Image: The Pokémon CompanyIn one of the most novel ideas we've seen from The Pokémon Company, the media giant has revealed Pokécology, an official book that focuses on the behaviours of the fictional creatures. Reported on my Automaton Media, Pokécology will be released in Japan on 18th June 2025 by publisher Shogakukan, with no official Western release confirmed yet. But the big draw here is that the book has been put together by two veterinary behaviorism and ecology PHD graduates from the University of Tokyo. So it's essentially a real science book about fictional creatures.Subscribe to Nintendo Life on YouTube809kWatch on YouTube The book has been penned by Yoshinari Yonehara — who has worked with the company on Pokémon Legends: Arceus and Scarlet & Violet — with illustrations form Chihiro Kinoshita, who is known for drawing a wide range of children's illustrations focusing on animal ecology. We've got no official images besides the logo, which is pretty charming, but pre-orders from Amazon Japan, Rakuten, and HMV (among other retailers) price the book at around ¥1,430 — just over USD $10. Image: Shogakukan Instead of focusing on Pokémon stats and battle techniques, Pokécology will instead look at things such as sleeping habits, preferred foods, migration patterns, and other likewise topics. Sounds like the perfect New Pokémon Snap companion to us. Plus, it'll apparently be presented in an easy-to-understand way, meaning this might be how you get your kids excited about animal sciences, ecology, and biology. We know translating the book could be a lot of work, but we'd love to see this get the official treatment here in the West. For now, we'll have our fingers crossed as we prepare to become Pokémon experts. It'd be a great thing to announce in the run-up to the next Pokémon game's release, Legends: Z-A. What do you think of a official Pokémon ecology book? Let us know in the comments.

Aidan Gomez, the co-founder and CEO of generative AI startup Cohere, has joined the board of EV maker Rivian, according to a regulatory filing. The appointment is the latest sign that Rivian sees promises in applying AI to its own venture while positioning itself as a software leader — and even provider — within the automotive industry. Rivian increased the size of the board and elected Gomez, whose term will expire in 2026, according to the filing. Gomez has had a long career as a data scientist and AI expert. He launched Cohere in 2019 with co-founders Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang with a focus on training AI foundation models for enterprises. The generative AI startup sells its services to companies such as Oracle and Notion. Prior to starting Cohere, Gomez was a researcher at Google Brain, the deep learning division at Google led by Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton. Gomez is also known for “Attention Is All You Need,” a 2017 technical paper he co-authored that laid the foundation for many of the most capable generative AI models today. Gomez’s skillset could be particularly useful for Rivian as the EV maker navigates a new $5.8 billion joint venture with Volkswagen Group to develop software. Under the joint venture, Rivian will share its electrical architecture expertise with a Volkswagen Group — including its many brands — and is expected to license existing intellectual property rights to the joint venture. It’s possible the joint venture will sell its tech to other companies in the future. Rivian has also been working on an AI assistant for its EVs since 2023, Rivian’s chief software officer, Wassym Bensaid, told TechCrunch during an interview in March. The AI work, which is specifically on the orchestration layer or framework for an AI assistant, sits outside the joint venture with VW, Bensaid said at the time. Gomez’s expertise in AI and as a data scientist is clearly attractive to Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe, who noted in a statement that his “thinking and expertise will support Rivian as we integrate new, cutting-edge technologies into our products, services and manufacturing.”

Mickey 17 is a black comedy film written, produced, and directed by Bong Joon Ho, based on the 2022 novel Mickey7 by Edward Ashton. The film stars Robert Pattinson in the title role, alongside Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun, Toni Collette, and Mark Ruffalo. Set in the year 2054, the plot follows a man who joins a space colony as an “Expendable”, a disposable worker who gets cloned every time he dies. The lead VFX house was DNEG, which worked alongside Framestore, to bring the film to ‘life’. In Mickey 17, the fusion of dark comedy and science fiction is brought to life through the meticulous efforts of DNEG’s visual effects team. VFX Supervisor Chris McLaughlin and Animation Director Robyn Luckham played pivotal roles in translating the film’s complex narrative and unique aesthetic into a visual spectacle as you can hear in this week’s fxpodcast. Chris McLaughlin, overseeing the visual effects, emphasized the collaborative nature of the project. The team faced the challenge of creating the icy planet, ensuring that the environment felt both otherworldly and tangible. The integration of live-action elements with CGI required precise coordination, particularly in scenes involving the “Expendable” clones, where Robert Pattinson’s character undergoes multiple regenerations. McLaughlin noted that achieving seamless transitions between practical effects and digital enhancements was crucial in maintaining the film’s immersive quality. Robyn Luckham, leading the animation department, focused on the characterization of the film’s unique creatures, notably the “Creepers.” Drawing inspiration from Bong’s vision, the animation team developed creatures that were both unsettling and endearing. Luckham highlighted the importance of motion capture technology in capturing nuanced performances, allowing the creatures to exhibit a range of emotions that resonated with audiences. The animation team’s attention to detail ensured that each creature’s movement contributed to the film’s narrative depth. The collaboration between McLaughlin and Luckham exemplifies the synergy required in modern filmmaking, where visual effects and animation converge to support storytelling. Their combined efforts resulted in a film that not only showcases technical prowess but also enhances the thematic elements central to Bong Joon Ho’s storytelling. Mickey 17  offers audiences a richly textured and darn funny film.

