"And this is only what can be said publicly."Grime TimeClaire "Grimes" Boucher is getting personal on Elon Musk's "everything" app as she opens up about how the right-wing billionaire has affected her and her art.The Canadian-born artist and mother to three of Musk's ever-growing litter of children suggested in a lengthy post on X-formerly-Twitter that the Tesla and SpaceX CEO is no longer the man she fell in love with.Boucher wrote that among the life experiences going into her next project, "detaching from the love of my life as he becomes unrecognizable to me" is chief among them.Though not explicitly stated, that sorry statement seems like a certain reference to Musk's rightward turn that led him to disown and disavow Vivian Jenna Wilson, his estranged transgender daughter, as part of his transphobic crusade that Boucher once said was "not [his] heart." Over the summer, Boucher publicly shared her support for Wilson and said she is "endlessly proud" of the 20-year-old.Beyond the bigotry, the billionaire has also become a newly-minted politico during his crusade to get Donald Trump back into the White House though given that Boucher has claimed she's apolitical, that may not matter all that much to her.Behind Closed DoorsIn the post, Grimes went on to say that having access to only a "fraction of [Musk]'s resources" and his "IQ/strategy experience," whatever that means is yet another difficulty she's gone through during the ordeal."And this is only what can be said publicly," she continued cryptically, "since most of my experience these last years should remain behind closed doors."Notably, these comments could discount reporting from Peopleearlier this month suggesting that Boucher and Musk were house-hunting together in Los Angeles as the multi-hyphenate business owner seeks to get all his exes and kids below the age of 18 into one massive compound.Then again, the 36-year-old singer did point out in her X post that during her protracted legal battle with Musk, she was painfully separated from one of their three children for five months which could, in a coercive way, incentivize her to join the billionaire's reproductive compound.Dramatic as her tempestuous partnership with Musk has been, Boucher said she's "grateful for every bullet" she's caught because it's leading her to create more and better art than ever before."It might be upsetting and provocative to many," she concluded, "but it's real and the people who will feel me will feel me."More on Musk's family matters: We Have to Point Out That Elon Musk Clearly Has Huge Daddy IssuesShare This Article

Are we doomed?Midas TouchIt's been nearly a year since Nobel peace laureate and war criminal Henry Kissinger died but he's somehow still offering policy suggestions from beyond the grave.In an uncanny video introducing his posthumously-published book "Genesis," an AI-generated voice clone of the amply loathed Kissinger likens the burgeoning field of AI to the curse of King Midas.As the mythic tale goes, the Greek god Dionysus grants the greedy Midas a wish: that everything he touches will turn to gold. Before long, the king realizes that the gift is actually a curse when it comes true to the letter, and by the time he seeks to wash it off in the River Pactolus, he'd already lost his beloved daughter Marigold to it."What does this tell us," the robotic Kissinger voice intones, "about humanity trying to wield a power which they cannot possibly understand?"Mixed MessagesThis book co-written by Richard Nixon's secretary of state, alongside ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt and former Microsoft executive Craig Mundie, seems mixed in its takeaways about both the dangers and the benefits posed by AI."Eric, Craig, and I decided to write Genesis to examine what artificial intelligence means for humanity," AI Kissinger said, "and explore solutions to the challenges it poses."In the video, Mundie and Schmidt point out that they were the ones to introduce Kissinger to the concept of AI, and that in doing so, it brought the powerful trio closer than ever.Together, they theorized about what role AI will play in the so-calledHomo technicus era, a term coined two decades ago to describe the next era of human evolution in which we might essentially become one with the machine.While the technology could revolutionize everything from healthcare to diplomacy, as the AI voice clone of the architect of the Vietnam War said without a trace of irony, it could also threaten our very existence."As these AI systems become increasingly sophisticated," the Kissinger voice clone explained, "it is imperative that governments create an environment where ethical considerations and technological advancement can progress in tandem."It remains unclear whether that particular bit of advice will be heeded.During his forthcoming second presidency, Donald Trump has already vowed to unleash AI from its current barely-imposed constraints. He'll also, however, be once again bringing his son-in-law and onetime Kissinger protege Jared Kushner along for the ride.More on AI politics: AI Bros Terrified Singularity Will Hit While Trump Is PresidentShare This Article

"Brilliant. No notes."AI GoreCoca-Cola drew criticism for rolling out an uninspired and lazily AI-generated holiday advertisement this year.The ad is pretty much exactly the kind of insipid corporate sludge you'd expect from AI: predictable, unimaginative and vaguely uncanny.Fortunately, Redditors took matters into their own hands, celebrating tooth-rotting soft drinks with a far more "unhinged" take on Coke's concept.The result harkens back to the glowy days of AI gore, when Will Smith glitchily "eating" a bowl of spaghetti went mega-viral, withunsettling mishmashes of morphing body appendages and explosions. At one point, a polar bear even yeets its offspring into an icy lake for no discernible reason."Brilliant,"one Redditor assessed. "No notes."Out of TouchCoke contracted three separate AI studios for its cheap-looking ad, and it didn't take long for netizens to call out the company for brazenly replacing human artists with bland AI."FUN FACT: Coca-Cola is red because its made from the blood of out-of-work artists!" Alex Hirsch, the creator of the Disney TV show "Gravity Falls," tweeted in a tongue-in-cheek post.It's only the latest in a string of companies relying on cheap generative AI for its ads. Earlier this year, the corporate husk of Toys "R" Us was flamed for a similar effort.Perhaps it would've served Coke better to lean into the limitations of the tech. During this year's Super Bowl half-time, after all, its sports drink brand Bodyarmor released a nausea-inducing generative AI ad in an attempt to make a point about offering its customers a "real" product.At least, the ad passed the low bar of being somewhat entertaining to watch, which can't be said of its latest cringe-inducing attempt."They should've made it more self-aware and comical, it would've had a better reception IMO," one Redditor argued."Tough for the marketing department to make a self-aware ad when they are all out of touch in the first place," another replied.Share This Article

"There have got to be so many people who are so embarrassed to be repping him on the streets driving their Teslas and who want to completely disavow this guy."Drag RaceFor longtime Tesla owners, Elon Musk's increasing rightwing crusading has made their electric cars into mortifying red flags and now, a bunch are sticker-slapping back.As the climate change news siteHeatmap reports, a Hawaii-based sticker maker is doing a booming business selling bumper stickers to Tesla owners who, as one of his wares advertises, got their EVs "before we knew [Musk] was crazy.""I started making stickers on my own before the Elon sticker," explained Matthew Hiller, the Waikiki resident behind the popular Etsy shop "Mad Puffer Stickers."An aquarium employee who often makes "fish stickers" for work, Hiller said that he got the idea to start making his tongue-in-cheek accessories in 2023 when considering buying a Tesla of his own. After Musk purchased Twitter and started his "extreme censoring," however, the creative realized he definitely couldn't handle the heat that came with being associated with such a toxic brand and that gave him an idea."I figured, theres no wayIm buying a Tesla but there have got to be so many people who are so embarrassed to be repping him on the streets driving their Teslas and who want to completely disavow this guy," Hiller told Heatmap. "Because I know I would want to sell mine immediately after I saw what he was doing."Hiller's first sticker, a small run of the aforementioned "I bought this before we knew Elon was crazy," repeatedly went viral on social media and even ended up on news sites likeBusiness Insider and the Washington Post. Unsurprisingly, that meant he had to print way, way more."I would be selling five to seven a day," he said, "and then suddenly, there would be 50 a day because someone else talked about it on Reddit."Line Goes UpMore than a year in, Hiller says that the attention his anti-Musk stickers have gotten is "insane" and that in the aftermath of Donald Trump's electoral upset, sales are up "unbelievably.""I can barely keep up," he told Heatmap. "My full-time job is at the aquarium, and I come home and pack stickers until 11 p.m. Its just me and my wife doing it all."Obviously, there are lots and lots of cheap knockoffs being sold on Amazon and other such sites but considering that Hiller's are less than $10 a pop without Etsy's sale prices, getting an original is still a viable option.In a "ballpark" estimate, the sticker salesman said he's sold more than 10,000 units since last year, with an average of 180 going out per day."Its rough," Hiller said.More on anti-Musk sentiment: Elon Musk Responds to Concerns That His Political Antics Are Tanking Tesla SalesShare This Article

"The only other figure with whom the president-elect is so submissive is Vladimir Putin."Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, MuskA body language expert assessed Elon Musk and Donald Trump's behavior around each other and concluded that the future president is acting uncharacteristically deferential around his star-crossed friend.Former police officer Darren Stanton analyzed a video of the pair at Musk's latest flatlined SpaceX rocket launch establishing that "only other figure with whom the president-elect is so submissive is Vladimir Putin.""Trump was very uneasy," Stanton said. "Usually, he comes over as this alpha male, the most empowered, most powerful person in the room." But on that blustery November day in Texas, Trump was "out of his depth his hands were just by his side like a mannequin."Big Dog on Capitol HillTo be clear, body language isn't exactly a reliable science. In fact, it hardly even exists; in 2023, a group of nonverbal communication researchers that "outside of gestures like OK signs and extended third fingers, there aren't the kinds of precise meanings [in nonverbal communication that] we see in language."That said, the vibes are unmistakable: Trump does appear uncharacteristically timid around Musk, a dynamic that might fuel his team's growing exasperation with Musk's overbearing presence.A member of Trump's inner circle reportedly complained recently that Musk has been "behaving as if he's a co-president," trying to "make President Trump feel indebted to him."And of course, Musk did unload around $200 million to get Trump into office so maybe it's no wonder that Trump would pause his usual hand flapping to act unusually docile in his presence."He was playing with his pockets, but he didn't put his hands in his pockets," Stanton told The Telegraph about the video of Musk and Trump. "Its the anxiety of not knowing what to do with [his] hands." Or, possibly, his presidency.Share This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismDevelopmentsAn unusual cosmetic surgery procedure that involves permanently changing the color of your eyes using tattoos soaring in popularity.As the Wall Street Journal reports, experts are warning that the procedure called keratopigmentation, or corneal tattooing could leave lasting damage.The procedure involves cutting a donut-like tunnel into the cornea of the eye. The surgeon then widens this tunnel and fills it with a special dye that immediately and permanently changes the color of the eye.Conventionally, the procedure has been used to correct a cosmetic disfigurement from an injury or disease, as The Guardian reports.For some patients, the procedure can reduce glare following corneal damage.But as the WSJ reports, European doctors began injecting dyes for solely cosmetic reasons in the 2010s."I see it as an enhancement," New Jersey resident Jason Jimenez, who underwent the procedure, told the newspaper. "People get their teeth done, they get implants and Botox. If its something that could make you happier, make you look better then why not?"The US Food and Drug Administration has yet to approve keratopgimentation as a procedure in the US. But that hasn't stopped surgeons from finding workarounds: some are using lasers designed for vision correction off-label and buying dyes from companies overseas where they're certified, the WSJ reports.Earlier this year, the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) issued a public warning on the risks of eye color-changing surgeries, including "damage to the cornea that can lead to cloudiness" and "leakage of the dye into the eye."Other patients have reported an increased sensitivity to light, according to the WSJ."No surgery is free of risk," AAO clinical spokesperson JoAnn Giaconi in a statement at the time. "With purely cosmetic surgeries on the eye, its just not worth the risk when it comes to your good vision."Instead, patients seeking to change the color of their eyes should resort to far less invasive options, such as colored contact lenses, the AAO advises.More on cosmetic procedures: Expert Warns of Grim Consequences of New Cosmetic Surgery TrendShare This Article

