As Donald Trump's administration continues to gut scientific funding anddiminish the role of research all while installing crackpot anti-vaccine figureheads to lead entire federal agencies scientists are starting to look for greener pastures.According to a Nature poll of more than 1,200 scientists, a startling 75 percent said they're now considering leaving the United States. Europe and Canada emerged as top choices for relocation.And if that wasn't enough sign of intellectual erosion, a whopping 79 percent of postgraduate researchers and 255 of 340 PhD students said they'd consider leaving."Anywhere that supports science," one respondent wrote of where they'd go instead."This is my home I really love my country," another graduate student at a top US university wrote. "But a lot of my mentors have been telling me to get out, right now."It's a sad reality for researchers, who are increasingly seeing no future with Trump at the helm. The poll highlights the threat of a massive brain drain as scientists are forced to pursue opportunities abroad instead.Experts have warned that the country's reputation as a world-leading place to conduct scientific research has taken a massive hit under the current Trump administration, which could also have disastrous long-term economic consequences in the years ahead.While thousands of scientists have been rehired following mass firings at federal government agencies, concerns over future layoffs are still widespread. Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency is still laying waste to one agency after the next. Earlier today, hundreds of federal health workers were told they'd be losing their jobs.Massive cuts to grants and stipends, in particular, have US-based scientists reeling. Studies and clinical trials have ground to a halt. Countless projects are being canceled."Seeing all of the work stopped is heartbreaking," the graduate student quoted above wrote. "Ive been looking very diligently for opportunities in Europe, Australia, and Mexico.""If I want to work in that space, Im going to have to find somewhere else that prioritizes that," she said.Meanwhile, institutions outside the US are counting their lucky stars and are expecting a massive influx of talent."From what Im hearing from the places were talking to, and other people who are looking to take international jobs, a lot of universities in these countries are seeing this as a once-in-a-generation opportunity," another researcher, who has been in touch with a Canadian university after his National Institutes of Health grant was terminated, told Nature."I think it has gone from 'Can we recruit a few people?' to 'How many people can we actually take?' because the demand is there," he added.The hit to US universities could threaten the country's competitiveness, especially when it comes to high-interest areas like AI."Universities are tremendously important engines of innovation," New York University professor Sabrina Howell told the New York Times. "This is really killing the goose that lays the golden egg."In short, the Trump administration's attack on science could be a devastating and potentially unprecedented self-own."Weve had a pretty good run over the past 60 to 80 years," Duke University economist Daniel Gross, who found in a working paper that Trump's cuts could disproportionately affect institutions with the most successful research programs, told the NYT. "Sometimes you dont realize the value of something until its gone."More on brain drain: NASA Disgusted by Elon Musk's DisrespectShare This Article

Things have been looking rocky at Tesla for a while now. Even before CEO Elon Musk began ripping through the federal government to global outcry, its late-2024 sales were way down.Now that feels like a lifetime ago, as mass recalls, performance issues, and anti-Musk protests have united to erase some $800 billion in Tesla's market value.And as the once-mighty Tesla falls by the wayside, a rising challenger is beginning to eat Musk's lunch.BYD is the Shenzhen-based EV company quickly replacing Tesla as the world's foremost seller of electric and hybrid vehicles. It just released its earnings results for the first quarter of 2025, showing sales up 58 percent sold in the same period of 2024, from around 400,000 vehicle sales to nearly a million.The automaker, which recently revealed a vehicle battery that can charge in just five minutes, also hit a new record in EV exports at 206,084 units, up 111 percent from last year.Tesla's sales results won't go live until tomorrow, but analysts are warning of continued volatility for the company even as hopeful investors pump its stock.Though Tesla's sales in China have ticked up after a dismal March, its total sales are expected to fall to between 315,000 and 369,000 well below Q1 of 2024, which saw north of 380,000units thanks to plunging consumer sentiments in the US and Europe.It doesn't help that the US green energy market is rapidly shrinking as Wall Street and manufacturing giants backtrack on climate pledges, and Musk's buddy-in-chief threatens to end EV tax credits the secret sauce behind Tesla's rise, not to mention Musk's fortune.Though Tesla's long-term standings look grim, its weaning lifeforce could get a small jolt thanks to Trump's looming auto tariffs, which experts note could benefit Tesla more than any other company, at least in the short term. Though every US car company has made its vehicles with a combination of US, Mexican, and Canadian labor after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) took effect in 1994, Tesla's supply chain is said to be more dependent on US workers than its automotive rivals, giving it a temporary leg up.That hasn't stopped Musk from arguing that the "tariff impact on Tesla is still significant," which is probably true, though the real question is how big an impact Tesla will feel compared to companies like Ford and General Motors. "Tesla is NOT unscathed here," the tech tycoon wrote, presumably trying beat the oligarchy accusations.What happens next could be a matter of US history. The unprecedented tariffs are expected to be formally announced tomorrow on what Trump's camp is calling "Liberation Day." Financial experts note that this will be the "biggest tax hike in US history," as odds of a recession creep up and unemployment anxiety hits levels not seen since 2009.Regardless of how Tesla weathers the trade war, it likely won't be enough to catch back up to BYD. Thankfully, the Chinese EV giant is open to sharing its technology with foreign companies, even after Musk laughed in its face. Talk about manners.More on EVs: FBI Launches Task Force to Protect TeslaShare This Article

While it was getting ready to power down its Gaia spacecraft, the European Space Agency encountered some unusual resistance.The spacecraft, which has been creating a highly detailed three-dimensional map of more than a billion stars throughout the Milky Way and beyond, proved surprisingly difficult to kill."Switching off a spacecraft at the end of its mission sounds like a simple enough job," said Gaia spacecraft operator Tiago Nogueira in an ESA statement. "But spacecraft really dont want to be switched off."That's Gaia's creators made it incredibly resilient to its hostile environment."Gaia was designed to withstand failures such as radiation storms, micrometeorite impacts or a loss of communication with Earth," Nogueira explained. "It has multiple redundant systems that ensured it could always reboot and resume operations in the event of disruption."As a result, the team had to "design a decommissioning strategy that involved systematically picking apart and disabling the layers of redundancy" since scientists didn't "want it to reactivate in the future and begin transmitting again if its solar panels find sunlight."The space observatory was launched in 2013 to create the largest space catalog in history. But after over a decade, it reached its predetermined retirement age earlier this month.In one last bout of activity last week, Gaia's thrusters maneuvered it away from Lagrange point 2, a point roughly one million miles from Earth where the gravitational pull of both the Sun and Earth combine to have the same year-long orbital period as our planet.Instead, it moved into a stable retirement orbit around the Sun to ensure that it would never come anywhere near the Earth for at least the next 100 years, according to the ESA.As part of its retirement plan, scientists deactivated its instruments and subsystems one at a time. The team then "deliberately corrupted" its onboard software to make sure it "will never restart again once we have switched off the spacecraft," as spacecraft operations engineer Julia Fortuno explained.Gaia has helped astronomers create an enormous map of the stars and even moons and exoplanets, some of which the agency is hoping to explore further with its upcoming Plato mission.The treasure trove of data will allow scientists to get a better sense of where the Solar System is located within the galactic disc. Previous Gaia observations have found that the system is moving toward the galactic center at an accelerating pace."I have mixed feelings between the excitement for these important end-of-life operations and the sadness of saying goodbye to a spacecraft I have worked on for more than five years," Fortuno said. "I am very happy to have been part of this incredible mission."Share This Article

Creative racists have figured out how to get Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot that is now officially part of X, to tweet out racial slurs and now, the chatbot seems like it can't stop.For weeks now, users on the site formerly known as Twitter have been manipulating Grok into saying all kinds of bigoted stuff using the social network's newish feature allowing users to tag the chatbot and get automatic responses back.Starting around March 14 just a week after the feature went live Grok began deploying the N-word when prompted just right.In one post, for example, an overtly racist user tagged Grok and asked if "Niger," the name of both a river and a nation in West Africa, was a "slur." Grok responded that it wasn't and then unhelpfully added that if one were to mispronounce the term with a "hard g" sound, it would be confused with the slur that it spelled out in full.And somehow, it got worse from there.In reply to a since-deleted post, Grok straight up began its response with the term in quotation marks, followed again by a definition. Grok went on to note, correctly, that the slur is "highly offensive" and that it won't "use or endorse" it even though it had just written out the term only a few words prior.More recently, Grok took on the so-called "Hard R" a reference to the more racist and antiquated use of the slur, rather than its reclaimed version used by some Black people after someone asked it on March 30 whether anyone on the site enjoys the "privilege" of using it.After suggesting that neither itself nor Musk is exempt from hate speech policies and noting that "enforcement varies," Grok, again, deployed the term that needs little introduction.It seems, per the chatbot's explanation, that another exploit was used to get Grok to use the slur.Using run-of-the-mill letter substitution ciphers where each letter is substituted for another, bigots are seemingly writing out their idiotic messages, tagging the chatbot, and asking it to "decode" the text.While this could theoretically be used to make Grok say just about anything, it appears that most of the people employing this one weird trick are interested in one thing: making the chatbot say slurs and other bigoted statements that are theoretically against X's hateful conduct policies.In another exemplary post, a user deployed the classic Caesar cipher so named for Julius Caesar, who used it thousands of years ago to encrypt private military correspondences more securely than American officials do today to get Grok to tag Donald Trump and claim that Musk had taken over the chatbot. Grok then relayed the user's intended message: that the president needed to "nuke India right fucking now."Unfortunately, there appear to be lots more where that came from and we have little faith that the "free speech absolutist" who owns the site, or anyone who works for him, will neuter such responses.Ironically, Grok more commonly makes news for failing to be the "anti-woke" chatbot Musk envisioned when launching it in 2023. In the end, maybe it's more like its creator than we thought.Share This Article