One of the many houses in the Cottage Farm-adjacent neighborhoods of Brookline, Massachusetts, is this great blending of the Tudor Revival and Arts and Crafts styles of architecture, which dominated residential architecture in the Boston suburbs in the early 20th century. This residence was built in 1906 for Mr. Frank Moseley and his wife, Martha Hawes Moseley from plans by architect Robert C. Coit. Covered in stucco siding and half timbering, the charming house evokes the countryside of England, right here in Brookline. After WWI, the house was owned by Ms. Lizzie Widger, a water color artist and member of Copley Society of Boston, and her husband, Samuel Widger, a cotton broker. The Moseley-Widger House looks as it did 120 years ago and is in a great state of preservation, thanks to generations of loving stewards.

Despite lost limbs, overheating, and a crash or two, a few of the 20 robots competing in China over the weekend did quite well. See for yourself.

Looking for help with today's New York Times Wordle? Here are hints, clues and commentary to help you solve today's Wordle and sharpen your guessing game.

Manners are not ruining the environment: The costs of training and running artificial intelligence model are massive. Even excluding everything but electricity, AI data centers burn through over $100 million a year to process user prompts and model outputs. So, does saying "please" and "thank you" to ChatGPT really cost OpenAI millions? Short answer: probably not. Some shocking headlines involving the costs of being polite to AI chatbots like ChatGPT have circulated over the past few days. A few examples include: Your politeness could be costly for OpenAI – TechCrunch Saying 'please' and 'thank you' to ChatGPT costs OpenAI millions, Sam Altman says – Quartz Being nice to ChatGPT might be bad for the environment. Here's why – Laptop The news stems from an offhand comment Sam Altman made on X. It began with a simple question: How much money has OpenAI lost in electricity costs from people saying "please" and "thank you" to its language models? Altman replied, "Tens of millions of dollars well spent – you never know." That one-liner was enough to send outlets like the New York Post and Futurism down a rabbit hole of speculation, trying to estimate the computing cost of civility. The logic goes like this: every extra word adds tokens to a prompt, and those extra tokens require more computational resources. Given the scale of ChatGPT's user base, these seemingly trivial additions can add up. // Related Stories However, several factors complicate the math behind Altman's comment. First is the actual cost per token. ChatGPT says GPT-3.5 Turbo costs roughly $0.0015 per 1,000 input tokens and $0.002 per 1,000 output tokens. "Please" and "thank you" typically add between two and four tokens in total. So the cost per use amounts to tiny fractions of a cent – somewhere around $0.0000015 to $0.000002 per exchange. Based on rough estimates, that amount translates to about $400 a day or $146,000 a year. That's several orders of magnitude lower than "tens of millions." As for real energy costs, the US Energy Information Administration's Electric Power Research Institute estimates OpenAI's monthly electricity bill at around $12 million, or $140 million a year. That figure includes every interaction – not just polite ones. So while it's theoretically possible that courteous prompts account for more than $10 million annually, we simply don't have the data to break that down. Only OpenAI's internal metrics can say for sure. Furthermore, Altman's phrasing wasn't literal. The follow-up – "you never know" – suggests the remark was tongue-in-cheek. It reads more like a wry endorsement of politeness than a real financial estimate. He likely meant that in an era when courtesy feels increasingly rare, maybe it's worth the negligible cost, whether $400 or $40 million. Sure, bots don't have feelings – but if humanity ends up answering to a superintelligent AI someday, it might just remember who was polite – "you never know." Image credit: Abaca Press

