A common dolphin stranded on a UK beachWaves & Wellies Photography Dolphins in seas around the UK are dying from a combination of increased water temperatures and toxic chemicals that the UK banned in the 1980s. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are a long-lasting type of persistent chemical pollutant, once widely used in industrial manufacturing. They interfere with animals’ reproduction and immune response and cause cancer in humans. Advertisement In a new study, researchers showed that higher levels of PCBs in the body and increased sea surface temperatures are linked to a greater mortality risk from infectious diseases for short-beaked common dolphins (Delphinus delphis), a first for marine mammals. The ocean is facing “a triple planetary crisis” – climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss – but we often look at threats in isolation, says Rosie Williams at Zoological Society of London. Williams and her colleagues analysed post-mortem data from 836 common dolphins stranded in the UK between 1990 and 2020 to assess the impact of these interlinked threats. Unmissable news about our planet delivered straight to your inbox every month. Sign up to newsletter They found a rise of 1 milligram of PCBs per kilogram of blubber was linked with a 1.6 per cent increase in the chance of infectious diseases – such as gastritis, enteritis, bacterial infection, encephalitis and pneumonia – becoming fatal. Every 1°C rise in sea surface temperature corresponded to a 14 per cent increase in mortality risk. According to the study, the threshold where PCB blubber concentrations have a significant effect on a dolphin’s risk of disease is 22 mg/kg, but the average concentration in samples was higher, at 32.15 mg/kg. Because dolphins are long-lived, widely distributed around the UK and high in the food chain, they are a good indicator species to show how threats might also affect other animals. “Their position at the top of the food web means that toxins from their prey accumulate in their blubber, providing a concentrated snapshot of chemical pollutants in the ocean – though unfortunately at the expense of their health,” says Thea Taylor, managing director of Sussex Dolphin Project. Despite being banned in the UK in 1981 and internationally in 2001, PCBs are still washing into the ocean. “They are still probably entering the environment through stockpiles and are often a side product or a byproduct of other manufacturing processes,” says Williams. Cleaning up PCBs is very difficult. “Because they’re so persistent, they’re a nightmare to get rid of,” she says. “There is definitely not an easy fix.” Some researchers are exploring dredging as a cleanup technique, while others are focused on improving water treatment plants’ effectiveness in removing persistent chemicals. These findings indicate what might happen if action isn’t taken to ban perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), another widespread group of so-called forever chemicals. “While we cannot reverse the contamination that has already occurred, it is critical to prevent further chemical inputs into the environment,” says Taylor. Journal reference:Communications Biology DOI: 10.1038/s42003-025-07858-7 Topics:

In 2021, 20 years after the death of her older sister, Vauhini Vara was still unable to tell the story of her loss. “I wondered,” she writes in Searches, her new collection of essays on AI technology, “if Sam Altman’s machine could do it for me.” So she tried ChatGPT. But as it expanded on Vara’s prompts in sentences ranging from the stilted to the unsettling to the sublime, the thing she’d enlisted as a tool stopped seeming so mechanical.  “Once upon a time, she taught me to exist,” the AI model wrote of the young woman Vara had idolized. Vara, a journalist and novelist, called the resulting essay “Ghosts,” and in her opinion, the best lines didn’t come from her: “I found myself irresistibly attracted to GPT-3—to the way it offered, without judgment, to deliver words to a writer who has found herself at a loss for them … as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same.” The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics in work and art. But it also offers a particularly human problem in narrative: How can we make sense of these machines, not just use them? And how do the words we choose and stories we tell about technology affect the role we allow it to take on (or even take over) in our creative lives? Both Vara’s book and The Uncanny Muse, a collection of essays on the history of art and automation by the music critic David Hajdu, explore how humans have historically and personally wrestled with the ways in which machines relate to our own bodies, brains, and creativity. At the same time, The Mind Electric, a new book by a neurologist, Pria Anand, reminds us that our own inner workings may not be so easy to replicate. Searches is a strange artifact. Part memoir, part critical analysis, and part AI-assisted creative experimentation, Vara’s essays trace her time as a tech reporter and then novelist in the San Francisco Bay Area alongside the history of the industry she watched grow up. Tech was always close enough to touch: One college friend was an early Google employee, and when Vara started reporting on Facebook (now Meta), she and Mark Zuckerberg became “friends” on his platform. In 2007, she published a scoop that the company was planning to introduce ad targeting based on users’ personal information—the first shot fired in the long, gnarly data war to come. In her essay “Stealing Great Ideas,” she talks about turning down a job reporting on Apple to go to graduate school for fiction. There, she wrote a novel about a tech founder, which was later published as The Immortal King Rao. Vara points out that in some ways at the time, her art was “inextricable from the resources [she] used to create it”—products like Google Docs, a MacBook, an iPhone. But these pre-AI resources were tools, plain and simple. What came next was different. Interspersed with Vara’s essays are chapters of back-and-forths between the author and ChatGPT about the book itself, where the bot serves as editor at Vara’s prompting. ChatGPT obligingly summarizes and critiques her writing in a corporate-­shaded tone that’s now familiar to any knowledge worker. “If there’s a place for disagreement,” it offers about the first few chapters on tech companies, “it might be in the balance of these narratives. Some might argue that the ­benefits—such as job creation, innovation in various sectors like AI and logistics, and contributions to the global economy—can outweigh the negatives.”  