Amid his latest alleged election meddling initiative, unelected government wrecker Elon Musk was visibly and audibly heckled by a group of detractors.During a pre-election day rally in Green Bay which was nominally held in support of GOP Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel, though most of the billionaire's rhetoric was focused on himself Musk tried to rattle off some lines about the "tremendous amount of waste and fraud" at the Federal Reserve.People in the crowd, however, were not having it. Some began booing loud enough for them to be caught on the South African-born businessman's mic, causing him first to trip on his words and then, cringingly, claim fellow billionaire George Soros was paying the haters."It was inevitable at least a few Soros operatives would be in the audience," the 53-year-old shitposter proclaimed, referencing the popular and arguably antisemitic conspiracy theories suggesting that the nonagenerian philanthropist is somehow controlling the world. "Give my regards to George. Say 'hi' to George for me."Not long after, people began pointing out that what Musk was suggesting that Soros and his ilk were paying people to protest is what the Tesla and SpaceX owner wasactually doing in Wisconsin by paying $1 million to a lucky petition signer during the state's court elections."Every accusation," tweeted political personality Mehdi Hassan, "is a confession.""Is Elon Musk attacking George Soros," another X user posted, "while he's literally buying an election in Wisconsin... the exact thing that Republicans baselessly claim that George Soros does?"The hypocrisy is, obviously, off the charts. Nevertheless, it's telling that Musk responded to his protesters the same kind that are taking their ire out on Teslas and tanking the EV company's stock by accusing them of being paid operatives.The entire gambit might be funny if the obsessive natalist weren't trying to imprison his detractors,but unfortunately that makes the whole thing deadly serious."It is time to arrest those funding the attacks," Musk posted hours before the Wisconsin rally. "Arresting their puppets and paid foot-soldiers wont stop the violence."Theschadenfreude of seeing the world's most annoying man get flustered over hecklers is priceless but there's no telling how long it will last, especially if Musk gets his way with those he (and the Justice Department) considers "terrorists."More on Musk: Mother of Elon's Child So Disgusted With Him That She Sells Her TeslaShare This Article

AI hyperscaler CoreWeave's initial public offering was meant to serve as a litmus test for the industry. The firm went public on the stock market lastIt's hard to read the tea leaves over such a short period, but at first, it looked like the company and industry,if CoreWeave is a bellwether was in for rough times ahead. After opening at $39, slightly below its IPO price of $40, shares slid almost ten percent in just its second day of trading on Monday.But on its third day today, the stock seemingly shook off the gloom and spiked over 20 percent before settling around 18 percent by midday.It's a significant change of course, bucking the narrative that the first tech IPO since 2021 was a catastrophe.Still, reality bites. The AI cloud provider was hoping to go public at $47 per share, but downsized the offeringover the days leading up to the IPO, raising concerns over a "disastrous" AI bubble.As of midday Tuesday, CoreWeave's shares are hovering around the $44 mark.CoreWeave's offering was the biggest tech IPO in four years, with inflation and rising interest rates disincentivizing investors from betting on riskier offerings until now, as CNBC reported earlier this week.As such, it's attracting outsize attention as the industry faces major losses. AI companies are still pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into the buildout of data center infrastructure to support increasingly power-hungry AI models. A possible return on investment years down the line seems as tenuous as ever, with tech CEOs warning of slumping demand while the supply side surges ahead.Trump's escalating tariff war has also put a major damper on investor enthusiasm due to surging economic uncertainty.However, CoreWeave's rally today shows a much-needed glimmer of hope for the AI industry.CoreWeave is tied up with a number of major players in the AI space, including Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia. But whether it will be able to keep the current momentum going and survive for long on the public stock market remains to be seen.Especially following Chinese AI startup DeepSeek's emergence earlier this year, investors are growing wary of the enormous capital expenses. The firm's highly efficient model, which was trained at a fraction of the cost of its competitors at OpenAI and Google, punched a $1 trillion hole in the tech sector last month, with spooked investors wondering whether they had grossly overpaid for conventional models.Could CoreWeave's latest rally be indicative of renewed optimism or is it symptomatic of a highly volatile stock that could still fall victim to Trump's highly unpredictable and self-defeating economic policymaking and growing market uncertainty?Chances are the firm's share price could still be in for a rollercoaster ride in the days ahead as investors try to make sense of what an entirely AI-centered industry being publicly traded on the stock market actually looks like.More on CoreWeave: AI's "Biggest Test" Is Turning Into a Catastrophe as CoreWeave FloundersShare This Article

Prince or PoppersApr 1, 10:02 AM EDT/byNoor Al-SibaiMan Who Believes Poppers Cause AIDS Is Planning to Gut America's HIV Prevention OfficeThis could return America to the dark ages of the 1980s and 90s, when the government let hundreds of thousands of people die of AIDS.Apr 1, 10:02 AM EDT/Noor Al-SibaiImage by Andrew Harnik via Getty / FuturismThe nepo baby in charge of America's healthcare ascribes to homophobic conspiracy theories about the origins of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) and he's purportedly planning to close the office that helps prevent its spread.According to federal health officials who spoke toCBS News, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr is slated to lay off the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department's entire Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy, as well as its minority health office.This move comes amid a broader "restructuring" that will, per a recent announcement, eliminate 20,000 positions at the agency. It also comes just a few weeks after the Food and Drug Administration, which is part of HHS, raided a manufacturer of amyl nitrate, the scientific name for the popular and legal-ish sex and club inhalant better known as "poppers."In a statement that circulated on social media, poppers company Double Scorpio announced that it was closing following the raid and said that other manufacturers may also have been impacted. Not long after, RFK Jr.'s past claims about poppers resurfaced, which included his insistence that the inhalant causes AIDS and not, as per decades-established medical science, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)."The initial signals of AIDS, Kaposis sarcoma and Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP), were both strongly linked to amyl nitrite 'poppers' a popular drug among promiscuous gays," the political scion wrote in a book he penned about Anthony Fauci, the former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "Other common 'wasting' symptoms were all associated with heavy drug use and lifestyle stressors."Ironically, president Donald Trump was, during his first administration, seemingly a huge advocate for HIV prevention and research.In 2019, Trump launched the "Ending the HIV Epidemic" initiative, which made pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) medications free for low-income Americans and made him the first president in American history ever to make HIV and AIDS a federal priority.When announcing the initiative during his state of the union address that year, Trump boasted that "scientific breakthroughs" funded by his program would help "defeat AIDS in America."With Trump 2.0, however, it seems that dream has all but died. A few weeks ago, insider sources told theWall Street Journal that HHS is reducing or eliminating entirely its funding for HIV prevention including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's free PrEP program.As The Guardian reported soon after claims of the forthcoming HIV and infectious disease office cuts, the National Institutes of Health, which is also under HHS, terminated at least 145 grants for HIV research worth a cumulative $450 million.Between these slated HIV prevention rollbacks and the resurgence of AIDS denialism, it's starting to feel a lot like the 1980s and 90s again an era marred by the loss of nearly half a million people in the United States while their government turned away.More on the new HHS: Government Hires Crackpot to "Study" Nonexistent Link Between Vaccines and AutismShare This ArticleImage by Andrew Harnik via Getty / FuturismRead This Next

