Cannady Hall, Karamuk Kuo’s recently completed, largely freestanding 2-story building at Rice University in Houston, complements and extends Rice School of Architecture’s Anderson Hall. Anderson was designed by Staub and Rather in 1947 as a simple bar building to anchor the northwest corner of the university’s central academic quadrangle, planned by Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson in 1910. In 1981 Anderson was quietly expanded by James Stirling and Michael Wilford, who added a second, parallel bar of offices and studios linked to the original with a central jury and exhibition space. This addition suggested a courtyard that Cannady Hall finalized, giving the school a legible precinct with a clear center. The new building mostly houses maker spaces: a large, traditional fabrication shop (for creating models, prototypes, and furniture) and mechanical support space downstairs, and a digital model shop and extensive, unassigned, open work area for students and faculty upstairs, from which you can look down through two double-height voids into the fabrication shop below. Cannady Hall also contains spaces to consider the results of making, in a long 2-story, street-facing public gallery, which can be isolated but has an obvious door to the upstairs work area—and a pinup hallway built over an existing covered loggia that originally linked Anderson to Fondren Library at the ground level and now also links Anderson to Cannady above. Finally, the new building displays the work of making to the campus community. Because Cannady is raised three feet above grade for flooding, the mostly glazed fabrication shop, with workspaces extending onto exterior porches, is easily visible from the surrounding public walkways—even from the reading room of the adjacent library. Cannady Hall, seen in the foreground, has become part of Rice’s central Academic Quad. (Iwan Baan) As an entity, Cannady Hall is a marvelous enigma. You can experience it as temporary or permanent, insertion or fabric, workmanlike or exquisite, freestanding or linked, transparent or opaque, object or field, forward-looking or traditional. Each reading is carefully balanced against the other to achieve what Jeannette Kuo, the supervising partner for this project, describes as “oscillation,” a quality that enlivens the deep pragmatism of the young Swiss architecture firm’s impressive and consistent built work. Seen from a distance, Cannady Hall seems temporary, like one of those straightforward, contextually oblivious, repetitive bay lab buildings that universities occasionally—but urgently—need. Inserted against the dense, dark-green live oak canopy and limestone-and-brick building fabric of the campus, it appears as a simple, mostly enclosed, metal-panel-clad object. Karamuk Kuo designed the building in a way that makes the brick-red upper mass appear to float (Iwan Baan) As you get closer, though, your understanding of the building changes. Stainless steel cladding panels and window wall on the ground floor make the brick-red upper mass appear to float. The prominent gallery bay, visible from the university’s inner loop road, cleverly extends beyond the simple footprint, further upsetting the reading of the whole as a simple box. As you turn the gallery corner into the courtyard, two bays float above, forming a deep porch below and dropping a partly veiled open stair from a bright upstairs entry. Still, these unconventional shifts—there is one more to the bay closest to the library—balance against convention. In conspiracy with Anderson Hall and the Fondren Library, the moves clarify and concentrate public movement. The courtyard now forms a logically shaped, layered threshold to Rice’s central Beaux Arts heart. Close in, what had seemed from afar to be enameled metal panels turn out to be glazed terra-cotta battens, carefully detailed. As you move into the courtyard, the weight and opacity that material brings to the building volume is undercut by the full-height window wall at the ground floor that invites you to see in and through the big fabrication shop. The gallery and the enclosed upper loggia use the same window wall, so you assume the upper floor is also largely transparent. While you can’t see inside because of the angle, the reflection of trees and sky in the ample glass nicely activates the courtyard. The glazed terra-cotta battens were carefully detailed(Iwan Baan) When you eventually arrive inside to the second floor, which is more busily and casually used than the shop below, you realize that the sense of transparency is illusionary. The gallery is isolated from that larger workspace with a wall, and the upper exterior window wall in the courtyard is spandrel, necessary to allow for interior wall space to hang work. But the illusion of transparency is cleverly and surprisingly sustained, as diffuse north light from the repetitive monitors floods in. The interior of the upper floor is organized under the repeating sawtooth skylit bays as an insistent field of steel I-beams painted white. This column grid does not differentiate the floor area into served and service spaces; it is all usable, flowing field space, entirely without hallway. While the repeating bay width is set by the existing loggia, it turns out this dimension is perfect for worktables for individuals or small groups, while providing enough room for passersby to circulate and observe without self-consciousness. Though the column field feels open, every other bay is enclosed with floor-to-ceiling glass layers—two sheets set several inches apart, flush with the beam and columns edges—that either surround the double-height