Searches: Selfhood in the Digital AgeVauhini VaraPANTHEON, 2025 Vara notices that ChatGPT writes “we” and “our” in these responses, pulling it into the human story, not the tech one: “Earlier you mentioned ‘our access to information’ and ‘our collective experiences and understandings.’” When she asks what the rhetorical purpose of that choice is, ChatGPT responds with a numbered list of benefits including “inclusivity and solidarity” and “neutrality and objectivity.” It adds that “using the first-person plural helps to frame the discussion in terms of shared human experiences and collective challenges.” Does the bot believe it’s human? Or at least, do the humans who made it want other humans to believe it does? “Can corporations use these [rhetorical] tools in their products too, to subtly make people identify with, and not in opposition to, them?” Vara asks. ChatGPT replies, “Absolutely.” Vara has concerns about the words she’s used as well. In “Thank You for Your Important Work,” she worries about the impact of “Ghosts,” which went viral after it was first published. Had her writing helped corporations hide the reality of AI behind a velvet curtain? She’d meant to offer a nuanced “provocation,” exploring how uncanny generative AI can be. But instead, she’d produced something beautiful enough to resonate as an ad for its creative potential. Even Vara herself felt fooled. She particularly loved one passage the bot wrote, about Vara and her sister as kids holding hands on a long drive. But she couldn’t imagine either of them being so sentimental. What Vara had elicited from the machine, she realized, was “wish fulfillment,” not a haunting.  The rapid proliferation of AI in our lives introduces new challenges around authorship, authenticity, and ethics in work and art. How can we make sense of these machines, not just use them?  The machine wasn’t the only thing crouching behind that too-good-to-be-true curtain. The GPT models and others are trained through human labor, in sometimes exploitative conditions. And much of the training data was the creative work of human writers before her. “I’d conjured artificial language about grief through the extraction of real human beings’ language about grief,” she writes. The creative ghosts in the model were made of code, yes, but also, ultimately, made of people. Maybe Vara’s essay helped cover up that truth too. In the book’s final essay, Vara offers a mirror image of those AI call-and-­response exchanges as an antidote. After sending out an anonymous survey to women of various ages, she presents the replies to each question, one after the other. “Describe something that doesn’t exist,” she prompts, and the women respond: “God.” “God.” “God.” “Perfection.” “My job. (Lost it.)” Real people contradict each other, joke, yell, mourn, and reminisce. Instead of a single authoritative voice—an editor, or a company’s limited style guide—Vara gives us the full gasping crowd of human creativity. “What’s it like to be alive?” Vara asks the group. “It depends,” one woman answers.     David Hajdu, now music editor at The Nation and previously a music critic for The New Republic, goes back much further than the early years of Facebook to tell the history of how humans have made and used machines to express ourselves. Player pianos, microphones, synthesizers, and electrical instruments were all assistive technologies that faced skepticism before acceptance and, sometimes, elevation in music and popular culture. They even influenced the kind of art people were able to and wanted to make. Electrical amplification, for instance, allowed singers to use a wider vocal range and still reach an audience. The synthesizer introduced a new lexicon of sound to rock music. “What’s so bad about being mechanical, anyway?” Hajdu asks in The Uncanny Muse. And “what’s so great about being human?”  The Uncanny Muse: Music, Art, and Machines from Automata to AIDavid HajduW.W. NORTON & COMPANY, 2025 But Hajdu is also interested in how intertwined the history of man and machine can be, and how often we’ve used one as a metaphor for the other. Descartes saw the body as empty machinery for consciousness, he reminds us. Hobbes wrote that “life is but a motion of limbs.” Freud described the mind as a steam engine. Andy Warhol told an interviewer that “everybody should be a machine.” And when computers entered the scene, humans used them as metaphors for themselves too. “Where the machine model had once helped us understand the human body … a new category of machines led us to imagine the brain (how we think, what we know, even how we feel or how we think about what we feel) in terms of the computer,” Hajdu writes.  But what is lost with these one-to-one mappings? What happens when we imagine that the complexity of the brain—an organ we do not even come close to fully understanding—can be replicated in 1s and 0s? Maybe what happens is we get a world full of chatbots and agents, computer-­generated artworks and AI DJs, that companies claim are singular creative voices rather than remixes of a million human inputs. And perhaps we also get projects like the painfully named Painting Fool—an AI that paints, developed by Simon Colton, a scholar at Queen Mary University of London. He told Hajdu that he wanted to “demonstrate the potential of a computer program to be taken seriously as a creative artist in its own right.” What Colton means is not just a machine that makes art but one that expresses its own worldview: “Art that communicates what it’s like to be a machine.”   