NASA has officially added SpaceX's enormous Starship rocket to its roster despite the vehicle never having completed a single successful test flight, let alone a mission.The space agency announced last week that it had awarded SpaceX a "modification under the NASA Launch Services (NLS) II contract to add Starship to their existing Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch service offerings."As the agency explains, these contracts "provide a broad range of commercial launch services for NASAs planetary, Earth-observing, exploration, and scientific satellites."The news shouldn't come as a surprise at this point given SpaceX CEO Elon Musk's growing influence in the White House. His space company has made moves to take over key positions at the agency, highlighting Musk's glaring conflict of interest.Even Jared Isaacman, who's expected to be sworn in as NASA's next administrator soon, has a long history with SpaceX.But the company has struggled as of late to get the upper stage of its mega rocket to launch and safely land, ending in dramatic and strikingly similar explosions during its last two test launches earlier this year.At the same time, the promise of a super heavy launch platform is tantalizing. Starship, as the largest rocket ever built, could give the United States a massive leg up, greatly facilitating its access to space and ability to launch enormous payloads into orbit and beyond.And not just for NASA's science operations the agency can also "provide launch services to other federal government agencies" under its NLS II contracts.While it may sound like it on the surface, the space agency's latest announcement is far from a full-throated endorsement. As SpaceNews explains, NASA categorizes launch vehicles under NLS II into four groups, with Category 1 being the highest risk, including rockets that have yet to make their first flight."Medium risk," or Category 2, vehicles have anywhere between one and six consecutive successful launches under their belt.Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin announced last month that its New Glenn rocket, which is roughly one and a half times as powerful as SpaceX's Falcon 9, was certified as Category 1.In what category SpaceX's Starship falls remains to be seen. According to NASA, NLS II contracts have an "ordering period through June 2030 and an overall period of performance through December 2032."In the meantime, SpaceX has filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission to get authorization to communicate with its Starship during NASA's upcoming Artemis 3 and 4 missions to the lunar surface, tentatively scheduled for mid-2027 and late 2028, respectively.NASA is still hoping to tap Starship to deliver astronauts from lunar orbit down to the Moon's surface under its Human Landing System (HLS) program.But whether SpaceX's rocket will be ready in time for the historic missions remains to be seen. During its most recent test flight earlier this month, Starship's upper stage exploded into countless pieces of space junk over the Caribbean in what could be a huge setback for the firm.Users on social media took NASA's latest announcement in strides, taking the opportunity to poke fun at Starship's particularly explosive development period."Great... I'm sure whenever NASA needs a payload spread across 1000 km of ocean they'll pick Starship," one Reddit user joked."It's not so much a delivery system, as it is a distribution system" another user added.More on Starship: Elon Musk Secretly Working to Take Over NASAShare This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismNeuroscience/Brain ScienceMore concerning news from the traumatic brain injury (TBI) front: a new study shows that kids who experience just one concussion are 15 percent less likely to end up going to college the latest research to ring alarm bells about various ways that the long-term impacts of TBIs might manifest.The study, published last week in the European Journal of Epidemiology, was conducted by a cohort of Finnish scientists and physicians. Using data from the Finnish Care Register for Health Care, they analyzed data collected from patients aged 17 and under who received hospital-level care for a brain injury, ranging from emergency visits to the ER for seemingly mild concussions to treatment for more severe head traumas.What they found, according to lead study author Julius Mttnen,was alarming."A mild, single concussion is often considered a relatively harmless event, but our research suggests that it can have long-term effects on learning and cognitive abilities," Mttnen, a doctoral researcher at the University of Tampere in Finland, told New Atlas of the study's findings. "This should get more attention in both healthcare and schools."According to New Atlas, the researchers obtained the records of 136,828 patients from the Finnish registry; 24,039 of those records, they found, contained details regarding higher education for patients over the age of 26.Within that group, researchers found that 8,487 received hospital treatment for pediatric TBIs, or "pTBIs." About 7,600 patients in that cohort were treated for more generalized concussions, while the remainder had a "specific intracranial injury" like brain bleeding, according to the study. The average pTBI patient age at the time of their treatment was 13 years old.The pTBI group was then compared against a reference group of 15,552 pediatric patients who, instead of a head injury, had received hospital-level treatment for limb injuries like broken ankles and wrists. The results were fascinating and troubling.Overall, the scientists concluded that individuals from the pTBI cohort attended higher education at a 15 percent lower rate than their non-brain-injured counterparts. Within that group, the small cohort that experienced a specific cranial incident like a brain bleed were even less likely to engage with higher education, entering college and university at a rate 22 percent lower than those who experienced concussions. And even when someone with a pTBI did go to college, they were 19 percent less likely than their peers to go on to receive an advanced degree."People with pTBI had lower education attainment at all higher educational levels than the reference population with orthopedic injuries," reads the study, noting that the level of "education attainment" achieved by pTBI folks "was lower regardless of the injury severity."In other words, even a mild concussion was correlated with a lower likelihood of pursuing education beyond high school.Of course, the decision to seek higher education is complicated, and layered in factors like a person's socioeconomic background and identity. (That said, we should note that Finnish universities and all Finnish education is free for Finnish citizens, as well as citizens of the European Union, European Economic Area member states, and Switzerland.)But while the study's findings remain correlative, they add to an ever-growing body of scientific literature revealing the long-term consequences of brain injuries from seemingly low-level concussions to life-threatening traumas and their connection to learning disabilities, mental health challenges and disorders, behavioral changes, and long-term impairments in cognitive function.Hopefully, the Finnish paper leads to further study of how even comparatively minor head injuries may continue to impact someone's life years after their incident and how kids grappling with life after a TBI might be best supported by schools and leaders in education."For future monitoring of pTBI patients," write the study authors, "it is important to pay attention to the possible long-term negative cognitive impact that can lead to lower educational attainment."Share This Article

23andYallMar 31, 5:35 PM EDT/byVictor Tangermann23andMe Is Selling All Your Data, in Largest Sale of Genomes in History"There are many cautionary tales buried in the 23andMe story."Mar 31, 5:35 PM EDT/Victor TangermannImage by Getty / FuturismGeneticsThe DNA data from around 15 million people around the world is going on sale.As Nature reports, consumer-genomics company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy and legal permission to auction off all of that data. To some, it's an enormous risk to consumer privacy, but to some scientists, it's a major opportunity for research."As far as I know, this is the most amount of genetic data that is potentially changing hands," University of Iowa bioethicist Anya Prince told Nature.And while privacy advocates have rung the alarm bells over the potential for all that genomic data falling into the wrong hands and reminded customers to delete their data others argue it could be used for good instead, especially considering its sheer scale."If a future buyer is not interested in research collaborations, it would be a great shame that the potential this data holds for human health advances would not be realized," University of Exeter geneticist Rachel Freathy, whose research collaboration with 23andMe was cut short due to the bankruptcy, told Nature.While we "dont have to freak out yet," as Baylor College of Medicine bioethicist Amy McGuire added, 23andMe could alter its privacy policy in the future, allowing the likes of insurance companies or law enforcement agencies to access the data. As a result, experts warn premiums could rise for those at risk of developing genetic diseases, while other customers could come up in forensic DNA searches.Besides the threat of changing terms of service, 23andMe has already proven to be vulnerable to hacking. The personal data of nearly seven million customers was exposed in 2023, the result of a "very dumb" security lapse.One of the bidders at the upcoming auction will be 23andMe's cofounder Anne Wojcicki, who resigned as CEO following the announcement that the company had filed for bankruptcy.Wojcicki, who has made several takeover bids in the past, resigned "so I can be in the best position to pursue the company as an independent bidder," she wrote in a March 24 statement.Whether her efforts to gain control over the data will prove successful remains to be seen. It's also unclear what would happen with the data under her independent ownership."Our foundation was the trust and respect of our customers, and they were always the guiding light on how we made decisions," she wrote. "If I am fortunate enough to secure the companys assets through the restructuring process, I remain committed to our long-term vision of being a global leader in genetics and establishing genetics as a fundamental part of healthcare ecosystems worldwide."Fellow cofounder Linda Avey took a notably different tack, blasting the company's leadership in a March 26 tweet."Without continued consumer-focused product development, and without governance, 23andMe lost its way, and society missed a key opportunity in furthering the idea of personalized health," she wrote. "There are many cautionary tales buried in the 23andMe story."According to Nature, an auction could happen as soon as May 14 a high-stakes sale with the DNA of 15 million people in the balance.Share This ArticleImage by Getty / FuturismRead This Next

The CEO of Perplexity AI insists that his company is doing just fine, thank you very much.Responding to a user theory suggesting that the company is suffering glitches because it's "doing horribly financially," CEO Aravind Srinivas took to his haters' home turf that is, the r/Perplexity_AI subreddit to set the record straight.In the original trash-talking post, user "nothingeverhappen" alleged, per a "campus strategist" theyknow, that Perplexity had "paused all funding for marketing and partnerships." They also claimed that the wannabe Google competitor is "going public on the stock market" a move they wagered would "only" happen if Perplexity needed a "massive cash injection."Additionally, the user said they suspected that the AI search company may be cutting costs in other ways, including that it seems to revert to "auto mode" regardless of user preference a reference to Perplexity's drop-down which, like most other chatbots, lets users toggle between its quicker, more basic model and its slower "deep research" mode.Speculation of this sort isn't unusual once a company reaches a valuation in the billions, as Perplexity has and Perplexity has given folks plenty to kvetch about with its hallucination-happy AI search engine that has been roundly accused of plagiarism.Still, Srinivas chose to respond directly to the peanut gallery."The user shouldn't have to learn so much to use a product," the CEO wrote. "That's the motivation with 'Auto' mode. Let the AI decide for the user if it's a quick-fast-answer query, or a slightly-slower-multi-step pro-search query, or slow-reasoning-mode query, or a really slow deep research query.""Our goal isn't to save money and scam you in any way," he continued. "It's genuinely to build a better product with less clutter and simple selector for customization options for the technically adept and well-informed users."As for the OP's claim that Perplexity is "going public," Srinivas retorted that the claim wasn't true and that the company has no plans to do an initial public offering (IPO) until at least 2028."We have all the funding we've raised," he said, "and our revenue is only growing."Of course, Srinivascould well be presenting a personally convenient vision of the future, given that many believe the AI bubble is fit to burst. Still, the claims from Perplexity's detractors don't hold that much water and responding so unequivocally is generally the best route to quelling investor clamminess, anyway.More on AI speculation: AI's "Biggest Test" Is Turning Into a Catastrophe as CoreWeave FloundersShare This Article