voids over the fabrication shop or isolate areas that serve as project rooms or classrooms. (The layered glass provides acoustic isolation.) These enclosure areas form transparent objects that disrupt free circulation in the field, but the net effect is that you still feel you have a panoptic sense of everything going on both upstairs and down. It’s a compelling and generous space. Interior of the upper floor is organized under the repeating sawtooth skylit bays. (Iwan Baan) So, here are two interestingly related facts: Cannady Hall adds about 22,000 square feet to the school, almost all of it usable by students. But Rice does not intend to admit a greater number of new architecture students. Initiated, developed, and constructed under the watch of three successive deans—Sarah Whiting, John Casbarian, and Igor Marjanović—Cannady Hall stands as concrete recognition by a leading architecture program that its young charges, who are fluent in virtual means, also pressingly need to study, test, and represent in real space, to think by means of material engagement, and to operate in an open, collaborative environment beyond the hermetic screen in an isolated studio. Large, detailed models, built mostly using combinations of digital and hand processes, seem to be everywhere around the school. The faculty I spoke with now expect those. If the programmatic and pedagogic agenda of the new building can be understood as a corrective measure to the consequences of the purely digital processes and representation that architectural design education has come to rely upon, what makes Karamuk Kuo’s building so interesting is its refusal to see this correction as backsliding. On the second floor of Cannady, when school is in session, you will find the motley order of work: an ever-changing scatter of desk stools, layout stands, model bases, worktables, and computer desks surrounded by stacks of model materials, backpacks, empty coffee cups, and lunch containers, all given meter by the casual temporary geometry of power cables and local foci by the temporary placement of laptops and monitors. Given this mess, the effect of the grid of white columns in even light—which, in photos of the cleaned-up space, seems overstated—is remarkable. An overarching sense of order happily prevails over the chaos. Bays were enclosed with floor-to-ceiling glass layers. (Iwan Baan) There are a few areas where the building is less successful. Most are circumstantial and outside the architect’s control. The site dictates that the building is a pavilion, with high visibility for all four elevations. Site hydrology did not allow for a basement, so mechanical spaces, masked with stainless panels, result in a relatively mute west facade facing a prominent public circulation axis across an open field. To help, a public artwork, yet to be commissioned, will be sited there. The second-floor hallway connecting Cannady and Anderson, built over the existing loggia to Fondren, is brilliant inside, but from the main quadrangle side it poses some detailing dilemmas. (The upper link is a necessity for the school to function, but elsewhere in the large quadrangle those corners are left open.) The new link seeks to appear as a preexisting extension of Anderson Hall over the loggia, but the latter cannot bear weight, posing difficult isolation-joint details. In this and a few other moments you sense perhaps the gap between the tolerance expectations of a Swiss firm detailing its first American building and the ability of even a solid American contractor like Linbeck to deliver. While the architecture of Cannady Hall goes out of its way to make clear its primary structure and assembly—and the architects and school to explain the recyclability of its major materials—my one larger complaint is that I wish the building would as clearly communicate its active environmental performance, which was a concern for Karamuk Kuo: Its target for this building was a 50 percent reduction in energy usage over standard practices. This seems low, but the achievable efficiency is skewed by the programmatic need to leave large window wall areas of the fabrication shop open to Houston’s hot and humid air and because the gallery has to work with its window wall blackout curtains drawn or fully raised. Karamuk Kuo typically integrates active and insulative systems to the point that they disappear. Here, given that it’s an educational facility for young architects, I wish they had been more didactic. Inside, the workspaces flood with light from repetitive monitors. (Iwan Baan) But that’s a minor complaint. Congratulations, Rice, and congratulations, Karamuk Kuo. As a professor up the road at the University of Texas at Austin, I’m jealous as hell. Anderson Hall, meanwhile, has been simultaneously and smartly renovated by Kwong Von Glinow to coordinate with its new addition. (The interiors commission is the firm’s first project outside its home state of Illinois.) The intervention does a remarkable job of clarifying that building’s primary entry—in part by cutting large new windows to create views of the quad—and of integrating its public spaces into the courtyard, which, though intended, had never worked as Stirling and Wilford had hoped. Anderson Hall’s new upper-floor connection to the loggia hallway provides a centralized group meeting area to balance the general work areas of Cannady and uses the exterior curve of one of Stirling’s round skylight coves for the geometry of a ramp to reach Cannady’s upper level. It all feels smart, and it works effortlessly with the new addition. A plan of the building’s second floor shows the continuity