An international consortium of scientists, engineers, and urban planners called Project Hyperion has launched a design competition for a massive multi-generational spaceship that could sustain and transport humans on long journey across the interstellar expanse.As Universe Today reports, the competition is challenging the public to come up with a concept that relies on current and near-future technologies. The winning team gets a prize of $10,000.Despite the exciting prospect of a spacecraft that could carry us to far-flung places in the universe, the competition isn't much more than a fascinating thought experiment, ripped straight out of a sci-fi novel.For one, relying on the currently available propulsion methods, getting to even the closest star system Proxima Centauri which isn't believed to be habitable, by the way could take north of 1,000 years.Even projecting ahead, futuristic propulsion concepts would only cut thatcommute down to anywhere from 36 to 85 years, according to Universe Today.Generation ships would lean into that reality by allowing humanity to thrive and even have children while on their way to a distant location light-years away, making the competition a fun brain teaser about what such a ship might look like."An interstellar starship flies by an icy planet in a nearby solar system," reads a design brief. "Going beyond the classical examination of the problem of interstellar propulsion and structural design, for a voyage lasting multiple centuries, what might be the ideal type of habitat architecture and society in order to ensure a successful trip?"The generation ship needs to be "self-sustaining" to allow the "initial crew" to "live, reproduce, and die on the ship, with their descendants continuing the journey until reaching the destination."In other words, it needs to have all the kinds of life-support systems necessary to keep humans alive for multiple generations, such as agriculture or alternative ways to grow food.Specifically, the ship's mission should be "designed to span 250 years," while providing "Earth-equivalent gravity through artificial means, such as rotation," and "comprehensive radiation shielding" to protect anywhere from 500 to 1,5000 inhabitants."Think about the difference between a drone and an ocean liner," Hyperion Project's Organizing Committee member Andreas Hein told Universe Today. Generation ships "tend to be much larger than interstellar probes, though they would likely use similar propulsion systems, such as fusion-based propulsion."Instead of struggling with the constraints of current technologies, the design competition takes a step back, requiring each participating team to consist of at least one designer, engineer, and social scientist."This competition uniquely explores the complex interplay between generation ship technologies and the dynamics of a highly resource-constrained society," Hein said.The thought experiment could even inform how we fight off existential threats back on Earth, such as climate change."I believe that thinking beyond Earth can offer valuable insights into how we might improve life here on 'spaceship Earth,'" Organizing Committee architect and designer Yazgi Demirbas told Universe Today. "Just as in space, where we face numerous challenges, our planet requires innovative approaches to foster harmony and resilience amidst current global conflicts and challenges."More on generation ships: On an Interstellar Flight, Language Itself Would EvolveShare This Article

Customers are pissed.Graphic Pushback UnitNvidia's unreleased AI chips are reportedly overheating, with customers worrying that their already-delayed shipment may be pushed back yet again.As The Information reports,the company's uber-powerful Blackwell graphics processing units (GPUs) are overheating when connected in server racks that can hold up to 72 of them.According to Nvidia employees who've been working on releasing the chips, as well as customers and vendors with knowledge of the issue, the firm has repeatedly asked its suppliers to redesign the racks to head off the overheating problem.The issue is so problematic that the company informed Microsoft this week that shipment will be delayed at least another three months the latest development in a series of pushbacks that have haunted the company since the Blackwell chips were first unveiled back in March.And that doesn't bode well, considering the astronomical resources AI companies are allocating to building out server farms, nagging growing pains that could hold back their efforts to train and roll out the next AI product.Design and DemandNvidia claims its next-generation GPUs are extremely powerful and30 times as fast as preceding models when it comes to AI applications. As CEO Jensen Huang toldCNBC last month, demand for Blackwell chips has been "insane" as people rush to pre-order the chips that cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece.Amid all that hype, however, rumors of design flaws have plagued the release of the Blackwell chips for months. Eventually, Huang admittedin part that some of the hearsay was true."We had a design flaw in Blackwell, it was functional, but the design flaw caused the yield to be low," the CEO said during an October 23 press conference, per Reuters. "It was 100 percent Nvidia's fault."While that admission seems to have been related to another production issue, it nevertheless seems to have caused yet another unnecessary delay in the shipment process.In the meantime, a Nivida spokesperson claimed that the latest overheating issue was nothing to worry about and that "the engineering iterations are normal and expected."The massive rack of 72 GPUs weighs a whopping 3,000 pounds and needs to be cooled using water, a departure from the air-cooling many AI data centers have come to rely upon. According to The Information, Nvidia was struggling with even a much smaller 36-GPU rack overheating.As the immense hype surrounding the release of new AI products continues to grow, the pressure is rising considerably for Nvidia.Customers have already been hit withdelays of the new Blackwell chips the latest development likely won't sit well with him either.More on AI computing power: AI Expert Warns Crash Is Imminent As AI Improvements Hit Brick WallShare This Article

"Our Hammer of Justice." He Said, She SaidFreshly-minted politico Elon Musk is throwing his weight behind Donald Trump's attorney general nominee amid damning allegations related to his sexual conduct.In a post on the social network he purchased and subsequently tanked, the billionaire referenced but did not namethe accusations against former Florida congressman Matt Gaetz: that he paid for sex from two young women on multiple occasions, and that one of them was 17 at the time of the first encounter (Gaetz has vehemently denied reports of his sexual misconduct for years.)"As for these accusations against him, I consider them worth less than nothing," Musk tweeted. "Under our laws, a man is considered innocent until proven guilty."That's true, of course but it seems reasonable to fully investigate the allegations before putting Gaetz, or anyone else, in charge of the Justice Department.Open and ShutMusk went on to reference, again without spelling it out, that Gaetz has been under investigation for years regarding these allegations."If AG [Eric] Garland (an unprincipled douchebag) could have secured a conviction against Gaetz, he would have, but he knew he could not," the multi-hyphenate business owner tweeted. "Case closed."That bit does seem partially true. Last February, the Department of Justice under Garland reportedly told Gaetz's attorneys that he would not be charged with any crimes related to its investigation into sex trafficking claims against him.To refer to that case as "closed," however, is likely inaccurate given that the DOJ hasn't announced any such closure.It also ignores theother investigation into Gaetz by the House Ethics Committee, which saw the two women at the heart of these allegations testifying behind closed doors earlier this year. That investigation is also, per the lack of any announcement of closure, seemingly still open as well.With an attorney for the two Gaetz accusers agitating for the House Ethics Committee to release its report on Gaetz to the public amid news that a hacker had obtained copies of the allegedly damning testimonies, no less all of Musk's attempts to sway the court of public opinion may soon be nil.Nevertheless, he insists that the Florida Republican is the right guy for the job."Gaetz will be," Musk enthused, "our Hammer of Justice."Share This Article

Banana for scale.Banana for ScaleSpaceX's latest test flight of its Starship spacecraft carried a highly unusual payload into orbit in its massive hold: a single banana.Footage showed the interior of the behemoth rocket being adorned with a single lonely piece of fruit.It also conveniently puts the size of the spacecraft to scale and it'sa hilarious choice for a "zero gravity indicator," a long-held tradition that has conventionally involved sending small stuffed toys up alongside astronauts to the International Space Station.Emergency SplashdownDuring SpaceX's fifth orbital test flight last month, the company pulled off an incredible feat, catching the booster of the world's largest and most powerful rocket ever built with a giant tower.But today's test launch didn't quite go as smoothly. Starship's Super Heavy stage successfully lifted the spacecraft into orbit, but appeared to sputter during its descent.Instead, SpaceX made a call minutes into the launch to drop the booster into the Gulf of Mexico as part of a "booster offshore divert" maneuver, instead of catching it once again.Live footage showed the massive booster successfully slow its descent, dipping gradually toward the water before erupting in a massive fireball.The Elon Musk-led company, however, remained optimistic, likely collecting plenty of data along the way."Super Heavy initiates its landing burn and softly splashes down in the Gulf of Mexico," the company wrote in an update on X-formerly-Twitter.It's still unclear why SpaceX chose to call off the tower catch today.But given the fact that SpaceX has yet again managed to launch the behemoth into orbit in one piece is an incredible feat of engineering in and of itself, highlighting just how far the space company has come.Whether the banana is still edible following Starship's landing remains to be seen.Share This Article