NASA has shared the first closeup images of the Donaldjohanson asteroid, captured by its Lucy spacecraft on a recent flyby around 139 million miles (223 million km) from Earth. Our #LucyMission took a look at asteroid Donaldjohanson, its second asteroid encounter on its journey to Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. The first images reveal a unique fragment of an asteroid that formed about 150 million years ago! Find out more: https://t.co/Bgg5CkQfYd pic.twitter.com/lgZRG8Qngh— NASA (@NASA) April 21, 2025 Prior to Lucy’s flyby, Donaldjohanson had only been observed from Earth, with no previous spacecraft having visited it at close range. Lucy’s encounter provides the first detailed, high-resolution views of the asteroid — believed to have formed some 150 million years old — revealing its shape, geology, and other characteristics for the first time. Recommended Videos Lucy’s images were collected as the spacecraft flew around 600 miles (960 km) from Donaldjohanson on April 20. Related “Asteroid Donaldjohanson has strikingly complicated geology,” Hal Levison, principal investigator for Lucy, said in a release. “As we study the complex structures in detail, they will reveal important information about the building blocks and collisional processes that formed the planets in our solar system.” The team studying the close-up images have been surprised by the odd shape of the narrow neck connecting the two lobes, which NASA said “look like two nested ice cream cones.” Initial analysis of the imagery suggests that the Donaldjohanson asteroid is about 5 miles (8 km) long and 2 miles (3.5 km) wide at the widest point — larger than originally estimated. NASA said it will take a few more days to downlink the rest of of the encounter data from the spacecraft, at which point it will be able to make a better judgment regarding the asteroid’s overall shape. Data collected by Lucy’s other scientific instruments — the L’Ralph color imager and infrared spectrometer and the L’TES thermal infrared spectrometer — will be retrieved and analyzed over the next few weeks. Lucy also made a close flyby of the Dinkinesh asteroid in 2023, but neither that one nor Donaldjohanson is the primary target of the Lucy mission. They were simply flybys as the spacecraft heads to the Jupiter Trojan asteroid Eurybates, which it’s set to reach in August 2027. “These early images of Donaldjohanson are again showing the tremendous capabilities of the Lucy spacecraft as an engine of discovery,” said Tom Statler, program scientist for the Lucy mission. “The potential to really open a new window into the history of our solar system when Lucy gets to the Trojan asteroids is immense.” And in case you’ve been wondering, the asteroid Donaldjohanson is named after American paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson, who discovered the “Lucy” fossil skeleton in in Ethiopia in 1974 in what’s regarded as a key find in the study of human evolution. The naming of the asteroid honors Johanson’s significant contribution to science, and also creates a symbolic link with NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, which is itself named after the famous fossil. Editors’ Recommendations

