deployed during his presidency held a Bushwick Boiler Room, would you line up to dance? OK, OK, OK: But what if the drone was really, really cool?
Everyone agrees that the art vs. the artist debate is tired. But we’re not talking about Kanye West’s antisemitic comments. There’s a big difference here: Kanye is a musician with a flawed moral character; Phantom is a weapon with a side hustle as a DJ. His music career essentially constitutes a goodwill campaign for a morally dubious project.
Boston Dynamics, in its pledge, raised concerns about military use of robots: “We believe that adding weapons to robots that are remotely or autonomously operated, widely available to the public, and capable of navigating to previously inaccessible locations where people live and work, raises new risks of harm and serious ethical issues.”
The Finance Ministry has issued an advisory instructing its employees not to use ChatGpt.
Finance Ministry has issued an advisory instructing its employees not to use AI tools like ChatGPT and DeepSeek for official work due to concerns over the security of government data and documents, Reuters reported. Although the notification is reportedly dated January 29, news of it surfaced only recently, coinciding with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s India visit.
Similar restrictions have been enforced in other countries, including Australia and Italy, where authorities have raised data security concerns over Chinese AI-powered tools like DeepSeek.
“It has been determined that AI tools and AI apps (such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek etc.) in the office computers and devices pose risks for confidentiality of (government) data and documents,” the Reuters report quoted the advisory as saying. Three finance ministry officials told Reuters that the note was genuine and the note was issued internally this week.
The ChatGPT maker is under pressure in India due to a major copyright dispute with leading media houses. In court filings, the company argued that since it has no servers in India, local courts should not handle the case.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO is in India for important meetings with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw. His visit comes almost a year after he sparked controversy by calling India’s AI ambitions “hopeless.” However, his views now seem to be changing.
China announced a wide range of measures on Tuesday targeting U.S. businesses including Google (GOOGL.O), farm equipment makers and the owner of fashion brand Calvin Klein, minutes after new U.S. tariffs on Chinese goods took effect.
Beijing also slapped tariffs on U.S. products such as coal, oil and some autos in a rapid response to the new duties on Chinese goods imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump, escalating trade tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation said Google was suspected of violating the country’s anti-monopoly law and an investigation was initiated in accordance with the law. It did not provide further details on the investigation or on what it alleged Google had done to breach the law.
Google products such as its search engine are blocked in China and its revenue from there is about 1% of global sales. It still works with Chinese partners such as advertisers.
In 2017, Google announced the launch of a small artificial intelligence centre in China. But the project was disbanded two years later and the firm does not conduct AI research in China, according to a blog posting.
Separately, China’s Commerce Ministry said it had put PVH Corp (PVH.N), the holding company for brands including Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, and U.S. biotechnology firm Illumina (ILMN.O), on its “unreliable entity” list.
It said the two companies took what it called “discriminatory measures against Chinese enterprises” and “damaged” the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies.
Companies added to the blacklist can be subject to fines and a broad range of other sanctions, including a freeze on trade and revocation of work permits for foreign staff.
While Google declined to comment, PVH said it was “surprised and deeply disappointed” by the ministry’s decision, saying that the company maintains “strict compliance with all relevant laws and regulations and operates in line with established industry standards and practices.”
PVH added it would continue engagement with relevant authorities and look forward to a positive resolution.
Illumina did not respond to a request for comment.
Shares of both PVH and Illumina were down nearly 4% each in premarket U.S. trading, while Google-parent Alphabet rose 1%.
The logo of Google LLC is shown at an entrance to one of their buildings in San Diego, California, U.S., October 9, 2024. REUTERS/Mike Blake/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
PVH had already been under scrutiny from Chinese regulators over “improper” conduct related to the Xinjiang region.
“These moves are warnings that China intends to harm U.S. interests if need be, but still give China the option to back down,” Capital Economics said in a note.
“The tariffs could be postponed or cancelled before they come into effect… The probe against Google could conclude without any penalties.”
TESLA AND FARM EQUIPMENT FIRMS
China also announced 10% tariffs on imports of U.S. farm equipment that could impact firms such as Caterpillar (CAT.N), Deere & Co (DE.N), opens new tab and AGCO (AGCO.N), as well as a small number of trucks and big-engine sedans shipped to China from the United States.
That could apply to Elon Musk’s Cybertruck, a niche offering Tesla (TSLA.O),has been promoting in China, as it awaits regulatory clearance to begin sales.
China’s Ministry of Industry and Information technology designated the Cybertruck as a “passenger car” in a posting in December that was quickly deleted.
If the Cybertruck was designated as an electric truck, Tesla would face a 10% tariff on any future imports from its factory in Texas.
Tesla had no immediate comment.
The new tariffs on U.S. products will start on Feb. 10, the ministry said.
The announcements made on Tuesday ramped up trade restrictions between Beijing and Washington that had been largely limited to the tech sector under the administration of former U.S. President Joe Biden, which sought to restrict China’s access to high-end semiconductors.
OpenAI logo is seen in this illustration taken May 20, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Microsoft (MSFT.O) backed OpenAI said on Tuesday it will roll out an education-specific version of its chatbot to about 500,000 students and faculty at California State University as it looks to expand its user base in the academic sector and counter competition from rivals like Alphabet (GOOGL.O).
The rollout will cover 23 campuses of the largest public university system in the United States, enabling students to access personalized tutoring and study guides through the chatbot, while the faculty will be able to use it for administrative tasks.
OpenAI has been looking to integrate ChatGPT into classrooms since 2023, even as initial concerns about its potential use for cheating and plagiarism had prompted some schools to consider bans.
Universities like the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at Austin in the U.S., and the University of Oxford in the UK have already been using ChatGPT Enterprise, prompting OpenAI to launch ChatGPT Edu in May last year.
Rival Alphabet has already been expanding into the education sector, where it has announced a $120 million investment fund for AI education programs and plans to introduce its GenAI chatbot Gemini to teen students’ school-issued Google accounts.
In November, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer opened London’s first Google-funded AI university, which will provide older teens with access to resources in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as mentorship and expertise from Google’s AI company, DeepMind.
In recent years, social media has turned ice baths from an athlete’s recovery tool into a mainstream wellness trend, with influencers and celebrities touting their supposed benefits for everything from mood enhancement to immune system boosting. Now, a new systematic review and meta-analysis cuts through the hype and reveals how cold-water immersion (CWI) actually affects the human body.
Analyzing data from 11 studies with 3,177 participants, researchers from the University of South Australia found that while cold-water immersion may offer some health benefits, these effects are highly time-dependent and context-specific. Their results are published in the journal PLOS ONE.
“Cold-water immersion has been extensively researched and used in sporting contexts to help athletes recover, but despite its growing popularity among health and wellbeing circles, little is known about its effects on the general population,” explains lead researcher Tara Cain, a research assistant with the university’s Allied Health & Human Performance program, in a statement.
The timing of cold water’s effects turned out to be crucial. While many people seek out ice baths for immediate stress relief, the research showed that significant stress reduction only occurred 12 hours after exposure. This delayed benefit suggests that the body’s response to cold exposure isn’t as straightforward as previously believed.
The research also revealed surprising findings about inflammation.
“At first glance this seems contradictory, as we know that ice baths are regularly used by elite athletes to reduce inflammation and muscle soreness after exercise,” explains co-researcher Dr. Ben Singh. “The immediate spike in inflammation is the body’s reaction to the cold as a stressor. It helps the body adapt and recover and is similar to how exercise causes muscle damage before making muscles stronger, which is why athletes use it despite the short-term increase.”
To understand these effects, the research team examined studies where participants were immersed in water ranging from 7°C to 15°C (44.6°F to 59°F). The exposure times varied dramatically, from just 30 seconds to two hours. While most studies looked at traditional ice baths, one large trial focused on cold showers, making the findings relevant to people who might not have access to specialized equipment.
The immune system findings proved particularly interesting. Although blood markers showed no immediate boost to immunity, one large study of over 3,000 participants found that people who took regular cold showers were 29% less likely to call in sick to work. However, when they did get sick, their illnesses lasted just as long as everyone else’s. This suggests that cold exposure might help people cope better with illness rather than preventing it entirely.
Sleep quality improvements emerged as another potential benefit, though primarily in male participants. The research showed better sleep scores among those who practiced cold-water immersion compared to control groups. However, the lack of female participants in these studies means we don’t yet know if women would experience the same benefits.
Quality of life measurements revealed short-term gains that faded over time. “We also noted that participants who took 20, 60, or 90 second cold showers reported slightly higher quality of life scores. But again, after three months these effects had faded,” Cain notes. This finding raises important questions about how long people need to continue cold exposure to maintain any benefits.
The research also highlighted important safety considerations, especially for certain groups. “Knowing this, people with pre-existing health conditions should take extra care if participating in cold-water immersion experiences as the initial inflammation could have detrimental health impacts,” warns Dr. Singh. This caution is particularly relevant given the growing popularity of cold exposure practices.
The current cold plunge trend shows no signs of slowing down. However, this research suggests that people might need to adjust their expectations about what cold exposure can and cannot do for their health.
Safety Considerations
The research emphasizes several important safety aspects of cold-water immersion. The initial inflammatory response could pose risks for people with pre-existing health conditions. Additionally, the wide range of protocols used in different studies, from very brief cold showers to extended ice baths, suggests that people should start gradually and pay attention to how their body responds.
While cold-water immersion shows promise for specific health outcomes, more research is needed to establish optimal protocols and understand who might benefit most. As Cain notes, “Right now, there isn’t enough high-quality research to say exactly who benefits most or what the ideal approach is to cold-water immersion. More long-term studies, among more diverse populations, are needed to understand its lasting effects and practical applications.”
ISRO’s landmark 100th mission has hit a setback as its navigation satellite, NVS-02, faces a technical glitch, raising concerns over its deployment.
ISRO’s 100th mission faces technical glitch
The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) milestone 100th rocket mission has encountered a setback, as its navigation satellite, launched on Wednesday, developed a technical glitch on Sunday. Providing an update, ISRO stated that “orbit raising operations towards positioning the satellite to the designated orbital slot could not be carried out as the valves for admitting the oxidizer to fire the thrusters for orbit raising did not open.”
The NVS-02 satellite, developed by the U R Rao Satellite Centre, was meant to be positioned in a geostationary circular orbit over India. However, with its liquid engine failing to function optimally, the effort to place it in its designated orbit remains uncertain.
“The satellite systems are healthy and the satellite is currently in elliptical orbit. Alternate mission strategies for utilising the satellite for navigation in an elliptical orbit is being worked out,” ISRO said.
Launched at 6:23 am on Wednesday aboard the GSLV-F15 from Sriharikota, the mission was not only ISRO’s 100th but also the first under Chairman V Narayanan, who recently took office. It also marked ISRO’s maiden launch for the year.
AI Artificial intelligence words, miniature of robot and British flag are seen in this illustration taken December 21, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File photo Purchase Licensing Rights
Britain will make it illegal to use artificial intelligence tools that create child sexual abuse images, it said on Saturday, becoming the first country in the world to introduce the new AI sexual abuse offences.
Possessing, taking, making, showing or distributing explicit images of children is a crime in England and Wales. The new offences target the use of AI tools to “nudeify” real-life images of children.
The move comes as online criminals increasingly use AI to create child abuse material, with reports of such explicit images rising nearly five-fold in 2024, according to the Internet Watch Foundation.
“We know that sick predators’ activities online often lead to them carrying out the most horrific abuse in person,” Britain’s interior minister Yvette Cooper said. “It is vital that we tackle child sexual abuse online as well as offline so we can better protect the public from new and emerging crimes.”
Predators also use AI tools to disguise their identity and blackmail children with fake images to force them into further abuse, such as by streaming live images, the government said.
The new criminal offences include the possession, creation or distribution of AI tools designed to create child sexual abuse material and the possession of so-called AI “paedophile manuals,” which provide instructions on the usage of the technology.
Another specific offence will target those who run websites on which child sexual abuse content is distributed. The government will also enable authorities to unlock digital devices for inspection.
The measures will be included in the Crime and Policing Bill when it comes to parliament.
In the harsh Arctic environment, where polar bears regularly plunge into freezing waters to hunt seals, a remarkable thing happens: unlike your car windshield on a winter morning, their fur resists turning into a frozen mass. Scientists have long wondered how these marine mammals keep ice from forming on their iconic white fur, and now an international study reveals their remarkable secret lies in their greasy hair.
The study, published in Science Advances, dives into this furry phenomenon. An international research team, led by PhD candidate Julian Carolan from Trinity College Dublin’s School of Chemistry, has discovered that these white fluffballs possess natural ice-repellant reactions in their fur similar to advanced synthetic materials, thanks to a protective oil called sebum. This finding helps explain how polar bears stay ice-free while hunting in temperatures that can plummet below -40°C.
“We measured ice adhesion strength, which is a useful measure of how well ice sticks to fur; hydrophobicity, which dictates whether water can be shed before it freezes; and freezing delay time, which simply shows how long it takes for a drop of water to freeze at certain temperatures on a given surface,” explains Carolan, in a statement. “We then compared the performance of the polar bear hair with that of human hair and two types of specialist human-made ‘ski skins.’”
In Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, a cluster of Arctic islands roughly halfway between mainland Norway and the North Pole, researchers studied fur samples from six wild polar bears. The research team found that polar bear fur has remarkably low “ice adhesion strength.” That means ice simply doesn’t stick well to it. The key to this ice-resistant superpower lies in the bears’ sebum, produced by specialized glands near each hair root.
“The sebum quickly jumped out as being the key component giving this anti-icing effect as we discovered the adhesion strength was greatly impacted when the hair was washed,” says Carolan. “Unwashed, greasy hair made it much harder for ice to stick. In contrast, when the polar bear hair was washed and the grease largely removed, it performed similarly to human hair, to which ice sticks easily whether it is washed or greasy.”
The research team’s chemical analysis revealed something unexpected: Polar bear sebum lacks squalene, an oily compound commonly found in human hair and in other aquatic mammals like sea otters. Instead, it contains a unique mixture of cholesterol, diacylglycerols, and fatty acids that appear to have been specifically evolved to prevent ice buildup. This is especially important for polar bears when hunting.
“One of the polar bears’ main hunting strategies is ‘still hunting,’ where they lay motionless beside a breathing hole on sea ice waiting for seals to surface,” says professor Bodil Holst from the University of Bergen. “Still hunting frequently develops into an ‘aquatic stalk’ with the polar bear using its hind paws to slide into the water to pursue its prey, and the lower the ice adhesion, the less noise generated and the faster and quieter the slide.”