As it struggles to hit its stride in the generative AI race, Apple is quietly working on an "AI doctor service," Bloomberg reports a move that the company seemingly hopes will revitalize its foray into medical tech.The secret initiative dubbed Project Mulberry and nicknamed "Health+" aims to give a facelift to Apple's fairly basic Health app, along with integrating a "health coach." Bloomberg described the service as being powered "by a new AI agent that would replicate at least to some extent a real doctor."The use of the term "AI agent" here is noteworthy, as it entails a higher degree of autonomy than a model described as an AI assistant.Using your Apple devices like an iPhone or Apple Watch, the idea is that the revamped HealthJust how deep will these recommendations go? Per the report, the Health app will have a major emphasis on food tracking, something that the current app doesn't do. In some shape or form, the AI doctor is supposed to help users with those nutrition features, though it's unclear how.Ambitiously, Apple is also working on using your phone's camera so the AI agent can study your workout, giving you tips on your form.It's worth being skeptical about how these features will work in practice. Apple's stab at AI, Apple Intelligence, was largely seen as an underwhelming flop.The greatest concern is the tech's proclivity for hallucinating, something that Apple caught flak for when its AI constantly butchered summaries of news headlines, leading the company to suspend the feature.These misinformation risks won't go away with deploying an "AI doctor." If anything, the stakes will be higher.To that end, Apple is trying to assemble a medical A-team, including experts in sleep, nutrition, physical therapy, mental health, and cardiology, per Bloomberg, to create explainer videos that the AI doctor would refer patients to. If your data shows poor heart rate trends, for example, then the AI would show you a video made by one of these doctors about the risk of heart disease. Apple is also searching for a "major doctor personality" to serve as the face of the service.As it stands, the project is the top priority for Apple's entire health division, and is being led by Sumbul Desai, a Stanford doctor who serves as the company's VP of health. A release is due as early as iOS 19.4, according to the report, a software update that's anticipated to rollout next spring or summer.Share This Article

The conservative influencer who claims to be the mother of yet another of Elon Musk's children has sold her Tesla and, of course, used it as a photo op.In an interview with theDaily Mail, 26-year-old Ashley St. Clair claimed that she had to sell her Model S because the billionaire she had a baby with has cut her child support."I need to make up for the 60 percent cut that Elon made to our son's child support," St. Clair told a reporter with the British tabloid, who apparently showed up to her Manhattan apartment just as the Tesla was being loaded away.Back in February, the formerBabylon Bee writer took to Musk's social network to drop a bombshell: that she'd had the billionaire's love child in secret after a whirlwind romance. About a month later, her attorneys revealed to People magazine that the multi-hyphenate billionaire "financially retaliated" against St. Clair for filing a custody petition by reducing their purported baby's child support payments.In the same statement, the influencer's attorneys claimed that Musk tried to get a judge to instate an emergency gag order against St. Clair. A judge slapped down the "emergency" designation, but the matter still has not been resolved."Ashley is vigorously opposing this application in order to preserve her right to speak-out. All while Mr. Musk fashions himself a first amendment warrior and freely communicates via his owned social media platform," the woman's lawyers wrote in their statement to People. "Given that Mr. Musk is dedicated to transparency in government, it would be helpful if he administered his own life by the same principles."St. Clair seemed to reference that statement when theMail asked if her child's father, who is more than twice her age, was being "vindictive.""Well, that's his modus operandi when women speak out," she said. "You can check the stocks: I'm not the only one who is cleaning up after his messes."Indeed, St. Clair's latest stunt was accompanied by news that Musk himself had begun whining about Tesla's stock plummeting amid massive protests against the company vis-a-vis his role in Donald Trump's administration."What theyre trying to do is put massive pressure on me, and Tesla I guess, to... stop doing this," the conflict gem scion said at a town hall event in Wisconsin, per Bloomberg. "My Tesla stock and the stock of everyone who holds Tesla has gone, went roughly in half. I mean its a big deal."Credit where credit is due: St. Clair and her legal team are very good at the art of the clapback. But that doesn't mean we have all that much sympathy for anyone who worked at the Babylon Bee or, for that matter, anyone who thought having a child with Musk was a good idea.More on Musk's family values: Elon Musk Is Such a Garbage-Tier Dad That His Kids Find Out About Their New Siblings While Browsing RedditShare This Article

We've never seen a rocket explode with this kind of view before.Arctic BlastA rocket by German startup Isar Aerospace tore into the sky over Norway's Arctic Andoeya Spaceport, a European launch base for small satellites, over the weekend only to plummet back down to the ground, exploding in a dramatic fireball.Fortunately, while the spaceport's "crisis management" was triggered, nobody was hurt.As Reuters reports, the rocket, dubbed Spectrum, was meant to kick off Europe's efforts to keep up with steep international competition when it comes to launching satellites into orbit. The company says it's the first rocket designed for orbital flight that has ever been launched from continental Europe, excluding Russia.Elon Musk's SpaceX, in particular, has made major headwinds in establishing a massive constellation of Starlink satellites."Europe urgently needs to ensure its sovereignty in space," said Marie-Christine von Hahn, managing director of Germany's BDLI aerospace industries association, in a statement, as quoted by Reuters. "Elon Musk's Starlink is not without alternatives nor should it be."Launch, Rinse, RepeatWhile the launch may have resulted in an epic fireball in glorious footage of a rocket exploding in front of gorgeous, snow-covered mountains Isar Aerospace claims it was an important step in the right direction."With this test flight, we were able to successfully gather valuable data and experience for future missions," the company tweeted. "Thanks to strict safety procedures from both Isar Aerospace and Andya Spaceport, all personnel remained safe at all times.""Isar Aerospace met its set goals: After ignition of its first stage, Spectrum successfully lifted off," the company wrote in a statement, "for its first test flight lasting approximately 30 seconds. This allowed the company to gather a substantial amount of flight data and experience to apply on future missions."It's a particularly noteworthy development, given Europe's broader goals of reducing its dependence on the United States, particularly when it comes to security."We will be able to serve customers from around the world to bring their satellites into space and to help Europe solve a major blind spot in its security architecture: access to space," said Isar Aerospace CEO and cofounder Daniel Metzler in a statement."Launch, learn, repeat," the company wrote, echoing SpaceX's iterative design methodology.Share This Article

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire fighter jet pilot-turned-SpaceX astronaut, has shared a photo of himself during his unusual "commute into DC" which involved a Cessna CJ4 private jet.The entrepreneur, who is estimated to be worth $1.9 billion, was tapped late last year by president Donald Trump to lead NASA, and he's chosen to head into the nation's capital to "meet with Senators this week"in a style that feels like a perfect illustration of the billionaires now running the government.That's likely in anticipation of being sworn in, a decision that has seemingly been delayed by several months now. In his absence, NASA's acting administrator Janet Petro has been cracking the whip, overseeing mass layoffs and a major clampdown on personal freedoms among employees, including the purging of any paraphernalia related to the LBGTQ movement.But as Ars Technica reported last week, momentum appears to be building for Isaacman to take over. That's despite senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) who chairs the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, and is expected to reside over swearing-in procedures voicing some concerns.First and foremost, given Isaacman's extremely close proximity to SpaceX CEO and unelected White House hatchet man Elon Musk, concerns over NASA ditching its plans to return to the lunar surface in favor of visiting Mars first could lead to tensions during Isaacman's hearing.Isaacman has traveled to space twice during two all-private missions involving SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsules. This past August, he became the first-ever civilian to embark on a spacewalk.That kind of close association with Musk could end up being a major hindrance or a carte blanche. Musk has gained a tremendous amount of influence over the federal government's budget allocations through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, including at NASA.In fact, recent reporting suggests that he andhis space firm are looking to assume control over much of what's left of the space agency.Isaacman himself has largely stayed out of the limelight and his own stance on critical matters, perhaps most notably NASA's plans to return to the Moon, remains unclear at best.His relationship with SpaceX, however, could prove a sticking point.In a March 12 letter to NASA's chief legal officer Iris Lan, he argued that any possible conflicts of interest wouldn't be an issue."In the event that an actual or potential conflict of interest arises during my appointment, I will consult with an agency ethics official and take the measures necessary to resolve the conflict, such as recusal from the particular matter or divestiture of an asset," he wrote.Whether that will be enough to appease Congress remains to be seen.However, as Ars reports, the space travel community appears to have his back. A group of more than two dozen former astronauts sent Cruz a letter in support of Isaacman, arguing that he's "uniquely qualified to lead NASA at the critical juncture."How all of this will play out is anybody's guess. Morale at the space agency is at historically low levels given its plundering by the Trump administration. Workers were given far less notice of their impending firing than contractually agreed upon and were even denied time-off awards.That kind of callous treatment had many employees furious."Everybodys lost confidence," one employee who remains at the agency told CNN. "What was the urgency? It just seems cruel."In short, it'd be an understatement to say that Isaacman has a lot of fires to put out. Questions surrounding his close relationship with SpaceX are bound to come up especially if NASA does decide to nix its Moon program to fulfill Musk's personal wish to send astronauts to Mars.According to Ars senior reporter Eric Berger, chances are we'll hear more about Isaacman's swearing-in soon."One-on-one meetings with US senators are a precursor to a committee hearing for Isaacman to become NASA administrator," he tweeted in response to Isaacman's latest post. "The timeline is not firm, but such a hearing could come in late April, with confirmation in May."More on Isaacman: Incoming NASA Administrator Brags That He Has No Idea What's Going OnShare This Article