What happens when we imagine that the complexity of the brain—an organ we do not even come close to fully understanding—can be replicated in 1s and 0s? Hajdu seems to be curious and optimistic about this line of inquiry. “Machines of many kinds have been communicating things for ages, playing invaluable roles in our communication through art,” he says. “Growing in intelligence, machines may still have more to communicate, if we let them.” But the question that The Uncanny Muse raises at the end is: Why should we art-­making humans be so quick to hand over the paint to the paintbrush? Why do we care how the paintbrush sees the world? Are we truly finished telling our own stories ourselves? Pria Anand might say no. In The Mind Electric, she writes: “Narrative is universally, spectacularly human; it is as unconscious as breathing, as essential as sleep, as comforting as familiarity. It has the capacity to bind us, but also to other, to lay bare, but also obscure.” The electricity in The Mind Electric belongs entirely to the human brain—no metaphor necessary. Instead, the book explores a number of neurological afflictions and the stories patients and doctors tell to better understand them. “The truth of our bodies and minds is as strange as fiction,” Anand writes—and the language she uses throughout the book is as evocative as that in any novel.  The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our BrainsPria AnandWASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS, 2025 In personal and deeply researched vignettes in the tradition of Oliver Sacks, Anand shows that any comparison between brains and machines will inevitably fall flat. She tells of patients who see clear images when they’re functionally blind, invent entire backstories when they’ve lost a memory, break along seams that few can find, and—yes—see and hear ghosts. In fact, Anand cites one study of 375 college students in which researchers found that nearly three-quarters “had heard a voice that no one else could hear.” These were not diagnosed schizophrenics or sufferers of brain tumors—just people listening to their own uncanny muses. Many heard their name, others heard God, and some could make out the voice of a loved one who’d passed on. Anand suggests that writers throughout history have harnessed organic exchanges with these internal apparitions to make art. “I see myself taking the breath of these voices in my sails,” Virginia Woolf wrote of her own experiences with ghostly sounds. “I am a porous vessel afloat on sensation.” The mind in The Mind Electric is vast, mysterious, and populated. The narratives people construct to traverse it are just as full of wonder.  Humans are not going to stop using technology to help us create anytime soon—and there’s no reason we should. Machines make for wonderful tools, as they always have. But when we turn the tools themselves into artists and storytellers, brains and bodies, magicians and ghosts, we bypass truth for wish fulfillment. Maybe what’s worse, we rob ourselves of the opportunity to contribute our own voices to the lively and loud chorus of human experience. And we keep others from the human pleasure of hearing them too.  Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist based in San Francisco.

Manuel Orbegozo/REUTERS Updated 2025-04-11T16:31:15Z Save Saved Read in app This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Meta Platforms is a closely watched company, with its quarterly earnings carefully scrutinized. Meta Platforms Q4 2024 earnings report was released on January 29. The company is fighting an anti-trust lawsuit against the government. Meta Platforms, the Silicon Valley parent company of social media sites Facebook, Instagram, and Threads, the messaging app WhatsApp, and more, releases its earnings quarterly.CEO and chairman Mark Zuckerberg plays a leading role on these calls to report Meta's status to its shareholders. Here's a breakdown of Meta's recent earnings.Meta Q4 earnings 2024Meta reported its fourth-quarter earnings on January 29 after the closing bell. The social media company crushed Wall Street's expectations.Meta tried to reassure investors about how much it's spending on artificial intelligence and about possible competition from Chinese AI company DeepSeek.The Facebook parent reported revenue for the period of $48.39 billion, beating the consensus analyst estimate of $46.98 billion.While its first-quarter sales forecast came in below estimates, investors seemed more concerned about other matters.During Meta's earnings conference call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg fielded questions from analysts on the company's recent content moderation changes, its big spending plans for 2025, TikTok, and more.He teased Llama 4 news and said he was "optimistic" about "progress and innovation" under Donald Trump's government. Zuckerberg also responded to a question about DeepSeek, saying it was important to have a domestic firm set the standard on open-source AI "for our own national advantage."4th Quarter resultsEarnings per share: $8.02 vs. estimate of $6.78Revenue: $48.39 billion vs. estimate of $46.98 billionOperating margin: 48% vs. estimate of 42.6%Meta Q3 earnings 2024Meta reported its third-quarter earnings on October 30 after the market close. The company made it clear it would not be slowing down on its spending while building out its AI infrastructure this year — and expects those costs to increase in 2025."We had a good quarter driven by AI progress across our apps and business," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. "We