This natural technology hasn’t gone unnoticed by Arctic indigenous peoples. The Inuit developed sophisticated hunting techniques that mimicked polar bears’ advantages. They crafted hunting stools with polar bear fur-lined feet and wore “polar bear trousers” to ensure silent movement across the ice. Notably, traditional Inuit fur preparation methods specifically protected the sebum by never washing the hair-covered side of polar bear skin, unlike fox fur, which they would clean with soapstone or dry clay.
While other Arctic animals have developed different anti-icing strategies, polar bears’ solution is unique. For example, a penguin’s feather structure prevents icing rather than oils.
“Our work shows that polar bear fur provides an alternative strategy to produce an anti-icing surface based on the characteristic blend of lipids present in their fur sebum or hair grease,” says Dr. Richard Hobbs, Assistant Professor at Trinity College Dublin.
The discovery could lead to more environmentally friendly anti-icing technologies. Current synthetic solutions often rely on problematic “forever chemicals” like PFAS. The natural lipid coating produced by polar bears might offer a sustainable alternative for applications ranging from aircraft surfaces to winter sports equipment.
Belgian Shepherd Malinois dogs. (Photo by ubaru on Shutterstock)
For centuries, police departments have favored German Shepherds, search-and-rescue teams have relied on Bloodhounds, and military units have trained Belgian Malinois. We’ve long believed these breeds were specially developed to excel at their jobs, thanks to unique skull shapes that enhanced their abilities. But new research suggests we’ve been wrong all along.
A new study published in Science Advances analyzed three-dimensional skull shapes from 117 canids, including 40 domestic dog breeds and 18 wild species like wolves and foxes. The surprising finding? Despite centuries of selective breeding that created dogs ranging from tiny Chihuahuas to massive Great Danes, there’s little evidence that these skull differences make breeds better at their traditional jobs.
“In the past 200 years, humans have created hundreds of dog breeds that look really different and are pretty specialized at some tasks like herding, protecting, and detecting odors,” explains Lindsay Waldrop, assistant professor of biological sciences at Chapman University, in a statement. “We have assumed that these dogs look different because they are structurally specialized at these tasks, but our study shows that, at least for their skulls, they are not specialized for tasks that involve the skull, such as biting tasks and scent work.”
The research team used advanced scanning technology to create detailed 3D models of dog skulls from museum collections. They mapped key points on each skull—like snout length, jaw structure, and cranial proportions—and compared these measurements across breeds. What they found challenges many common beliefs about working dogs.
“I was most surprised by the overall similarity we see in most of the dog skulls,” admits lead author Nicholas Hebron, who completed the work as a postdoctoral research associate at Chapman University. “Humans have done so much breeding work to alter the visual appearance of these animals that I honestly expected to see really marked groupings of some kind and we really didn’t see much of that.”
When researchers looked specifically at breeds used for scent detection or protection work, they found no distinct skull adaptations that would give these dogs an advantage, though scenting breeds showed some variation within a limited range. They calculated bite-force quotients for different skull types and found no significant differences between breeds historically used for bite work and other breeds of similar size.
This research directly challenges myths about certain breeds being more dangerous than others. “There are many news stories about dogs attacking people badly and often there are specific breeds that are targets of this reporting,” Waldrop notes. “Some people claim these dogs will bite harder than other dogs of the same size, or they have special features like ‘locking jaws’ that make them especially dangerous to people. Our study shows that this is simply not true.”
The only breeds that stood out as truly different were those with extremely short snouts, like Pugs and Bulldogs. These flat-faced breeds have skull shapes unlike any wild canids, suggesting these features came from human preferences rather than functional needs.
These results suggest that successful working dogs aren’t born with specialized equipment. Instead, they’re made through training, temperament, and determination. While we’ve bred dogs to look remarkably different from one another, their skull structures remain surprisingly similar. For organizations selecting working dogs, this means the perfect candidate might not come in the package they expect.
Image by Matthias Balk / picture alliance via Getty / Futurism
Google might be one of the wealthiest corporations in the world, but that doesn’t mean the multi-trillion-dollar company won’t resort to downsizing.
Over the last year or so, employees in the once-ironclad tech sector have watched in horror as waves of layoffs ravaged their offices and sent wages tumbling.
Bracing for cuts after annual performance reviews on Tuesday, over 1,300 Google employees signed a petition organized by the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU)— the labor union covering Google’s parent corporation, Alphabet — requesting changes to the company’s policy.
Those include guaranteed severance for every laid-off employee, an offer of voluntary layoffs backed by those severance packages, and an end to Google’s performance review system which has pulled double-duty as a mass layoff machine.
“Ongoing rounds of layoffs make us feel insecure about our jobs,” read the petition. “The company is clearly in a strong financial position, making the loss of so many valuable colleagues without explanation hurt even more.”
Google’s response was to turn around and give the petitioners what they asked for. Yesterday, the tech conglomerate announced a “voluntary exit program” for US employees in its Platforms and Devices group — the workers responsible for products like Pixel, Android, Chrome, Fitbit, and Nest. But the AWU notes a one-time offer does not change the long-term employee outlook.
“We are happy to see material progress in response to our concerns,” Google software engineer and AWU union organizing chair Alan McAvinney told Futurism, “but we continue to demand that Google commit to practices like offers of voluntary buyouts and fair terms of severance by codifying them in its actual written policies.”
A keyboard is placed in front of a displayed WhatsApp logo in this illustration taken February 21, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
An official with Meta Platforms’ (META.O), opens new tab popular WhatsApp chat service said Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions had targeted scores of its users, including journalists and members of civil society.
The official said on Friday that WhatsApp had sent Paragon a cease-and-desist letter following the hack. In a statement, WhatsApp said the company “will continue to protect people’s ability to communicate privately.”Paragon declined to comment.
The WhatsApp official told Reuters it had detected an effort to hack approximately 90 users.
The official declined to say who, specifically, was targeted. But he said those targeted were based in more than two dozen countries, including several people in Europe. He said WhatsApp users were sent malicious electronic documents that required no user interaction to compromise their targets, a so-called zero-click hack that is considered particularly stealthy.
The official said WhatsApp had since disrupted the hacking effort and was referring targets to Canadian internet watchdog group Citizen Lab. The official declined to discuss how it determined that Paragon was responsible for the hack. He said law enforcement and industry partners had been informed, but declined to give details.
The FBI did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton said the discovery of Paragon spyware targeting WhatsApp users “is a reminder that mercenary spyware continues to proliferate and as it does, so we continue to see familiar patterns of problematic use.”
Spyware merchants such as Paragon sell high-end surveillance software to government clients and typically pitch their services as critical to fighting crime and protecting national security.
But such spy tools have repeatedly been discovered on the phones of journalists, activists, opposition politicians, and at least 50 U.S. officials, raising concerns over the unchecked proliferation of the technology.
We’re still fresh off the heels of iOS 18.3, which released on January 28, and already we’re getting leaks on what to expect from iOS 18.4. That’s good news to me, because the biggest thing about the lukewarm iOS 18.3 release was removing an Apple Intelligence screw-up that in turn, was the biggest thing about iOS 18.2.
Waiting for Apple Intelligence to go from party trick to useful trick to integral component will come in fits, bits, and stages. We’re still early on in the process, but these leaked updates—if they turn out to be true—feel like we’ll see a lurch of progress when it releases in April.
go on, give us the juice
Merging Apple Intelligence’s, well, uh, smarts with Siri was always the game plan. Apart, the two are each somehow less than a half, each one frustratingly compromised and often unhelpful. With iOS 18.4, we’re expecting more integration to bring the following long-awaited capabilities to Siri:
“Awareness of your personal context enables Siri to help you in ways that are unique to you,” reads Apple’s page on Apple Intelligence. “Can’t remember if a friend shared that recipe with you in a note, a text, or an email? Need your passport number while booking a flight?
“Siri can use its knowledge of the information on your device to help find what you’re looking for, without compromising your privacy.”
On-screen awareness, as Apple terms it, is also a major capability granted to Siri by Apple Intelligence. When you give a command to Siri, it’ll be able to use the context of what you’re looking at on the screen to determine what you mean.
Apple gives the example of a friend texting you their address. You can just say, “Hey Siri, add this address to their contact card,” and it’s done.
Cross-app functionality is another anticipated feature. “Seamlessly take action in and across apps with Siri,” says Apple. “You can make a request like ‘Send the email I drafted to April and Lilly’ and Siri knows which email you’re referencing and which app it’s in.
“And Siri can take actions across apps, so after you ask Siri to enhance a photo for you by saying ‘Make this photo pop,’ you can ask Siri to drop it in a specific note in the Notes app — without lifting a finger.”
ooh la la
Because it can’t (and shouldn’t) go on being English-only forever, Apple says Apple Intelligence will pick up a few more languages in iOS 18.4. Currently, it’s only available in English (Australian, Canadian, Irish, New Zealander, South African, British, and American dialects).
They’re being coy about which ones will appear in April’s update, but do say that support for Chinese, English (Indian and Singaporean dialects), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Vietnamese, and “other languages” is coming throughout the year.
The Deepseek logo and words reading “Artificial Intelligence AI” are seen in this illustration taken on January 29, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights
Top White House advisers this week expressed alarm that China’s DeepSeek may have benefited from a method that allegedly piggybacks off the advances of U.S. rivals called “distillation.”
The technique, which involves one AI system learning from another AI system, may be difficult to stop, according to executive and investor sources in Silicon Valley.
DeepSeek this month rocked the technology sector with a new AI model that appeared to rival the capabilities of U.S. giants like OpenAI, but at much lower cost. And the China-based company gave away the code for free.
Some technologists believe that DeepSeek’s model may have learned from U.S. models to make some of its gains. The distillation technique involves having an older, more established and powerful AI model evaluate the quality of the answers coming out of a newer model, effectively transferring the older model’s learnings.
That means the newer model can reap the benefits of the massive investments of time and computing power that went into building the initial model without the associated costs.
This form of distillation, which is different from how most academic researchers previously used the word, is a common technique used in the AI field. However, it is a violation of the terms of service of some prominent models put out by U.S. tech companies in recent years, including OpenAI.
The ChatGPT maker said that it knows of groups in China actively working to replicate U.S. AI models via distillation and is reviewing whether or not DeepSeek may have distilled its models inappropriately, a spokesperson told Reuters.
Naveen Rao, vice president of AI at San Francisco-based Databricks, which does not use the technique when terms of service prohibit it, said that learning from rivals is “par for the course” in the AI industry. Rao likened this to how automakers will buy and then examine one another’s engines.
“To be completely fair, this happens in every scenario. Competition is a real thing, and when it’s extractable information, you’re going to extract it and try to get a win,” Rao said. “We all try to be good citizens, but we’re all competing at the same time.”
Howard Lutnick, President Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Commerce who would oversee future export controls on AI technology, told the U.S. Senate during a confirmation hearing on Wednesday that it appeared DeepSeek had misappropriated U.S. AI technology and vowed to impose restrictions.
“I do not believe that DeepSeek was done all above board. That’s nonsense,” Lutnick said. “I’m going to be rigorous in our pursuit of restrictions and enforcing those restrictions to keep us in the lead.”
David Sacks, the White House’s AI and crypto czar, also raised concerns about DeepSeek distillation in a Fox News interview on Tuesday.
DeepSeek did not immediately answer a request for comment on the allegations.
OpenAI added it will work with the U.S. government to protect U.S. technology, though it did not detail how.
“As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models,” the company said in a statement.
The most recent round of concern in Washington about China’s use of U.S. products to advance its tech sector is similar to previous concerns about the semiconductor industry, where the U.S. has imposed restrictions on what chips and manufacturing tools can be shipped to China and is examining restricting work on certain open technologies.
NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK
Technologists said blocking distillation may be harder than it looks.
One of DeepSeek’s innovations was showing that a relatively small number of data samples – fewer than one million – from a larger, more capable model could drastically improve the capabilities of a smaller model.
When popular products like ChatGPT have hundreds of millions of users, such small amounts of traffic could be hard to detect – and some models, such as Meta Platforms’ (META.O), Llama and French startup Mistral’s offerings, can be downloaded freely and used in private data centers, meaning violations of their terms of service may be hard to spot.
“It’s impossible to stop model distillation when you have open-source models like Mistral and Llama. They are available to everybody. They can also find OpenAI’s model somewhere through customers,” said Umesh Padval, managing director at Thomvest Ventures.
The license for Meta’s Llama model requires those using it for distillation to disclose that practice, a Meta spokesperson told Reuters.
DeepSeek in a paper did disclose using Llama for some distilled versions of the models it released this month, but did not address whether it had ever used Meta’s model earlier in the process. The Meta spokesperson declined to say whether the company believed DeepSeek had violated its terms of service.
One source familiar with the thinking at a major AI lab said the only way to stop firms like DeepSeek from distilling U.S. models would be stringent know-your-customer requirements similar to how financial companies identify with whom they do business.
But nothing like that is set in stone, the source said. The administration of former President Joe Biden had put forth such requirements, which President Donald Trump may not embrace.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Jonathan Ross, chief executive of Groq, an AI computing company that hosts AI models in its cloud, has taken the step of blocking all Chinese IP addresses from accessing its cloud to block Chinese firms from allegedly piggybacking off the AI models it hosts.
Chinese tech company Alibaba (9988.HK) on Wednesday released a new version of its Qwen 2.5 artificial intelligence model that it claimed surpassed the highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
The unusual timing of the Qwen 2.5-Max’s release, on the first day of the Lunar New Year when most Chinese people are off work and with their families, points to the pressure Chinese AI startup DeepSeek’s meteoric rise in the past three weeks has placed on not just overseas rivals, but also its domestic competition.
“Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms … almost across the board GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3 and Llama-3.1-405B,” Alibaba’s cloud unit said in an announcement posted on its official WeChat account, referring to OpenAI and Meta’s most advanced open-source AI models.
The Jan. 10 release of DeepSeek’s AI assistant, powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model, as well as the Jan. 20 release of its R1 model, has shocked Silicon Valley and caused tech shares to plunge, with the Chinese startup’s purportedly low development and usage costs prompting investors to question huge spending plans by leading AI firms in the United States.
But DeepSeek’s success has also led to a scramble among its domestic competitors to upgrade their own AI models.