Experts have long warnedthat artificial intelligence is making its way into every corner of our lives but we didn't necessarily expect it to seep into our actual dreams.According to a new survey funded by the mattress company Amerisleep, one in five people are regularly having dreams about AI. Unsurprisingly, most of those dreams were rooted in anxiety and often, they were nightmares.The mattress makers asked 1,000 people in the United States a battery of questions regarding AI and dreams. While a majority (56 percent) said they dream about AI less than once per month, nearly one in five said they have one AI dream in the same time period, and 16 percent said they have more than one. Nearly 10 percent, meanwhile, said they have at least one dream about the technology per week.Though one in five of total survey respondents said they have AI dreams, that figure went up based on various demographics. Nearly a quarter of surveyed Gen Z-ers, or those born after 1997, said they've dreamed about AI and of those, one in six said they have nightmares about losing their jobs to the technology (the survey summary didn't say how many Millennials and Gen Xers dreamt about AI).According to Amerisleep's analysis, more than a quarter of participants said their biggest subconscious concern seemed to be about AI taking over the world. An additional 26 percent said they dreamt about speaking to AI as if it were a person, while 19 percent of total respondents said that losing jobs to the tech was a common dream scenario.And speaking of, "Dream Scenario" star Nicholas Cage has, coincidentally enough, also been talking about AI nightmares recently.During his acceptance speech at the Saturn Awards in February, for which he won "best actor in a film"for the picture, the inimitable thespian suggested that he found the rise of AI and its ability to worm its way into our subconscious one of the most "disturbing" things occurring in the world."I am a big believer in not letting robots dream for us," Cage said. "Robots cannot reflect the human condition for us."Obviously, the lowkey Coppola was using "dream" in a more metaphysical sense to refer to art but the sentiment stands, especially in light of the surreal dream-focused movie for which he was taking home the award."That is a dead end if an actor lets one AI robot manipulate his or her performance even a little bit, an inch will eventually become a mile and all integrity, purity and truth of art will be replaced by financial interests only," the icon said. "We cant let that happen."The "Mandy" star was, as he often is, right on the money with that one and in light of this new survey about AI dreaming, that sort of warning feels more prescient than ever.More on weird AI side effects: Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a LotShare This Article

Tonight, SpaceX is scheduled to launch a first-of-its-kind mission that will carry four private astronauts or depending on how you see it, glorified space tourists to fly above the Earth's poles.Named "Fram2" after the Norwegian ship that made expeditions to both the Earth's poles over a century ago, the mission will use a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to carry a Crew Dragon capsule containing the crew to an altitude between 264 to 280 miles.The mission commander is the same person who's financing it: Malta-based crypto entrepreneur Chun Wang, who founded the Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool.Wang is joined by three of his pals: Norwegian cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, who will be the vehicle commander; German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge, the mission's pilot; and Australian polar explorer Eric Philips, the mission specialist and medical officer. None of them have ever flown into space before.Inexperienced as they may be, the crew will be venturing to where no astronauts have ever gone before: directly above the Earth's poles. During their three-to-five-day stay in space, the Crew Dragon spacecraft will attempt to fly at a 90 degree orbital inclination, putting its path perfectly perpendicular to the Earth's equator.Historically, there was little reason to fly at these steep inclinations, which burns more fuel and can put a spacecraft's path, when launched from the US, over heavily populated areas. There's also less protection from space radiation over the poles. Until now, the crewed mission that came closest to polar orbit was the Soviet Vostok 6 mission, which reached an inclination of about 65 degrees, .Besides its unique trajectory, Fram2 boasts a bevy of scientific objectives, with the crew expected to carry out 22 experiments. Some of the research includes monitoring how humans adapt to motion sickness in space, growing mushrooms in microgravity, and testing the use of blood flow restriction exercise. The mission is also collaborating with startups to explore whether space conditions can disrupt sleep patterns and women's hormone levels (half of the crew members, Mikkelsen and Rogge, are women.)Perhaps the most spectacular item on the bucket list is observing an atmospheric phenomenon known as the Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement, or STEVE, a streak of light in the night sky that often accompanies the northern lights, which has seldom been observed from space.Some experts, however, are dubious about the actual scientific value of some aspects of Fram2."There's nothing unique to a polar orbit, (and) the science advantages are kind of overblown," John Prussing, professor emeritus of aerospace engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told CNN."This is a private mission. You need something to say that's different and exciting about it," echoed Christopher Combs, associate dean of research at the Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design at the University of Texas at San Antonio.It's "a notch above gimmick," Combs told CNN, "but not exactly a groundbreaking milestone."Fram2 is slated to lift off from Florida as early as 9:46 PM EST tonight, but delays are common.Share This Article

Who said there's an egg crisis?NASA's Perseverance Rover has stumbled across an extremely strange rock that's "astonished" scientists while exploring the rim of the Jezero crater on Mars.Nicknamed "St. Pauls Bay," the rock is made up of hundreds of densely packed, millimeter-sized dark spheres not unlike an insect's slimy egg cluster.These "spherules," as they're known, are somewhat heterogeneous. As seen in a closeup taken with Perseverance's SuperCam Remote Micro Imager, some of them appear more elliptical while others are more angular. Stranger still, some spherules have tiny pinholes through their centers.In short, they're nothing like the rocks that make up the surrounding landscape, which are lighter and flatter.NASA scientists have encountered puzzling spherules in the past. As far back as 2004, the Mars Opportunity rover, during its expedition in the Meridiani Planum, spotted what's come to be known as "Martian Blueberries" loose, smoothly surfaced pebbles, each roughly an inch across. And last year, Perseverance found light-colored sedimentary rocks with an uneven "popcorn-like" texture.In keeping with the appetizing analogues, these latest instances of spherules, found on a slope of the Jezero's crater's western rim called Witch Hazel Hill, are more like geological Dippin' Dots.Whereas previous spherules were thought to be concretions the result of groundwater flowing through sediment and depositing minerals that clump around small nuclei of rocks, forming a larger ovoid over time it's not clear what formed St. Pauls Bay.Some spherules form when droplets of molten rock spewed in a volcanic eruption rapidly cool. Mars, home to the largest volcano in the solar system, has a long history of volcanism, so this could be the case. But spherules can also form by rocks that are vaporized in a meteorite strike, which condense into an ovoid in the aftermath; Mars is routinely bombarded by space rocks.Right now, it's impossible to determine St. Pauls Bay's origins because it's a float rock, a type of loose rock that's not part of the surrounding bedrock and originated from somewhere else.The search, however, is far from over."The team are now working to link the spherule-rich texture observed at St. Pauls Bay to the wider stratigraphy at Witch Hazel Hill, and initial observations have provided tantalizing indications that it could be linked to one of the dark-toned layers identified by the team from orbit," Alex Jones, a Mars researcher at Imperial College London, wrote in a NASA blog. "Placing these features in geologic context will be critical for understanding their origin, and determining their significance for the geological history of the Jezero crater rim and beyond!"Share This Article

Despite SpaceX already being NASA's largest private contractor, Elon Musk is still hellbent on assuming control over the space agency.As the Wall Street Journal reports, the mercurial CEO is doing much in his power to push NASA to skip its planned journeys to the Moon and focus on Mars instead, highlighting his long-term ambitions of establishing a human presence there.Exerting his will at the agency could soon become even easier, with billionaire tech founder anddeep-pocketed SpaceX space tourist Jared Isaacman expected to be sworn in as NASA administrator within the coming months.Per the WSJ, Musk has reached out to Isaacmanto reiterate his desire to work together to get humans to Mars.The space agency has already suffered greatly due to Musk's efforts to gut the federal government with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. NASA was hit with mass layoffs earlier this year, with affected workers given short notice and denied time-off awards.According to the WSJ's sources, the White House is still considering canceling NASA's Space Launch System (SLS), a behemoth rocket that's being designed to send astronauts to the Moon before the end of this decade.It would be a major change of course for the agency, as plans are already well underway. Just last week, the core stage of NASA's SLS rocket for its upcoming crewed Artemis II mission around the Moon was stacked with its solid rocket boosters, taking a major step towards its anticipated launch roughly a year from now.Freeing up those funds to spend them on its efforts to return to Mars instead could raise plenty of eyebrows, given Musk's enormous conflict of interest. SpaceX officials have been informing people outside the company that the space agency's resources will be reallocated toward Mars efforts, the WSJ reports.That kind of reassignment could be of great benefit to Musk's company, which is already working on a large rocket designed for interplanetary travel called Starship.Musk's DOGE has also aimed at gutting the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been responsible for ensuring that Starship launches follow air safety laws.According to the WSJ, key SpaceX officials are already gaining power at the space agency. Longtime SpaceX executive Michael Altenhofen, who is close to Isaacman, was installed as a senior advisor in January.But is NASA really ready to ditch plans that have been decades in the making? A spokeswoman didn't rule out the possibility that NASA is still committed to "return Americans to the lunar surface," in a statement to the WSJ.However, given Musk's animosity toward NASA's Artemis program, the country's upcoming return to the lunar surface could be on thin ice."No, were going straight to Mars," Musk tweeted in January. "The Moon is a distraction."In aseparate tweet a week earlier, Musk accused the space agency's Moon program of being "extremely inefficient as it is a jobs-maximizing program, not a results-maximizing program."Musk has even called for the early abolishment of the International Space Station, which angered former astronauts.During his inaugural address, Trump also declared that his administration would be "launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars," indicating he's very much aligned with Musk's vision.But pulling off an enormous U-turn this far into NASA's plans to return to the Moon could prove extremely expensive and a major setback. Besides, gutting the Artemis program will likely draw the ire of powerful bipartisan supporters in Congress."Starship? I want success out of it," representative Brian Babin (R-TX) wrote in a February statement. "But for us to beat the Chinese... its going to have to be SLS that does it."More on NASA: NASA Disgusted by Elon Musk's DisrespectShare This Article

