Technology

Mathematician and author Steven Strogatz starts to cry when he talks about the artificial-intelligence-driven breakthroughs in his field over the past week.“The science is thrilling,” the Cornell University professor says, “but there's a lot of human unpleasantness going with...

A new study suggests Mercury may have shrunk about 30% more than scientists previously thought, losing as much as 14 miles in diameter as its interior cooled and contracted over billions of years. "That's significant for a planet...

The Athletic reports that researchers at the University of Utah are studying itPBM, a medical-grade red-light therapy that has shown promising signs of reducing brain inflammation and improving cognition, mood, anxiety, motor performance and neural connectivity. The report...

Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly's brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was...

A set of parents and their children in Illinois and California filed a lawsuit last week in federal court in Chicago alleging that Meta illegally used their Facebook and Instagram photos to build NameTag, an unreleased face-recognition system for...

The UK government has rejected the idea of creating a so-called "kill switch" to stop a dangerous attack from rogue AI.The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of laws Thursday aimed at protecting children from the risks of technology, including social media and AI chatbots. The laws...

How do you interpret the resignation of that Anthropic engineer, who’s saying the companies are reckless and gambling with our lives? On the one hand, you seem to agree that the companies are being reckless; on the other hand,...

Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon said that artificial intelligence, while safe for people to use today, could one day threaten humanity as the technology grows more powerful.The development of AI "doesn't look that different from...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world's forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen...