• This Asus gaming laptop with RTX 4070 is $500 off today
    www.digitaltrends.com
    A great gaming laptop has a lot on its shoulders to contend with, especially when you look at how demanding some of the most demanding online games of 2025 are slated to be. Fortunately, brands like Asus know a thing or two about developing hardware that covers your gaming needs, both in the present day and in the future. And, as luck would have it, one of the brands top gaming PCs is on sale today:Right now, when you purchase the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 Gaming Laptop at Best Buy, youll only pay $1,100. The full MSRP on this model is $1,600.When it comes to power and performance, this Asus G16 configuration doesnt disappoint in any way. Running a 10-core Intel Core i7 CPU, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 GPU, 16GB of RAM, and 512GB of storage, you can expect fast, reliable multitasking from the G16. Its a solid choice for a Windows 11 workplace laptop and a great pick for graphic designers and video editors, too. But were betting most folks are going to grab this bad boy for gaming, which is precisely what its engineered to handle most effectively!RelatedWith its 1920 x 1080p resolution and 165Hz native refresh rate, the Asus G16 is also 100% DCI-P3 certified and delivers up to 3m response times. Rich colors, excellent contrast levels, and top-notch motion handling can be yours, along with ROG Intelligent Cooling, a customizable RGB keyboard, and HDMI 2.1 connectivity, should you be interested in one of the best monitor deals we found this week.Its hard to say how long this discount is going to stick around, so today might be the last day to save big on this incredible gaming laptop. Take $500 off the Asus ROG Zephyrus G16 Gaming Laptop when you purchase at Best Buy. We also suggest taking a look at our roundups of the best Asus laptop deals, Best Buy deals, and best laptop deals.Editors Recommendations
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  • Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Scorsese eyeing reunion on The Devil In The White City
    www.digitaltrends.com
    Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese are getting the band back together.Per Deadline, DiCaprio and Scorsese are eyeing a reunion for the film adaptation of The Devil in the White City. 20th Century Studios has boarded the project, with DiCaprio in talks to star and Scorsese in talks to direct. The movie is based on Erik Larsons bestselling non-fiction book The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.Recommended VideosThere is no script attached to the project. DiCaprio and Scorsese would produce alongside Stacey Sher, Rick Yorn, and Jennifer Davisson.Please enable Javascript to view this contentThe Devil in the White City explores the Worlds Columbian Exposition in 1893 Chicago. The two central characters are Daniel Burnham, a Worlds Fair architect, and H.H. Holmes, a con man considered the first serial killer in the U.S.DiCaprio first purchased rights to Larsons book in 2010. Since then, the project has been in development hell, with several setbacks and delays. DiCaprio was eyeing the role of Holmes with Scorsese attached to direct.Apple TV+In 2019, Hulu began developing the book as a TV series, with Keanu Reeves attached as the star and Todd Field on board to direct the first two episodes. DiCaprio and Scorsese were producers. However, Hulu moved on from the project in 2023.DiCaprio and Scorseses partnership dates back. DiCaprio has appeared in six Scorsese films, including Gangs of New York, The Aviator, The Departed, Shutter Island, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Killers of the Flower Moon. DiCaprio also starred in Scorseses 2015 short film The Audition.DiCaprio can next be seen in Paul Thomas Andersons untitled film, which is rumored to be The Battle of Baktan Cross, in theaters on August 8, 2025.Editors Recommendations
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  • Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story Review: A Supersize Star Persona
    www.wsj.com
    Bruce David Klein directs a warm documentary tribute to the flamboyantly fabulous actress and singer.
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  • Presence Review: Steven Soderbergh Rethinks the Ghost Story
    www.wsj.com
    Lucy Liu stars in the directors clever haunted-house mystery that adopts the perspective of the specter.