Irresponsible Controversial doc gets measles while treating unvaccinated kids—keeps working Ben Edwards has grown popular in Texas for providing unproven measles treatments. Beth Mole – Apr 21, 2025 7:28 pm | 33 Signs point the way to measles testing in the parking lot of the Seminole Hospital District across from Wigwam Stadium on February 27, 2025 in Seminole, Texas. Credit: Getty | Jan Sonnenmair Signs point the way to measles testing in the parking lot of the Seminole Hospital District across from Wigwam Stadium on February 27, 2025 in Seminole, Texas. Credit: Getty | Jan Sonnenmair Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more A controversial doctor providing unproven measles treatments to unvaccinated children in West Texas recently contracted the highly infectious virus himself amid the mushrooming outbreak—and he continued treating patients while visibly ill with the virus. The doctor's infection was revealed in a video posted online by Children's Health Defense (CHD), the rabid anti-vaccine advocacy organization founded and previously run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a long-time anti-vaccine advocate who is now the US secretary of health. Kennedy headed CHD until January, when he stepped down in anticipation of his Senate confirmation. In the video, the doctor, Ben Edwards, can be seen with mild spots on his face. Someone asks him if he caught measles himself, and he responds, "Yeah," saying he was "pretty achy yesterday." He went on to say that he had developed the rash the day before but woke up that day feeling "pretty good." The video was posted by CHD on March 31, and the Associated Press was the first to report it. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a person infected with measles is considered contagious from four days before the rash appears to four days after it appears. The virus is among the most infectious known to humans. It spreads in the air and can linger in the airspace of a room for up to two hours after an infectious person is present. Up to 90 percent of people who lack immunity—either from prior infection or vaccination—will get sick upon an exposure. In the video, Edwards is wearing scrubs, apparently in a clinic with patients, parents, and people from CHD. In an email to the AP, Edwards claimed that he "interacted with zero patients that were not already infected with measles" during the time he was infectious. "Therefore, obviously, there were no patients that were put in danger of acquiring measles since they already had measles." However, the video shows him in a room with other people who do not appear sick, and he is not wearing a mask. Edwards has become quite popular in the severely undervaccinated community in Gaines County, Texas, the epicenter of the explosive outbreak that began in late January and continues to grow steadily. Edwards set up a makeshift measles clinic in Gaines and provides unproven treatments, such as cod liver oil, the antibiotic clarithromycin, and the glucocorticoid budesonide, which is used to treat asthma and Crohn's disease. Edwards and his unproven treatments have garnered direct praise from Kennedy, who in a social media post called Edwards and another controversial doctor working in the area, Richard Bartlett, "extraordinary healers." In 2003, Bartlett was disciplined by the Texas Medical Board for "unusual use of risk-filled medications" in multiple patients, including children. The risky treatments included intravenous antibiotics and hefty doses of glucocorticoids. In the social media post, Kennedy claimed the two doctors had treated "some 300" children with measles amid the outbreak. According to another video posted by CHD, some of those children included the four surviving siblings of an unvaccinated 6-year-old girl who died of measles in February. In the video, members of CHD interviewed the girl's parents, who believed that if Edwards had treated their now-deceased daughter, who developed measles before her siblings, she, too, would have lived. They also falsely claimed that the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine was dangerous. Misinformation The interview culminated with the parents urging others to avoid the MMR vaccine. "We would absolutely not take the MMR," the mother said through a translator of Low German. "The measles wasn't that bad, and they got over it pretty quickly," she added, speaking of her four living children. In the video with Edwards that has just come to light, CHD once again uses the situation to disparage MMR vaccines. Someone off camera asks Edwards if he had never had measles before, to which he replies that he had gotten an MMR vaccine as a kid, though he didn't know if he had gotten one or the recommended two doses. "That doesn't work then, does it?" the off-camera person asks, referring to the MMR vaccine. "No, apparently not, " Edwards replies. "Just wear[s] off." It appears Edwards had a breakthrough infection, which is rare, but it does occur. They're more common in people who have only gotten one dose, which is possibly the case for Edwards. A single dose of MMR is 93 percent effective against measles, and two doses are 97 percent effective. In either case, the protection is considered lifelong. While up to 97 percent effectiveness is extremely protective, some people do not mount protective responses and are still vulnerable to an infection upon exposure. However, their illnesses will likely be milder than if they had not been vaccinated. In the video, Edwards described his illness as a "mild case." The data on the outbreak demonstrates the effectiveness of vaccination. As of April 18, Texas health officials have identified 597 measles cases, leading to 62 hospitalizations and two deaths in school-aged, unvaccinated children with no underlying medical conditions. Most of the cases have been in unvaccinated children. Of the 597 cases, 12 (2 percent) had received two MMR doses previously, and 10 (1.6 percent) had received one dose. The remaining 99 percent of cases are either unvaccinated or have no record of vaccination. Toward the end of the video, Edwards tells CHD he's "doing what any doctor should be doing." Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter Beth Mole Senior Health Reporter Beth is Ars Technica’s Senior Health Reporter. Beth has a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and attended the Science Communication program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in covering infectious diseases, public health, and microbes. 33 Comments

Sunnu Rebecca Choi Per Borghammer’s “aha” moment came nearly 20 years ago. The neuroscientist was reading a paper from researchers who were examining whether REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD), a condition that causes people to act out their dreams and is often found in people who later develop Parkinson’s disease, could be an early form of the neurological condition. Rather than starting with the brain, however, the team instead looked for nerve cell loss in the heart. Though Parkinson’s is historically associated with nerve cell depletion in the brain, it also affects neurons in the heart that manage autonomic functions such as heart rate and blood pressure. And, says Borghammer, “In all of these patients, the heart is invisible; it is gone.” Not literally, of course. But in these people, the neurons that produce the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which helps control heart rate, were so depleted that their hearts didn’t show up on scans using radioactive tracers. This kind of neuron loss is associated with Parkinson’s, but at the time, none of the people had been diagnosed with the disease and their brain scans seemed normal. What struck Borghammer was that Parkinson’s didn’t seem to follow the same trajectory in everyone it affected: RBD strongly predicts Parkinson’s, but not everyone with Parkinson’s experiences RBD. “I realised that Parkinson’s must be at least two types,” says Borghammer – when neuron loss starts outside the brain, eventually working its way in, and when neuron loss is largely restricted to the brain from the beginning. By 2019, Borghammer,…