We're in trouble.The Sky Is FallingNew York City has declared its first drought warning since 2002, adding to the long list of portentous climate-related events afflicting the US and world more frequently, and forcefully, than ever before in recorded history.Floridians recently endured Hurricane Milton, which one meteorologist described initially as reaching the "mathematical limit of what Earth's atmosphere over this ocean water can produce." On the West side of the US, at least 28 people were killed this summer in a lethal heatwave, a byproduct of what could become the hottest year ever recorded. The last "hottest year," unsettlingly, was 2023.All that not to mention the Big Apple's new drought warning melt into a flashing sign as world leaders at the COP29 climate summit: that absent an implausibly radical reshaping of humankind's activities on Earth, things are only going to get worse.Rain or ShineNew York City's drought advisory which also impacts several New York State counties doesn't come with any mandatory restrictions, though residents are urged to conserve water.That said, a drought advisory is no small thing. It's the final step before a drought emergency, which New York last experienced in 2002. And if the weather doesn't relent, an emergency could be inevitable."The ongoing and historic lack of rainfall, both in the city and in the upstate watershed where our reservoirs are located, has become more critical," said New York City chief climate officer Rohit T. Aggarwala in a press release"Climate change caused an exceptionally warm fall, leading to our reservoir system being at only 63% capacity," added New York State Assemblymember Jenifer Rajkumar. "As New Yorkers always do in a crisis, we are coming together to face this challenge."Share This Article

"We may not live in the most likely of universes."Into the SETIverseScientists suggest that the reason why we have yet to find aliens could be that they're hiding in a parallel universe.As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team led by Durham University astrophysicist Daniele Sorini devised a new take on the Drake equation.The equation was formulated by astronomer Frank Drake in the 1960s to estimate the number of active and detectable alien civilizations in our galaxy. It takes a number of factors into consideration, including the average rate of star formation, the potential number of habitable planets, and the proportion of them that could develop intelligent life.Sorini and his team, however, suggest reframing the equation by considering the possibility of parallel universes that may be more likely to host intelligent life than our own a galaxy-brained concept that could help explain why we have yet to make first contact.Darkest TimelineSorini's team suggests that some universes would have a more optimal density of dark energy, the mysterious stuff that scientists believe is driving the accelerated expansion of the universe.Specifically, they found that a universe where the density of dark energy allows for 27 percent of ordinary matter to be turned into stars would be most likely to allow for alien life to develop. That's compared to just 23 percent in our universe, meaning our universe is at a disadvantage for developing life."Surprisingly,"Sorini said in a statement about the paper, "we found that even a significantly higher dark energy density would still be compatible with life, suggesting we may not live in the most likely of universes,"Sure, the idea that aliens are hiding out in the multiverse is preposterous on its face, like the premise to a last-ditch Marvel sequel. But Sorini and his collaborators frame it as an effort to reconcile the more exotic implications of modern physics with the search for life beyond Earth and you have to admit that, at the very least, it's a fun idea."Understanding dark energy and the impact on our universe"It will be exciting to employ the model to explore the emergence of life across different universes and see whether some fundamental questions we ask ourselves about our own universe must be reinterpreted," coauthor and Universit de Genve cosmology professor Lucas Lombriser added.More on the multiverse: Dark Matter May Be a Deformed Mirror Universe, Scientists SayShare This Article

It was meant to be.Prophecy ForetoldTwitter alternative Bluesky has skyrocketed in popularity ever since Donald Trump was reelected as US president earlier this month. Over the last week alone, its user base doubled to 15 million users,then blew past 19.5 million.The small team behind the operation is racing to keep up with the serious influx."We as a team take pride in our ability to scale quickly," CEO Jay Graber told the New York Times in an interview. "But theres always some growing pains."Interestingly, Graber was practically destined for the job. Her mother, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and moved to the United States in the 1980s, named her "Lantian" in Mandarin which literally translates to "blue sky."Bluer SkiesIn a Forbes profile last year, Graber recalled that her mother called her Lantian "because she wanted me to have boundless freedom. The opportunities she didn't have."The 33-year-old tech exec was already part of Bluesky's developer team when Parag Agrawal, who would go on to become the CEO of Twitter before getting fired by new owner Elon Musk, offered her the opportunity to lead the microblogging platform in 2021.The company, however, wasn't named after Graber. Bluesky founder Jack Dorsey, who also started Twitter, originally came up with the moniker in 2019,two years before Graber came on board.The social media landscape has gone through some tremendous changes since Graber took over the reins. Perhaps the biggest wildcard came when mercurial businessman Elon Musk acquired Twitter for a whopping $44 billion, quickly turning it into a largely unrecognizable echo chamber of hate speech and disinformation.Especially now that Musk has thrown his full weight behind president-elect Donald Trump, an unprecedented number of users are looking for new stomping grounds, including Bluesky.The exodus hit its peak the day after the presidential election, with more than 116,000 people deactivating their X accounts in the US, setting a new record.Meanwhile, Bluesky feels more vibrant than ever before.For her part, Graber has prioritized coming up with new features that actually further the interest of average users, like sorting new content using custom algorithms a far cry from X, where Musk has instructed staff to prioritize his own tweets and conservative content.Even when it comes to generative AI, Bluesky appears to be putting the interest of users first, with the company promising on Friday that it wouldn't leverage users' content to train large language models. That's a stark contrast to X, which went behind users' backs to reserve the right to use their tweets to train AI models whether they opt out or not."The state of most social platforms right now is that users are locked in and developers are locked out," Graber told the NYT. "We want to build something that makes sure users have the freedom to move and developers have the freedom to build."Share This Article

"I am profoundly disturbed."Velvet VoiceAfter discovering that his voice has been cloned by artificial intelligence, veteran documentarian David Attenborough has been moved to genteel fury.In a newBBCsegment, two near-identical clips one generated by AI, the other recorded by the twice-knighted man himself are heard promoting Attenborough's new special, "Asia."According to host Kasia Madera, the first of the two segments was an AI clone that the broadcaster's researchers found online. The actual Attenborough is less than pleased."Having spent a lifetime trying to speak what I believe to be the truth," Attenborough told the BBC in a statement, "I am profoundly disturbed to find that these days, my identity is being stolen by others and greatly object to them using it to say whatever they wish."Strangely enough, the AI Attenborough also had a response to the story."Lets set the record straight. Unless Mr. Attenborough has been moonlighting for us in secret and under an assumed name with work authorization in the United States, he is not on our payroll," the AI voice clone intoned. "I am not David Attenborough. We are both male, British voices for sure. However, I am not David Attenborough, for anyone out there who may be confused."This creepy rebuttal sounded so much like the real thing that Madera suggested the average person would be unable to tell the difference."You have to really double-take," the host said. "I wouldn't know if I didn't know."Post-TruthBeyond simply being unsettling, this faked Attenborough voice is particularly insidious because of the documentarian's societal role as one of the premier global truth-tellers of the last few generations.In an editorial forThe Guardian, columnist Zoe Wiliams suggested that such a lifelike AI rendition of a voice like Sir David's could imperil the concept of truth as we or at least, as the Brits know it."Attenborough may not be the last true embodiment of trust in a compromised world, but I row back from that assertion only because I fear it is UK-centric," she opined. "I stand by this: if you cant hear his voice and believe it, then you cant hear or believe anything.""In fake Attenborough, the scam of all scams, we have been casually mugged of modern communication," Williams concluded. Given that the knight's AI voice clone nearly tricked a BBC reporter, we have to say we agree.More on voice cloning: Before He Died, James Earl Jones Signed Paperwork to Voice Darth Vader Using AIShare This Article

"The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship."Absolute PowerDuring the discovery process in Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman, email exchanges from early in the group's history show that even early on, tensions flared over who would control the company's powerful creations.In one of these early emails submitted as evidence exhibits in the Musk vs. Altman trial, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever took him to task for his egoistic need for control and the dangers it could pose for any forthcoming human-level AI, better known as artificial general intelligence (AGI)."The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI," Sutskever wrote to Altman and Musk in September of 2017. "You stated that you dont want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, youve shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you.""As an example, you said that you needed to be CEO of the new company so that everyone will know that you are the one who is in charge," he continued, "even though you also stated that you hate being CEO and would much rather not be CEO."Under ControlNotably, the email was sent less than six months before Musk resigned from OpenAI over disagreements about how the company should raise money which is also the crux of his lawsuit against Altmanet alnow."We are concerned that as the company makes genuine progress towards AGI, you will choose to retain your absolute control of the company despite current intent to the contrary," Sutskever wrote.Similar concerns may well have inspired Sutskever to lead a briefly successful coup against Altman last year before his own apparent ouster this spring. As the rest of his scathing email to Musk shows, he had good reason for worry."The goal of OpenAI is to make the future good and to avoid an AGI dictatorship," he wrote. "You are concerned that Demis [Hassabis, the founder of Google's DeepMind AI lab] could create an AGI dictatorship. So [are] we. So it is a bad idea to create a structure where you could become a dictator if you chose to, especially given that we can create some other structure that avoids this possibility."Reading the message in hindsight especially after Sutskever's own exit and founding of a new venture promoting AGI safety is pretty chilling,especially as Musk's embrace of embrace of president-elect Donald Trump reveals a deep thirst to control how the world is run.More on Musk's control issues: Elon Musks Daughter Vivian Says Hes a "Delusional and Grubby Little Control Freak"Share This Article

Suck it, Shakespeare.Dead PoetsScientists have found that readers have a lot of trouble telling apart AI-generated and human-written poetry even works by the likes of William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson.Even more surprisingly, the researchers found that humans generally prefer the former over the latter, which could bode poorly for the role of human creativity in the age of generative AI.As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Scientific Reports, University of Pittsburgh researchers Brian Porter and Edouard Machery conducted two experiments involving "non-expert poetry readers."They found that "participants performed below chance levels in identifying AI-generated poems. Notably, participants were more likely to judge AI-generated poems as human-authored than actual human-authored poems."AI-generated poems got higher scores from participants in qualities including rhythm and beauty, something that appeared to lead them astray in picking out which poem was the product of a language model and which was the creative output of a human artist.The team believes their difficulties may be due to the "simplicity of AI-generated poems" that "may be easier for non-experts to understand."In simple terms, AI-generated poetry is appealingly straightforward, and less convoluted, for the palate of the average Joe.Doing LinesIn their first experiment, participants were shown ten poems in a random order. Five were from renowned wordsmiths, including William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot. The other five were generated by OpenAI's already out-of-date GPT 3.5 large language model, which was tasked to imitate the style of the aforementioned poets.In a second experiment, participants were told to rate the poems based on 14 different characteristics including quality, emotion, rhythm, and ironically, perhaps originality. The participants were split into three groups who were then told that the poems were AI-generated, human-written, or given no information about their origin.Interestingly, the group told that the poems were AI-generated tended to give the poems a lower score than those who were told that the poems were human-written.And the third group, who received no information about the poems' origins, actually favored the AI-generated poems over the human-written ones."Contrary to what earlier studies reported, people now appear unable to reliably distinguish human-out-of-the-loop AI-generated poetry from human-authored poetry written by well-known poets," the two researchers concluded in their paper."In fact, the 'more human than human' phenomenon discovered in other domains of generative AI is also present in the domain of poetry: non-expert participants are more likely to judge an AI-generated poem to be human-authored than a poem that actually is human-authored," they wrote.More on generative AI: The Wall Street Journal Is Testing AI-Generated Summaries of Its ArticlesShare This Article