Two days after the release of DeepSeek-R1, TikTok owner ByteDance released an update to its flagship AI model, which it claimed outperformed Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s o1 in AIME, a benchmark test that measures how well AI models understand and respond to complex instructions.
This echoed DeepSeek’s claim that its R1 model rivalled OpenAI’s o1 on several performance benchmarks.
DEEPSEEK VERSUS DOMESTIC COMPETITORS
Alibaba Group sign is seen at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, China July 6, 2023. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
The predecessor of DeepSeek’s V3 model, DeepSeek-V2, triggered an AI model price war in China after it was released last May.
The fact that DeepSeek-V2 was open-source and unprecedentedly cheap, only 1 yuan ($0.14) per 1 million tokens – or units of data processed by the AI model – led to Alibaba’s cloud unit announcing price cuts of up to 97% on a range of models.
Other Chinese tech companies followed suit, including Baidu (9888.HK), which released China’s first equivalent to ChatGPT in March 2023, and the country’s most valuable internet company Tencent (0700.HK).
Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek’s enigmatic founder, said in a rare interview with Chinese media outlet Waves in July that the startup “did not care” about price wars and that achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence) was its main goal.
OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
While large Chinese tech companies like Alibaba have hundreds of thousands of employees, DeepSeek operates like a research lab, staffed mainly by young graduates and doctorate students from top Chinese universities.
Liang said in his July interview that he believed China’s largest tech companies might not be well suited to the future of the AI industry, contrasting their high costs and top-down structures with DeepSeek’s lean operation and loose management style.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams pose for a picture at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, ahead of Boeing’s Starliner-1 Crew Flight Test (CFT) mission on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket to the International Space Station, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., June 5, 2024. REUTERS/Joe Skipper/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
NASA affirmed on Wednesday a plan it set last year to work with Elon Musk’s SpaceX in returning two astronauts from the International Space Station, saying it will do so “as soon as practical,” the day after President Donald Trump suggested he wants a quicker return for the crew.
On Tuesday night, Trump said he had asked Elon Musk’s SpaceX to return two NASA astronauts from the International Space Station, who were already scheduled to fly back on a SpaceX capsule in March.
Earlier, Musk said Trump had asked him to return the two astronauts “as soon as possible,” suggesting a change to NASA’s current plan for a late March return. “We will do so,” Musk said.
“I have just asked Elon Musk and @SpaceX to ‘go get’ the 2 brave astronauts who have been virtually abandoned in space by the Biden Administration,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They have been waiting for many months on @Space Station. Elon will soon be on his way. Hopefully, all will be safe. Good luck Elon!!!”
The astronauts were left on the ISS because of problems with Boeing’s Starliner capsule, which led NASA in August to tap SpaceX for their return instead. Former President Joe Biden and his White House had no involvement in the agency’s decision-making on the mission.
Trump’s demand that SpaceX retrieve veteran NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been assigned a SpaceX ride home since August, was an unusual intervention by a U.S. president into NASA’s operations that caught many agency officials by surprise, two officials said.
Wilmore and Williams are among seven astronauts on the ISS, and they remain healthy and busy with routine scientific research aboard the station, NASA has said.
A spokesperson with NASA, which oversees SpaceX’s flights to the ISS, said “NASA and SpaceX are expeditiously working to safely return the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore as soon as practical, while also preparing for the launch of Crew-10 to complete a handover between expeditions.”
Wilmore and Williams flew Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft to the ISS last summer for an eight-day test mission that instead has lasted nearly a year because of problems with the craft’s propulsion system.
NASA in August, during Biden’s administration, deemed Starliner too risky to bring them back to Earth and tapped SpaceX to return them on a Crew Dragon spacecraft.
That craft is already docked with the space station, having flown there for NASA’s Crew-9 astronaut rotation mission in September with empty seats for Wilmore and Williams.
The astronauts’ original February departure date on Crew-9 was delayed to late March because SpaceX needed more time “to complete processing” of a new Crew Dragon capsule that will replace theirs for the Crew-10 mission, NASA said in December.
The agency has a delicately coordinated ISS schedule, and an early Crew-9 return might leave the station’s U.S. contingent understaffed.
It had been unclear whether Trump’s demand would mean NASA bringing Crew-9 back to Earth before the Crew-10 capsule arrives, or SpaceX launching Crew-10 earlier than planned. While NASA appeared to affirm the astronaut’s return plan remains unchanged, it did not answer a question on whether the Crew-10 launch date would be sooner.
Returning Crew-9 to Earth before Crew-10’s arrival would mean NASA astronaut Don Pettit, who flew to the ISS with a Russian crew in September, would be the only American aboard the station, a rare staffing imbalance that NASA has said complicates maintenance of the station’s U.S. components.
Though Starliner’s development since 2019 has been a persistent challenge for Boeing, rife with engineering troubles and cost overruns, some Trump advisers in recent months have sought to blame Biden, although the former president had no involvement in Starliner’s development.
NASA since 2020 has used SpaceX’s Crew Dragon to ferry U.S. astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The spacecraft was developed under a more than $3 billion NASA contract under the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, a program created under former U.S. president Barack Obama.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has revealed it is closely monitoring an asteroid the size of a football pitch that could hit the Earth in a little over seven years.
The asteroid, called 2024 YR4, is estimated to have a one in 83 chance of a direct hit, causing “severe damage to a local region”, according to ESA.
The space rock, which measures 100m by 40m, is currently at a distance of around 27 million miles and moving away from the planet. But its path will cross the Earth’s orbit on 22 December 2032.
Most likely there would be a near miss, with the asteroid passing within a few thousand miles.
The Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, which is chaired by ESA, will discuss the latest observations of the asteroid at a meeting in Vienna next week.
If the impact risk is confirmed it will make official recommendations to the United Nations and work may begin on options for a “spacecraft-based response to the potential hazard”, the agency said in a statement.
Dr Simeon Barber, a space scientist at the Open University, told Sky News: “We shouldn’t be overly worried – at least not just yet.
“That’s because our early detection systems quite often overestimate the likelihood of an impact with Earth.
“In the early stages, we can’t determine its trajectory very accurately, and so the probability of impact has to take into account this uncertainty.
“It’s likely that as our technologies for detecting Earth-bound objects improve, we may see an increasing number of alerts such as this.
“It’s important that we find the right balance between treating the threat seriously, but not over-reacting in these early stages of discovery when the trajectory is still not well-defined.”
‘Protect our home planet’
Just over two years ago NASA smashed a spacecraft into the 160m-wide asteroid Dimorphos and successfully changed its orbit.
At the time NASA administrator Bill Nelson said: “All of us have a responsibility to protect our home planet. After all, it’s the only one we have.”
Near-Earth Asteroid 2024 YR4 was first spotted by a telescope in Chile. Since the start of January, astronomers have been tracking the asteroid to gauge its size and movement.
The asteroid is expected to fade from view within the next few months as it moves further from the Earth. Increasingly powerful telescopes will be trained on the rock to gather as much data as possible on its trajectory.
Once it disappears it won’t come back into view until 2028.
US President Donald Trump and SpaceX Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk issued separate statements Tuesday night in the US, claiming that SpaceX will “go get” two astronauts on the International Space Station “as soon as possible,” despite NASA’s already announced plans to bring them home on a SpaceX capsule around March.
The @POTUS has asked @SpaceX to bring home the 2 astronauts stranded on the @Space_Station as soon as possible. We will do so.
Terrible that the Biden administration left them there so long.
SpaceX is already on the hook to return Sunita “Suni” Williams and Barry “Butch” Wilmore, the two astronauts Musk and Trump are presumably referencing in their social media posts and who have received increased media attention over their extended mission in orbit.
It’s unclear exactly what Trump and Musk mean considering the capsule that NASA has tasked with returning the astronauts is already up in space. It was launched in September and is now docked to the ISS.
Williams and Wilmore have been living on the space station since early June after arriving on a Boeing Co. Starliner capsule, becoming the first crew to fly on the vehicle as part of a critical test flight that was meant to last roughly a week.
But Starliner suffered numerous technical issues with its thruster engines during its flight and so NASA decided to bring the Boeing capsule home to Earth empty, with Williams and Wilmore to return on a future SpaceX capsule instead.
A doctor from AIIMS Delhi has identified gastroenteritis as one of the key triggers for GBS and warned people about the risks associated with contaminated food and water.
Dr Priyanka Sehrawat has urged people to avoid eating certain foods that may increase the risk of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS).
Pune has recorded over 111 cases of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), with one suspected fatality reported in Solapur. At least 17 patients are reportedly on ventilators, while seven have been discharged. Amid growing concerns, a doctor has urged people to be mindful of their diet and highlighted certain foods that could contribute to this rare but treatable condition.
Dr Priyanka Sehrawat from AIIMS Delhi has identified gastroenteritis as one of the key triggers for GBS and warned people about the risks associated with contaminated food and water.
“Avoid eating out. Avoid contaminated food and water. Take care of yourself immunity too,” Dr Sehrawat advised, adding that foods like paneer, cheese, and rice should be consumed with caution, as they are particularly susceptible to bacterial growth if not stored or handled properly. Additionally, she recommended including vitamin C-rich foods into the diet to boost immunity.
What is GBS virus?
Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) is a rare neurological disorder, often preceded by symptoms of an infection within six weeks. These infections can range from respiratory to gastrointestinal issues, including Covid-19. GBS can also be triggered by the Zika virus.
GBS symptoms
Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS) causes symptoms like numbness, weakness, and paralysis, often starting with tingling in the hands and feet. It can lead to difficulty walking, facial movements, and breathing. In severe cases, it’s a medical emergency requiring hospitalisation and can also cause pain, vision issues, and problems with bladder or bowel control.
“GBS is an autoimmune-mediated illness where the body’s own antibodies attack the nerves, weakening muscle strength. It starts with reduced power in the legs, making it difficult to wear slippers or lift objects. Patients may experience tingling sensations in the hands and legs. As the condition progresses, it can impact the lungs, eventually leading to the need for ventilatory support. The rate of progression varies for each patient, but in the current outbreak, the deterioration is alarmingly rapid, with some patients requiring ventilators within just 2-3 days,” Dr Sehrawat said.
Words reading “Artificial intelligence AI”, miniature of robot and toy hand are pictured in this illustration taken December 14, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
The Vatican on Tuesday called for governments to keep a close eye on the development of artificial intelligence, warning the technology contained “the shadow of evil” in its ability to spread misinformation.
“AI generated fake media can gradually undermine the foundations of society,” said a new text on the ethics of AI, written by two Vatican departments and approved by Pope Francis.
“This issue requires careful regulation, as misinformation—especially through AI-controlled or influenced media—can spread unintentionally, fuelling political polarization and social unrest,” it said.
Francis, leader of the 1.4 billion-member Catholic Church since 2013, has focused attention on the ethical issues surrounding AI in recent years.
Last week, the pope sent a message about AI to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, warning political, economic and business leaders there that the technology raised “critical concerns” about humanity’s future.
The pope also spoke about the technology at the G7 summit in Italy last June, and said people should not let algorithms decide their destiny.
The Vatican’s new document, titled “Antica et nova” (Ancient and new), considered the impacts of AI in a range of sectors, including in the labour market, healthcare and education.
“As in all areas where humans are called to make decisions, the shadow of evil also looms here,” it said. “The moral evaluation of this technology will need to take into account how it is directed and used.”
New research has been published about a new habitable exoplanet orbiting a sun-like star (Image: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC)/PA Wire)
A new habitable planet that orbits the sun near Earth has been discovered by scientists.
The exoplanet, a planet outside our solar system, was originally discovered two years ago by Oxford University scientist Dr. Michael Cretignier.
However, a team of international researchers at the institution have published new findings expanding on his planetary discovery in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The researchers found that the exoplanet, named HD 20794 d, orbits a “habitable zone” of a nearby star akin to our sun, which the exoplanet uniquely orbits elliptically rather than circularly.
This means that the exoplanet is close enough to its star to maintain liquid water on its surface, which is essential for sustaining life.
However, scientists say more research is required to determine if the planet can host life.
The planet, which has a whopping six times greater mass than Earth, is about 20 light years away from our solar system, the researchers found.
Dr. Cretignier discovered the astral body while analyzing archived data from High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) at the La Silla Observatory in Chile.
HARPS studies the light absorbed and emitted by objects.
Dr. Cretignier was able to detect the planet by noticing periodic shifts in the spectrum of light emitted by the host star.
Researchers believed this could have occurred because of the gravitational pull of a nearby planet.
To test the theory, the international team recorded two decades’ worth of data to analyze.
He said, “We worked on data analysis for years, gradually analyizing and eliminating all possible sources of contamination.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he is the “product of the bond” that exists between India and the US, as top government officials and American lawmakers lauded the Indian community’s contribution during Republic Day commemoration here.
The Consulate General of India in Seattle hosted a special reception on Sunday at the Bell Harbour Conference Centre to commemorate India’s 76th Republic Day.
Washington State Governor Bob Ferguson and Nadella were the Guests of Honour at the reception attended by over 500 people from the Indian-American community, according to a press release issued by the Consulate. In a unique first, several members of the US Congress also joined the evening celebrations.
Nadella, addressing the gathering, acknowledged that he “was a product of the bond that exists between the two countries (India and US).” He praised the leadership of both nations for their “focus on how to use technology to leverage education outcomes, health outcomes, public service efficiency, competitiveness and productivity of small businesses”, the press release said.
Addressing members of the Indian-American community at the Republic Day reception, Ferguson, the newly elected 24th Governor of Washington State, acknowledged “the incredible contribution the Indian society makes not just for India but for the entire world”.
He added that as a new Governor of the State of Washington, he looked forward to building on the relationship with the Consulate General of India in Seattle.
In a special recognition to mark the occasion, Washington State Senate in Olympia passed a State Senate Resolution, moved by State Senator Manka Dhingra and supported by Senator Vandana Slatter, welcoming the 76th Republic Day of India and the strong friendship between the people of India and the US.
The Republic Day reception, hosted by the Consul General of India in Seattle Prakash Gupta was also attended by a distinguished line-up of top government officials, lawmakers as well as Mayors of ten cities.
Several members of the US Congress who joined the evening celebrations included Rep. Suzan DelBene, Rep. Adam Smith, Rep. Michael Baumgartner, and Rep. Kim Schrier, who welcomed India’s achievements as the world’s largest democracy. Other distinguished participants included Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, several Washington State Senators and Representatives.