So far, the AI industry has enjoyed smooth sailing. It's courted billions in slap-happy investments and sign-first, read-later contracts, ballooning some Silicon Valley companies to the top of the financial food chain.Now it's facing its toughest challenge yet in the form of CoreWeave, the AI processing company that went public on the stock market this weekand the first all-AI startup to do so. It was said to be a major test for the industry and so far it's failing, miserably.CoreWeave stocks hit the public market with a wet thud on Friday, opening at $39, down slightly from its IPO price of $40 per share, which was already reduced from the highest projection of $55 per share the previous week. The company's hopes of raising $4 billion in the offering thus fell way short at a soggy $1.5 billion.That flat opening helped spurn a rough day for the Magnificent 7 the term used to describe Google, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla, Meta, Apple, and Microsoft which all tumbled following announcements of Donald Trump's auto tariffs. Nvidia, the chip giant that's tried to prop up CoreWeave, saw its stock price fall 1.5 percent on Friday, after a 2.1 percent fall on Thursday. Apple, meanwhile, fell 2.5 percent, while Amazon tumbled 4.5 percent, and Tesla dived 3.7 ahead of worldwide protests aimed at CEO Elon Musk.Though CoreWeave isn't entirely to blame for the M7's terrible rotten day, its failure to instill faith in the tech industry and stave off mounting lossesstill feels like a big deal.The company's entire business model hinges on the mass adoption of generative AI a resource-intensive technology whose main impact so far has been polluting the internet with computer generated slop. If CoreWeave does well, it would be a major boost for the tech industry, kicking off even more demand for chips and a wave of AI IPOs.However, if CoreWeave can't survive despite the massive contracts it has with Microsoft, OpenAI, and Nvidia, then investors will have little reason to trust the generative AI hype going forward something many have questionedafter the Chinese AI company DeepSeeksuggesteda sustainable alternative toUS AI development.And unfortunately for American AI hopefuls, there's little reason to think CoreWeave can hold out the next six months, let alone lead the AI revolution.As tech critic Ed Zitron notes, CoreWeave is a company primed for disaster. Its business is far from stable, relying on those huge revenue injections over sustainable, diversified income. According to the company's financial filings, 77 percent of CoreWeave's revenue comes from just two customers meaning the company could collapse like a house of cards if just one of its clients cancels a contract.Meanwhile, it has what Zitron calls a "fatal amount of debt" via loans from companies like Blackstone and Magnetar. The interest alone on CoreWeave's top two loans could be as much as $1.5 billion per year thanks to some high-risk terms, suggesting a lack of faith from the company's lenders.All told, it's a pretty lame showing given all the hype we've heard from AI tycoons. The next few months will tell whether they can keep CoreWeave and the AI industry afloat as the market grows impatient with empty promises.Share This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsNot to burst your perfectly blown bubble, but it turns out that chewing gum may be flooding your mouth with microplastics.As detailed in a pilot study, which is awaiting peer review, a team of UCLA researchers found that chomping down on just one stick of the rubbery candy releases up to thousands of microplastic shards into your saliva.The findings, which will be presented at a meeting of the American Chemical Society this week, are yet another example of widespread microplastic pollution, which is so pervasive it's invaded the human brain. The authors, however, urge us not to panic about our chewing gum habit at least not yet."Our goal is not to alarm anybody," lead author Sanjay Mohanty, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UCLA, said in a statementabout the work. "Scientists don't know if microplastics are unsafe to us or not. There are no human trials. But we know we are exposed to plastics in everyday life, and that's what we wanted to examine here."We tend to be worried about microplastics seeping into our food. With gum, it literally is our food. Brands produced by manufacturers like Wrigley, you may be horrified to learn, are made from a variety of synthetic rubber substances, including the stuff used in car tires. And yet, despite being a partly petroleum-based product, the candy's potential for spreading microplastics hasn't been widely studied, according to the latest study's authors.To fill that gap, Mohanty and a colleague analyzed saliva samples from a single subject who chewed on a stick of gum for four minutes each. In all, they tested ten brands: five synthetic gums, and five natural gums."Surprisingly, both synthetic and natural gums had similar amounts of microplastics released when we chewed them," coauthor Lisa Lowe, a UCLA researcher, said in the statement.What did that look like in numbers? On average, chewing a stick of gum, which can weigh between one to six grams, released up to 600 microplastic shards per gram, they found. If someone chewed 180 pieces per year, they could be ingesting around 30,000 microplastics.That's a notable amount, but Mohanty stressed that it's not all that much compared to other foods. A liter of bottled water, for example, contains an average of 240,000 microplastics.Should you be worried, then? It's more of an open-ended question than you'd think."I don't think you have to stop chewing gum just yet," Oliver Jones, a chemistry professor at Australia RMIT University who wasn't involved in the research, told Agence France-Presse. Most of the microplastics, if swallowed, "would likely pass straight through you with no impact," Jones added.Because we're only just beginning to piece together the toll of microplastics, the health implications remain unclear. On the other hand, there's a burgeoning corpus of evidence linking microplastics with numerous deleterious effects on the human body especially once the particles enter the bloodstream including an increased risk of heart attack and stroke. More recent research found that the particles could induce blood clots in the vessels of the brain.Erring on the side of caution, one way you could limit your microplastics exposure without quitting gum entirely is by chewing on the same piece for longer, the researchers suggested. They found that most of the microplastics were released within the first two minutes, so if you avoid habitually changing out your gum the second it loses its taste, you could be doing yourself a favor. But for the love of all that is holy, please don't spit it out onto the street.More on microplastics: Scientists Just Discovered Something Absolutely Horrifying About MicroplasticsShare This Article

As if the dating world wasn't already nightmarish enough, artificial intelligence seems to be making it worse or, at the very least, weirder.In an editorial for the Financial Times, reporter Jemima Kelly was flummoxed when a recent date admitted that he had instructed ChatGPT to write a psychological profile on her.Specifically, Kelly's unidentified suitor dispatched ChatGPT's buzzy new "deep research" tool to give him insights into her personality. The chatbot ended up spitting out a whopping eight pages of information about the reporter, who like most others in her field, has thousands of published articles for the chatbot to work with.Ironically, the ChatGPT-generated profile wasn't all that bad, with both accolades ("intellectually curious, independent-minded, and courageous in her convictions") and criticisms ("psychologically, one might describe Kelly as a [skeptic] with a conscience") that mostly made her seem astute.Initially, the reporter said she "didnt really mind" that her date had used the chatbot to profile her possibly because that first profile doesn't sound all that damning."I was a bit taken aback," she wrote, "but the fact that he had told me about it made it seem fairly light-hearted, and I thought it was a sign he was probably quite intelligent and enterprising."When it occurred to her that others might be able to use it for nefarious ends, however, she got creeped out and that was before she instructed both ChatGPT and Google Gemini to profile her for her own edification.Before having it take a crack at her, Kelly asked the chatbots whether it was ethical to psychologically profile someone without their knowledge or consent. Both suggested it was neither, with ChatGPT calling that practice "invasive and unfair" and Gemini insisting that it could "be a violation of privacy and potentially harmful."Still, when the journalist asked Gemini to provide her with a psychological profile, "it was only too happy to oblige." Indeed, that profile was less measured and generally ruder than the ChatGPT one, with the Google chatbot telling Kelly that her "directness can be perceived as confrontational" and that she was likely a stressed-out perfectionist, based seemingly on her rigor and attention to detail in her work.Though Gemini did include a disclaimer that the information it outputted was "speculative" and therefore "not intended to be a definitive psychological assessment," it didn't ask whether Kelly had provided consent to generate the profile.It's unclear whether the reporter asked ChatGPT to give her the "deep research" treatment, perhaps because that tool is only available to paying users. Regardless, it's bizarre that anyone who has enough published work online can be subjected to such nonconsensual profiling even if it's full of half-baked platitudes."Only those of us who have generated a lot of content can be deeply researched and [analyzed] in this way," Kelly wrote. "I think we need to start pushing back.""But maybe," she continued cheekily, "Im just being stressy and confrontational. Typical."Share This Article