between the existing and new structures. (Courtesy Karamuk Kuo) I would be remiss to not mention that the new building is named for its lead donor, the irascible, driven, and superbly pragmatic architect William T. “Bill” Cannady, who was already a Rice professor when I was an architecture student there in the late 1970s. Bill’s career has been marked by several fundamental changes of direction, so the pedagogical shift this legacy ensures feels appropriate. With that support, Rice may be one of the few U.S. architecture schools that can afford to make more, better space these days. But the university, as a leading academic institution, seems to have committed itself, in this building and several others both finished and underway, to the critical role that design, generously and thoughtfully housed, plays in a leading university. Fingers crossed that this message makes it out beyond the hedges. David Heymann is an architect, writer, and the Harwell Hamilton Harris Regents Professor in the School of Architecture at UT Austin.

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Looking for help with today's NYT Strands puzzle? Here's an extra hint to help you uncover the right words, as well as all of today's answers and Spangram.

Why it matters: When Liang Wenfeng launched his advanced AI model DeepSeek on Hugging Face, it marked a turning point for artificial intelligence and the global open-source movement. Its debut shifted the focus from a Chinese national achievement to a broader story about how open collaboration can cross borders and reshape innovation. MongoDB Developer Relations head and open-source advocate Matt Asay argues that DeepSeek represents more than just Chinese innovation – it shows how open source reshapes ownership, collaboration, and the pace of technological progress. "It stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face and no one can put the open source genie back in the bottle – not even the U.S. government," Asay wrote in Info World, where he moonlights as a contributing writer. DeepSeek's release sparked a wave of global developer activity, including a high-profile effort from the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), which launched a rival project called OpenSeek. The initiative aims to outperform DeepSeek while bringing together the global open-source community to advance algorithms, data, and infrastructure progress. Policymakers, particularly in the United States, responded swiftly and harshly – adding the BAAI to a government blacklist. To Asay, attempts to rein in open-source artificial intelligence are futile and reflect a profound misunderstanding of the movement. "DeepSeek didn't just have a moment. It's now very much a movement," he observes. "The open source AI ecosystem surrounding it has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot of technological brilliance into something much bigger – and much harder to stop." The scale of the movement is staggering. Thousands of developers – from academic researchers to hobbyists – are working to refine and expand open-source artificial intelligence models like DeepSeek. Platforms like Hugging Face now serve as global collaboration hubs, driving innovation faster than even the most nimble corporate labs. While Hugging Face may be a single company, the communities it fosters are far more durable – and beyond the reach of centralized control. // Related Stories This democratization of artificial intelligence is already reshaping the real world. Companies like Perplexity are incorporating open-source models into consumer products, proving that advanced AI is no longer the sole domain of tech giants or state-funded labs. Asay envisions a future where powerful AI tools are within reach of everyone – designed to be modified, improved, and expanded by a global network of developers. To him, the parallels to the early rise of Linux are unmistakable. "It's Linux all over again. One passionate start becomes a movement, then infrastructure, then a global standard," he explains. "The key difference is that this time it's happening in months, not decades," Linux thrived not due to government or corporate backing but because it sparked a wave of developer contributions and innovation. This same dynamic is now driving the rapid advancement of open-source AI. In contrast, organizations clinging to proprietary models, like OpenAI, are fighting a losing battle. As Asay puts it, "They're attempting to dam an ocean," underscoring the futility of trying to contain a movement defined by decentralization and collaboration. While some companies nod to open-source ideals, few have matched the transparency and openness shown by efforts like DeepSeek and OpenSeek. Asay is clear-eyed about the challenges facing policymakers. "Open source isn't subject to export controls or trade embargoes. It's a pull request away, all day every day," he notes. Attempts to slow or block the spread of open-source AI will only backfire, harming domestic innovation and pushing leadership elsewhere. The lesson from recent technology history is that open ecosystems, driven by global collaboration, adapt and evolve far faster than closed, centralized projects. The rise of DeepSeek and its open-source successors marks a fundamental shift in how technology is developed and distributed. Governments, corporations, and developers now face a choice: engage with the open-source AI movement or watch others pull ahead. Open-source artificial intelligence is not a distant trend – it is already transforming the landscape. "No one can own this wave, no one can stop it, and no one can contain it," Asay concludes.