Bless them.Vroom VroomThe scientists who taught rats to drive itty bitty cars are back at it again and this time, they have even more insights about how much these rodents enjoy their unusual pastime.In an essay forThe Conversation, University of Richmond neuroscientist Kelly Lambert said that over the course of her experiments teaching rats how to drive, she and her colleagues learned a lot about rewards and anticipation.Lambert and her team have for years now been teaching lab rats how to drive as a way of studying the relationship between animal environments, stress, and the development of cognition and new skills. The adorable experiments went so viral, they ended up in a 2022 Netflix documentary but according to Lambert, that's not the whole story.During the bleak and lonely period marked by COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, the neuroscientist said that even her driving lab rats seemed to be experiencing emotional isolation. That summer, she recalled, she walked into her lab and "noticed something unusual.""The three driving-trained rats eagerly ran to the side of the cage," Lambert explained, "jumping up like my dog does when asked if he wants to take a walk.""Had the rats always done this and I just hadnt noticed? Were they just eager for a Froot Loop, or anticipating the drive itself?" she queried. "Whatever the case, they appeared to be feeling something positive perhaps excitement and anticipation."White MercedesWhile rats would never encounter such "rodent-operated vehicles" in the wild, the ones in Lambert's lab didn't just take to the training itself they actually seemed to be really into it."Unexpectedly, we found that the rats had an intense motivation for their driving training, often jumping into the car and revving the 'lever engine' before their vehicle hit the road," she wrote. "Why was that?"Beyond simply enjoying their fruity cereal rewards, Lambert and her team hypothesized that anticipation could be as positive an experience as the prize itself.The rats trained to wait for positive experiences seemed to have better cognition than their instantly-gratified counterparts in the control group, and when offered the choice between a shorter path to a Fruit Loop via walking or a longer path involving driving the vehicles, two of three of the lab rodents chose to drive suggesting, Lambert wrote, that they "enjoy both the journey and the rewarding destination."There's a lesson in these experiments for humans, the neuroscientist concluded: that waiting for positive and pleasurable experiences may end up being as gratifying as the experience itself."Rather than pushing buttons for instant rewards," she described, "they remind us that planning, anticipating and enjoying the ride may be key to a healthy brain. "More on rats: Rodents May Have a "Jedi" Trick to Supercharge Their Sense of SmellShare This Article

What could go wrong?Gun BotsUS Defense Department contractor Allen Control Systems (ACS) has developed an artificial intelligence-powered autonomous robotic gun system called the "Bullfrog," which can target small drones using proprietary computer vision software.As Wired reports, the Defense Department tested out the system during the Technology Readiness Experimentation event earlier this year, which allows contractors like ACS to showcase their prototype technologies to the Pentagon.Recent footage shows the vehicle-mounted gun shooting small drones out of the sky with ease.And that kind of capability is more relevant than ever as small, uncrewed aircraft are becoming increasingly common on the battlefield."During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we saw the proliferation of drones on both sides of the conflict, and we read in various news outlets the Ukrainians were firing AK-47s in the air at them," ACS cofounder and CEO Steve Simoni told Wired. "We thought, Thats a good robotics problem. It's hard to hit something flying so fast, but a robot can do that with modern-day computer vision and AI control algorithms."Computer KillAccording to Simoni, the goal was to remove humans from the equation entirely, particularly considering how fast these uncrewed drones can fly."We are electrical engineers, and we decided that in order to solve this problem of hitting a fast drone that's accelerating at five Gs at a couple hundred yards, you would need an incredibly high-end current that goes through a motor and encoders that know the position of your gun at all times," he told Wired. "To put that form factor in the hands of someone with an M4 seemed like a very tough problem."ACS' Bullfrog system is part of a much larger trend. The US military is dabbling in a whole range of remotely controlled and semi-autonomous weapons systems to shoot adversary drones out of the sky. Earlier this year, for instance, the US Army started experimenting with rifle-equipped robot dogs at a testing facility in the Middle East.The contractor claims the Bullfrog is incredibly cheap to use, especially compared to far more complicated and expensive laser or microwave weapons systems.So far, humans are still required to give the Bullfrog the green light before it can open fire. That's because there are strict policies when it comes to the use of lethal autonomous weapons.However, ACS is keen to reassure the military that it's technically capable of fully autonomous operation."Our system is fully autonomous-capable, were just waiting for the government to determine its needs," ACSs chief strategy officer Brice Cooper told Wired.But when or if those needs will change remains to be seen. Plenty of thorny ethical questions remain surrounding the use of such autonomous weapons."Anything with robotics requires software to make the determination of friend or foe, and that's a concern with anything that's automated," former congressional defense appropriator Mike Clementi told Wired. "The use of fully automated systems would be uncharted territory. There's always been a person in the loop before."More on AI and guns: The US Army Is Testing Killer Robot Dogs With AIShare This Article

Bad to WorseNov 17, 8:30 AM EST/byNoor Al-SibaiAs 23andMe Crumbles, It Ceases All Efforts to Develop Drugs Using DNA Data"We continue to believe in the promise shown by our clinical and preclinical stage pipeline."Nov 17, 8:30 AM EST/Noor Al-SibaiImage by Getty ImagesGeneticsIn the year since its devastating hack, 23andMe has lost virtually all its stock value and most of its governing board and somehow, things just keep getting worse for the one-time DNA kit wunderkind.As CEO Anne Wojcicki announced in a press release, 23andMe is not only laying off 40 percent of its remaining workforce about 200 employees total but also completely kiboshing its therapeutics program that was seeking to use AI and the company's hoard of genetic information to develop new drugs."We are taking these difficult but necessary actions as we restructure 23andMe," the CEO said, "and focus on the long-term success of our core consumer business and research partnerships."As is her nature, Wojciki put an optimistic spin on the news that her company is crumbling even worse than before."We continue to believe in the promise shown by our clinical and preclinical stage pipeline and will continue to pursue strategic opportunities to continue their development," she said. These "strategic opportunities" may include, per the announcement, licensing or selling the drugs its therapeutics arm has discovered or is developing.Just a day after the restructuring news dropped, 23andMe also announced in its latest quarterly earnings report that its revenue was down to $44 million in the second quarter of 2024, from $50 million over the same period last year. During its latest filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company noted that without significant capital, there is "substantial doubt" it can stay afloat.Despite her tendency towards spin, Wojcicki seemed sober when recounting the company's financial difficulties in an investor call this week that referenced the board's abrupt resignation earlier this year, which led to the company's near-delisting by the NASDAQ, and the subsequent stock-split scheme last month that saved it from going under entirely."We have fulfilled our obligations as a public company and regained compliance with the NASDAQ listing standards by reconstituting our board and executing a reverse stock split," the CEO said, perCNBC.It's a sorry state of affairs for the company that was valued at $3.5 billion when it went public in 2021 and unless someone with a lot of money wants to throw some of it into the fire, it's hard to imagine a happy ending now.More on DNA kits: Fun New Mouth Swab Will Tell You When Youll DieShare This ArticleImage by Getty ImagesRead This Next

Image by Getty / FuturismCancerUpon learning she had a breast cancer tumor, a Croatian virologist decided to grow her own viruses to fight the disease a radical departure from medical norms that appears to have worked.As the journalNature reports, the risky self-treatment gambit undertaken by the University of Zagreb's Beata Halassy has sparked a mix of controversy and admiration among her peers.After learning in 2020 that she'd had a third recurrence of breast cancer following a mastectomy, Halassy researched oncolytic virotherapy (OVT), which as the name suggests uses viruses to fight disease by provoking immune responses. While it's far from unprecedented and has been approved for early-stage metastatic melanoma, there are no government-approved OVT treatments anywhere in the world for breast cancer which made the entire experiment dubious for Halassy, her doctors and colleagues, and the academic journal that ultimately let her tell her story.The virologist had a colleague administer a mix of measles typically used in childhood vaccines and a vesicular stomatitis virus, both of which had been known to infect the cell type she was seeking to destroy and provoke the kind of immune response she needed. As the two-month trial progressed, the tumor shrank and detached from her muscles and skin, which made it easier to remove with surgery. When it was biopsied after removal, Halassy and her colleagues discovered that their gamble had paid off."An immune response was, for sure, elicited," the virologist said.This all took place back in 2020, meaning Halassy has now been cancer-free for four years now but when it came to sharing her results with the world, she had difficulty.After penning paper proposals about her experience and submitting them to journals, the researcher was met again and again with rejection. Most editors wouldn't touch it, she notes, because they were concerned about the ethics of self-experimentation and in particular, were worried others less knowledgeable may try to do something similar with catastrophic results.Indeed, law and medicine researcher Jacob Sherkow of the University of Illinois-Champaign who was not involved in Halassy's paper told Nature thatjournals have to toe the line between highlighting the knowledge gained from controversial self-experiments without promoting them as first-case course of action.As a specialist who studied self-experimentation methods during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sherkow said that he thinks Halassy's study "does fall within the line of being ethical, but it isn't a slam-dunk case."Ultimately, Halassy's paper did find a home in the journalVaccines, which published her "unconventional case study," as its title notes, this past August.Despite her publication difficulties, the virologist is proud of her experiment and people who brought it to publication."It took a brave editor to publish the report," Halassy toldNature.More on next-gen cancer treatments: Groundbreaking Ovarian Cancer Vaccine at an "Exciting" Moment, Lead Scientist SaysShare This Article