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  • Doom: The Dark Ages wants to be more like the original Doom
    arstechnica.com
    The more things change... Doom: The Dark Ages wants to be more like the original Doom Preview: A more grounded game than Doom Eternal in more ways than one. Kyle Orland Jan 23, 2025 2:00 pm | 29 Who's ready top rip and tear? Credit: Bethesda Softworks Who's ready top rip and tear? Credit: Bethesda Softworks Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreThe modern Doom games have been a master class in reviving a beloved retro gaming series. Both 2016's Doom and 2020's Doom Eternal paid homage to both the look and feel of the original Doom titles without being slavishly devoted to older gameplay conventions that can feel dated decades later.Yet by the end of Doom Eternal, you could feel the modernized gameplay system threatening to burst at the seams a bit. Managing your limited ammo, health, and armor resources in Eternal meant expertly juggling a bewildering array of chainsaws, flamethrowers, grenades, and melee-based staggers into powerful, pre-animated "glory kills." That was all on top of the frequent weapon-switching needed to take advantage of the weaknesses of the varied enemies surrounding you and the double-jump-and-dash movement system that required expert use of all three dimensions.Something had to give. So for Doom: The Dark Ages, the team at id Software has committed to a more streamlined, back-to-basics system that limits complexity while maintaining the same overall difficulty level. That means a "fewer strings on the guitar" approach to controls that narrows almost every action down to just three context-sensitive buttons, as the developers discussed in a hands-off virtual preview session attended by Ars Technica.Simpler, not easierIn figuring out how to re-simplify the modern Doom formula, id Software Creative Designer Hugo Martin said he found himself going back to the '90s Doom games for inspiration more than any others. "The original Doom, and why it has stood the test of timeis it's one of the most accessible FPS single-player campaigns ever made," he said. "When it comes to combat, it's really incredibly streamlined, and that's why it's fun to this day."Flattening the controls was key to that return to old-school Doom accessibility, the developers said. In The Dark Ages, that starts with the standard weapon trigger and melee buttons, though now you can pre-select which of three different melee weapons will be activated by that single input. That shieldsaw in your left hand can do a lot with just a single button press. Credit: Bethesda Softworks That shieldsaw in your left hand can do a lot with just a single button press. Credit: Bethesda Softworks Then there's the shieldsaw, a round buckler with a revved-up chainsaw edge that's ever-present on your left forearm. The shieldsaw is controlled with a single context-sensitive button that changes functions depending on your specific situation. That means pressing the same button will block and parry melee attacks, deflect enemy projectiles (stunning them in the process), throw the saw for a ranged attack, activate a "shield bash" for a grappling-hook style lunge towards the thrown shield, and more.The idea, Martin said, is for the controls to feel intuitive enough that "when we pressure the player, they're not reaching for buttons they're not familiar with." But making the controls simpler doesn't make the game easier overall, he said. On the contrary, Martin argued that "when you streamline your control scheme, you can actually make things harder.""Some people said Doom Eternal was too hard," Martin continued. "I think it was too complex. The complexity of the control scheme led to unnecessary difficulties. You want to be fighting the demons, not the controls."The developers said they want The Dark Ages to recapture the feeling from the original Doom of being "an easy game to get into, harder to master... really accessible but very challenging." Narrowing the control options helps lead to a game that "feels more like classic Doom than any game we've made up to this point," Martin said. Demons come in many sizes. Credit: Bethesda Softworks Demons come in many sizes. Credit: Bethesda Softworks And when it comes to managing that difficulty, The Dark Ages also promises an array of sliders for more precise and flexible tuning of specific elements like enemy speed, weapon damage, and the timing window for parries. These can be adjusted down for players who are new to shooters or cranked way up for an experience that goes beyond the usual "Ultra Nightmare" ceiling.This kind of difficulty tuning was previously limited to arcane console commands, id Studio Director Marty Stratton told us, but is now being given to all players for the first time. "When you can dial up game speed and then dial up difficulty for the parry windows, change the damage done to you... you can create a very challenging experience," he said.Feet on the groundAnother big part of recapturing that OG Doom simplicity is returning to "a more grounded slayer" compared to the aerial focus of Eternal. "There weren't a lot of places to go after Eternal," Stratton said, referring to the high-flying gameplay focus in the last Doom game. "We couldn't go more vertical. [It was] about as intense as you could get... [and] we don't want to repeat ourselves."In place of Doom Eternal's "jump and shoot" gameplay loop, The Dark Ages focuses on more of a "stand and fight" mentality, the developers