Table of Contents Table of Contents How will Bluesky verification work?  Giving power to trusted institutions  Why is it better than X and Meta?  Bluesky, the social platform often seen as a less chaotic and open alternative to X, has finally announced plans for an account verification system. The core idea is to put a blue tick as a visual identifier for all accounts belonging to important figures.  The company, however, is taking a slightly different route, compared to how blue tick verification now works on platforms such as X and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram. So far, the only way to exist as a verified account on Bluesky was putting a business or institution’s name in the domain.  Recommended Videos That approach, however, didn’t always work. Late in 2024, the company had to grapple with the menace of impersonation and handle-squatting. The company subsequently tightened its policy around such activity and said a robust verification system will arrive soon.  Bluesky Bluesky will verify accounts through a couple of methods. In the first wave, it will select important public figures and bestow a blue checkmark icon on their social account. This is the system that was initially followed by X (back when it went by Twitter) and Meta-owned platforms. “Bluesky will proactively verify authentic and notable accounts and display a blue check next to their names,” says the company. The approach is familiar, but the criteria that decide which account is “important” or “notable” enough remain a mystery.  For now, Bluesky will cherry-pick important accounts that will get a blue checkmark appearing before their user name. More importantly, you can not request to get your account verified.  “As this feature stabilizes, we’ll launch a request form for notable and authentic accounts interested in becoming verified or becoming trusted verifiers,” the company says in a blog post. Bluesky In addition to vetting and giving a blue check to accounts at its discretion, Bluesky is also setting up a Trusted Verifiers system. These are independent bodies, such as a media house or government agency, that can verify the accounts of their important employees.  The account of Trusted Verifiers will have its own blue tick, but it will appear as a scalloped blue check. The personal accounts they verify will have the familiar rounded check mark.  Personal accounts that are authenticated by a third-party, such as a journalist profile issued a blue tick by a media organization, would still go through a check by Bluesky’s team. Viewers can also check if an account was verified by Bluesky directly or by a trusted body.  Bluesky X, Facebook, and Instagram started off by verifying important or notable accounts through their own team. They focused on politicians, actors, sportsmen, and other important figures who are at risk of impersonation and could lead to online scams.  The Elon Musk-owned platform ended the in-house verification system. Instead, the company started offering blue checks to any account that paid for a premium subscription. This approach has opened the doors for a lot of online nuisances.  “There is evidence of motivated malicious actors abusing the ‘verified account’ to deceive users,” the European Commission said in a notice released in 2024. A year before that, Kaspersky also warned that fake accounts with a blue tick mark are impersonating brands to dupe users. The most recent analysis came out in January this year, detailing how the X Premium subscription is being abused by scammers. The folks over at Sentinel One discovered that verified accounts are being exploited to hawk sham crypto projects. Digital Trends Likewise, Meta now offers a subscription tool that will give you a verified blue tick mark on Instagram and Facebook, one that extends to Threads, as well. It doesn’t really help with enhancing the account reach, but ensures priority access to Meta support. “Paying an extra $15 a month for a blue checkmark ultimately did exactly what I expected — nothing. My kids, in fact, think it’s lame to pay for that sort of vanity,” wrote Digital Trends’ Phil Nickinson after trying Meta Verified for his Instagram account. In a nutshell, Meta and X’s approach lost the true meaning and purpose of having a blue check mark on one’s social profile. It used to stand for notability, importance, and trust. Now, you can simply buy it for the same amount as a tall glass of overpriced sugar-bomb coffee. It’s heartening to see that at least an upstart like Bluesky is still doing it the right way.