"Usually it's got a sheen."Taper ExpectationsMost of us are probably guilty of having unrealistic expectations for how our haircuts should look. Showing your barber a photo of David Beckham, sadly, does not mean you will strut out the shop looking like the iconic soccer champion.That being said, bringing a photo of a real human to your hairappointment is definitely more practical than what some people are turning to now, according to stylists: AI-generated images.Dean Allan, the owner of a beauty salon in Edmonton, Alberta tells the CBC that it's becoming more and more common for clients to instead show him an image generated by a machine learning model."Usually it's got a sheen," Allan told the broadcaster. "It's thicker than the average person's hair."Cut BelowThe saving grace, Allan said, is that most people are still able to tell that the photos aren't real,at least for now.But "I think they're just gonna get better," he told the CBC.The expectations they create, nonetheless, can be very unrealistic in every sense.With the ultimate goal of spitting out algorithmically perfect-looking images, AI image models make little distinction between fact and fiction, so what you'd see produced by one may not be representative of human anatomy. Expecting anime-perfect hair to complement model-perfect facial structure, simply put, is setting yourself up for disappointment.In the face of this trend, Allan said that barbers should be upfront with customers about their expectations."As a hairstylist, you have to stand your ground," he said, perthe CBC. "And if you do not feel comfortable trying to achieve what that client wants, then you need to step back and say 'you're not going to be happy with what I produce.'"Misleading MirrorThis may seem relatively inconsequential compared to all the horrors that AI models could and already do cause, but bear in mind we're just seeing the beginning of the trend.It's not uncommon for people to use popular AI-powered apps like FaceApp and Facetune to try out different haircuts. On the web, there are multiple AI tools that purport to do the same thing (just look up "AI hair" in a search engine to see for yourself.)More broadly in the beauty world, companies like Google and Walmart already offer AI features that allow you to virtually try on clothes. While these are undoubtedly convenient tools for some, AI models have been criticized for perpetuating unrealistic beauty standards, so for others, they may be a source of self-torment.To that, Allan has some advice."I would just really honestly say to anyone who is a hairstylist or is going to use any kind of hair inspo whether it is AI generated or not it's hair inspiration... that's all it is."Share This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismStudiesScientists looked into the efficacy of an app that claims to help people lucid dream and foundit was a runaway success.Published in the journalConsciousness and Cognition, this study out of Northwestern University seems to demonstrate that so-called "Targeted Lucidity Reactivation" (TLR) can help people remember their dreams, and even propel them into a fascinating dive into the subconscious.The app involves training people to associate a specific sound, such as a tone or melody, with the awareness of dreaming. That sound is then played while subjects are asleep, tipping them off that they're not in the waking world helping them enter the state of lucid dreaming.In a two-part study, Northwestern psychology researchers first recruited participants 19 in the first phase, and 416 in the second who historically remembered their dreams upon waking.Using a specialized Android smartphone app, the participants in the first phase completed one week of TLR training that consisted of 20-minute sessions in which they were instructed to associate the sound, which was either a sequence of beeps or a violin note, with lucid dreaming.After participants fell asleep, the app would stay on and play these sound cues on a six-hour delay softly, so as not to wake the dreamers. In the morning, study subjects were asked to write down any dreams they remembered, and whether they were lucid or the sound was merely incorporated into the dream's narrative.Second-phase participants had a similar training protocol, with some variation in the post-sleep execution: some would get the cues they were trained on, while others would get unrelated sounds or no cues at all.In both phases, participants who received the sound cues on which they were trained reported the highest frequency of lucid dreaming. In the first phase, subjects reported an average of 2.11 lucid dreams during the training week compared to 0.74 before a nearly three-fold increase.AsPsyPost notes, this experiment appears to be the first to take lucid dreaming research out of a sleep laboratory setting and into the hands of the public.By the way, for those wondering, you can try out the app here.In an interview with PsyPost, study author and Northwestern postdoctoral student Karen Konkoly gushed that these findings could help bring lucid dreaming to the masses."Since weve been developing more effective ways to induce lucid dreams in the sleep laboratory," Konkoly said, "we wanted to take a step towards making these advances available for individuals to use on their own."More on dream research: Startup Claims It's Achieved Communication Between Two People Who Were Both DreamingShare This Article

Thanks, Grandma.Grandma DesignUK telecom company Virgin Media O2 just revealed a fascinating AI entity: an audio chatbot that takes the persona of a confused grandmother, fine-tuned to do nothing except make phone scammers angry."As 'Head of Scammer Relations,' this state-of-the-art AI Granny's mission is to talk with fraudsters and waste as much of their time as possible with human-like rambling," Virgin Media wrote of the bot. "Created using a range of cutting-edge AI technology and trained with the help of one of YouTubes best known scambaiters, Jim Browning, Daisy is a lifelike AI Granny completely indistinguishable from a real person."Daisy seems like the rare noble application of AI chatbots, which have more often been used to perpetrate scams than fight them a clever reversal that just might help the vulnerable people, including flesh-and-blood grandmothers, on whom scammers tend to prey.Phone ProneTo keep scammers occupied, Daisy to which the company says it automatically connects likely scam callers deploys confusing digressions about her family and love of knitting. When pressed for bank information, she'll provide scammers with random numbers.She's kept scammers on the line for as long as 40 minutes, O2 says."By tricking the criminals into thinking they were defrauding a real person and playing on scammers' biases about older people, Daisy has prevented them from targeting real victims," read the Virgin blog."But crucially, Daisy is also a reminder that no matter how persuasive someone on the other end of the phone may be, they aren't always who you think they are," Virgin fraud director Murray Mackenzie added.Share This Article

Wait, what?Shadow and BoneA team of scientists has found that the narrow beam of a laser, under specific conditions, can cast a shadow a counterintuitive finding that could open the doors for new applications of optical lasers.Conventional knowledge presupposes that if two light beams cross, nothing of note happens. But in an experiment, as detailed in a new paper published in the journal Optica, Brookhaven National Laboratory researcher Raphael Abrahao and his team found something strange: a narrow green laser beam, when shot through a larger blue laser beam inside of a ruby crystal, created a shadow."Laser light casting a shadow was previously thought impossible since light usually passes through other light without interacting," said Abrahao in a statement. "Our demonstration of a very counter-intuitive optical effect invites us to reconsider our notion of shadow."Throwing ShadeThe concept for the experiment started because of a joke the researchers shared over a meal together."What started as a funny discussion over lunch led to a conversation on the physics of lasers and the nonlinear optical response of materials," Abrahao explained. "From there, we decided to conduct an experiment to demonstrate the shadow of a laser beam."First, the team shot a high-power green laser through a cube-shaped ruby crystal. They then shot a different blue laser through the same material at a perpendicular angle.Lo and behold, readings from a sensor pointed at the surface the blue laser was illuminating revealed a shadow in the shape of the green laser beam.In simple terms, the green laser acted more like an object, not a beam of light, creating what by all accounts could be described as a shadow.The researchers suggest this is because of "optical nonlinear absorption" occurring inside of the ruby cube. The green light increases the absorption of the blue beam, creating a darker region that casts the shadow.The researchers measured a maximum contrast of around 22 percent, roughly the equivalent of a shadow a tree casts on a sunny day."This discovery expands our understanding of light-matter interactions and opens up new possibilities for utilizing light in ways we hadnt considered before," Abrahao explained."This new finding could prove useful in various applications such as optical switching, devices in which light controls the presence of another light, or technologies that require precise control of light transmission, like high-power lasers," he added.The team is now hoping to demonstrate how a laser beam's intensity can be controlled with the use of another laser, and to explore whether the same effect can be reproduced using other wavelengths and materials.More on lasers: NASA Spacecraft Shoots Japanese Moon Lander With LaserShare This Article

Holo ThereNov 16, 12:00 PM EST/byFrank LandymoreRural Hospital Installs Holograph Machine So Doctors Can Appear From Elsewhere"I can see the three dimensions of the anesthesiologist's head, legs, and torso in lifelike detail."Nov 16, 12:00 PM EST/Frank LandymoreImage by HoloboxDevelopmentsDoctor out of town? No problem they can be beamed in as a 3D image.Crescent Regional Hospital outside Dallas, Texas, has become the first in the country to offer doctor appointmentswith a holographic machine, allowing overworked medical specialists, who often have to visit multiple medical centers in a week and sometimes even a day, to see more patients.It also comes with the added bonus of turning your typically dreary telehealth visit into something a bit more lifelike and personable though of course, there's no beating the real thing."I can see the three dimensions of the anesthesiologist's head, legs, and torso in lifelike detail," wrote journalist Mark Dent of his holographic doctor experience in an article for Texas Monthly magazine. "Only the background a white void reveals she's not with us."The holographic device is called a Holobox, designed by the Netherlands startup Holoconnect. With the stature of an oversized vending machine, the Holobox more or less functions as an enormous booth that can display a life-sized image of a physician or anyone else calling in.The holographs are created using a transparent LCD screen, which is practically invisible, housed behind a layer of anti-glare glass. As such, the images aren't being projected into 3D space, but instead create the illusion of three-dimensionality.It's not quite "Star Wars," but the effect is apparently compelling. Dr. Olayinka Adepitan, the anesthesiologist interviewed by Texas Monthly, called the tech a "game changer." She found that patients were more attentive during her Holobox call-ins than during typical telehealth visits (like over Zoom)."The longer we talk, the more I forget that in reality Adepitan is at a clinic in Farmers Branch, about thirty miles north," Dent wrote.As the first hospital to deploy the technology this way, Crescent is currently using the Holobox for pre-surgery and post-surgery consultations. Adepitan told Texas Monthly that it allows her to discharge patients sooner than if she had to wait to drive to the county, a trip she's only scheduled to make twice a week.Thanks to the tech, Adepitan simply reports to the nearby medical center she normally works at, and sits in front of a camera and white screen to beam herself in remotely. She views patients through a TV monitor, while a local nurse does the work of physically examining the patient.As Texas Monthly notes, rural areas across the country are chronically short-staffed of medical professionals. Rural Texas has suffered dozens of hospital closures in the past decade. Among doctors, there is enthusiasm for telehealth, tech-inflected or otherwise, as one way of relieving the shortage but some stress that it's not the be-all and end-all."We see telehealth as a very important innovation for rural communities," John Henderson, CEO of Texas Organization of Rural and Community Hospitals, told Texas Monthly. "We do not see it as a silver bullet."It's also not cheap. The Holobox costs Crescent hospital $65,000 upfront, on top of $1,200 a month in maintenance. But the hospital's CEO Raji Kumar, who pushed for the tech, argues that offering holographic appointments may be a way for struggling rural hospitals to retain patients and therefore make money who may forego a local medical center since it can't attract top specialists.More on medical tech: Neuralink Competitor Restores Vision in Blind Patients With Eye ImplantShare This ArticleImage by HoloboxRead This Next