said. If Doom Eternal was like flying a fighter jet, then The Dark Ages is more like controlling a tank, they added by way of analogy. Less fighter jet, more tank Credit: Bethesda Softworks Less fighter jet, more tank Credit: Bethesda Softworks That means a "flatter" game space, where the old-fashioned "strafe-to-aim" strategies work more effectively than in recent Doom games, with less need to be constantly floating through the air. The developers say they're returning to the slower projectile speeds of the original Doom games, too, allowing players to more easily weave between them in a sort of first-person take on a shmup pattern. At the same time, your own projectile weapons tend toward the medium to short range, the developers said, encouraging you to take the fight close to the enemies.While staggering enemies to set up instant Glory Kills is still a core part of The Dark Ages, the developers said the system has been redesigned to avoid taking control away from the player for extended, repetitive canned animations. The new Glory Kill system allows for instant, physics-based attacks that can be activated from any angle without interrupting the gameplay flow.The more things changeThe Dark Ages developers also promised a more open design, where the usual more linear corridors are interspersed with larger playspaces that let you decide which direction to go and which objective to pursue in what order. And the standard shooting action will be broken up into specific sections where you control a 30-story mech or fly a powerful dragon. *Fleetwood Mac voice* You can go your own way... Credit: Bethesda Softworks *Fleetwood Mac voice* You can go your own way... Credit: Bethesda Softworks But the core game will still include the requisite raft of secret areas and hidden nooks to discover, the developers promised. This time around, though, those secrets are more directly tied to your power progression rather than just being collectible in-game trinkets, the developers said.It's all in service of pushing toward a game that feels "new but familiar," Martin said. The Dark Ages is still about the same sense of exploration and power that all good Doom games capture. But Martin said the development team is comfortable experimenting with what that specific sense of power is, "especially if the change you make brings it closer to classic Doom."But "I want to play a Doom game," he added. "We don't [want to] change so much that it's not a Doom game.Doom: The Dark Ages is scheduled to hit Windows, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S on May 15.Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming EditorKyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper. 29 Comments
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  • Capital One Outage Highlights Third-Party Risk
    www.informationweek.com
    Thousands of Capital One customers recently experienced the fallout of a multi-day outage. Customers could not access online banking services and faced delays in receiving direct-deposited paychecks, The New York Times reported.Capital One attributed the outage to a technical issue with a third-party vendor, according to a Jan. 16 post on X.The third-party vendor in question? Fidelity Information Services (FIS), a financial technology company. On Jan. 19, Capital One posted that all customer account functionality was restored.Capital One was one of several banks impacted by the FIS system outage.Whether via malicious actors executing ransomware attacks or unintentional mistakes, third-party outages can have widespread ripple effects. We can see that here with the FIS outage and thousands of banking customers. Last year, we saw impact on a global scale with the CrowdStrike and Microsoft outage.In a time when most companies rely on third parties to operate, this kind of risk isnt going anywhere. What can enterprise leaders learn from the Capital One outage as they assess the ongoing third-party risk their organizations face?The OutageFIS attributed the outage to a local area power loss and a hardware failure, according to a company statement.Related:The company did not share more details regarding the nature of the outage, but it does raise questions about the testing and backups it has in place.There should be testing done. There should be the right tools in place with backups, Randolph Barr, CISO at Cequence Security, an API security company, tells InformationWeek. Surprising that there was a power outage that caused a disruption in their customers environments.When an outage like this happens, who gets the blame depends on who you ask. FIS attributes the outage to power loss and hardware failure. Its customers are likely to place blame on FIS. For consumers, their relationship is with their bank.A Capital One consumer they don't know who FIS is and they don't care, says Jason Rebholz, vice president, cyber risk officer at insurance company Travelers. At the end of the day, your customers are going to hold you accountable. They don't care about the details.Regardless of the ultimate cause of the outage, the impacted companies -- FIS, Capital One, and other impacted banks -- must manage the fallout.Evaluating Third-Party Relationships and Managing RiskThe interconnected nature of business and the supply chain is unlikely to change anytime soon. If anything, it will continue to grow more complex as companies look for partners in AI and machine learning. That means the possibility of outages and breaches, related to third parties isnt going anywhere either. Most organizations (98%) have a third party that has been breached in their supply chains, according to SecurityScorecard.Related:How can enterprise leaders evaluate their relationships with third-party vendors to better understand and manage that risk?Review contracts. A major outage is always a reminder for enterprise leaders to consider their third-party contracts. What kind of service level agreements (SLAs) are in place? What uptime guarantee does a vendor offer?The larger the company, typically, the more power it possesses to negotiate on these terms. If I were to look at small-, medium-sized companies, they don't have that much flexibility working with larger organizations. But when you're a large fintech company or banking company -- Capital One being a large one -- they have a lot more influence over the contracts and working closely with their vendors, says Barr.Conduct regular assessments. A businesss security is only as good as its vendors security and business continuity plans. What steps does a third party take to protect its operations, and by extension its customers operations?Related:Start off with classifying your vendors based on the criticality [to] your business, says Rebholz. The bigger impact a vendor outage would have on your business, the more critical it is.Regularly conduct assessments of that vendors security and business continuity practices.Evaluate vendor scale. As companies grow, leaders need to consider their third-party vendors ability to keep up. As [businesses] grow , they have to reevaluate every single one of [their third parties] to make sure that they can scale right along with them, says Barr.Businesses can manage those third-party relationships and diversify their supply chains to create more fail-safes, but that doesnt mean that outages or breaches wont happen.There are always these edge cases that pop up no reasonable person [who] would assume that all of these things are going to happen together, says Rebholz.When the perfect storm hits, whether its a power outage and hardware failure or something else, enterprise leaders need to be ready.You still have a lot of work that you should be doing on your side to make sure you plan for the inevitable failure or security incident at your critical vendors, Rebholz points out.Insurance can play an important role in that business continuity planning process. What kind of coverage does an enterprise have, and is it enough?The cyber insurance business is going strong; annual premiums are expected to hit approximately $23 billion by the end of 2026, according to S&P Global. But enterprise leaders need to examine the details of any policy they have or are thinking about buying.A lot of cyber insurance policies are very much geared towards malicious events, cyberattacks that type of stuff, and don't cover the accidental, Scott Kannry, CEO and cofounder of cybersecurity company Axio, points out.Risk quantification can help enterprise leaders determine the type of insurance coverage they need and the amount. What is the risk of a third-party vendor outage? How big is the potential financial loss? Does my policy cover third-party outages, accidental and caused by cyberattack?The FIS outage and its impact on Capital One and other customers is not the last incident of this nature the market willsee.We need to learn from a lot of these incidents, and we need to remind ourselves on a regular basis that this can happen to anybody, says Barr. Therefore, we need to make sure we step up our game in assessing these vendors.
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  • Giant sloths lived alongside humans in South America for millennia
    www.newscientist.com
    South American megafauna, from giant sloths to camel-like creatures, survived thousands of years longer than we thought, challenging the idea that they were hunted to extinction by humans
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  • Dinosaurs may have first evolved in the Sahara and Amazon rainforest
    www.newscientist.com
    Life would have been particularly hot and dry if dinosaurs really did emerge near the equatorMark Witton/The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, LondonDinosaurs may have first evolved close to the equator, not in the far south of the southern hemisphere as previously thought. A modelling study suggests they originated in a region that covers what is now the Amazon rainforest, Congo basin and Sahara desert.When you consider the gaps in the fossil record and the evolutionary tree of dinosaurs, it could very likely be a centre point for where dinosaurs originated, says Joel Heath at University College London. AdvertisementDinosaurs evolved some time during the Triassic Period, which ran from 252 to 201 million years ago, but Heath says there is pretty huge uncertainty about where and when. The oldest known fossils of these animals are about 230 million years old, but they are distinct enough to suggest that dinosaurs had already existed for a few million years. There must have been a lot going on in terms of dinosaur evolution, but we just dont have the fossils, he says.At this time, Earth looked very different. All the continents were joined into a single supercontinent called Pangaea, which was shaped like a C with its middle straddling the equator. South America and Africa were in the southern hemisphere segment of this, where they fitted together like jigsaw pieces. The earliest known dinosaurs are from southern parts of those two continents, in places such as modern Argentina and Zimbabwe so this was thought to be their point of origin.To learn more, Heath and his colleagues built computer models to work backwards in time from the oldest known dinosaurs to the origin of the group. They created several dozen versions, to take into account uncertainties such as gaps in the fossil record, possible geographic barriers and ongoing doubts over how the earliest dinosaurs were related to each other. The latest science news delivered to your inbox, every day.Sign up to newsletterMost of these simulations concluded that dinosaurs first appeared near the equator, with just a minority supporting the southerly origin.Palaeontologists have tended to assume that dinosaurs couldnt have originated near the equator, says Heath, partly because there are no early dinosaur fossils from that region. Whats more, it was a challenging place to live. It was very, very dry and very hot, he says. The dinosaurs were thought to have not been able to survive in those sorts of conditions.However, most of the models say otherwise. Its suggesting things that we didnt actually think were possible in the past, says Heath.Instead, the lack of early dinosaur fossils from near the equator may have a more prosaic explanation. Palaeontologists have tended to dig in North America and Europe, and more latterly China. There are lots of areas in the globe that are quite neglected, says Heath. He adds that geologists havent found many rocks of the right age in the regions relevant to the studys findings that they can excavate. They might not be exposed in a way that we can easily study them.However, a piece of evidence in support of Heaths idea has recently emerged. On 8 January, researchers led by David Lovelace at the University of Wisconsin-Madison reported that they had found the oldest known dinosaur from the northern part of Pangaea. They discovered a species that is new to science called Ahvaytum bahndooiveche, a sauropodomorph related to long-necked dinosaurs like Diplodocus that evolved later. The team found it in the rocks of the Popo Agie Formation in Wyoming, dated to 230 million years ago.If dinosaurs were already in the north and south of Pangaea that long ago, the equatorial middle cant have been closed off to them, says Heath. They have to have been crossing that region.Journal reference:Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2024.12.053Topics:dinosaurs
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  • Whats next for robots
    www.technologyreview.com
    MIT Technology Reviews Whats Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of themhere. Jan Liphardt teaches bioengineering at Stanford, but to many strangers in Los Altos, California, he is a peculiar man they see walking a four-legged robotic dog down the street. Liphardt has been experimenting with building and modifying robots for years, and when he brings his dog out in public, he generally gets one of three reactions. Young children want to have one, their parents are creeped out, and baby boomers try to ignore it. "Theyll quickly walk by, he says, like, What kind of dumb new stuff is going on here? In the many conversations Ive had about robots, Ive also found that most people tend to fall into these three camps, though I dont see such a neat age division. Some are upbeat and vocally hopeful that a future is just around the corner in which machines can expertly handle much of what is currently done by humans, from cooking to surgery. Others are scared: of job losses, injuries, and whatever problems may come up as we try to live side by side. The final camp, which I think is the largest, is just unimpressed. Weve been sold lots of promises that robots will transform society ever since the first robotic arm was installed on an assembly line at a General Motors plant in New Jersey in 1961. Few of those promises have panned out so far. But this year, theres reason to think that even those staunchly in the bored camp will be intrigued by whats happening in the robot races. Heres a glimpse at what to keep an eye on. Humanoids are put to the test The race to build humanoid robots is motivated by the idea that the world is set up for the human form, and that automating that form could mean a seismic shift for robotics. It is led by some particularly outspoken and optimistic entrepreneurs, including Brett Adcock, the founder of Figure AI, a company making such robots thats valued at more than $2.6 billion (its begun testing its robots with BMW). Adcock recently told Time, Eventually, physical labor will be optional. Elon Musk, whose company Tesla is building a version called Optimus, has said humanoid robots will create a future where there is no poverty. A robotics company called Eliza Wakes Up is taking preorders for a $420,000 humanoid called, yes, Eliza. In June 2024, Agility Robotics sent a fleet of its Digit humanoid robots to GXO Logistics, which moves products for companies ranging from Nike to Nestl. The humanoids can handle most tasks that involve picking things up and moving them somewhere else, like unloading pallets or putting boxes on a conveyor. There have been hiccups: Highly polished concrete floors can cause robots to slip at first, and buildings need good Wi-Fi coverage for the robots to keep functioning. But charging is a bigger issue. Agilitys current version of Digit, with a 39-pound battery, can run for two to four hours before it needs to charge for one hour, so swapping out the robots for fresh ones is a common task on each shift. If there are a small