The Republic Day reception in Seattle showcased several unique exhibits highlighting the cultural diversity of India, including ‘One District, One Product’ (ODOP) featuring one unique cultural heritage product from each state and union territory of India.
On the occasion, a photo exhibit ‘India through Tim’s Eyes’ was also organised that displayed some of India’s most iconic tourism sites photographed by ace photographer Tim Durkan during a visit to India in September last year. The reception also featured a specially-curated dance performance showcasing various dance forms of Bharat titled ‘Natyam’, which was widely applauded by the gathering.
In another special gesture by Seattle city, several iconic buildings in Seattle, including the Seattle Great Wheel, Seattle Convention Center and Columbia Center were lit up in hues of the Indian tricolour to mark the Republic Day, the release added.
Earlier this month, Nadella had met Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi. “Thank you, PM @narendramodi ji for your leadership. Excited to build on our commitment to making India AI-first and work together on our continued expansion in the country to ensure every Indian benefits from this AI platform shift,” the Microsoft Chairman and CEO had said in a post on X about his meeting with Modi.
Thank you, PM @narendramodi ji for your leadership. Excited to build on our commitment to making India AI-first and work together on our continued expansion in the country to ensure every Indian benefits from this AI platform shift. pic.twitter.com/SjfiTnVUjl
NASA has warned of two asteroids, 2025 BF5 and 2025 BS4, making close flybys of Earth on January 28.
NASA has issued an alert about two asteroids, 2025 BF5 and 2025 BS4, that will make dangerously close flybys by Earth tomorrow, January 28. Though no immediate danger of collision is expected, the close proximity of these space rocks raises concerns about the risk of an impact. Should we be worried?
Asteroid 2025 BF5: Size, Time And Speed
The first asteroid, 2025 BF5, measures 36 feet in size and is classified as an Apollo near-Earth object (NEO). It is expected to pass within 1.28 million kilometres of Earth at 9:20 AM IST. While this distance may seem vast, in cosmic terms, it’s dangerously close. The asteroid is travelling at a speed of 40,745 km/h, and even a small deviation in its path could bring it closer to our planet.
Asteroid 2025 BS4: Size, Time And Speed
The second asteroid, 2025 BS4, is smaller at 22 feet in size but is moving faster than its counterpart at 57,617 km/h. It will make its closest approach at 10:06 AM IST, coming within just 823,000 kilometres of Earth. Although this is slightly closer, it is still well beyond the danger zone. However, the speed at which it’s travelling makes it a potential hazard if it were to change course unexpectedly.
What Are Apollo Asteroids?
Apollo asteroids are a group of near-Earth objects that have orbits crossing Earth’s orbit around the Sun. These asteroids can vary in size, but if one were to collide with Earth, the impact could be catastrophic. The larger the asteroid, the greater the potential damage. An asteroid impact could result in massive destruction, fires, tsunamis, and even global climate changes, depending on the size of the rock.
When we bake two loaves of bread using the same recipe, subtle differences in temperature or mixing could lead to slightly different results. Even with identical ingredients and instructions, the outcome isn’t always identical. Scientists have just discovered that something similar happens in human development, and it might explain why some people are more likely to get cancer than others.
An intriguing new study from the Van Andel Institute suggests that tiny differences in our earliest stages of development — even before birth — might set the stage for cancer risk later in life. This discovery challenges what we thought we knew about cancer, which has traditionally been viewed mainly as a disease caused by genetic mutations that accumulate as we age.
“Most people think of cancer as bad luck,” explains Dr. Ilaria Panzeri, who led the research. “But bad luck doesn’t fully explain why some people develop cancer and others don’t. Most importantly, bad luck cannot be targeted for treatment.”
At the heart of this discovery is something called epigenetics, akin to a set of switches that can turn genes on or off without changing the genes themselves. These switches help control which instructions in our DNA get carried out and which remain dormant. When these switches don’t work properly, it can lead to health problems, including cancer.
The research team focused on a particular switch-operator called TRIM28. Using mice with reduced levels of TRIM28, they discovered something fascinating: identical mice naturally developed into two distinct groups with different cancer risks, despite having the exact same genes. One group tended to be lighter in weight, while the other was heavier; but the real differences went far deeper than appearance.
Even more interesting was how these differences affected the types of cancer that developed. Mice in one group were more likely to develop blood cancers like leukemia, while the other group showed higher rates of solid tumors, like lung or prostate cancer. These differences could be detected in tissue samples taken when the mice were just 10 days old – long before any visible signs of disease appeared.
“Because most cancers occur later in life and are understood as diseases of mutation, or genetics, there hasn’t been a deep focus on how development might shape cancer risk. Our findings change that,” explains Dr. Andrew Pospisilik, who helped lead the research. He notes that while we can’t change our genes, we might be able to influence these genetic switches, potentially leading to new ways to prevent or treat cancer.
When the scientists looked at human cancer databases, they found patterns comparable to their findings. Patients with changes in the human versions of the genes affected in the mice tended to have worse cancer outcomes, suggesting these early-life patterns might be important in human cancer too.
What makes the study, which is published in Nature Cancer, particularly exciting is its potential for cancer prevention. If doctors could identify these risk patterns early in life, they might be able to develop strategies to prevent cancer before it starts. It’s like having an early warning system that could help identify who might benefit most from enhanced screening or preventive measures.
Much work remains to be done, but this study marks a crucial step toward understanding — and potentially preventing — cancer at its earliest origins.
iOS 18.3 is here, and it’s bringing changes to AI notification summaries on your iPhone. In iOS 18.3’s release notes, Apple says it has temporarily disabled notification summaries for news and entertainment apps.
The change, which was first spotted in the iOS 18.3 beta, comes after the BBC called out the feature for incorrectly summarizing one of its headlines. If you opt-in to the feature, Apple will notify you once it becomes available again.
For Apple devices that support Apple Intelligence (iPhone 15 Pro and later, iPads and Macs with the Apple Silicon M1 chip or later, and the most recent version of the iPad mini), today’s updates will also switch Apple Intelligence on by default.
Other features coming with the new iPhone update include the ability to use Visual Intelligence to add an event to the Calendar app from a poster or flyer, as well as a way to “easily identify plants and animals.” On Macs, the macOS 15.3 update that is also rolling out now is adding support for Genmoji, along with similar changes for notification summaries.
Indian and international publishers have sued OpenAI, alleging unauthorised use of copyrighted books to train ChatGPT.
OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, is facing a new legal challenge in India. A group of major Indian and international book publishers has filed a lawsuit, accusing the tech giant of using their copyrighted content without permission. The lawsuit, led by the Federation of Indian Publishers (FIP), includes big names such as Bloomsbury, Penguin Random House, Cambridge University Press, and Indian publishers like Rupa Publications and S. Chand and Co. The publishers claim that OpenAI trained its chatbot using their literary works without obtaining proper licenses, which they argue could harm book sales and impact the publishing industry. The case will be heard in a New Delhi court on January 28.
Publishers Demand Action
The lawsuit claims that OpenAI has violated copyright laws by using books to train ChatGPT without consent. According to the publishers, the AI-generated content, such as book summaries and extracts, is often sourced from unauthorised copies available online. They argue that this practice threatens their business and discourages creativity among authors. The Federation of Indian Publishers is demanding that OpenAI stop using their copyrighted content and either license it properly or delete the data used in AI training.
Concerns Over AI’s Impact on Creativity
Pranav Gupta, General Secretary of the Federation of Indian Publishers, stated that publishers are concerned about the potential long-term impact on the publishing industry. He emphasised that unless OpenAI complies with copyright regulations, it could significantly affect the livelihoods of authors and publishers. Global publishers are also stepping up their efforts to protect their content. Penguin Random House, for instance, has introduced a copyright disclaimer in its books to prevent AI models from using their content without authorisation.
When most middle school students go on field trips, they might bring back photos or souvenirs. But at Chicago’s Garfield Park Lagoon, one student brought back something far more significant: bacteria from goose droppings that would lead scientists to discover a potential new cancer-fighting compound.
The discovery emerged through an innovative program called the Chicago Antibiotic Discovery Lab, where students from underserved communities work alongside university scientists to explore their neighborhoods for beneficial bacteria. Led by Brian Murphy at the University of Illinois Chicago, the 14-week program, in concert with the Boys and Girls Club of Chicago, aims to address significant disparities in science education while producing meaningful research.
These young participants became genuine biomedical scientists before entering high school. Rather than observing from the sidelines, they actively participate in sophisticated laboratory work. Students learn to program and operate a specialized robot that scoops up bacterial colonies from growth plates and tests them for antibiotic activity. This hands-on approach transforms students into scientific investigators, giving them real-world experience while contributing to potential medical breakthroughs.
From 14 samples of goose dropping collected by the students, one particular sample collected in 2022 by 11-year-old Camarria Williams yielded exciting results. The bacteria discovered in the sample, called Pseudomonas idahonensis, produces a previously unknown natural compound named orfamide N. Williams interpreted the initial bioassay data, determining that the bacterium showed promising antibiotic activity.
“It was Camarria’s intellectual input that chose the goose poop,” Murphy told the Chicago Tribune. “None of us would have thought to do that, and she did it.”
In an interesting twist, it turned out that orfamide N wasn’t responsible for the antibiotic effects first observed. Incredibly, subsequent laboratory testing revealed it had a different and equally valuable (and exciting) property.
When testing the compound’s effects on cancer cells, researchers found that relatively small amounts of orfamide N could slow down the growth of both melanoma and ovarian cancer cells. Specifically, they measured how much of the compound was needed to reduce cancer cell growth by half. The results showed that orfamide N was effective at concentrations comparable to another similar compound they used for comparison.
This unexpected turn demonstrates a common occurrence in scientific research: sometimes you find something valuable while looking for something else entirely.
For Williams, the finding meant she was listed as a co-author on the paper documenting the discovery, which was published this past October in the peer-reviewed journal ACS Omega.
While the long-term impact of orfamide N remains to be seen, the impact of this discovery on the students involved is already clear. They’ve learned that science isn’t just something that happens in distant laboratories. It’s happening in their own neighborhoods, and they can be part of it. That realization might prove just as valuable as any compound they’ve discovered.
The Indian government warns of high-security risks in Google Chrome due to multiple vulnerabilities.
If you are using Google Chrome on Windows, Linux or Mac — now is the time to update your browser. The government has issued a high-risk warning about critical security flaws in Google Chrome users in India. The advisory, released by the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), warned about serious security flaws that could make users in India vulnerable to cyberattacks. These newly discovered issues could allow hackers to exploit the browser, putting user data and devices at serious risk.
“Multiple vulnerabilities have been reported in Google Chrome which could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause denial of service (DoS) condition on the targeted system,” the CERT-In team said.
Affected Software
The affected software includes Google Chrome versions earlier than 132.0.6834.110/111 for Windows and Mac, and versions earlier than 132.0.6834.110 for Linux. These vulnerabilities pose a serious security risk and users are strongly advised to update their browsers to the latest version to protect themselves from potential threats.
Are You Safe?
All organisations and individuals using Google Chrome for desktop are at risk due to these vulnerabilities. The impact includes the potential exposure of sensitive information or system instability, which could lead to serious security and operational issues, the cybersecurity agency said.
“Multiple vulnerabilities exist in Google Chrome due to Object corruption in V8 and Out of bounds memory access in V8. A remote attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by executing a specially crafted webpage to conduct remote code execution or cause denial of service (DoS) condition on the targeted system,” CERT-In said.
Indian flag, ChatGPT logo and gavel are seen in this illustration taken, January 22, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration Purchase Licensing Rights
OpenAI has told an Indian court that any order to remove training data powering its ChatGPT service would be inconsistent with its legal obligations in the United States, according to a recent filing seen by Reuters.
The Microsoft-backed AI firm also said that it was not within the jurisdiction of Indian courts to hear a copyright breach case brought by local news agency ANI as OpenAI had no presence in the country.
In the most high-profile and closely-tracked lawsuit on AI use in India, ANI sued OpenAI in Delhi in November, accusing it of using the news agency’s published content without permission to train ChatGPT.
OpenAI responded to the lawsuit, which is also seeking the deletion of ANI’s data already stored by ChatGPT, in an 86-page filing at the Delhi High Court dated Jan. 10 which has not previously been reported.
OpenAI and other firms have faced a wave of similar lawsuits from prominent copyright owners over alleged misuse of their work to train AI models, including a case brought by the New York Times against OpenAI in the United States.
OpenAI has repeatedly denied the allegations, saying its AI systems make fair use of publicly available data.
During a November hearing, OpenAI told the Delhi court it would not use ANI’s content anymore but the news agency argued its published works were stored in ChatGPT’s memory and should be deleted.
In the Jan. 10 submission, OpenAI said that it is currently defending litigation in the United States concerning the data on which its models have been trained, with laws there requiring it to preserve the data while hearings are pending.
OpenAI “is therefore under a legal obligation, under the laws of the United States to preserve, and not delete, the said training data”, it said.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
In its submission, OpenAI also said the relief being claimed by ANI was not subject to the processes of Indian courts and was beyond their jurisdiction.
The company has “no office or permanent establishment in India … the servers on which (ChatGPT) stores its training data are similarly situated outside of India”.
ANI, in which Reuters holds a 26% interest, in a statement said that it believes the Delhi court has jurisdiction to decide on the matter, and it would file a detailed response.
A Reuters spokesperson did not respond immediately to a request for comment but the agency in November said it was not involved in ANI’s business practices or operations.
The New Delhi court is due to hear the case on Jan. 28.
OpenAI has been gearing up to transition from a non-profit enterprise into a for-profit business as it looks to capture even more funding to stay ahead in the costly AI race after raising $6.6 billion last year.
In recent months, it has signed deals with Time magazine, the Financial Times, Business Insider-owner Axel Springer, France’s Le Monde and Spain’s Prisa Media to display content.
ANI has also said it is concerned about unfair competition given OpenAI’s commercial partnerships with other news organisations, and has told the court that in response to user prompts, ChatGPT reproduced verbatim or substantially similar extracts of ANI’s works.
Scientists created a sensor that acts as an ‘electronic tongue’ for food safety testing. (Zametalov/Shutterstock)
Your smartphone can recognize faces, and your car can detect lane markers; now, researchers have taught machines to taste. A team at Penn State University has developed an “electronic tongue” that combines atom-thin sensors with artificial intelligence to detect food fraud, spoilage, and contamination within minutes.