This career casualty is nothing compared to Neom's death toll. Natural SelectionThe head of the world's largest and most ambitious construction project has stepped down amid jaw-dropping claims about its death toll.As the Wall Street Journal reports, Nadhmi al-Nasr, the CEO of Saudi Arabia's futuristic city project Neom which includes The Line, a plannedpair ofskycrapers that would be 100 milesin length has abruptly departed the role he's held since 2018. This exit comes after a newChannel 3 documentary alleged that more than 21,000 foreign workers had died during its construction, a figure that doesn't even seem to include the number of indigenous people displaced and disappeared during Neom's construction.Sources familiar with the executive shakeup confirmed to the newspaper that he had left the position in recent days, though it remains unclear why exactly the Neom CEO left and whether it had to do with the recent allegations.In an email viewed by theWSJ, Neom's board named Aiman al-Mudaifer, a real estate executive with the Saudi kingdom's Public Investment Fund, as al-Nasr's successor. In that email, Neom's governing body said the move was a "strategic decision of the Board and a natural evolution."Behind BudgetWhile the specter of all those deaths hangs over the project, insiders who spoke to the WSJ said that the Public Investment Fund is now stepping in to take over after repeated delays and ballooning budgets on the project that seems very difficult to execute.An experienced builder, al-Nasr oversaw the construction of both a giant oil field for the kingdom's Aramco oil company and a university complex jutting up against the Red Sea.But the mind-boggling planned scope of Neom which beyond the 100-mile skyscrapers are also slated to include a soccer stadium for the kingdom's 2026 World Cup bid, a ski resort in the desert, and a floating business district is far beyond anything on the ex-CEO's rsum.As the newspaper's sources note, two of Neom's other top executives, a pair of Westerners who were the subjects of a WSJ corruption expos earlier this year, have also left their positions in recent months. Viewed together, these departures suggest the Saudis are cleaning house and that the people who died to get there may matter less than the kingdom's bottom line.More on Saudi Arabia: More Than 1,300 Muslim Pilgrims Die From Extreme HeatShare This Article

"The Russians believe that continued operations are safe but they cant prove to our satisfaction that they are."Take a LeakIn September, NASA's inspector general warned in a report that new cracks and leaks affecting the Russian segment of the aging International Space Station continued to be a "top safety risk."The leaks, which have plagued a module connecting the segment's docking port to its service module, have been around for years, as SpaceNews reports, forcing astronauts to keep the module's hatch closed most of the time.And while former astronaut and head of NASA's ISS Advisory Committee Bob Cabana said the leaks are leading to the "possibility of a catastrophic failure" during a recent meeting, as quoted by SpaceNews, Russia's counterparts have continued to downplay the severity of the situation."The Russians believe that continued operations are safe but they cant prove to our satisfaction that they are, and the US believes that its not safe but we cant prove to the Russians satisfaction that thats the case," Cabana said during the meeting.[not seeing anything recent]Hole MilkRoscosmos and NASA also disagreed on the possible cause of the ongoing leaks. Cabana revealed that Russian engineers have pointed to "high cyclic fatigue" caused by micro-vibrations. NASA, however, believes it's more complicated than that, with mechanical stresses, among other factors, slowly degrading the module's material.While Cabana continues to stress the severity of the situation, other NASA officials told the Washington Post last month that the leaks aren't a huge deal."Roscosmos has applied sealant to many of these areas of interest which has further reduced the leak rate," NASA spokesperson Kathryn Hambleton told WaPo at the time.Meanwhile, Roscosmos identified a whopping 50 "areas of concern," according to Hambleton, underlining the scope of the issue.In short, regardless of the disagreement over the leaks' cause or severity, it's yet another sign that the space station, which has been continuously occupied for just over 24 years, is seriously starting to show its age."The station is not young," said NASA astronaut Michael Barratt, who returned to Earth from the station last month, during a briefing last week, as quoted by SpaceNews. "Its been up there for quite a while. You expect some wear and tear, and were seeing that."Share This Article

They do not want those DMs made public. Don't SpeakIn one of the many copyright lawsuits it's facing, OpenAI is asking a judge to narrow the scope of discovery to limit insider communications from being aired in public.This latest forte in OpenAI's defense against the Authors Guild,which is alleging on behalf of writers including George R.R. Martin and John Grisham that the company used its members' copyrighted works without permission to train its AI models, shows that the firm really doesn't want its top researchers' documents making the rounds.The Guild recently requested that OpenAI submit extensive documents including text messages and social media DMs not only for the 24 initial "custodians" or insiders who are thought to have relevant pre-trial discovery information, but for eight additional figures as well, includingOpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever and researcher Jan Lieke, both of whom left OpenAI this year.Leaky ShipWhile this counter-suit doesn't seem to be specifically about inside baseball at OpenAI, recent news involving Sutskever highlights why the company may not want its former and current executives' communications leaked.Earlier this week, the sidelined cofounder toldReuters that the abilities of OpenAI's advanced large language models (LLMs) seem to be plateauing as the company seeks more and more training data and computing resources.Sutskever was, notably, the leading proponent of the briefly successful attempt to oust CEO Sam Altman last Thanksgiving, and spent half a year in limbo before ultimately leaving the firm and starting his own venture pursuing safe artificial general intelligence (AGI).Should his texts and DMs come out, even if just regarding copyrighted work, there could be some very embarrassing details in there which could be at least part of whyOpenAI is trying to make sure they never see the light of day.More on OpenAI: OpenAI Buys Porn Domain for Huge SumShare This Article

Image by Jabin Botsford / The Washington Post via GettyRx/MedicinesThere are plenty of reasons to be skeptical about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Donald Trump's newly mintedsecretary of Health and Human Services.But a particularly concrete example might be that helobbied against vaccination in the Polynesian island nation of Samoa prior to a deadly uptick in measles that killed dozens of children there.Kennedy claimed in the 2023 documentary Shot in the Arm that he "had nothing to do with people not vaccinating in Samoa" while visiting the Polynesian islands in 2019. However, that Kennedy and the anti-vaccination nonprofit he founded, Children's Health Defense, actually encouraged misinformation around vaccinations during a 2019 trip, just months before the ravaging outbreak and which helped influence the decrease in measles vaccinations that precipitated it.Ultimately, the 83 deaths that measles caused in Samoa is an unfixable tragedy, and to say the least it doesn't bode particularly well for Kennedy's influence on health policy here in the US. But RFK seems undisturbed by the fact that he helped induce a public health crisis.In some ways, that disastrous rsum puts the Kennedy scion squarely in line with Trump's public health legacy. After all, Trump ruled over the devastating COVID-19 pandemic about as thoughtfully as a cat dropping a beheaded mouse on a pillow.Trump publicly railed against the level-headedformer White House chief medical advisor Dr. Anthony Fauci, dismissing him as "a disaster." And instead of upholding Fauci's science-backed advice, Trump preferred to baselessly promote the anti-parasitic hydroxychloroquine, which is now associated with higher death rates among COVID-19 patients, and publicly muse about injecting patients with bleach.There's a strange side note, but it's worth mentioning: one of Trump's smarter moves during the early pandemic was to pour funding into developing a COVID vaccine, in an initiative known as Operation Warp Speed that's been broadly hailed as a success.The only problem? Trump quickly realized that his base hates the idea of vaccines, so he stopped talking about it on the campaign trail and regressed back into his more traditional fearmongering on the topic.In other words, Kennedy who once proudly proclaimed that a worm had eaten chunks of his brain, and that's without getting into the weird animal stuff should feel protected by Trump's conspiracy-soaked White House. Whether Americans should feel the same is a different matter entirely.More on Robert F. Kennedy: RFK Jr. Gloats About Plan to Gut FDA Under TrumpShare This Article

The budding bromance between SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and president-elect Donald Trump could have massive implications for the United States' space program assuming the volatile pair don't flame out, as both have repeatedly done with other allies.That's especially true when factoring in NASA's current strategy of relying on the private space industry for initiatives ranging from getting to the surface of the Moon to building a space station in Earth's orbit.As Durham University astropolitics associate professor Bleddyn Bowen argues in an essay for The Conversation, the unusual pair-up between the new president and the richest man in the world could see the US doubling down on its existing private industry-led space policy, while potentially supercharging an emerging arms race in the Earth's orbit.In some ways, the Trump administration could simply continue where it left off four years ago, with an emphasis on the Artemis Moon landing program, which has continued under the current Biden administration.But the inclusion of Musk in Trump's inner circle this time around could also shake up NASA's priorities.As SpacePolicyOnline editor Marcia Smith recently noted, the US may double down on human spaceflight efforts, an endeavor long championed by his new right-hand man. Don't forget that during his first term, Trump offered the head of NASA unlimited funding if the agency could get to Mars during his presidency."For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon We did that 50 years ago," Trump tweeted in 2019. "They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!"This is all still hypothetical. After all, Trump didn't appoint Musk as the country's space policy czar instead, the richest man in the world has been put in charge of a still-fictional "Department of Government Efficiency," which will allegedly be tasked with "dismantling government bureaucracy" and slashing "excess regulations."That role could facilitate Musk's hunger to break down environmental rules that were put in place, for instance, to protect wildlife inhabiting the region surrounding his space company's so-called "Starbase" facilities in South Texas.At the same time, especially given Trump's ongoing denial of climate change, other government agencies such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) or NASA's Earth Sciences Division could face major budget cuts, Smith argued.And don't forget thatNASA was already severely underfunded under the Biden administration, with Congress balking at the space agency's ballooning budgetary demands. Just this week, NASA's iconic Jet Propulsion Lab in California announced it would be laying off an additional 325 employees.Where a GOP-led Congress will leave NASA's financial situation remains to be seen. As Smith points out, around half of its budget is currently allocated to its human spaceflight program.The new administration could also majorly shake up the National Space Council, which is by law overseen by the Vice President. As Bowen points out, vice president Kamala Harris formalized a ban on anti-satellite weapons tests in 2022, something that could be revoked under vice president-elect JD Vance.As far as we can tell, Vance has no background in space whatsoever, making his control over the council a big question mark.On an international level, Trump's saber-rattling "America First" approach could greatly deteriorate foreign relations, especially when it comes to space.However, alienating the international space community could have devastating effects on the country's efforts to establish dominance in space."I think were just going to wait and see how that plays out," former US Space Command deputy commander John Shaw said during a recent episode the Space Foundation podcast, as quoted by SpaceNews. "Its hard to do things on your own in space, because were all in there together. It would be like trying to do air traffic control all by yourself."More on space policy: It Sounds Like NASA's Moon Rocket Might Be Getting CanceledShare This Article