number of charging docks installed, the robots can theoretically charge by shuffling among the docks themselves overnight when some facilities arent running, but moving around on their own can set off a buildings security system. Its a problem, says CTO Melonee Wise. Wise is cautious about whether humanoids will be widely adopted in workplaces. Ive always been a pessimist, she says. Thats because getting robots to work well in a lab is one thing, but integrating them into a bustling warehouse full of people and forklifts moving goods on tight deadlines is another task entirely. If 2024 was the year of unsettling humanoid product launch videos, this year we will see those humanoids put to the test, and well find out whether theyll be as productive for paying customers as promised. Now that Agilitys robots have been deployed in fast-paced customer facilities, its clear that small problems can really add up. Then there are issues with how robots and humans share spaces. In the GXO facility the two work in completely separate areas, Wise says, but there are cases where, for example, a human worker might accidentally leave something obstructing a charging station. That means Agilitys robots cant return to the dock to charge, so they need to alert a human employee to move the obstruction out of the way, slowing operations down. Its often said that robots dont call out sick or need health care. But this year, as fleets of humanoids arrive on the job, well begin to find out the limitations they do have. Learning from imagination The way we teach robots how to do things is changing rapidly. It used to be necessary to break their tasks down into steps with specifically coded instructions, but now, thanks to AI, those instructions can be gleaned from observation. Just as ChatGPT was taught to write through exposure to trillions of sentences rather than by explicitly learning the rules of grammar, robots are learning through videos and demonstrations. That poses a big question: Where do you get all these videos and demonstrations for robots to learn from? Nvidia, the worlds most valuable company, has long aimed to meet that need with simulated worlds, drawing on its roots in the video-game industry. It creates worlds in which roboticists can expose digital replicas of their robots to new environments to learn. A self-driving car can drive millions of virtual miles, or a factory robot can learn how to navigate in different lighting conditions. In December, the company went a step further, releasing what its calling a world foundation model. Called Cosmos, the model has learned from 20 million hours of videothe equivalent of watching YouTube nonstop since Rome was at war with Carthagethat can be used to generate synthetic training data. Heres an example of how this model could help in practice. Imagine you run a robotics company that wants to build a humanoid that cleans up hospitals. You can start building this robots brain with a model from Nvidia, which will give it a basic understanding of physics and how the world works, but then you need to help it figure out the specifics of how hospitals work. You could go out and take videos and images of the insides of hospitals, or pay people to wear sensors and cameras while they go about their work there. But those are expensive to create and time consuming, so you can only do a limited number of them, says Rev Lebaredian, vice president of simulation technologies at Nvidia. Cosmos can instead take a handful of those examples and create a three-dimensional simulation of a hospital. It will then start making changesdifferent floor colors, different sizes of hospital bedsand create slightly different environments. Youll multiply that data that you captured in the real world millions of times, Lebaredian says. In the process, the model will be fine-tuned to work well in that specific hospital setting. Its sort of like learning both from your experiences in the real world and from your own imagination (stipulating that your imagination is still bound by the rules of physics). Teaching robots through AI and simulations isnt new, but its going to become much cheaper and more powerful in the years to come. A smarter brain gets a smarter body Plenty of progress in robotics has to do with improving the way a robot senses and plans what to doits brain, in other words. Those advancements can often happen faster than those that improve a robots body, which determine how well a robot can move through the physical world, especially in environments that are more chaotic and unpredictable than controlled assembly lines. The military has always been keen on changing that and expanding the boundaries of whats physically possible. The US Navy has been testing machines from a company called Gecko Robotics that can navigate up vertical walls (using magnets) to do things like infrastructure inspections, checking for cracks, flaws, and bad welding on aircraft carriers. There are also investments being made for the battlefield. While nimble and affordable drones have reshaped rural battlefields in Ukraine, new efforts are underway to bring those drone capabilities indoors. The defense manufacturer Xtend received an $8.8 million contract from the Pentagon in December 2024 for its drones, which can navigate in confined indoor spaces and urban environments. These so-called loitering munitions are one-way attack drones carrying explosives that detonate on impact. These systems are designed to overcome challenges like confined spaces, unpredictable