This research, published in Nature, combines two cutting-edge technologies. The team used sensors made from graphene, which is an incredibly thin form of carbon that’s just one atom thick and conducts electricity exceptionally well. They paired these sensors with artificial intelligence that can learn patterns. Together, this creates a system that’s remarkably good at detecting tiny differences between similar liquids.
The system mimics how humans taste and process flavors. Just as our tongues have taste receptors that send signals to our brain’s gustatory cortex — the region responsible for interpreting tastes beyond the basic categories of sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and savory — this electronic tongue uses sensors that send electrical signals to an artificial neural network that analyzes the data.
Traditional food testing requires expensive laboratory equipment and time-consuming analysis. However, this new system can detect various substances and assess their quality, authenticity, and freshness in about a minute. The sensors work like electronic taste buds, producing electrical signals that change when exposed to different chemical solutions.
What makes this system particularly innovative is its ability to learn and improve on human expertise. When researchers allowed the artificial intelligence to define its own parameters for analysis rather than using human-selected metrics, accuracy improved from 80% to more than 95%. Using a technique called Shapley additive explanations, the team could even peek into the AI’s decision-making process, offering a rare glimpse into how artificial intelligence reaches its conclusions.
“We found that the network looked at more subtle characteristics in the data—things we, as humans, struggle to define properly,” says corresponding author Saptarshi Das, in a statement. “In terms of the milk, the neural network can determine the varying water content of the milk and, in that context, determine if any indicators of degradation are meaningful enough to be considered a food safety issue.”
The system proved remarkably effective at detecting watered-down milk at concentrations as low as 5%, distinguishing between different types of coffee blends, and tracking fruit juice freshness over several days. In one impressive demonstration, it differentiated between similar products like regular Coke, Diet Coke, Pepsi, caffeine-free Coke, and zero-sugar Coke with over 97% accuracy.
What’s amazing is this system doesn’t need perfectly identical sensors to work well. The AI is smart enough to adjust for small differences between sensors, much like our brains can adjust to slight variations in taste buds. This makes the technology much cheaper to produce in large quantities since manufacturers don’t need to worry about making every sensor exactly the same.
The system is incredibly sensitive at detecting harmful chemicals in food and water. To put this in perspective, it can find a potentially dangerous compound called perfluorohexanoic acid (a chemical used in manufacturing that can contaminate food and water) at levels equivalent to detecting a single drop in an Olympic-sized swimming pool—that’s 2.5 parts per billion. This ultra-sensitive detection ability could help catch contaminated food and water before it reaches consumers.
These results extend far beyond food testing, though. According to the researchers, its applications could potentially include medical diagnostics, with its capabilities limited only by the data used to train it.
This “electronic tongue” represents a significant step toward making sophisticated chemical testing more accessible and reliable. By embracing imperfection in the sensors while leveraging artificial intelligence, the researchers have created a system that could fundamentally change how we verify food safety and authenticity.
The location of the fast radio burst, indicated by the oval outlines, is on the outskirts of a massive elliptical galaxy, the yellow oval at right. (Credit: Gemini Observatory)
Astronomers have made a perplexing discovery that’s pushing the boundaries of what we know about mysterious cosmic signals. Using specialized telescopes, they’ve detected powerful radio bursts coming from an unexpected location: the distant outskirts of an ancient, inactive galaxy located 2 billion light-years from Earth.
The discovery began when researchers using the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) telescope detected repeated bursts of intense radio waves from a source in the northern constellation Ursa Minor. These cosmic signals, known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), appear as powerful flashes that last for just milliseconds.
Between February and July 2024, the team observed 22 separate bursts from this single source, dubbed “FRB 20240209A.” To precisely locate these signals, they combined observations from CHIME with those from a partner facility called KKO, located 66 kilometers away. This combination worked like a giant pair of astronomical binoculars, allowing unprecedented precision in pinpointing the bursts’ origin.
What they found challenged existing theories: the signals were coming from approximately 40,000 light-years away from the center of their host galaxy –roughly twice the distance from Earth to the center of our Milky Way. This represents the largest offset from a host galaxy ever observed for an FRB source.
Even more puzzling was the nature of the host galaxy itself. Unlike most galaxies where these signals have been found before, this one is an elliptical galaxy estimated to be 11.3 billion years old, which is quite ancient by cosmic standards. With a mass more than 100 billion times that of our Sun, this galaxy is effectively “dead,” meaning new stars rarely form there.
“This is not only the first FRB to be found outside a dead galaxy, but compared to all other FRBs, it’s also the farthest from the galaxy it’s associated with,” said Vishwangi Shah, a doctoral student at McGill University and lead author of the study, in a statement. “The FRB’s location is surprising and raises questions about how such energetic events can occur in regions where no new stars are forming.”
The discovery, described in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, challenges the leading theory that these bursts come from magnetars, which are highly magnetized, spinning neutron stars left over from the explosive deaths of massive young stars. In an galaxy as old as this one, such stellar remnants should have disappeared long ago.
One possible explanation is that the bursts might be coming from a globular cluster — a dense collection of ancient stars that orbits the main galaxy. “The source could be in a globular cluster, a dense region of old, dead stars outside the galaxy. If confirmed, it would make FRB 20240209A only the second FRB linked to a globular cluster,” Shah noted.
To investigate further, the research team used the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii to study this region in detail. While they were looking for signs of a small companion galaxy that might be hosting these bursts, they found nothing visible at that location, deepening the mystery.
The timing pattern of these signals provides additional intrigue. After its initial discovery in February 2024, the source remained relatively quiet for several months before dramatically increasing its activity in June, producing 17 bursts in just one month.
It’s been an exciting time for fast radio burst research. A third telescope array is being added to the CHIME network at Hat Creek Observatory in Northern California, which will help scientists locate these mysterious bursts with even greater precision. “When paired with the three outriggers, we should be able to accurately pinpoint one FRB a day to its galaxy, which is substantial,” said Calvin Leung, a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley and co-author of the study.
This discovery expands our understanding of where these enigmatic signals can occur and what might be producing them. Finding repeating bursts in such an unexpected location suggests multiple formation pathways for these cosmic phenomena, providing new directions for future research.
A pioneering new treatment promises to tackle a wider range of cancers, with fewer side-effects than conventional radiotherapy. It also takes less than a second.
In a series of vast underground caverns on the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, experiments are taking place which may one day lead to new generation of radiotherapy machines. The hope is that these devices could make it possible to cure complex brain tumours, eliminate cancers that have metastasised to distant organs, and generally limit the toll which cancer treatment exerts on the human body.
The home of these experiments is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (Cern), best known to the world as the particle physics hub that developed the Large Hadron Collider, a 27 kilometre (16.7 mile)-long ring of superconducting magnets capable of accelerating particles to near the speed of light.
Arguably Cern’s crowning achievement was the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson, the so-called “God Particle” which gives other particles their mass and in doing so lays the foundation for everything that exists in the universe. But in recent years, the centre’s unique expertise in accelerating high-energy particles has found a new niche – the world of cancer radiotherapy.
Eleven years ago, Marie-Catherine Vozenin, a radiobiologist now working at Geneva University Hospitals (Hug), and others published a paper outlining a paradigm-shifting approach to traditional radiotherapy treatment which they called Flash. By delivering radiation at ultra-high dose rates, with exposures of less than a second, they showed that it was possible to destroy tumours in rodents while sparing healthy tissue.
Its impact was immediate. International experts described it as a seminal breakthrough, and it galvanised fellow radiobiologists around the world to conduct their own experiments using the Flash approach to treat a wide variety of tumours in rodents, household pets, and now humans.
The Flash concept resonated as it addressed some of the long-standing limitations of radiotherapy, one of the most common cancer therapies, which two-thirds of all cancer patients will receive at some point in their treatment journey. Typically delivered through administering a beam of X-rays or other particles over the course of two to five minutes, the total dose is usually spread across dozens of individual treatment sessions over up to eight weeks, to make it more tolerable for the patient.
Over the past three decades, advanced imaging scans and state-of-the-art radiotherapy machines have made it possible to target an individual tumour with increasing precision. But the risk of damaging or deadly side effects is still present.
Vozenin cites the example of paediatric brain tumours, which can often be cured by blasting the brain with radiotherapy, but at a great cost. “The survivors are often left with lifelong anxiety and depression, while the impact of the radiation affects brain development, causing significant loss of IQ,” she says. “We’re [sometimes] able to cure these kids but the price they pay is high.”
Billy Loo, a professor of radiation oncology who runs the Flash sciences lab at Stanford University School of Medicine in the US, explains that tumours, especially those of larger volume, are rarely neatly segregated from the surrounding tissue. This means it’s often next to impossible to avoid harming healthy cells, so oncologists are often unable to use as high a dose as they would like, says Loo.
Cancer specialists have long believed that being able to boost the radiation dose would greatly enhance their ability to cure patients with difficult-to-treat cancers, according to Vozenin. For example, research has previously indicated that being able to increase the radiation dose in lung cancer patients with tumours that have metastasised to the brain could improve survival.
In recent years, animal studies have repeatedly shown that Flash makes it possible to markedly increase the amount of radiation delivered to the body while minimising the impact that it has on surrounding healthy tissue. In one experiment, healthy lab mice which were given two rounds of radiation via Flash did not develop the typical side effects which would be expected during the second round. In another study, animals treated with Flash for head and neck cancers experienced fewer side effects, such as reduced saliva production or difficulty swallowing.
Loo is cautiously optimistic that going forwards, such benefits may also translate to human patients. “Flash produces less normal tissue injury than conventional irradiation, without compromising anti-tumour efficacy – which could be game-changing,” he says. An additional hope is that this could then reduce the risk of secondary cancers, resulting from radiation-induced damage later in life, although it is still too early to know if that will be the case.
Now, increasing numbers of human trials are beginning to take place around the world. Cincinnati Children’s Hospital in Ohio, US, is planning an early stage trial in children with metastatic cancer that has spread to their chest bones. Meanwhile, oncologists at Lausanne University Hospital in Switzerland are conducting a Phase 2 trial – where the details are finessed, including the optimum dose, how effective the treatment is and if there are any side effects – for patients with localised skin cancer.
But the next phase of research is not only about testing whether Flash works in people. It’s also about identifying which kind of radiation is the best one to use.
A choice of particles
From carbon ions to protons and electrons, there are many ways of delivering radiotherapy, each with different applications and challenges. One of the most precise forms of radiotherapy is hadron therapy, delivered with carbon ions. But there are only 14 facilities which can deliver this in the entire world, each one costing an estimated $150m (£122m). Currently this therapy is delivered using a conventional dosing regime, in which the radiation is delivered over several minutes. However, with the Flash protocol the ions would be delivered in less than a second.
“High energy electrons can be used to treat superficial tumours in the skin,” says André-Dante Durham Faivre, a radiation oncologist at Hug. “Photons, i.e. X-rays, or protons [a type of subatomic particle], can be used to treat deeper tumours, while we save carbon ions and helium particles for very specialised cases, as it’s only very, very big clinical centres that can offer that type of treatment. The particle accelerator needed to administer carbon ion radiotherapy is the size of a building.”
This is one tricky problem with Flash therapies. Because creating subatomic particles requires extremely complex particle accelerators, at the moment this treatment can only be delivered via vast pieces of equipment in specialist centres, which is expensive. This means patients will most likely need to travel long distances for their treatment – and while researchers hope that eventually Flash will be available to everyone who needs it, at the moment treatments such as proton therapy are only available to a relatively small minority of patients.
So far, protons have been the particle of choice for human Flash trials, both because they can penetrate up to 30cm (12in) into the body, enabling them to reach relatively deep internal organs, and because existing proton radiotherapy machines can be adapted relatively easily to deliver Flash dose rates.
In 2020, the University of Cincinnati Medical Centre launched the first ever clinical trial of Flash proton radiotherapy in patients whose primary cancer had metastasised to the bones, with early results suggesting that the treatment was just as effective as conventional radiotherapy and the incidence of adverse events was similar. Now, radiation oncologists at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine are hoping to launch their own trial later this year in patients with recurrent head and neck cancer.
“These are patients who have few other options as their tumours are impossible to remove via surgery,” says Alexander Lin, professor of radiation oncology at the University of Pennsylvania, who will lead the proposed trial. “Going through another course of standard radiotherapy would potentially lead to dangerous side effects such as jaw fractures, mouth wounds and even potentially fatal damage to the carotid artery. We believe that proton Flash will be less toxic.”
A practical challenge
However, if proton Flash were to be approved by regulators in future, Durham Faivre says that one of the disadvantages is that the machines required are still relatively large, meaning the treatment could only be administered in a select number of centres, restricting patient access.
Now Cern are working with researchers at Lausanne University Hospital and the French company TheryQ to try and develop a new form of accelerator which delivers even more radiation – described as very high energy electrons – at Flash dose rates. And according to Durham Faivre, Hug researchers are currently in discussions with commercial partners to develop an X-ray Flash machine.
Such accelerators could enable the benefits of Flash to be applied to deep tumours without requiring a vast machine, says Durham Faivre. The ultimate goal is to make it possible for any hospital with radiotherapy equipment to be able to provide Flash. “We believe that X-ray Flash machines could in time replace existing conventional X-ray machines,” he says.
In particular, Durham Faivre is optimistic that newer accelerators could allow oncologists to tackle more complex tumours such as glioblastoma, the most common form of brain cancer and one of the deadliest forms of the disease, with a five-year survival rate of just 5%.
Following on from the University of Cincinnati trial, oncologists are also hopeful that Flash machines could improve the treatment of various forms of metastatic disease (where the cancer has spread from its primary location) and actually cure patients who were previously considered incurable. Loo predicts that Flash could be used to destroy the primary and secondary tumours, then followed by chemotherapy or immunotherapy to eliminate the microscopic cancer cells which are enabling the disease to spread.
“Metastatic cancers involve large volumes of the body because of their diffuse distribution,” says Durham Faivre. He explains that this means they’re usually hard to cure, because it wouldn’t be possible to deliver enough radiation to the body’s tissues to kill all the cancerous cells. If you did, the patient may not survive the effects of the radiation on previously healthy tissue. But newer treatments are changing this, he says, particularly in people with limited metastases. “Flash offers the prospect of safely treating many more metastases,” he says.
Another hope is that Flash could ultimately help make radiotherapy more accessible to all.