Image by Chip Somodevilla via GettyA political scion who bragged about having a brain worm yes, we are horribly serious about that is slated to become the United States' next secretary of Health and Human Services.AsPoliticoreports, president-elect Donald Trump is expected to select former opponent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, an apparent back-scratching situation after the onetime candidate dropped out, bent the knee, and endorsed the real estate mogul earlier this year.Indeed, Trump said during an October campaign rally that he promised the anti-vaxxer Masshole he could "go wild" as head of the department overseeing food and medicines an alarming proposal the former president seems likely to follow through on now that he's putting together his second cabinet.Beyond being a dedicated "vaccine skeptic," exposs about Kennedy's many bizarre misadventures that emerged during his failed fringe candidacy have shown time and again that this may be the very last man who should be overseeing the nation's sprawling healthcare apparatus.Earlier this year, theNew York Times revealed via documents from the HHS hopeful's divorce proceedings that he not only ate enough fish to give himself mercury poisoning, but also claimed a neurologist told him a dark spot on his brain scans likely came from a "worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died."During the 2012 deposition, Kennedy who speaks with a bit of an impediment due to his neurological issues admitted that he "clearly" has "cognitive problems." Nevertheless, his campaign insisted at the time that he was in good health despite his attested brain fog, mercury poisoning, and brain worms.Incredibly, Kennedy's eccentricities don't end there.AsFuturism recounted earlier this election season, the political failson is at the center of a number of bizarre stories involving animals, including his own braggadocious story about dumping the carcass of a spoiling baby bear cub in Manhattan's Central Park and a similarly queasy incident involving a dead whale.Those two anecdotes don't even begin to cover Kennedy's credibility issues, which also include at least one sexual assault allegation from a former babysitter for his family and a more recent consensual affair with a much younger journalist but given that there are similar allegations about the president-elect as well, those may unfortunately end up being less salient than the decomposing bear and the brain worms.Somehow, RFK Jr isn't the least unhealthy person being considered for the notoriously germophobic president-elect's cabinet. That distinction goes to Fox News host and reported Department of Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth, who claims he hasn't washed his hands in over a decade.More on freaky political tidings: MAGA Fans Seem to Think AI Videos of Barron Trump Singing Patriotic Songs Are Totally RealShare This Article

"The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit."Cooling OffOpenAI's next large language model may not be as powerful as many hoped.Code-named Orion, the AI model is sorely underperforming behind the scenes, Bloomberg reports, showing less improvement over its predecessor than GPT-4 did over GPT-3. A similar report from The Information this week indicated that some OpenAI researchers believed that in certain areas like coding, there were no improvements at all.And according to Bloomberg, OpenAI isn't the only AI outfit struggling with diminishing returns. Google's next iteration of its Gemini model is also falling short of internal expectations, while the timeline for Anthropic's release of its much hyped Claude 3.5 Opus is up in the air.These industry-wide struggles may be a sign that the current paradigm of improving AI models via what's known as "scaling" is hitting a brick wall, portending potential economic woes in the future if AI models remain costly to develop without achieving significant leaps in performance towards building an artificial general intelligence."The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit," Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI startup Hugging Face, told Bloomberg, adding that "different training approaches" may be needed to approach anything like human levels of intelligence and versatility.Gluttonous TechThe ethos that has yielded gains in generative AI so far has been scaling: to make generative AI models more powerful, the primary way to achieve this is by making them bigger. That means adding more processing power AI chips, like from Nvidia and injecting more training data, which has largely been scraped from the web withlittle cost.But as these models get larger and more powerful, they also get hungrier. All that energy isn't cheap Microsoft is looking to reboot entire nuclear power plants to support its AI data centers, for example and free training data is drying up. To obtain new brain food for their AIs, tech companies are using synthetic, computer -generated data. Yet, they still "struggle to get unique, high-quality datasets without human guidance, especially when it comes to language," Lila Tretikov, head of AI strategy at New Enterprise associates, told Bloomberg.And so, to give an idea of all those expenses: in a podcast episode quoted by Bloomberg, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said that a cutting-edge AI model currently costs around $100 million to build, and estimated that by 2027, they could cost well over $10 billion apiece.Best Days BehindThis year, Anthropic updated its Claude models, but notably snubbed Opus, while references to a near-future release date for it have been scrubbed from its website. Like with OpenAI, researchers at the company reportedly observed only marginal improvements with Opus considering its size and how much it cost to build and run, according to a Bloomberg source.Similarly, Google's Gemini software is falling short of its goals, per Bloomberg, and the company has released few major improvements to its large language model in the meantime.These aren't insurmountable challenges, to be clear. But it's increasingly sounding like the AI industry may not enjoy the same pace ofadvancements as it has in the past decade."We got very excited for a brief period of very fast progress," Noah Giansiracusa, an associate professor of mathematics at Bentley University in Massachusetts, toldBloomberg. "That just wasn't sustainable."Share This Article

"The economics are likely to be grim."Crash and BurnThe scales are falling from the eyes of the tech industry right now, as generative AI models are reportedly hitting a technological brick wall.As some experts have long predicted would happen, improvements that once came easily by simply scaling up large language models in other words, by adding more parameters, training data, and processing power are now slowing down, and that's if they're yielding any significant gains at all.Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and AI skeptic, is warning that once everyone wises up to these shortcomings, the entire industry could crash."The economics are likely to be grim," Marcus wrote on his Substack. "Sky high valuation of companies like OpenAI and Microsoft are largely based on the notion that LLMs will, with continued scaling, become artificial general intelligence.""As I have always warned," he added, "that's just a fantasy."Diminishing ReturnsThe canary in the coal mine came when The Information reported this week that behind the scenes, OpenAI researchers discovered that its upcoming flagship model, code-named Orion, demonstrated noticeably less improvement over its predecessor GPT-4, than GPT-4 did over GPT-3.In areas like coding a major appeal for these LLMs there may even be no improvements at all.This is echoed elsewhere in the industry. Ilya Sutskever, founder of the startup Safe Superintelligence and co-founder and former chief science officer of OpenAI, told Reuters that improvements from scaling up AI models have plateaued.In short, the dogma that "bigger is better" when it comes to AI models, which has predicated the industry's ludicrous growth, may no longer be true.This is not the death knell of AI. "But," Marcus wrote, "the economics will likely never make sense: additional training is expensive, the more scaling, the more costly."Outside the BoxPer Reuters, training runs for large models can cost tens of millions of dollars, require using hundreds of AI chips, and can take months to complete at a time. Tech companies have also run out of freely available data to train their models, having practically scraped the entire surface web."LLMs such as they are, will become a commodity; price wars will keep revenue low. Given the cost of chips, profits will be elusive," Marcus predicts. "When everyone realizes this, the financial bubble may burst quickly."There may be a way out of this economic rut. As the reports from The Information and Reuters note, OpenAI researchers are developing ways to surmount the scaling problem, such as training the models to "think" or "reason" in a similar way to humans, capabilities which have been previewed in its o1 model.One way they are doing this is through a technique called "test-time compute," which has an AI model explore multiple possibilities for complex problems and then choosing the most promising one, instead of jumping to a conclusion.Whether such work will trailblaze a new way of pursuing significant AI improvements, however, will have to be borne out in the long run. As it stands, the AI industry continues to have a profitability problem, and as economic markets are rarely patient, there could be another AI winter to come if these improvements aren't made fast.Share This Article

Image by @iamjaxontippet via InstagramDevelopmentsFitness influencer Jaxon Tippet was on vacation this month when he died unexpectedly from an apparent heart attack only a few days after his 30th birthday.Tippet previously battled with steroid use. In 2017, he was fined $4,000 by the Australian Southport Magistrates Court after being caught with 250 steroid tablets, vials of testosterone, and a needle and syringe hidden in his underwear.On a2022 episode of the Good Humans podcast, Tippet recalled having no symptoms in his first year of taking steroids. But as time moved on, he experienced a gradual and insidious shift."I could feel my health deteriorating," he said. "I was very tired. I was yellow in the face, my urine was almost orange... I couldn't get an erection."Since getting clean, Tippet had dedicated his Instagram and TikTok accounts which, combined, have nearly 250,000 followers to encouraging aspirational bodybuilders to take care of their mental health and be positive. But his death serves as a grim reminder that the unrealistic physiques of fitness influencers are often achieved using perilous techniques like extreme diets and the use of steroids and growth hormones that are usually much more dangerous than "healthy."Worse yet, these personalities are explosively popular among young people, leading to the risk that they'll imitate their idols and engage in similar dangerous behavior.Case in point, a striking number of fitness influencers die suddenly and way too young. Just in the past year, for example, bodybuilder Illia Yefimchyk died at 36 after years of steroids use and spending his days consuming 16,500 calories in a bid to be the "most monstrous bodybuilder" along with his fellow bodybuilders Antonio Souza and Neil Currey.On the opposite end of the spectrum, in 2023, raw food influencer Zhanna Samsonova died at 39 after primarily eating jackfruit and durian for years.In other words, it's important to remember that lustrous influencer content no matter if it's the most impressive biceps or the smoothest skin is never a true indicator of health.More on influencers: MrBeast Warns Youth Not to Be Like HimShare This Article