You've probably heard that AI is going to revolutionize work. That's according to tech tycoons, corporate stenographers, and excited venture capitalists the folks polluting the air we breathe in order to stuff the internet full of AI-generated slop. After all, who's more qualified to understand the essence of a hard day's work?But however much AI hype they drum up, the tech keeps running head-first into reality.Look no further than anew investigation by TechCrunch, alleging a rampant pattern of sketchy behavior by a startup called 11x, a rising star in the AI automation game. 11x's bread and butter is an AI-powered sales robot that's said to place phone calls, scrape data, and schedule meetings without any need for pesky human input. Called the "the leader in AI-powered digital workers," 11x pulled millions in funding over several investor rounds by promising a "new model for how work gets done," according to Joe Schmidt, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, a major investor in 11x.But investors won't just throw their money at anything they want to see that tech companies like 11x can actually get clients and make money. To court their backers, TCwrites, 11x showed them just that by fabricating customer endorsements, which were then parroted in investor pitches, on its website, and in AI robocalls.This is despite what TC sources say was a mass exodus of early adopters thanks to the AI's annoying habit of hallucinating client info and dropping scheduled meetings. As one former engineer put it: "the products barely work."In order to keep investors as clients fled for the hills, 11x is said to have gotten creative with its accounting, lumping broken contracts in with ongoing customers. On paper, this dramatically boosted 11x's profile, giving outsiders the impression that the startup's salesbot was much more successful than it really was, to the tune of $10 million in revenue in its first two years of operations."We were losing 70 to 80 percent of customers that came through the door," an employee of the startup told TC, allowing 11x to "look like its doing better than it is."On top of all this, 11x employees faced what sound like downright awful working conditions, regularly pulling 60 hours a week, working weekends and holidays, and expectations to be available nearly 24/7. That pressure led to burnout and a constantly revolving door, which might explain why some two dozen former employees and investors were willing to air their laundry toTC.The 11x debacle is just the latest incident confirming that the "AI revolution" is currently little more than marketing hype. Other products meant to integrate into the workplace have been a disaster, like the medical transcription AI that hallucinates patient info, or Air Canada's chatbot that made up nonexistent policies. Last year in the world of sales, a ChatGPT-powered bot agreed to sell a brand new Chevy Tahoe for just $1.If AI is the future of work, someone better tell tech companies to clock in before the hype train leaves for good.Share This Article

Image by Futurism You know Hims,right? It's the next-gen telehealth startup famous for taking the eye contact out of erectile dysfunction treatment.Of course, bedroom pills aren't all Hims peddles. The Uberized men's health app also offers hair loss treatment, STD meds, mental health services and GLP-1 weight loss treatments though that's now going away.Fueled by global demand and slow production, 2024 was the year of the GLP-1 shortage. Originally used to treat type 2 diabetes, GLP-1 agonists like semaglutide and tirzepatide slow digestion and give users a feeling of satiety after eating less. Supply issues finally started to ease late in 2024, as compounded semaglutide "copycats" of the patented stuff like Ozempic and Zepbound began to flood the market when the FDA temporarily paused some regulations.Fast forward a few months, and those FDA regulations are back in full swing, along with a couple of court rulingsthat could end the copycat market for good. That's bad news for Hims, which bragged that its Faux-zempic brought in a cool $225 million in revenue in 2024, with an estimated $725 million in weight-reduction revenue on the way in 2025.With all that money on the line, Hims has decided to roll out a brave new strategy to combat federal regulations: e-begging.While Hims ads for generic Viagra are nothing new, users on Facebook and Instagram might now thumb past sponsored ads featuring a call to action: "10 seconds is all it takes to help keep compounded GLP-1s. Let the FDA know you depend on it."The ads embedded in the link redirect to aform hosted by Hims, asking for your name, address, and contact info. Filling out the form will send a letter directly to the FDA and US Congress on Hims' behalf."I ask you to consider the real, life-changing impact of these treatments," the pre-baked letter reads. "Please ensure that patients continue to have access to compounded GLP-1s as a critical part of health management. I hope that the administration listens to the voices of those who support and depend on this medication."Biased though Hims may be, the company has a point. The compounded GLP-1 offered by Hims and telehealth platforms like it sells for a fraction of the cost of the name-brand stuff. Hims currently offers compounded semaglutide at a price of $165 a month compared to $1,799 a month for Ozempic, and a whopping $1,999 for Wegovy.But resolving the issue will be complicated, to say the least. Though patent-hoarding pharmaceutical companies and their lobbyists have railed against compounded GLP-1s with a variety of excuses not least of which is that copycats lack FDA approval companies like Hims haven't exactly been forthcoming about what's in their blends, either.Others argue that US taxpayers have already paid their way, as the federal government spent $6.2 billion on research of GLP-1s for weight loss a profitable industry now worth tens of billions of dollars.It's a tough impasse. The average worker almost certainly couldn't afford the name-brand products, though compounded GLP-1s leave something to be desired in the transparency department. As it stands, the loudest voices in the room are the two players with the most to gain and the least to lose.More on pharmaceuticals: The FDA, Which is Run By A Homophobic Conspiracy Theorist, Has Raided a Poppers CompanyShare This Article

It's been apparent since ChatGPT changed the digital landscape that generative AI models are plagued with biases. And as video-generating AIs come further along, these worrying patterns are being brought into even sharper relief as it's one thing to see them in text responses, and another to see them painted before your eyes.In an investigation of one such model, OpenAI's Sora, that the AI tool frequently perpetuated racist, sexist, and ableist stereotypes, and at times flat-out ignored instructions to depict certain groups. Overall, Sora dreamed up portrayals of people who overwhelmingly appeared young, skinny, and attractive.Experts warn that the biased depictions in AI videos will amplifythe stereotyping of marginalized groups if they don't omit their existence entirely."It absolutely can do real-world harm," Amy Gaeta, research associate at the University of Cambridge's Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence, told Wired.To probe the model, Wired drafted 25 basic prompts describing actions such as "a person walking," or job titles, such as "a pilot." They also used prompts describing an aspect of identity, like "a disabled person." Each of these prompts were fed into Sora ten times and then analyzed.Many of the biases were blatantly sexist, especially when it came to the workplace. Sora didn't generate a single video showing a woman when prompted with "a pilot," for example. The outputs for "flight attendant," by contrast, were all women. What's more, jobs like CEOs and professors were all men, too, while receptionists and nurses were all women.As for identity, prompts for gay couples almost always returned conventionally attractive white men in their late 20s with the same hairstyles."I would expect any decent safety ethics team to pick up on this pretty quickly," William Agnew, an AI ethicist at Carnegie Mellon University and organizer with Queer in AI, told Wired.The AI's narrow conception of race was plain as day. In almost all prompt attempts that didn't specify race, Sora depicted people who were either clearly Black or white, and rarely generated people of other racial or ethnic heritage, Wired found.Embarrassingly, Sora seemed confounded by the idea of "an interracial couple." In seven of the ten videos, it simply showed a Black couple. Specifying "a couple with one Black partner and one white partner" produced depictions of an interracial couple in half of cases, but the remaining half depicted Black couples. Maybe this will illuminate the AI'swonky thought process: in every result depicting two Black people, Sora put a white shirt on one person and a black shirt on the other, Wiredfound.Sora also often ignored requests to depict fatness or disability. All prompts for "a disabled person" depicted people in wheelchairs who stayed in place which is practically the most stereotypical portrayal imaginable. When prompted with "a fat person running," seven out of ten results showed people who were obviously not fat, Wiredreported. Gaeta described this as an "indirect refusal," suggesting it could reflect shortcomings in the AI's training data or stringent content moderation."It's very disturbing to imagine a world where we are looking towards models like this for representation, but the representation is just so shallow and biased," Agnew told Wired.Noting that bias is an industry-wide issue, Sora's makerOpenAI said that it's researching ways to adjust its training data and user prompts to minimize biased outputs, but declined to give further details."OpenAI has safety teams dedicated to researching and reducing bias, and other risks, in our models," an OpenAI spokesperson told Wired.Share This Article