The radiotherapy gap
At last September’s UICC World Cancer Congress – a conference that brings together cancer experts from around the world – Katy Graef, vice-president of the non-profit Bio Ventures for Global Health, highlighted a major challenge in global health which is sometimes referred to as “the radiotherapy gap”.
Using data compiled by the Lancet Oncology Commission, Graef described how there are only 195 radiotherapy machines in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 4,172 in the US and Canada. With the annual incidence and mortality from cancer expected to double across the African continent by 2040, she explained that it has been projected that the region will require more than 5,000 additional machines in the next two decades, a demand which many nations will struggle to afford.
In December, a new review of national cancer control plans around the globe highlighted how the radiotherapy gap extends beyond Africa to many low and middle-income countries. “Only about 10% of cancer patients in low-income countries have access to radiotherapy, compared to 90% in high-income countries,” says Lisa Stevens, director of the programme of action for cancer therapy at the International Atomic Energy Agency, and one of the authors on the paper. “The integration of radiotherapy into cancer control strategies is more crucial than ever.”
Spotify may control your exposure to new music more than record labels do. (Mar Fernandez/Shutterstock)
In the high-stakes world of music streaming, getting noticed can make or break an artist’s career. But what drives users to follow certain playlists over others on Spotify? Prime real estate on the Search Page has emerged as a powerful force in playlist popularity. A new study from Tilburg University reveals that simply appearing on this digital storefront drives more playlist followers than having a Taylor Swift track in your mix, fundamentally shifting how music reaches our ears.
The study, published in Marketing Science, analyzed over 30,000 popular playlists on Spotify between October 2019 and March 2020, examining how different factors influenced playlist follower growth. They focused on playlists tracking everything from follower counts to content updates to understand what drives their popularity.
“Before our work, little was known about how strongly users respond to the drivers of playlist demand,” says study co-author Hannes Datta of Tilburg University, in a statement. “We decided to more deeply explore the cause-and-effect nature and influence of curated playlists.”
The researchers analyzed data from Chartmetric.com, tracking 34,483 playlists from professional curators, including both Spotify and major record labels. They compiled information about roughly 2 million tracks, monitoring daily follower counts and playlist changes over six months. This comprehensive approach allowed them to measure precisely how different factors influenced playlist popularity.
When Spotify features a playlist prominently on its Search Page, the main discovery hub where users browse music categories, that playlist sees an average 0.95% increase in daily followers. For mega-popular playlists like “Reggaeton Classic” with 1.9 million followers, being featured can bring in over 18,000 new followers in a single day. By comparison, adding a track from a major label superstar artist increases daily followers by just 0.45%.
“This demonstrates Spotify’s ability to steer user engagement and listening behavior through its platform design,” explains study co-author Max Pachali. “In comparison, we find that users are about half as sensitive to the addition of popular label artists.”
Major record labels still wield considerable influence through their roster of superstar artists. The research found that playlists featuring tracks by major label superstars attract an average of 72,255 followers, compared to 54,017 followers for playlists without superstar content. These playlists also tend to be updated more frequently and feature shorter tracks.
The findings arrive at a critical moment for the music industry. Historically, major record labels controlled not just content distribution but also how music was promoted and sold in physical stores. Today’s digital landscape tells a different story. Streaming platforms have assumed unprecedented influence over listening habits through their ability to curate and promote content. In 2023, streaming accounted for 84% of total recorded music revenue in the U.S.
“For industry players, understanding playlist curation strategies – especially the role of major label superstar content and how platform algorithms prioritize playlists on the search page – is more important than ever,” says Pachali.
The research suggests that while superstar artists remain valuable assets for major music labels, professional playlist curation combined with strategic platform placement has become an even more powerful force in shaping music consumption.
Industry experts predict this tension between streaming platforms and traditional music industry players will only intensify. Some suggest that record labels may eventually need to pay for prominent playlist placement, similar to how they historically paid for radio play.
These findings demonstrate that in modern music consumption, the medium has become as influential as the message. While star power continues to draw audiences, platform visibility has emerged as the dominant force in playlist success. By curating what we see and hear, Spotify doesn’t just reflect our preferences—it shapes them, influencing the music that becomes part of our daily lives. This reality promises to shape music industry strategy for years to come.
Apple Intelligence will be switched on by default, starting in iOS 18.3, iPadOS 18.3, and macOS 15.3. In release candidate notes spotted by 9to5Mac, Apple says it will switch on AI-powered features automatically for new users or those upgrading to the latest versions of its operating systems.
The AI update will only apply to devices that support Apple Intelligence, including the iPhone 15 Pro and later, iPads and Macs with the Apple Silicon M1 chip or later, and the most recent version of the iPad mini.
For users new or upgrading to macOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during Mac onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.
As Apple’s notes mention, after updating your device, you’ll have to manually disable Apple Intelligence if you don’t want support for features like AI notification summaries, Image Playground, and tools that can rewrite pieces of text running on your device. To turn Apple Intelligence off, you’ll have to head to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and then switch off the Apple Intelligence toggle.
There are several memes that burst on the internet on the accuracy of Google Maps and other GPS navigation tools. Earlier a vehicle tragically drove over an unconstructed bridge in UP and cost lives, followed by another incident which left no other than police officials in trouble after they entered into another state being guided by Google Maps.
A recent case reported regarding the navigation tool threw light on Bengaluru traffic and misrepresented a space as a parking lot. A car stuck in city traffic was shown on Google Maps suggesting the area was meant for parking.
While the area wasn’t really a parking zone, Google Maps confused people for suggesting the traffic-hit car’s location to be a parking space.
Google Maps in Bengaluru traffic
When the driver of this vehicle stuck in peak Bengaluru traffic found their vehicle marked as a parked car on Google Maps, he shared the incident on social media to draw a wide range of reactions. The incident was posted on Reddit and it has now gone viral.
The Reddit post made on r/Bangalore subreddit noted the vehicle was stranded on the Domlur flyover, however the maps chose to identify it as a parking area. The car was heading towards the Indiranagar region of the IT city, when it faced huge traffic on the flyover, leading the app to misinterpret the stagnation and the still state of the vehicle. Seeing the vehicle stuck was a long while on the roadway, Google Maps mistakenly identified the location as a parking zone.
TikTok stopped working in the United States late on Saturday and disappeared from Apple and Google app stores ahead of a law that takes effect Sunday requiring the shutdown of the app used by 170 million Americans.
President-elect Donald Trump said earlier in the day he would “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day reprieve from the ban after he takes office on Monday, a promise TikTok cited in a notice posted to users on the app.
TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance, told users attempting to use the app around 10:45 p.m. ET (0345 GMT): “A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned.”
Other apps owned by ByteDance, including video editing app Capcut and lifestyle social app Lemon8, were also offline and unavailable in U.S. app stores as of late Saturday.
“The 90-day extension is something that will be most likely done, because it’s appropriate,” Trump told NBC. “If I decide to do that, I’ll probably announce it on Monday.”
It was not clear if any U.S. users could still access the app, but it was no longer working for many users and people seeking to access it through a web application were met with the same message that TikTok was no longer working.
TikTok, which has captivated nearly half of all Americans, powered small businesses and shaped online culture, warned on Friday it would go dark in the U.S. on Sunday unless President Joe Biden’s administration provides assurances to companies such as Apple (AAPL.O) and Google (GOOGL.O) that they will not face enforcement actions when a ban takes effect.
Under a law passed last year and upheld on Friday by a unanimous Supreme Court, the platform has until Sunday to cut ties with its China-based parent ByteDance or shut down its U.S. operation to resolve concerns it poses a threat to national security.
The White House reiterated on Saturday that it was up to the incoming administration to take action.
“We see no reason for TikTok or other companies to take actions in the next few days before the Trump administration takes office on Monday,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement.
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment on the new White House statement.
TikToker and “newsfluencer” Joe Andaloro, who goes by the TikTok handle @joy.of.everything, films a TikTok video outside the U.S. headquarters of the social media company TikTok in Culver City, California, U.S. January 18, 2025. REUTERS/Fred Greaves Purchase Licensing Rights
The Chinese embassy in Washington on Friday accused the U.S. of using unfair state power to suppress TikTok. “China will take all necessary measures to resolutely safeguard its legitimate rights and interests,” a spokesperson said.
USERS MOVE TO ALTERNATIVES
Uncertainty over the app’s future had sent users – mostly younger people – scrambling to alternatives including China-based RedNote. Rivals Meta (META.O) and Snap (SNAP.N) had also seen their shares rise this month ahead of the ban, as investors bet on an influx of users and advertising dollars.
“This is my new home now,” wrote one user in a RedNote post, tagged with the words “tiktokrefugee” and “sad”.
Minutes after TikTok’s U.S. shutdown, other users took to X, formerly called Twitter.
“I didn’t really think that they would cut off TikTok. Now I’m sad and I miss the friends I made there. Hoping it all comes back in just a few days,” wrote @RavenclawJedi.
Marketing firms reliant on TikTok have rushed to prepare contingency plans this week in what one executive described as a “hair on fire” moment after months of conventional wisdom saying that a solution would materialize to keep the app running.
There have been signs TikTok could make a comeback under Trump, who has said he wants to pursue a “political resolution” of the issue and last month urged the Supreme Court to pause implementation of the ban.
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew plans to attend the U.S. presidential inauguration and attend a rally with Trump on Sunday, a source told Reuters.
Suitors including former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt have expressed interest in the fast-growing business that analysts estimate could be worth as much as $50 billion. Media reports say Beijing has also held talks about selling TikTok’s U.S. operations to billionaire and Trump ally Elon Musk, though the company has denied that.
U.S. search engine startup Perplexity AI submitted a bid on Saturday to ByteDance for Perplexity to merge with TikTok U.S., a source familiar with the company’s plans told Reuters. Perplexity would merge with TikTok U.S. and create a new entity by combining the merged company with other partners, the person added.
Privately held ByteDance is about 60% owned by institutional investors such as BlackRock and General Atlantic, while its founders and employees own 20% each. It has more than 7,000 employees in the U.S.
A doctor’s unconscious bias could affect patient care. A hiring manager’s preconceptions might influence recruitment. But what happens when you add AI to these scenarios? According to new research, AI systems don’t just mirror our biases — they amplify them, creating a snowball effect that makes humans progressively more biased over time.
This troubling finding comes from new research published in Nature Human Behaviour that reveals how AI can shape human judgment in ways that compound existing prejudices and errors. In a series of experiments involving 1,401 participants, researchers from University College London and MIT discovered that even small initial biases can snowball into much larger ones through repeated human-AI interaction. This amplification effect was significantly stronger than what occurs when humans interact with other humans, suggesting there’s something unique about how we process and internalize AI-generated information.
“People are inherently biased, so when we train AI systems on sets of data that have been produced by people, the AI algorithms learn the human biases that are embedded in the data,” explains Professor Tali Sharot, co-lead author of the study, in a statement. “AI then tends to exploit and amplify these biases to improve its prediction accuracy.”
Consider a hypothetical scenario: A healthcare provider uses an AI system to help screen medical images for potential diseases. If that system has even a slight bias, like being marginally more likely to miss warning signs in certain demographic groups, the human doctor may begin unconsciously incorporating that bias in their own screening decisions over time. As the AI continues learning from these human decisions, both human and machine judgments could become increasingly skewed.
The researchers investigated this phenomenon through several carefully designed experiments. In one key test, participants were asked to look at groups of 12 faces displayed for half a second and judge whether the faces, on average, appeared more happy or sad. The initial human participants showed a small bias, categorizing faces as sad about 53% of the time. When a computer program called a Convolutional Neural Network (think of it as an AI system that processes images similarly to how human brains do) was trained on these human judgments, it amplified this bias significantly, classifying faces as sad 65% of the time.
When new participants interacted with this biased AI system, they began adopting its skewed perspective. The numbers tell a striking story. When participants disagreed with the AI’s judgment, they changed their minds nearly one-third of the time (32.72%). In contrast, when interacting with other humans, participants only changed their disagreeing opinions about one-tenth of the time (11.27%). This suggests that people are roughly three times more likely to be swayed by AI judgment than human judgment.
The bias amplification effect appeared consistently across various types of tasks. Beyond facial expressions, participants completed tests involving motion perception where they judged the direction of dots moving across a screen. They also assessed other people’s performance on tasks, where researchers found participants were particularly likely to overestimate men’s performance after interacting with an AI system that had been deliberately programmed with gender bias to mirror biases found in many existing AI systems.
“Not only do biased people contribute to biased AIs, but biased AI systems can alter people’s own beliefs so that people using AI tools can end up becoming more biased in domains ranging from social judgements to basic perception,” says Dr. Moshe Glickman, co-lead author of the study.
To demonstrate real-world implications, the researchers tested a popular AI image generation system called Stable Diffusion. When asked to create images of “financial managers,” the system showed a strong bias, generating images of white men 85% of the time – far out of proportion with real-world demographics. After viewing these AI-generated images, participants became significantly more likely to associate the role of financial manager with white men, demonstrating how AI biases can shape human perceptions of social roles.
When participants were falsely told they were interacting with another person, while actually interacting with AI, they internalized the biases to a lesser degree. The researchers suggest this may be because people expect AI to be more accurate than humans on certain tasks, making them more susceptible to AI influence when they know they’re working with a machine.
This finding is particularly concerning given how frequently people encounter AI-generated content in their daily lives. From social media feeds to hiring algorithms to medical diagnostic tools, AI systems are increasingly shaping human perceptions and decisions. The researchers note that children may be especially vulnerable to these effects, as their beliefs and perceptions are still forming.
However, the research wasn’t all bad news. When humans interacted with accurate, unbiased AI systems, their own judgment improved over time. “Importantly, we found that interacting with accurate AIs can improve people’s judgments, so it’s vital that AI systems are refined to be as unbiased and as accurate as possible,” says Dr. Glickman.
AI bias is not a one-way street but rather a circular path where human and machine biases reinforce each other. Understanding this dynamic is crucial as we continue to integrate AI systems into increasingly important aspects of society, from healthcare to criminal justice.
ISRO releases docking video of two SpaDex mission satellites (Screengrab) | X/@isro
The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), on Friday, released a video of the docking of two satellites of the Space Docking Experiment (SpaDeX) mission. The docking process was carried out on Thursday, January 16. With this manoeuvre, India became the fourth country after the United States, Russia and China to dock satellites in the space.
The video showed the complete docking process. The milestone was achieved after the ISRO brought the two satellites to three metres and then moved them back at a safe distance in its trial attempt.