also have strong momentum with Meta AI, Llama adoption, and AI-powered glasses."The company's revenue for the quarter was $40.59 billion, ahead of the expected $40.25 billion. Earnings per share were in at $6.06, above the expected $5.25.In its core business of advertising, Meta said its average price per ad had increased 11% year over year.However, the company missed expectations for user growth. It said daily active users grew 5% year over year to 3.29 billion. That was lower than expectations of 3.31 billion daily users.Shares dipped more than 3% following Meta's earnings call with analysts, during which Zuckerberg talked through the company's AI investment strategy and said that "this might be the most dynamic moment I've seen in our industry."The company's big bet on AI, which includes both training its own AI models and launching consumer products across its platforms powered by them, continued to drive up its costs.3rd Quarter resultsEarnings per share: $6.03 vs. estimate of $5.25Revenue: $40.59 billion vs. estimate of $40.25 billionOperating margin: 43% vs. estimate of 39.6%Meta Q2 earnings 2024Meta reported second-quarter earnings on July 31 after the market close, and it was another win for Mark Zuckerberg.The Facebook parent's revenue and earnings-per-share beat consensus analyst estimates, driven by better-than-expected advertising sales.Like other tech giants, Meta has been heavily investing in generative AI with little to show for it so far, but CEO Zuckerberg defended its spending plans in the earnings call."Before we're really talking about monetization of any of those things by themselves, I don't think anyone should be surprised I would say that would be years," he said, noting that "the early signals on this are good."Zuckerberg also said in the earnings release that the company's chatbot, Meta AI, is on pace to become the most widely used in the world by the end of 2024.Meta's stock rose more than 6% in after-hours trading shortly after the results.2nd Quarter ResultsEarnings per share: $5.16 vs. estimate of $4.72Revenue: $39.07 billion, vs. estimate of $38.34 billionOperating margin: 38% vs. estimate of 37.7%Meta Q1 earnings 2024Meta reported first-quarter earnings on April 24 after the closing bell. The company reported revenue and earnings-per-share that beat consensus analyst estimates. But shares slid after Meta gave a range for second-quarter sales that was on the light side of forecasts and said it would spend more than it expected this year.The report is Meta's first without monthly- and daily-average-user numbers specifically broken out for Facebook. The company instead reported overall "Family of Apps" results that also included Instagram and WhatsApp. The combined group saw $36 billion of revenue, beating the consensus estimate of $35.5 billion.Meta's stock fell as much as 17% in after-hours trading as investors assessed the results.CEO Mark Zuckerberg's main focus on the investor call was Meta's plans to invest more significantly in AI. He also hyped up the company's recent partnership with Ray-Ban.1st Quarter ResultsEarnings per share: $4.71 vs. estimate of $4.30Revenue: $36.46 billion, +27% y/y, estimate $36.12 billionOperating margin: 38% vs. 25% y/y, estimate 37.2%Meta earnings historyMeta's earnings are a chance for investors to hear from Mark Zuckerberg himself. The founder and CEO tends to sprinkle in interesting snippets during earnings calls and has a front-row seat to the growing AI boom.Meta has shifted its focus recently from the Metaverse to AI-based large language models. Meta's AI offering, Llama, is unique in that it is open-sourced, similar to China's DeepSeek. The company has also talked up the adoption of AI technologies into its ad network, which has shown solid results so far.An ongoing anti-trust lawsuit from the government has recently weighed on Meta. The lawsuit alleges that Meta illegally purchased Instagram and WhatsApp to crush the competition and maintain a monopoly in the social networking industry.Zuckerberg himself has reportedly lobbied the Trump administration to ditch the lawsuit.If Meta proves unsuccessful in fighting the anti-trust lawsuit, it could lead to a break up of some aspects of its business.Meta's next earnings report is scheduled for April 30 after the market close. Recommended video

We’ve been hands-on with the Nintendo Switch 2 and played some of its biggest games – here’s all we learned about the new console so far, including one game we didn't expect to loveTech14:48, 11 Apr 2025Start your engines - Switch 2 isn't that far away(Image: Nintendo)It’s perhaps a little strange that Nintendo’s April 2 Switch 2 Direct left us with a fair number of questions as well as answers, and that Nintendo has been doing its best to clarify messaging since.One of the biggest conversations around the console has been the price. Pre-orders are postponed in the US (and Canada), but even if you’re not hampered by Trump’s tariffs, it’s already an expensive purchase.‌Article continues belowAdd in a pricey launch game, lack of a pack-in title, and some pretty expensive accessories and services, and the Switch 2 might not be for everyone. In fact, having scooped up a pre-order through sheer dumb luck, I went into my hands-on session with the system expecting to find a reason to cancel it.What I found, however, is a true generational leap from the first Switch that maintains Nintendo’s whimsy while offering a profound technical improvement.Mario Kart World is Nintendo's big Switch 2 launch title(Image: Nintendo)‌My first introduction to the Nintendo Switch 2 was its biggest, most prestigious launch title – Mario Kart World.While we weren’t able to explore the open world or dig for any secrets just yet, I was able to play both docked and in handheld mode. Both support up to 120 FPS, and even if that means nothing to you, if you’ve played any amount of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe then the visual step up in both resolution and smoothness is immediately noticeable.As I hit those buttery smooth powerslides around a couple of the game’s new tracks, I managed to manoeuvre myself so close to an encroaching Elk on the track (don’t ask) that I almost brushed its hooves with Mario’s bumper.