The judge who found that the tech company maintained an illegal monopoly is asked to force it to sell its Chrome web browser.

In upstate New York, director R.B. Schlather sought to wrestle Handel’s opera into modernity; in Brooklyn, Anthony Roth Costanzo offered a performance considering the high male voice that included an olfactory component.

they had a whiskey drink, they had a cider drink Are these chimps having a fruity booze-up in the wild? New data suggests that the human inclination toward feasting in groups is part of our deep evolutionary history. Jennifer Ouellette – Apr 21, 2025 3:18 pm | 9 The chimp equivalent of bellying up to the bar with friends? Credit: Bowland et al. The chimp equivalent of bellying up to the bar with friends? Credit: Bowland et al. Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Is there anything more human than gathering in groups to share food and partake in a fermented beverage or two (or three, or....)? Researchers have caught wild chimpanzees on camera engaging in what appears to be similar activity: sharing fermented African breadfruit with measurable alcoholic content. According to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology, the observational data is the first evidence of the sharing of alcoholic foods among nonhuman great apes in the wild. The fruit in question is seasonal and comes from Treculia africana trees common across the home environment of the wild chimps in Cantanhez National Park in Guinea-Bissau. Once mature, the fruits drop from the tree to the ground and slowly ripen from a hard, deep green exterior to a yellow, spongier texture. Because the chimps are unhabituated, the authors deployed camera traps at three separate locations to record their feeding and sharing behavior. They recorded 10 instances of selective fruit sharing among 17 chimps, with the animals exhibiting a marked preference for riper fruit. Between April and July 2022, the authors measured the alcohol content of the fruit with a handy portable breathalyzer and found almost all of the fallen fruit (90 percent) contained some ethanol, with the ripest containing the highest levels—the equivalent of 0.61 percent ABV (alcohol by volume). That's comparatively low to alcoholic drinks typically consumed by humans, but then again, fruit accounts for as much as 60 to 80 percent of the chimps' diet, so the amount of ethanol consumed could add up quickly. It's highly unlikely the chimps would get drunk, however. It wouldn't confer any evolutionary advantage, and per the authors, there is evidence in the common ancestor of African apes of a molecular mechanism that increases the ability to metabolize alcohol. The interpretation of the observed behavior remains somewhat speculative. It's unclear, for instance, whether any of the chimps were related to each other; kin-selection effects may be at play. Nor could the authors conclude definitively that the chimps were deliberately consuming ethanol-rich fruits and sharing it with their compatriots. That said, there are well-known benefits to such behavior. “For humans, we know that drinking alcohol leads to a release of dopamine and endorphins, and resulting feelings of happiness and relaxation,” said co-author Anna Bowland of the University of Exeter’s Penryn Campus in Cornwall. “We also know that sharing alcohol–including through traditions such as feasting–helps to form and strengthen social bonds. So—now we know that wild chimpanzees are eating and sharing ethanolic fruits–the question is: could they be getting similar benefits?” The authors believe this data suggests that the human inclination toward feasting in groups is part of our deep evolutionary history. "To fully understand this in a social context requires data on the role of alcohol consumption in reinforcing social bonds and building social capital, including the exchange of other goods, between extended kin and non-kin, and the degree to which ethanol ingestion is intentional or not," they concluded. "This necessitates long-term observations of individuals with well-established relationships where changes in feeding and social behavior can be monitored, alongside measurement of ethanol in foods." Current Biology, 2025. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.02.067 (About DOIs). Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer Ouellette Senior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 9 Comments

Can weight-loss drugs ditch the needles?Aleksandr Zubkov/Getty Images A daily pill appears to lower blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes as effectively as injectable drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro. The medication, called orforglipron, also led to substantial weight loss in clinical trials, meaning it could become a convenient alternative to popular weight-loss drugs. Drugs mimicking the hormone GLP-1, which regulates appetite and blood sugar, have exploded in popularity. Known as GLP-1 agonists, these medications can treat obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease. One downside is that nearly…

Pope Francis has died at age 88, over a decade after becoming the first Jesuit and Latin American pope. As the Vatican mourns, preparations begin for the centuries-old conclave to elect his successor.Read the original article on Business Insider