The space agency launched the mission on December 30. The PSLV C60 rocket, carrying two small satellites — SDX01 (Chaser) and SDX02 (Target) — along with 24 payloads, lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. About 15 minutes later, the two small spacecraft weighing about 220 kilogrammes each were launched into a 475-kilometre circular orbit, as intended.
Notably, the docking mechanism is a low-impact docking system (approach velocity is in the order of 10 mm/s), androgynous (docking systems are identical for both spacecraft, Chaser & Target), and is a peripheral docking system (concept similar to the International Docking System Standard used by other agencies for human missions), accordingto the Indian space agency.
“The mechanism is smaller (450 mm) with one degree of freedom for extension and uses two motors compared to the IDSS (800 mm) on a hexapod with 24 motors. Multiple test beds were established to test the hardware and software simulation of the docking kinematics to verify and finalise the docking approach parameters,” the ISRO said.
Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo by Brendan Hoffman, Getty Images
It’s been more than four years since Donald Trump first moved to expel TikTok from the US — and now, just days before a second Trump presidency begins, it just might happen.
President Joe Biden signed legislation last April that officially began the countdown that would force TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to divest from the US business. But even afterward, the atmosphere on the video powerhouse was mostly nonchalant, with a handful of stray jokes about “this app disappearing” slotted between the usual fare.
In the last week, though, the vibe has shifted — my favorite creators are posting links to their other social accounts, audiences are making highlight reels of the most viral moments on the app, and they’re saying goodbye to their “Chinese spy” and threatening to hand over their data to the Chinese government. A Chinese-owned app Xiaohongshu, known as RedNote, topped the App Store this week, driven by a wave of “TikTok refugees” trying to recreate the experience of the platform. It’s feeling a bit like a fever dream last day of school.
For many creatives online, this wouldn’t be the first time they’ve had to migrate to new spaces: reach, engagement, and visibility are constantly shifting even on the largest and most stable platforms. But the possibility that a social media site of this size would disappear — or slowly break down until it’s nonfunctional — is a new threat. For small creators especially, TikTok is like playing the lottery: you don’t need thousands of followers for your video to get big, and this unpredictability incentivized the average person to upload content.
It’s still unclear what will happen to TikTok after January 19th. I asked content creators what their game plan is. (Responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.)
Noelle Johansen, @astraeagoods (89K followers)
“At the peak, I was making approximately 70 percent of my sales through TikTok from December 2020 to January 2022. Now, it drives at most, 10 percent of my sales,” says Noelle Johansen, who sells slogan sweatshirts, accessories, stickers, and other products.
“At my peak with TikTok, I was able to reach so many customers with ease. Instagram and Twitter have always been a shot in the dark as to whether the content will be seen, but TikTok was very consistent in showing my followers and potential new customers my videos,” Johansen told The Verge in an email. “I’ve also made great friends from the artist community on TikTok, and it’s difficult to translate that community to other social media. Most apps function a lot differently than TikTok, and many people don’t have the bandwidth to keep up with all of the new socials and building platforms there.”
Going forward, Johansen says they’ll focus on X and Instagram for sales while working to grow an audience on Bluesky and Threads.
Kay Poyer, @ladymisskay_ (704K followers)
“I think the ease of use on TikTok opened an avenue for a lot of would-be creators,” Kay Poyer, a popular creator making humor and commentary content, says. “Right now we’re seeing a cleaving point, where many will choose to stop or be forced to adapt back to older platforms (which tend to be more difficult to build followings on and monetize).”
As for her own plans, Poyer says she’ll stay where the engagement is if TikTok becomes unavailable — smaller platforms like Bluesky or Neptune aren’t yet impactful enough.
“I’m seeing a big spike in subscribers to my Substack, The Quiet Part, as well as followers flooding to my Instagram and Twitter,” Poyer told The Verge. “Personally I have chosen to make my podcast, Meat Bus, the flagship of my content. We’re launching our video episodes sometime next month on YouTube.”
Bethany Brookshire, a science journalist and author, has been sharing videos about human anatomy on TikTok, Bluesky, Instagram, and YouTube. Across platforms, Brookshire has observed differences in audiences — YouTube, for example, “is not a place [to] build an audience,” she says, citing negative comments on her work.
“Sometimes I feel like the only ethical way to produce any content is to write it out in artisanal chalk on an organically sourced vegan stone”
“I find people on TikTok comment and engage a lot more, and most importantly, their comments are often touching or funny,” she says. “When I was doing pelvic anatomy, a lot of people with uteruses wrote in to tell me they felt seen, that they had a specific condition, and they even bonded with each other in the comments.”
Brookshire told The Verge in an email that sharing content anywhere can at times feel fraught. Between Nazi content on Substack, right-wing ass-kissing at Meta, and the national security concerns of TikTok, it doesn’t feel like any platform is perfectly ideal.
“Sometimes I feel like the only ethical way to produce any content is to write it out in artisanal chalk on an organically sourced vegan stone, which I then try to show to a single person with their consent before gently tossing it into the ocean to complete its circle of life,” Brookshire says. “But if I want to inform, and I want to educate, I need to be in the places people go.”
The Woodstock Farm Sanctuary in upstate New York uses TikTok to share information with new audiences — the group’s Instagram following is mostly people who are already animal rights activists, vegans, or sanctuary supporters.
“TikTok has allowed us to reach people who don’t even know what animal sanctuaries are,” social media coordinator Riki Higgins told The Verge in an email. “While we still primarily fundraise via Meta platforms, we seem to make the biggest education and advocacy impact when we post on TikTok.”
With a small social media and marketing team of two, Woodstock Farm Sanctuary (like other small businesses and organizations) must be strategic in how it uses its efforts. YouTube content can be more labor-intensive, Higgins says, and Instagram Reels is missing key features like 2x video speed and the ability to pause videos.
“TikTok users really, really don’t like Reels. They view it as the platform where jokes, trends, etc., go to die, where outdated content gets recycled, and especially younger users see it as an app only older audiences use,” Higgins says.
The sanctuary says it will meet audiences wherever they migrate in the case that TikTok becomes inaccessible.
SpaceX’s gigantic Starship rocket has been “lost” just minutes into its seventh test flight.
The 400ft rocket – the biggest and most powerful in the world – soared from Boca Chica, south Texas, on Thursday around 4.40pm local time (10.40pm in the UK).
Just minutes after the rocket launched, its booster made its planned return to the ground and after momentarily hovering over the launchpad, it was spectacularly caught between two giant mechanical arms.
It’s the second time SpaceX has managed this particular feat.
However, as crowds cheered the booster’s return, the company said it had lost contact with Starship as the engines went out.
A host on SpaceX’s livestream soon confirmed: “At this point in time, we can confirm we did lose the ship.
“It looks like we lost contact a little under eight and a half minutes into the flight.”
The mega rocket launched into blue skies. Pic: AP
“It was great to see a booster come down, but we are obviously bummed out about ship,” SpaceX spokesman Dan Huot said, adding it will take time to analyse the data and figure out what went wrong.
The last data received from Starship indicated an altitude of 90 miles and a velocity of 13,245 mph.
Musk and Bezos heading for space showdown
The two richest people on the planet are heading for a showdown in space.
Elon Musk versus Amazon founder Jeff Bezos: they both launched prototype rockets on the same day, a rivalry with billions of dollars at stake.
SpaceX’s Starship is fuelled by Musk’s extraordinary appetite for risk. He innovates through failure, and the seventh test flight didn’t go entirely to plan.
Contact was lost with the upper part of the rocket eight minutes into the flight and engineers will be studying the data to work out why.
But the booster, which had already separated, successfully returned to base.
The flight was the seventh test run for the newly-upgraded Starship, and marked the next step in Elon Musk’s bid to build the first fully reusable spacecraft to get humans to Mars.
“Every Starship launch is one more step closer towards Mars,” he said on X before liftoff.
The Starship prototype had been modified significantly since its sixth test flight in November.
It was due to soar across the Gulf of Mexico on a near-loop around the world and SpaceX had packed it with dummy satellites, so it could practice releasing them.
Suni Williams working outside the ISS during a spacewalk on Thursday. Pic: AP/NASA
One of the two NASA astronauts stuck in space got a much-welcome change of scenery when she stepped out for her first spacewalk after seven months in orbit.
Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore have been stuck aboard the International Space Station (ISS) since rocketing into orbit on 5 June last year.
Due to thruster failures and helium leaks, they were unable to return home on what should have been a week-long test flight and it will be late March or early April before they can set foot on Earth again.
But after months in orbit, the station’s commander Ms Williams had to tackle some overdue repair work along with NASA’s Nick Hague.
They emerged as the orbiting lab sailed 260 miles (420km) above Turkmenistan.
“I’m coming out,” Ms Williams radioed.
It was the first spacewalk by NASA astronauts since an aborted one last summer.
US spacewalks were put on hold after water leaked into an airlock from the cooling loop in an astronaut’s suit, but NASA said the problem has since been fixed.
Ms Williams and Mr Hague helped fix the NICER telescope which studies neutron stars and other cosmic phenomena.
Mr Hague installed patches which, the space station said, would hopefully restore full operations after it experienced data collection issues.
Apple has come under intense scrutiny for rolling out an underbaked AI-powered feature that summarizes breaking news — while often butchering it beyond recognition.
For over a month, roughly as long as the feature has been available to iPhone users, publishers have found that it consistently generates false information and pushes it to millions of users.
Despite broadcasting a barrage of fabrications for weeks, Apple has yet to meaningfully address the problem.
“This is my periodic rant that Apple Intelligence is so bad that today it got every fact wrong in its AI a summary of Washington Post news alerts,” the newspaper’s tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler wrote in a post on Bluesky this week.
Fowler appended a screenshot of an alert, which claimed that Pete Hegseth, who’s been facing a confrontational confirmation hearing for the role of defense secretary this week, had been fired by his former employer, Fox News — which is false and not what the WaPo’s syndication of an Associated Press story actually said. The AI alert also claimed that Florida senator Marco Rubio had been sworn in as secretary of state, which is also false as of the time of writing.
“It’s wildly irresponsible that Apple doesn’t turn off summaries for news apps until it gets a bit better at this AI thing,” Fowler added.
The constant blunders of Apple’s AI summaries put the tech’s nagging shortcomings on full display, demonstrating that even tech giants like Apple are failing miserably to successfully integrate AI without constantly embarrassing themselves.
AI models are still coming up with all sorts of “hallucinated” lies, a problem experts believe could be intrinsic to the tech. After all, large language models like the one powering Apple’s summarizing feature simply predict the next word based on probability and are incapable of actually understanding the content they’re paraphrasing, at least for the time being.
And the stakes are high, given the context. Apple’s notifications are intended to alert iPhone users to breaking news — not sow distrust and confusion.
The story also highlights a stark power imbalance, with news organizations powerless to determine how Apple represents their work to its vast number of users.
“News organizations have vigorously complained to Apple about this, but we have no power over what iOS does to the accurate and expertly crafted alerts we send out,” Fowler wrote in a followup.
In December, the BBC first filed a complaint with Apple after the feature mistakenly claimed that Luigi Mangione, the man who killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, had shot himself — an egregious and easily disproven fabrication.
Last week, Apple finally caved and responded to the complaint, vowing to add a clarifying disclaimer that the summaries were AI-generated while also attempting to distance itself from bearing any responsibility.
“Apple Intelligence features are in beta and we are continuously making improvements with the help of user feedback,” a company spokesperson told the BBC in a statement. “A software update in the coming weeks will further clarify when the text being displayed is summarization provided by Apple Intelligence.”
“We encourage users to report a concern if they view an unexpected notification summary,” the company continued.
The disclaimer unintentionally points to the dubious value proposition of today’s AI: what’s the point of a summarizing feature if the company is forced to include a disclaimer on each one that it might be entirely wrong? Should Apple’s customers really be the ones responsible for pointing out each time its AI summaries are spreading lies?
“It just transfers the responsibility to users, who — in an already confusing information landscape — will be expected to check if information is true or not,” Reporters Without Borders technology and journalism desk head Vincent Berthier told the BBC.
Journalists are particularly worried about further eroding trust in the news industry, a pertinent topic given the tidal wave of AI slop that has been crashing over the internet.
Pixxel logo and Indian flag are seen in this illustration taken, October 10, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
India’s space tech startup Pixxel launched three of its six hyperspectral imaging satellites aboard a SpaceX rocket from California on Tuesday.
The satellites were launched at 1915 GMT, just after midnight in India, from the Vandenberg Space Force Base, a live telecast from SpaceX showed. The launch marks a milestone for the country’s growing private space sector and for Google-backed Pixxel, a five-year-old startup.
The satellites aim to use hyperspectral imaging, a technology that captures highly detailed data across hundreds of light bands to serve industries such as agriculture, mining, environmental monitoring and defence.
Such technology can help deliver insights into improving crop yields in India’s agrarian economy, track resources, monitor oil spills and geographic boundaries in much better details than current technology allows.
The remaining three satellites are expected to be deployed in the second quarter of the year.
The SpaceX rocket is also carrying a satellite from another Indian space company, Diganatara.
“By 2029, the (satellite imagery) market is projected to reach $19 billion. Hyperspectral imaging, which is new, could realistically capture $500 million to $1 billion of this,” Pixxel’s founder and Chief Executive Awais Ahmed told Reuters earlier on Monday.
The startup plans to add 18 more spacecraft to the six it has already developed, Ahmed said, adding that Pixxel has signed up around 65 clients, including Rio Tinto, British Petroleum, and India’s Ministry of Agriculture, with some already paying for data from its demo satellites.
U.S. flag and TikTok logo are seen in this illustration taken January 8, 2025. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights
TikTok plans to keep paying U.S. employees even if the Supreme Court does not overturn a law that would force the sale of the short-video app in the U.S. or ban it, the company’s leadership said in an internal memo reviewed by Reuters on Tuesday.
The hugely popular platform is owned by China-based ByteDance and has 7,000 employees in the U.S.
“I cannot emphasize enough that your wellbeing is a top priority and so most importantly, I want to reinforce that as employees in the US, your employment, pay, and benefits are secure, and our offices will remain open, even if this situation hasn’t been resolved before the January 19 deadline,” the memo to TikTok employees said. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court seemed inclined to uphold the law, which was passed in April, despite calls from U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and lawmakers to extend the Jan. 19 deadline.
Trump, whose inauguration takes place the day after the law goes into effect, has said he should have time after taking office to pursue a “political resolution” to the issue.