‌It’s a small thing, but it’s not something I’d have necessarily felt confident pulling off in the Switch 1’s best-selling game.In handheld mode, I wanted to see how much the lack of OLED would affect my experience. If you’ve spent time with the Switch 1’s OLED screen, you’ll know what a difference it can make to just about anything, so I was a little sceptical the same could be achieved with a reversion to LCD.Thankfully, the display is crisp and bright, and HDR makes a big difference to allowing additional nuance. I wasn’t able to compare it to my Steam Deck OLED’s display, but it’s miles better than the Switch 1’s launch panel.‌Where I think Nintendo has Valve beat is just how the Switch 2 feels in the hands. It’s not necessarily the size (although it certainly is comfortable), but it’s the thickness – or lack thereof.It’s still the same thickness as the Switch 1, meaning it felt comfortable to hold.The JoyCon's can be used as mice on the Switch 2(Image: Amazon)‌Switching away from Mario Kart, I was able to play a few more Switch 2 titles that make use of alternative controller options. I’ll cover Donkey Kong Bananza shortly because it warrants its own spot, but another game that stood out was Metroid Prime 4.With the first Switch being my first Nintendo console outside of a Gameboy Colour, my only experience of Metroid Prime was the recent remaster of the first game – a title I really enjoyed.That had me itching to see how things have evolved in the years since, and I’m pleased to say Metroid Prime 4 looks absolutely stonking on Switch 2, even at 1080p performance mode at 120 FPS.‌What I wasn’t expecting, though, was to be playing it with the Joy-Con controllers in a mouse-like configuration. While I could see the appeal of playing Civilization 7 (which worked great, by the way), Metroid Prime 4’s reliance on a pretty generous auto-lock meant I didn’t think I’d enjoy the shift – but I was wrong.We're so ready to step into Samus' boots againI was only given a fifteen-minute demo, which saw me whisked through an early game area gunning down space pirates, before using the Morph Ball to get through some vents. The new abilities shown in last week’s trailer were absent, but as I tackled an enormous boss fight, I was impressed by how intuitive the controls had become in just a quarter of an hour.‌I was jumping over projectiles, rolling under wave attacks and gunning down weak points as if I’d been playing the game this way for hours. And while the lock-on remains a core ingredient, there’s just a smidge of extra reward for those who want to nail those headshots.Other titles that use the mouse felt similarly easy to use, but I still feel as though Switch 2 Welcome Tour would be best suited as a pack-in. It’s a great way to get a feel for so much of the system’s nuances, but just feels like a bizarre thing to fork out an extra tenner at launch for.‌Two things that I wager will be worth picking up, however, are the Switch 2 Editions of Link’s latest adventures: Breath of the Wild, and Tears of the Kingdom.Having experienced both, the strongest praise I can give is that each feels like it could have been launched this year. These are two of the greatest games of all time, running better than you’d have ever believed they could at launch.There’s still a slight bit of pop-in at times, but otherwise, these are stunning versions of two games I never finished because I was hoping my patience would be rewarded by Switch 2 – and it has.‌I also got to check out Cyberpunk 2077 and, while I acknowledge that I’m lucky enough to have a big, powerful PC so I’ve been somewhat spoiled by developer CD Projekt’s sci-fi RPG, I am very impressed to see it running on Switch 2.Whether the Switch 2 will keep pace with newer ports in the years to come remains to be seen (Cyberpunk 2077 launched in 2020, after all), but the fact it’s here at all is impressive.Switch 2 is just a couple of months away(Image: AFP via Getty Images)‌I loved Super Mario Odyssey on the first Nintendo Switch, and honestly felt like a sequel was a shoo-in for the new console’s launch line-up.Instead, I was initially a little disappointed when we got Donkey Kong: Bonanza instead. It’s another 3D platformer, sure, but I worried that the focus on destruction would ruin some of the hand-crafted nature of Odyssey’s lineage.After playing for 20 minutes, though, I’m impressed. That’s not to say it’ll reach the high bar that is Odyssey, but smashing through items and solving puzzles with the big ape was great fun.‌Perhaps most impressively, it showed just how comfortable the Switch 2 is with just about everything exploding on the screen at once. I smashed through entire mountains to reach the other side, and the frame rate didn’t drop.And, despite my reservations that digging underground was a recipe for getting lost or stuck, DK had me covered with a delightful 3D map and the option to reset terrain if I got too far off the beaten track.Add to that the opportunity to hurl chunks of wall, floor, and anything else at enemies, and I feel I could’ve happily smashed through even more for a few hours.‌Did I cancel my pre-order?I was all set to have that sweet, sweet moolah back in my account by the weekend, but I simply couldn’t do it.The Switch 2 is a more impressive upgrade than I (and perhaps others) had given credit for, and while I’m sure Nintendo has much more to show us in the months to come, I feel like the launch window line-up is strong enough to warrant a purchase already.Article continues belowWe’ll have a full review up on Daily Star when my pre-order arrives in a couple of months, but for now, I really wish I could’ve taken one home.For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.‌‌‌