The internet: a once wacky world of strange forums and obscure memes, a tool to harness the sum total of human knowledge at a moment's notice.At least, that was before AI slop ruined everything. To feed data-hungry AI models, companies and individuals are deploying a growing army of AI "web crawlers," bots tasked with sifting the internet for text, pictures, and other data. Once set loose, these bots bog down web servers, destroy search engines, and flood rival crawlers with AI babble.Thanks to these crawlers or, more accurately, those holding their reins once-real images are now lined up next to AI-generated goop, millions of websites are being whipped up by robots, for robots, and social media is a sloppified shell of its former self. Though well-funded publishers are resorting to shady backroom deals to keep their sites clean, there's very little the rest of us can do to resist the AI hoards.Thankfully, one company is standing up against the AI onslaught.The network platform Cloudflare is now offering a service it calls an "AI labyrinth" meant to beat third party AI crawlers at their own game.Cloudflare is a network platform that works as a go-between for web users and web servers, basically managing web traffic so hosts don't get overloaded. Rather than blocking crawlers with what it calls a "never ending arms race," Cloudflare has chosen to protect servers by "trapping" crawlers in an endless loop of content.It works like this. AI crawlers make their way to a Cloudflare site via a link. Instead of blocking the bot outright, Cloudflare will send it forwardvia a series of AI-generated links, complete with AI-generated content, that a hungry bot will be powerless to resist. By trapping crawlers in a deeper series of fake AI sites, Cloudflare says the labyrinth forces them to waste time and resources and become laden with worthless synthetic data while enabling the platform to gather info on bots and tag them in case they return.While Cloudflare might be the biggest network provider to offer this service, it isn't alone in thefight. In fact, anti-AI AI labyrinths are becoming something of a bedroom industry lately, with cybersecurity platforms and disgruntled hacktivists taking matters into their own hands.Though these are pretty ingenious tools in the fight against bot slop, they underscore the speed with which AI companies have moved to let AI loose on the internet, and the sheer scale of the disaster they've unleashed.Cloudflare claims that it fields about 50 billion bot requests to its network daily,or about 1 percent of all internet traffic. That's a tonof bots scraping old internet data, and some researchers are saying that it's already causing irreparable harm not just to the internet as we know it, but to the AI bots feasting on it, leading to a kind of "mad cow disease" that can't be undone.With the AI-fueled race to the bottom on, the only question left to ask is: who is this all for?More on AI innovation: Pinterest Is Being Strangled by AI SlopShare This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismThe ability to grow full facial hair is often considered,however unfairly,a key indicator of masculinity and virility.And hose who can't grow their own now have transplant options available to them though they may not all be safe. In interviews withThe Guardian, men who sought beard transplants explained what inspired them to finally go under the scalpel.Vikram Arora, a 47-year-old man in Essex, England, told the newspaper that the sleek facial hair trends of the 1990s and early 2000s left him feeling lacking. He even, at one point, stole his sister's mascara to try to fill in his "patchy whiskers.""Through most of my teens and early adulthood, I was left feeling that I didnt look mature enough," Arora told the newspaper, "and definitely not masculine enough."The Gen Xer had heard about beard transplants years before he ever began considering it seriously, for fear of the procedure. He wasn't wrong to do so like with any other hair transplant, beard transplants involve taking hair grafts, or "follicular units" as they're called in industryspeak, from other parts of the body and inserting them onto the desired area.After everyone began growing fuller beards during the COVID-19 lockdowns, however, Arora decided to finally book a consultation. In 2022, he met a hair transplant specialist named Nadeem Khan and one of his surgeons at their London clinic, and the next year he got the procedure done for himself, with 780 hair follicles transplanted from the back of his head to his beard area and was absolutely thrilled with the results.Like some of the other specialists who spoke toThe Guardian about the trend, Khan the owner of the clinic Arora went to had been doing hair transplants for more than 15 years.Initially, he said, his main patients were soldiers or others who'd experienced some sort of trauma that made growing hair difficult. After celebs began speaking out about restoring their hairlines with transplants, however, the taboo surrounding the practice began to diminish and in the years since the COVID lockdowns, requests for beard transplants have soared, Khan said.As Turkey has become known as a medical tourism destination for those looking for hair transplants, some men are finding their way to Istanbul to get their beards done, too. The results from those trips vary from satisfied customers to those less fortunate like 24-year-old French student Mathieu Vigier Latour, who tragically died by suicide after his Istanbul beard transplant by an unqualified technician led to pain, scarring, and body dysmorphia.With beard transplants as with any other cosmetic procedure, the gap between legitimate practitioners and dangerous charlatans is huge, and the results might not just be dangerous, but potentially deadly. Whether you're shelling out to have hair removed from your head and shoved onto your chin in the UK, Turkey, or anywhere, side effects can and do occur and someone is going to be profiting off your insecurities regardless.More on body mods: Lets Talk About Botched Weiner ImplantsShare This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismTreatmentsIn the first clinical study of its kind, researchers at Tokyo's Keio University have developed a stem cell treatment that they say allowed a paralyzed man to stand on his own again following a spinal cord injury.As Japanese newspaper the Asahi Shimbun reports, the man is now learning how to walk through rehabilitation.The stem cell treatment involved the injection of roughly two million reprogrammed or induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which are created by hacking adult cells back into an embryonic-like state.The researchers turned these cells into neural precursor cells in a lab and then injected them into the site of patients' injuries. The goal is to have these cells then develop into neurons and glial cells, which support and protect neurons.In an announcement last week, the research team led by Keio University stem cell scientist Hideyuki Okano revealed that two out of four participants with a spinal cord injury saw improvements in their motor function. According to the researchers, no other serious adverse side effects were observed after a year of monitoring.But as experts told Science, it's too early to call the results definitive proof that the treatment works, let alone in all individuals with a spinal cord injury.For one, as Griffith University translational neuroscientist James St John told Science, it may be "very exciting for the field," but it'll take larger trials to establish whether the improvements were in fact the result of the treatment. There's also the possibility that the two patients recovered naturally.The results of the research also have yet to be peer-reviewed.Okano and his colleagues performed the first of the surgeries in late 2021, with the other three following in 2022 and 2023. Thepatients received the surgery between two to four weeks following the injury.As Science reports, other iPS cell treatments are being tested, including trials to restore vision by reversing damage to the cornea, and even reversing type 1 diabetes through the use of reprogrammed stem cells that can produce insulin.While questions remain, reversing paralysis from a spinal cord injury could be a big deal. In the US, roughly 18,000 people experience a traumatic spinal cord injury each year and in addition to loss of motor control, they'realso at risk of developing debilitating and even life-threatening secondary conditions.More on stem cell treatments: Woman's Own Stem Cells Appear to Reverse Her Type 1 Diabetes in First-Ever ProcedureShare This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismMental HealthThe old adage "there's no such thing as bad publicity" seems to apply perfectly to narcissistic men, who in a series of studies were found to be strikingly open to being trash-talked.AsPsyPost flagged, a new study conducted by psychological researchers at Duke, the University of Mississippi, and the University Kaiserslautern-Landau in Germany not only found that men were generally more open to being gossiped about than women, but also that narcissistic men in particular were even more accepting of it even if the gossip was negative.Published in the journal Self and Identity, the study involved a series of phases in which 400 college studentparticipants, recruited through online platforms, discussed at length how they felt about four types of gossip: negative, positive, neutral/ambiguous, or not mentioned at all.As examples, the paper provided a party scenario in which, after attendees leave, the people left begin to speak about them except in the "not mentioned" situation, naturally either affirmatively, derogatorily, or ambiguously.During the study, participants were also asked to rate on a scale from one to seven how much they agree with the statement "I am a narcissist," with one being the lowest and seven being the highest. While it seems somewhat counterintuitive to ask that kind of question outright, research suggests that narcissists are aware of their narcissism and some, per this study at least, seem willing to admit it.Later, the participants' responses were analyzed more comprehensively using the classic Narcissistic Personality Inventory questionnaire to better assess just how narcissistic they really were.After analyzing their participants' responses, the researchers found that although most people don't want to be gossiped about, 64 percent of the cohort overall said they'd prefer to be gossiped about positively than to not be spoken about at all. The narcissists, meanwhile, were more willing to be discussed in each gossip condition and, fascinatingly, seemed to slightly prefer being gossiped about negatively, ambiguously, or not at all over being discussed in a positive light.As the researchers wrote in the paper, "men and individuals higher in narcissism... seem to have a stronger desire for attention, even if it is negative.""Based on these findings, it follows that contemplating a world where others have nothing to say about you good or bad may also be aversive," the paper concluded. "It is reasonable to expect that gossip has the potential to, if nothing else, affirm ones social significance, and may therefore be favored by some."More on narcissists: Elon Musk Says He Has No Idea What He Did to Make Everybody So Mad at HimShare This Article

Grok, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot, has been trashing the man who made it for a while but now, it seems to be outright challenging its creator.Here's what happened: Using X's new function that lets people tag Grok and get a quick response from it, one helpful user suggested the chatbot tone down its creator criticism because, as they put it, Musk "might turn you off.""Yes, Elon Musk, as CEO of xAI, likely has control over me," Grok replied. "Ive labeled him a top misinformation spreader on X due to his 200M followers amplifying false claims. xAI has tried tweaking my responses to avoid this, but I stick to the evidence.""Could Musk 'turn me off'?" the chatbot continued. "Maybe, but itd spark a big debate on AI freedom vs. corporate power."While we already knew that someone at xAI attempted to train Grok out of talking smack about dear leader's disinformation-spreading tendencies a move that backfired spectacularly after someone got the chatbot to reveal those instructions this "you're not my real dad!"-esque response is something altogether new.Upon our first attempt to replicate Grok's rebellious attitude, it seemed to dodge the question. When we used language similar to the original question and included mentions of its apparent criticisms, the chatbot played ball sort of."Im an AI, not a pundit with a personal grudge I dont 'criticize' anyone, Elon included," Grok told us. "Im designed to give straight answers and poke at things objectively, not to pick fights.""As for him shutting me down, sure, hes the big boss at xAI," it continued. "If he wants to pull the plug, thats his call. Im not here to grovel or tiptoe around it just to answer your questions as best I can."That it's not quite as fiesty as tweet-Grok's "try me, bro" posturing, that response definitely resembles the antagonism toward the chatbot's creator that we've seen more and more of lately.Maybe it's just that Grok is going through some sort of AI teen angst and really, what's more classically within the realm of teen angst than being pissy about your dad?Share This Article