“Our leadership team remains laser focused on planning for various scenarios and continuing to plan the way forward,” TikTok said in the memo.
“The bill is not written in a way that impacts the entities through which you are employed, only the US user experience,” the company said, adding that it will continue to navigate the situation to protect employees and the more than 170 million TikTok users in the United States.
When is the end for humankind? Whether it’s by a nuclear holocaust, a result of exceeding a critical climate threshold, at the hands of artificial intelligence-powered robots, or the “Don’t Look Up” asteroid, the question plagues our thoughts, our research, and our Facebook rants.
Now, one theorist warns that the human civilization of 8.2 billion people is at a critical junction: teetering between what he forecasts will be authoritarian collapse and superabundance.
“Industrial civilisation is facing ‘inevitable’ decline as it is replaced by what could turn out to be a far more advanced ‘postmaterialist’ civilisation based on distributed superabundant clean energy. The main challenge is that industrial civilisation is facing such rapid decline that this could derail the emergence of a new and superior ‘life-cycle’ for the human species”, Dr. Nafeez Ahmed, the bestselling author and journalist who is a distinguished fellow at the UK-based Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, said in a statement.
Ahmed, who has spoken at United Nations summits in recent years, is the author of the paper which was recently published in the journal Foresight.
Gaya Herrington, vice president at Schneider Electric who was not involved in the research, told The Independent that she agrees with all of Ahmed’s big points.
Southern Florida and the Caribbean are seen from the International Space Station. Earth, home to 8.2 billion people, could be facing decline, according to a new analysis (NASA)
“We live in a historic now-or-never moment, and what we do in the next five years will determine our wellbeing levels for the rest of this century,” she said.
Using scientific literature, the study offers a theory of the rise and fall of civilizations, concluding that humanity is on the brink of the next “giant leap” in evolution, should progress not be thwarted by authoritarianism.
The research concludes that civilizations evolve through a four-stage life-cycle: growth, stability, decline, and eventual transformation. Today’s industrial civilization, he says, is moving through decline.
The increase in authoritarian politics and efforts to protect the fossil fuel industry — which produce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change — are factors that could jeopardize civilization, Ahmed says. The global decrease in energy return on investment is central to the decline.
Investing in carefully-designed clean energy and new material capabilities like that industry, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and lab-grown agriculture could create new forms of networked superabundance — when there is an abundance of resources available through networks — that protect Earth systems. But, they cannot be governed by old, centralized industrial hierarchies, Ahmed states.
Ultimately, he finds a widening rift between the so-called emerging new system and “industrial operating system,” leading to political and cultural disruption and global crises.
“An amazing new possibility space is emerging, where humanity could provide itself superabundant energy, transport, food, and knowledge without hurting the earth. This could be the next giant leap in human evolution. But if we fail to genuinely evolve as humans by rewiring how we govern these emerging capabilities responsibly and for the benefit of all, they could be our undoing,” he warned. “Instead of evolving, we would regress – if not collapse. The rise in authoritarian and far-right governments around the world, increases this grave risk of collapse.”
In his new book A Darwinian Survival Guide, University of Toronto Professor Daniel Brooks says that while the danger is great and the time is short, humans can make change happen.
His perspective, he told The Independent via email, is that while utopia is unattainable, apocalypse won’t happen even if there is a major collapse of technological humanity. He believes that the world has a “no-technological-solution problem,” and that if there is a collapse around 2050, people who continued business as usual will “all be to blame – regardless of politics, economics, or beliefs – and those who manage to be part of the survivors and rebuilders will all share in the credit.”
“We agree with those who say that we have sufficient technology to solve the problems now and although technological advances are helpful, the accelerating pace of global climate change is outstripping the rate of technological advance – the solution to maintaining technological humanity lies in changing our behavior (not electing anti-science authoritarians would be a good behavioral change at the level of elections, a point with which we agree with Dr. Ahmed),” Brooks wrote, referring to his co-author, Virginia Commonwealth University associate professor Salvatore Agosta.
Ahmed’s paper comes following dire warnings about Earth’s rapidly warming future. Last year, a team of international scientists said that six of Earth’s nine planetary boundaries — that define a safe operating space for humanity — have been crossed.
“This update on planetary boundaries clearly depicts a patient that is unwell, as pressure on the planet increases and vital boundaries are being breached. We don’t know how long we can keep transgressing these key boundaries before combined pressures lead to irreversible change and harm,” said co-author Johan Rockström, the director of the Germany Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
Research published earlier this year found that maintaining at least net zero emissions of greenhouse gases, a level that can be absorbed by nature and other carbon dioxide removal methods, is crucial by 2100 to minimize the risk of climate tipping points and to ensure planetary stability.
ISRO on Sunday said the two satellites launched to perform space docking experiments were brought within three metres and then moved safely back in a trial attempt.
The space agency also said the docking process would be done after analysing the data further.
Tweet Of ISRO
“A trial attempt to reach up to 15 metres and further to three metres is done. Moving back spacecraft to safe distance. The docking process will be done after analysing data further,” ISRO said in a post on X.
SpaDeX Docking Update:
A trial attempt to reach up to 15 m and further to 3 m is done.
Moving back spacecrafts to safe distance
The docking process will be done after analysing data further.
The Space Docking Experiment (SpaDeX) project has missed two announced schedules for docking experiments on January 7 and January 9.
ISRO launched the mission on December 30.
The PSLV C60 rocket, carrying two small satellites — SDX01 (Chaser) and SDX02 (Target) — along with 24 payloads, lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. About 15 minutes later, the two small spacecraft weighing about 220 kilogrammes each were launched into a 475-kilometre circular orbit, as intended.
The SpaDeX project is a cost-effective technology demonstrator mission for the demonstration of in-space docking using small spacecraft, according to ISRO.
V Narayanan outlined a strategic roadmap for expanding the ISRO’s global footprint. (Representational)
The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) LVM3 rocket will launch in March a communication satellite of a US-based firm AST SpaceMobile that plans to provide space-based cellular broadband network services on smartphones.
“The commercial LVM3-M5 mission, set for March, will deploy BlueBird Block-2 satellites under a contract with the US-based AST SpaceMobile,” an official statement said.
The statement came after Science and Technology Minister Jitendra Singh reviewed the functioning of the Department of Space with senior officials, including the outgoing ISRO chairman S Somanath, his successor V Narayanan and Pawan Kumar Goenka, Chairman of Indian National Space Promotion and Authorisation Centre (IN-SPACe).
V Narayanan, who will succeed S Somanath on January 14, during the meeting outlined a strategic roadmap for expanding the ISRO’s global footprint.
The joint NASA-ISRO satellite – NISAR – and a navigation satellite NVS-02 are set for launch in February on board two separate missions of the GSLV rocket, it added.
With ambitious projects on the horizon, including the first “uncrewed” orbital mission under “Gaganyaan”, India’s space exploration efforts are poised for groundbreaking achievements.
The ISRO has lined up significant missions showcasing technological prowess and international collaboration, which include the launch of Gaganyaan’s uncrewed orbital test mission.
“This critical endeavour will pave the way for India’s human spaceflight program, aiming to validate systems for crew safety and recovery,” the statement said.
In addition, two GSLV missions, a commercial launch of LVM3 and the much-anticipated ISRO-NASA collaboration on the NISAR satellite are slated for the coming months.
The GSLV-F15 mission in January will carry the NVS-02 navigation satellite to augment the NavIC constellation, bolstering India’s positioning and navigation capabilities with indigenously developed atomic clocks.
In February, the GSLV-F16 mission will launch NISAR, a sophisticated Earth observation satellite co-developed with NASA.
Equipped with advanced radar imaging technology, NISAR will provide critical data on agriculture, natural disasters and climate monitoring.
Could cancer patients and those hoping to live longer be frozen? (Picture: SWNS)
A new facility could eventually allow humans to ‘pause’ their bodies until the future arrives.
TimeShift describes itself as the world’s first cryopreservation facility and is based on cutting-edge AI and new cryopreservation techniques.
If the idea comes to fruition, cryopreservation could allow cancer patients to ‘freeze’ themselves until medicine advances, or allow humans to ‘outlive’ the apocalypse – as seen in Futurama.
AI could also be utilised to help an ‘avatar’ of the frozen person’s likeness speak with their family and friends while their real body is frozen.
The facility has been proposed by Dr Alex Zhavoronkov, a generative AI scientist and anti-ageing researcher, and Hashem Al-Ghaili, a molecular biologist.
Hashem said: ‘The project is still in the R&D phase. The primary focus right now is to continue optimising the cryopreservation process developed by Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov.
‘Once fully optimised, we plan to test it on animal models and proceed from there.
‘Traditional cryopreservation methods are ineffective and lead to cell death; however, the new method is designed to avoid this problem.
‘After optimising the process, the next step will involve testing its efficacy and safety. There is no specific timeframe, but if everything goes as planned, a functional prototype could be ready within 5 to 8 years.’
TimeShift also hopes to offer ‘pre-hibernation enhancements’, which could allow those frozen to wake up healthier.
Dr Alex Zhavoronkov said: ‘Over the past 10 years, multiple technologies have advanced in different laboratories around the world, and it is now a matter of multi-parameter optimisation for rapid cryogenic freezing and rewarming protocol.
‘Getting to the dream of gaining the ability to see more life is now a matter of time.’
Hashem Al-Ghaili added: ‘By combining AI and cryopreservation, we’re making it possible for families to remain close, even across decades.”
A new computer model visualizes material in the lower mantle that cannot come from subducted plates. (Credit: Sebastian Noe / ETH Zurich)
Miles beneath the Pacific Ocean, in a region of Earth’s mantle where conventional wisdom says nothing unusual should exist, scientists have discovered something extraordinary. Using innovative technology to analyze seismic waves, researchers have identified massive structures that challenge fundamental theories about how our planet formed and evolved. It’s as if we’ve discovered a new geological continent – not on Earth’s surface, but deep within it.
Just as doctors use ultrasound waves to peer inside the human body without surgery, geophysicists employ seismic waves from earthquakes to study Earth’s deep interior. When earthquakes occur, they send waves in all directions through the planet. These waves travel at different speeds depending on the materials they encounter, getting bent, bounced, and scattered along the way. By recording these waves at seismic stations worldwide, scientists can create images of structures deep within Earth, much like creating a medical scan of our planet.
For decades, this technique revealed fast-moving wave patterns primarily beneath areas where tectonic plates collide and one plate dives beneath another – a process called subduction. These patterns were thought to be the remains of ancient tectonic plates that had sunk into Earth’s mantle, the layer between the crust and core. However, the earth-shattering new study, published in Scientific Reports, has uncovered something unexpected.
Using one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the Piz Daint at CSCS in Lugano, researchers from ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have discovered similar wave patterns in places where they shouldn’t exist – beneath vast oceans and continental interiors, far from any known plate boundaries. “Apparently, such zones in the Earth’s mantle are much more widespread than previously thought,” says Thomas Schouten, the study’s lead author and doctoral student at ETH Zurich’s Geological Institute, in a statement.
The key to this discovery lies in a sophisticated technique called full-waveform inversion (FWI). Unlike traditional methods that analyze only specific types of seismic waves, FWI examines entire seismograms, capturing a more complete picture of Earth’s interior. This comprehensive approach requires enormous computational power but provides unprecedented detail.
The most striking finding emerged beneath the western Pacific Ocean, where researchers identified a massive anomaly between 900 and 1,200 kilometers depth. According to current plate tectonic theories, this material couldn’t have come from subducted plates because the region has no recent history of subduction zones.
ETH professor Andreas Fichtner, who developed the computer model, draws a medical parallel: “It’s like a doctor who has been examining blood circulation with ultrasound for decades and finds arteries exactly where he expects them. Then if you give him a new, better examination tool, he suddenly sees an artery in the buttock that doesn’t really belong there. That’s exactly how we feel about the new findings.”
The discovery suggests these deep Earth structures might have diverse origins, Schouten explains. They could be ancient silica-rich material that has survived since the mantle’s formation about 4 billion years ago, despite continuous churning movements. Alternatively, they might be zones where iron-rich rocks have accumulated over billions of years due to these mantle movements.
The research team emphasizes that current models only show wave speed patterns, which alone cannot fully explain Earth’s complex interior. Future research will need to delve deeper into the material properties creating these patterns, requiring even more sophisticated models and computational power.
ISRO’s SpaDeX satellites, launched on December 30, 2024, are testing space docking technology in low-Earth orbit.
The Space Docking Experiment (SpaDeX) satellites, which ISRO planned to unite early Thursday, faced an unexpected issue late Wednesday, forcing it to postpone the procedure for the second time in just three days. “While making a maneuver to reach 225m between satellites, the drift was found to be more than expected, post non-visibility period. The planned docking for tomorrow (January 9) is postponed. Satellites are safe,” ISRO announced at around 9 pm on Wednesday.
The drift maneuver for the chaser satellite — one of the two satellites designated as chaser and target — began at 8:05 pm. Since their launch on December 30, ISRO has been meticulously preparing for the docking, which involves a series of complex steps. Each stage has been closely monitored from the ground, with clearance required before moving to the next phase.
This latest delay comes just days after ISRO had rescheduled the first docking attempt. On January 6, the agency identified a need for further ground simulation validations based on an abort scenario and moved the docking attempt to January 9.
Meta-owned WhatsApp is reportedly planning to add a new feature that allows users to attach photos to polls. By adding the ability to attach photos to poll options, voters will have a visual representation of each choice, making it easier to understand and evaluate the options before casting their vote.
This feature is helpful when text isn’t enough, and visuals can add clarity. According to the report from WABetaInfo, a website that tracks WhatsApp, Channel owners will be able to add a photo to each poll option. For example, channels about design, travel, or food can use images for poll choices, making it easier for followers to decide
“It appears WhatsApp is continuing to enhance the polls feature by developing new options to further boost engagement. Thanks to the latest WhatsApp beta for Android 2.25.1.17 update, which is available on the Google Play Store, we discovered that WhatsApp is working on a feature to assign photos to poll options in channels,” the report said.
The report also revealed that if you add a photo to one poll option, you’ll need to add photos to all the other options too. This keeps the poll consistent and ensures every choice is shown equally. It also avoids confusion by presenting all options in the same format, making it easier for voters to compare them.
Initially, the ability to assign photos to poll options will be exclusive to channels, likely to enable WhatsApp to refine the feature within a controlled environment before expanding it to group chats and individual conversations in the future.