Game over? (GAME) GAME’s head office is in the process of being shut down, as it auctions off GTA posters and pirate ship displays. GAME’s presence on the UK high street has been in decline over the past few years, with the majority of stores now housed within other Frasers Group-owned shops like Sports Direct. The high street chain has slimmed down its services as part of this transition – with stores no longer selling pre-owned games or offering reward points. For the Switch 2 launch, there will be no in-store pre-orders at all, and reportedly only a ‘small allocation’ through its website. The bones of GAME are now being picked apart from what was once its beating heart, as the retailer’s headquarters in Basingstoke is shut down and auctioned off. As shown in a listing on bidding site NCM Auctions, office equipment, storage units, and warehouse items are being sold off from GAME’s Basingstoke headquarters, which has been the company’s HQ for over two decades. ‘Clearance on behalf of GAME warehouse – due to closure,’ the listing reads. While the majority of the items are fairly dull, there are some oddities, like a pirate ship display from Beanie Babies’ maker TY and a GTA: San Andreas wall poster, which is currently going for £45. The highlight of the collection (GAME) If you’re a collector, there are some branded display cases which might be useful if you’re looking to showcase your gaming wares, priced at £20-£30. Alternatively, you can buy a vending machine or some trolleys. More Trending The downside is you have to collect these items from Basingstoke, and be available from 23-25 April. You can also view the items via an appointment on Wednesday April 16 if you want to take a look beforehand, with all bids closing on April 17. As reported by Eurogamer, staff at GAME have said in-store pre-orders will now no longer be offered on any item, despite a post on their website stating otherwise. While GAME continues to fall apart, the UK’s biggest retailer in second-hand games, CeX, has recently expanded its operations to delivery app JustEat. The future of GAME is toys (Google Maps) Email gamecentral@metro.co.uk, leave a comment below, follow us on Twitter, and sign-up to our newsletter. To submit Inbox letters and Reader’s Features more easily, without the need to send an email, just use our Submit Stuff page here. For more stories like this, check our Gaming page. GameCentral Sign up for exclusive analysis, latest releases, and bonus community content. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Your information will be used in line with our Privacy Policy

Wireless charging pucks make hot phones even hotter. Sure, it allows you access to phones’ only USB-C port while charging, but the process of electromagnetic induction is still less efficient than a direct connection through a power cable. That leads to excess heat. If you’ve ever picked up a phone on the charge and immediately dropped it like you’ve touched a hot iron, then you already know that particular pain point. Which is why I’m surprised there aren’t more devices like the $60 Torras PowerCircle Qi2 charger. It’s essentially a combination wireless charger and fan cooler. Yes, it may make your phone look like its trying out its jet engine cosplay, but its the kind of device whose function vastly outweighs its form. The Torras PowerCircle slaps onto the back of any supporting phone for 15W wireless charging and can prop up the device with the rotating stand-up ring. However, with the fan whirring away, Torras claims the device will stay at an even 55 degrees Fahrenheit or lower throughout over 100 minutes of charging time. The company also claims you can go from zero to 80% in just under an hour, which seems about right for 15W wireless charging. And to account for the fan, it’s also far thicker than your traditional charging puck. Heck its even thicker than other pucks with fans built in, like the $45 MagFusion GameFrost Qi2 15w charger from Aukey. Phones that grow hot lose out in both performance and charging efficiency, which is not a big deal if all you’re doing is sticking your phone on a pad to charge while you sleep. It’s when you actually want to use your device while charging that you may see performance dip. Torras claims its burger slider-sized charging puck will maintain stable performance far better than a traditional Qi2 charger. You can also use the charger without the fan, but as AndroidCentral pointed out, that’s because you need to press a button on the charger then re-plug it in to get the fan working to begin with. Phone fan coolers—including cheap ones made by companies like Trakxy or more-expensive varieties from Black Shark—are nothing new. Yet the PowerCircle is one of the few that focuses exclusively on fast charging heat. But spending $60 (though likely closer to $50 on sale) or even $40 on a wireless charger seems a little much when a 15W Qi-certified Anker puck will cost you less than $30. The fan-cooler devices have a niche use case, but I can imagine it could be extra practical for gaming on a phone. The PowerCircle might charge your phone while the phone’s USB port is occupied by a phone controller like a BackBone One or Razer Kishi and keep it cool for uninterrupted performance. The fan on charger is really a “no, duh” now that we’re starting to see more of these on these devices on the market. According to the Wireless Power Consortium, Qi2 is supposed to achieve up to 95% power efficiency, far above the 75% of the older Qi standard. Even that 5% is enough to create a sauna on the back of your device. Anybody with experience in PC building already knows the benefit of simple fan cooling. Rather than sticking it near the air conditioner, a small dedicated fan just makes more sense. Now lets see how far we can take it.