layouts, and GPS-denied zones, says Rubi Liani, cofounder and CTO at Xtend. Deliveries to the Pentagon should begin in the first few months of this year. Another initiativesparked in part by the Replicator project, the Pentagons plan to spend more than $1 billion on small unmanned vehiclesaims to develop more autonomously controlled submarines and surface vehicles. This is particularly of interest as the Department of Defense focuses increasingly on the possibility of a future conflict in the Pacific between China and Taiwan. In such a conflict, the drones that have dominated the war in Ukraine would serve little use because battles would be waged almost entirely at sea, where small aerial drones would be limited by their range. Instead, undersea drones would play a larger role. All these changes, taken together, point toward a future where robots are more flexible in how they learn, where they work, and how they move. Jan Liphardt from Stanford thinks the next frontier of this transformation will hinge on the ability to instruct robots through speech. Large language models ability to understand and generate text has already made them a sort of translator between Liphardt and his robot. We can take one of our quadrupeds and we can tell it, Hey, youre a dog, and the thing wants to sniff you and tries to bark, he says. Then we do one word changeYoure a cat. Then the thing meows and, you know, runs away from dogs. And we havent changed a single line of code. Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the robotics company Eliza Wakes Up has ties to a16z.
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  • Federal judge blocks Trump's 'blatantly unconstitutional' executive order to revoke birthright citizenship
    www.businessinsider.com
    A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump's order ending birthright citizenship.The order was challenged by multiple lawsuits, claiming it violated the 14th Amendment.In temporarily halting the order, the Seattle judge called it "blatantly unconstitutional."A federal judge in Seattle temporarily halted President Donald Trump's controversial executive order denying automatic citizenship for anyone born on US soil, calling the move to end birthright citizenship "blatantly unconstitutional.""I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that is a constitutional order," US District Judge John Coughenour told the Trump administration's attorneys after hearing arguments Thursday morning, according to multiple news outlets in the courtroom. "It boggles my mind.""I've been on the bench for over four decades, I can't remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is," the judge added.The ruling was made in a case brought by four states Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon. The case is among at least five lawsuits filed this week challenging Trump's birthright citizenship order on the grounds that it violates the 14th Amendment.The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider.In the judge's ruling granting a 14-day temporary restraining order, Coughenour wrote, "There is a strong likelihood that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of their claims that the Executive Order violates the Fourteenth Amendment and Immigration and Nationality Act."On Tuesday, attorneys general from a total of 22 states and two cities across the country filed two separate lawsuits in a bid to block the order. A hearing has not yet been held in the first suit, which 18 states and the top law enforcement officers of Washington, DC, and San Francisco had joined.The lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon argued that the president "has no authority to amend the Constitution or supersede the Citizenship Clause's grant of citizenship to individuals born in the United States. Nor is he empowered by any other constitutional provision or law to determine who shall or shall not be granted United States citizenship at birth.""United States citizens are entitled to a broad array of rights and benefits as a result of their citizenship," the lawsuit said. "Withholding citizenship or stripping individuals of their citizenship will result in an immediate and irreparable harm to those individuals and to the Plaintiff States."Trump's order targeting birthright citizenship, titled "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship," was signed shortly after Trump was sworn into office for a second presidential term on Monday. It was scheduled to take effect 30 days after its signing.Birthright citizenship is a policy that automatically gives citizenship to anyone born in the US or US territories. Under Trump's executive order, federal agencies would be barred from issuing any documents granting citizenship to US-born children whose parents live in the country illegally, or cases in which the mother was lawfully in the country temporarily such as a student or tourist but the father is neither a US citizen or lawful permanent resident.The ACLU also brought a lawsuit on Monday that said at least 150,000 children would be affected.Other immigration executive orders Trump signed after he was sworn in included declaring a national emergency, sending the military to the US-Mexico border, shutting down the CBP One app from which immigrants seeking asylum could submit information, and restricting federal funding to sanctuary cities which have limited cooperation with agents working to deport immigrants in the US illegally.
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