Broomhill Road House / Urban Projects BureauSave this picture!© Kilian O'Sullivan•London, United Kingdom Architects: Urban Projects Bureau Area Area of this architecture project Area:  350 m² Year Completion year of this architecture project Year:  2023 Photographs Photographs:Kilian O'Sullivan Lead Architects: Yonatan Buchhandler, Alex Warnock-Smith More SpecsLess Specs Save this picture! Text description provided by the architects. This project transformed a Victorian terrace house in East London into a four-story family home that reflects the clients' South Asian heritage. At its center is a three-story gallery inspired by Islamic courtyard houses, organizing the kitchen, living room, and study. The kitchen acts as a courtyard, connecting living spaces via staircases and a bridge, while large landscape steps lead to a new basement family room. The design emphasizes detail, color, and texture for a cohesive interior, with views connecting the front and rear gardens, integrating outdoor elements including a winter garden to enhance the home's flow.Save this picture!Save this picture!Improving well-being and liveability within the spaces of this traditional terrace house was central to the brief for a large family with diverse living and accessibility requirements. This was achieved by opening spaces up, creating large unobstructed floor planes, allowing clear visual connections between spaces and levels, and connecting spaces with specially designed slow staircases and a bridge. The project also includes the construction of a new treatment room in the rear garden.Save this picture!Save this picture!Inspired by the traditional Islamic courtyard house, the new kitchen is conceived as a courtyard at the center of the house and is linked to different living spaces by new staircases and a bridge, giving a sense of community and intimacy to a domestic space. From the kitchen island, you can see into all the other living spaces and out to the front and rear gardens. Large landscape steps lead down from the kitchen to a new basement family room encouraging family interaction.Save this picture!Save this picture!Connections with external landscape spaces, plants, and natural life are another important feature of the design, as well as ensuring good quality natural ventilation. Views are created through the depth of the house, linking newly landscaped front and rear gardens, and allowing light and air to pass through spaces and between the levels through natural cross ventilation. Natural stack ventilation is enabled from basement to roof through the new staircase and stepped section.Save this picture!An internal winter garden in the dining room creates a resting place and transition between interior and exterior, garden and house. A clay-plaster wall lines the winter garden and provides a natural bio-based breathable wall that will change in tone in response to plants, temperature, and humidity. The rear extension is lined with a green roof.Save this picture! Project gallerySee allShow less About this office Published on April 11, 2025Cite: "Broomhill Road House / Urban Projects Bureau" 11 Apr 2025. ArchDaily. Accessed . <https://www.archdaily.com/1028433/broomhill-road-house-urban-projects-bureau&gt ISSN 0719-8884Save世界上最受欢迎的建筑网站现已推出你的母语版本!想浏览ArchDaily中国吗?是否 You've started following your first account!Did you know?You'll now receive updates based on what you follow! Personalize your stream and start following your favorite authors, offices and users.Go to my stream

(Image Credit: DC Studio/Shutterstock) NewsletterSign up for our email newsletter for the latest science newsBack in 1950, Alan Turing proposed an elegantly simple yet profoundly challenging way to determine whether machines could be said to "think." Known as the Turing Test, this measure of machine intelligence sets humans and machines in conversational competition, challenging human judges to distinguish between artificial and genuine intelligence through text-based interactions. Despite numerous attempts, no artificial system had ever convincingly passed this test. Until now.Cameron Jones and Benjamin Bergen from the University of California, San Diego, have gathered for the first time empirical evidence that OpenAI’s GPT-4.5, a sophisticated large language model (LLM), has successfully passed the Turing Test. Not only did GPT-4.5 pass, but under specific conditions, it outperformed human counterparts in convincing participants of its humanity.The work has significant implications for society, ethics and humanity’s understanding of intelligence itself.Human v MachineThe Turing Test pits an interrogator against two conversational partners — one human and one machine — engaging both simultaneously via text. The interrogator's task is simple: to decide which conversational partner is human. But despite rapid advancements in computational linguistics and machine learning, AI systems have consistently failed this seemingly straightforward challenge.To take the test, Jones and Bergen recruited 284 participants from diverse backgrounds, including undergraduate students and paid crowd-sourced workers from Prolific, a tech company that employs humans to take part in AI-related experiments. The researchers pitted several contemporary AI models against humans — including GPT-4o, LLaMa-3.1-405B, and GPT-4.5. Interestingly, GPT-4.5 emerged as the winner but only when instructed to adopt a "humanlike persona." In those conversations, GPT-4.5 was judged to be the human 73% of the time: significantly more often than interrogators selected the real human participant, say Jones and Bergen, highlighting a remarkable shift in AI’s ability to emulate human conversation.The researchers also used an older rule-based chatbot called ELIZA to generate text and this was readily identified as a machine by the judges. Similarly, GPT-4o, a previous generation model, also significantly underperformed, chosen as human in just 21% of cases. "The results constitute the first empirical evidence that any artificial system passes a standard three-party Turing test," say Jones and Bergen.Jones and Bergen attribute part of GPT4.5’s success to the careful crafting of prompts designed to guide the model into adopting a persona that humans find relatable and convincingly authentic — specifically, a persona of an introverted young person fluent in internet slang and culture. GPT4.5’s ability to do this, say the researchers, demonstrates nuanced command over language patterns and interactive subtleties previously thought uniquely human."It is arguably the ease with which LLMs can be prompted to adapt their behavior to different scenarios that makes them so flexible: and apparently so capable of passing as human," say Jones and Bergen. This adaptability, rather than being a weakness, is precisely what underscores their emerging intelligence.Of course, the work also raises the thorny question of whether the Turing Test is measuring intelligence at all or just measuring the ability to pass the test. Either way, the success of GPT-4.5 challenges the conventional wisdom that genuine intelligence must include conscious awareness or deep comprehension. It may even prompt a reevaluation of the criteria used to define cognitive abilities and intellect.Evolving IntelligenceThat’s an impressive result with significant ethical, economic and social implications. "Models with this ability to robustly deceive and masquerade as people could be used for social engineering or to spread misinformation," say the researchers, warning of the potential misuse of “counterfeit humans” in politics, marketing and cybersecurity.But there is also a clear upside, albeit with important caveats. Better conversational agents could significantly enhance human-computer interactions, improve automated services, virtual assistance, companionship and educational tools. Achieving a balance between utility and risk will probably require carefully considered regulation.The work may also force humans to change how they interact with each other. Jones and Bergen imagine a greater cultural emphasis on authentic human interaction, spurred by the ubiquity of capable AI counterparts. This blurring of the distinction between machines and humans would surely have fascinated even Turing himself.Ref: Large Language Models Pass the Turing Test : arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674artificial intelligence1 free article leftWant More? Get unlimited access for as low as $1.99/monthSubscribeAlready a subscriber?Register or Log In1 free articleSubscribeWant more?Keep reading for as low as $1.99!SubscribeAlready a subscriber?Register or Log In

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 I’m waiting for my allergy meds to kick in as I write this. Even if you don’t suffer from seasonal allergies, you can benefit from a good air purifier in your home. And right now, Amazon has some of our favorite air purifiers from Coway on sale for clearance prices. The sale includes models that cover just about any type of home, from large rooms to small apartments. No matter where you live, you’ll be breathing better. This sale goes until April 15, and then prices go back up, so add to cart now. Airmega 100 (White) — $89.25 (was $129.99) Coway This affordable air purifier takes just one hour to clean the air in a room up to 810 square feet. It can scrub a 167 square-foot room in just 12.5 minutes. It’s not slacking as it works, either. The three-stage HEPA filter promises to scrape 99.999 percent of harmful particles out of the air. And let’s face it, that 0.001 percent of particles that get through have earned the honor of messing with you. You can keep this purifier in the bedroom as it operates at just 20 dB, so there’s no worry about it keeping you awake. If you still don’t want it running at night, it has a sleep mode and a built-in timer to clean the air on your schedule. AP-1512HH (White) — $173.25 (was $229.99)  Terri Williams This is our pick for the best portable air purifier for asthma. It can clean a room up to 361 square feet, and it has a burly four-stage filter to capture as much airborne crud as possible. Like the Airmega 100, it has a built-in timer function, so you can customize when it’s on. This is a great, easily packable option if you want to bring it along on a trip. After all, you don’t want to breathe in that hotel air that other guests have already breathed. Gross. More Coway air purifier deals AP-1512HH (Black) $173.25 (was $229.99)        Airmega 400 (White) $429.45 (was $649.00) AIRMEGA 250 $283.50 (was $399.00)  AIRMEGA ProX (Beige) $711.90 (was $999.99) AP-1512HHS $210.00 (was $299.00) Airmega 300 (White) $362.25 (was $549.00) Coway bidet deals Since we’re talking about Coway products on sale, it’s worth noting that the company’s bidets are also discounted right now. They’re kind of like air purifiers, but for your butt. Bidetmega 500S (E) $494.70 (was $699.00) Bidetmega 500S (R) $497.70 (was $699.00) Bidetmega 400S (E) $426.30 (was $599.00) Bidetmega 400S (R) $426.30 (was $599.00)

SlitherStephen S. HallGrand Central Publishing, $30 Snakes don’t often get to be the protagonists. From the biblical tempter in the Garden of Eden to the eponymous snakes on a plane, your stereotypical serpent often gets cast as a villain — cunning, treacherous, cruel, deadly. But human views of snakes are full of contradictions. In mythology, snakes whispered secrets about the healing arts to the Greeks and established the concept of linear time in Mesoamerica. In the real world, they continue to inspire scientists in fields as diverse as pharmacology, reproductive biology and disaster relief. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.