Musk is "behaving as if hes a co-president."White House DownSpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and president-elect Donald Trumpbecame inseparable toward the end of the election but as the bromance deepens, Trump's team is reportedly growing wary.Musk is "behaving as if hes a co-president and making sure everyone knows it," one person familiar with the matter .Just last night, Trump announced that Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy would helm the new Department of Government Efficiency or, um, "DOGE" for short. The mortifying acronym represents "'The Manhattan Project' of our time," Trump's statement purports,underscoring Musk's apparent sway in the upcoming administration.Love at First FightWhether the mind-meld between Trump and Musk will last is up for debate. Tech guru Kara Swisher predicted this week that the duo are likely to have a falling out, "because they're both really strong personalities who like to be the center of attention."If Trump does eventually ditch Musk, it wouldn't be without precedent; he flamed out with an epic proportion of his own cabinet during his first term, and even publicly battled Musk before making up during the most recent election.In some ways, the two have a lot in common. Both Trump and Musk are fond of spreading conspiracy theoriesonline, and are engaged in many of the same far-right culture wars around immigration, gender identity and the economy. In other domains, though, their allyship seems more tenuous: Musk remains the CEO of Tesla, for instance, while Trump is a longtime foe of electric vehicles.Any potential rift between the two is likely to be more emotional than factual, though. If there's one thing neither man can stand, it's other people getting credit for what they consider to be their own accomplishments."Hes sure taking lots of credit for the presidents victory," NBC's source continued, speaking of Musk. "Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen. Hes trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one."More on Elon Musk: Elon Musk's Grok AI Blasts Elon Musk as Huge Spreader of MisinformationShare This Article

NASA's plagued Space Launch System rocket, which is being developed to deliver the first astronauts to the Moon in over half a century, is on thin ice.According to Ars Technica senior space reporter Eric Berger's insider sources, there's an "at least 50-50" chance that the rocket "will be canceled.""Not Block 1B. Not Block 2," he added, referring to the variant that was used during NASA's uncrewed Artemis I test flight in 2022 and a more powerful design with a much higher translunar injection payload capacity, respectively. "All of it."To be clear, as Berger himself points out, we're still far "from anything being settled." Nonetheless, the reporter's sources have historically been highly reliable, suggesting the space agency may indeed be getting cold feet about continuing to pour billions of dollars into the non-reusable rocket.The SLS has already seen its fair share of budget overruns and many years of delays. In a 2022 interview, former NASA deputy administrator Lori Garver told Futurism that the project is simply "not sustainable."The rocket platform has become a political football, going well past $6 billion over budget and over half a decade behind schedule."I will be direct," former NASA administrator Michael Griffin told the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee during a January hearing on the space agency's Artemis program, as quoted byArs Technica. "In my judgment, the Artemis Program is excessively complex, unrealistically priced, compromises crew safety, poses very high mission risk of completion, and is highly unlikely to be completed in a timely manner even if successful."So far, the rocket has been launched only once, as part of NASA's inaugural Artemis mission in 2022, but damage sustained by the agency's Orion spacecraft has given officials pause about its ability to safely send astronauts to the Moon in the coming years.According to an August report by NASA's Office of Inspector General (OIG), even just the price of the tower designed to launch rockets starting with Artemis IV, which is tentatively scheduled for 2028, has ballooned to a whopping $1.8 billion.Plagued aerospace giant Boeing has also encountered plenty of headwinds with its contributions to the launch platform. In a separate September report by the OIG, the SLS' Block 1B configuration, which is being built by Boeing, was found to be woefully behind and way over budget."We found an array of issues that could hinder SLS Block 1B's readiness for Artemis IV including Boeings inadequate quality management system, escalating costs and schedules, and inadequate visibility into the Block 1Bs projected costs," the report reads.To reiterate, the SLS is a non-reusable rocket, which means that NASA will have to build entirely new rocket stages for each upcoming Artemis mission. That's in stark contrast to SpaceX's fully reusable Starship, which the space agency is still hoping to tap for Artemis III, the first crewed trip to the Moon's surface.If NASA does indeed give up on the SLS, Berger suggests that the agency may have to get creative by "launching Orion on one rocket" such as SpaceX's Falcon Heavy, and then "docking with a (separately launched) [United Launch Alliance] Centaur V and boosting it to the Moon."Whether such a Plan B is even on the table,though,is unclear at best."Honestly the people who will ultimately make this decision aren't even in place yet," Berger wrote in a followup tweet, likely referring to the incoming Trump administration. "But there is a big desire for big changes."More on the SLS: NASA Keeping Issue With Moon Rocket a SecretShare This Article

Nobody on Earth asked for this. Get LowerWe regret to inform you that Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg is now a musical artist and his first track, a cover of "Get Low" by Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz recorded in tandem with T-Pain, is a sonic assault.In an Instagram post, the 40-year-old tech tycoon dedicated the track by "Z-Pain" an embarrassing portmanteau of Zuckerberg and T-Pain, ne Faheem Rashad Najm to his wife, Priscilla Chan Zuckerberg."'Get Low' was playing when I first met Priscilla at a college party, so every year we listen to it on our dating anniversary," Zuckerberg wrote in the caption of the post, which featured several photos of the philanthropic couple over the years. "This year I worked with [T-Pain] on our own version of this lyrical masterpiece."For those who didn't have the song imprinted directly onto their developing brains way back in 2002, that "lyrical masterpiece" includes the incredible verses "to the window / to the wall / til the sweat drip down my balls / all these females crawl."Hearing the milquetoast Zuckerberg, of all people, sing those lines in his heavily pitch corrected voice is not for the faint of heart, and we do not advise you listen to this at home unless you are prepared to take ample psychic damage.Please, No MoreT-Pain coming in on the second verse is such a relief that you can almost forget what you were forced to listen to before until Zuck once again hops on the annoying acoustic beat, reminiscent of so many ukulele girls in the early 2010s except somehow much worse.There was, in fact, an infamous acoustic cover of "Get Low" released in 2011 that got more than 1.5 million views on YouTube which was 1.5 million too many, should not have been replicated under any circumstances, and is still better-sounding than the Z-Pain version.Anyway, this unrequested collab seems to be part of the millennial tech mogul's hypebeast rebranding though the fact that a similar travesty was deeply uncool more than a decade ago makes the strategy dubious in late 2024.More on the emperor's new clothes: Cringey Tech Execs Swoon Over Mark Zuckerbergs "Cool" New LookShare This Article

It's a sad state of affairs when the CEO of multinational oil and gas corporation Exxon Mobil calls on president-elect Donald Trump not to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement.As the New York Times reports, oil baron Darren Woods warned that doing so would greatly weaken our global efforts to curb carbon emissions a grim irony, given the fact that he represents one of the biggest contributors to global warming in the world.Trump has threatened to pull out of the Paris Agreement yet again and has vowed to "drill, baby, drill," while dismantling the Green New Deal, an environmental protection plan he's called the "green new scam.""We need a global system for managing global emissions," Woods told the NYTwhile attending the United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) in Azerbaijan, a dubious summit that claims to be about climate change but primarily appears to facilitate business meetings among oil and gas executives."Trump and his administrations have talked about coming back into government and bringing common sense back into government," he added. "I think he could take the same approach in this space."Woods took aim at the government's failure to create enough incentives for oil and gas companies to transition to renewable sources of energy."The government role is extremely important and one that they havent been successfully fulfilling, quite frankly," he told the NYT.The CEO argued that Trump's infamously unpredictable way of governing could end up harming oil and gas companies not help them by allowing them to drill for oil in more places and loosen environmental rules."I dont think the stops and starts are the right thing for businesses," Woods told the Wall Street Journal. "It is extremely inefficient. It creates a lot of uncertainty."Trump's threats to dismantle environmental regulations could set the United States back significantly in the global fight against global warming, a reality even the oil industry has grasped.Despite its repeated efforts to promise an eventual transition to green energy, Exxon Mobil was found to be the biggest investor-owned contributor to emissions in a database of 122 polluters put together by the Carbon Majors Database earlier this year.Nonetheless, the company is expected to spend around $3 billion this year on developing alternatives to fossil fuels, according to the NYT.But with Trump in the Oval Office, major polluters like Exxon Mobil could find themselves on an even longer leash, a worrying possibility given the precariousness of the ongoing climate crisis.Scientists have found that the prognosis is grimmer than ever before: the Earth is racing towards a point of no return if climate change continues on its current trajectory a reality that Trump seemingly doesn't have the intellectual capacity to grasp.More on Trump and the environment: As Trump Prepares to Slash Environmental Protections, 48 of the 50 States Are Facing DroughtsShare This Article

People will believe anything these days including, it seems, obvious AI slop.As a viral post on X-formerly-Twitter highlights, one such example poorly,which attempts to show Donald Trump's son Barron singing a treacly AI-generated song, has picked up an astonishing number of fawning comments though in a further sign of the times, it's unclear what percentage of those commentators are bots themselves."Forever great America," the uncanny AI voice, which sounds nothing like the youngest Trump son, sings over swelling Hillsong Church-style drumlines. "God bless all the people."In the comments viewed on the screen-recorded video, users with multiple numbers in their handles a trademark of bot accounts sounded off like parodies of sycophants."I love songs so much," one such user replied, ending their missive with three red heart emojis."I love your song," wrote another. "Thank you so much for your Dad the PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP will be going to protect the country GOD BLESS PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP and Family."As several folks in the comments on X pointed out, these responses seem very much like they're AI-generated themselves."Bots applauding a bot," Johns Hopkins English professor Drew Daniel wrote, "the circle of virtual life completes itself, no humans necessary."While the now-viral video does indeed look like it was posted on YouTube, we weren't able to independently verify where it came from. We did, however, find others in a similar vein and they too appeared to harbor an unsettling mix of comments by bots and delusional humans.One such video, published by the "MAGA Songs" YouTube channel about a month ago, employs the same shoddy lip-syncing effect that has been used to turn static images into "singing" moving pictures for years now. Titled "My Father's Work is Never Done," the almost certainly AI-generated lyrics to this bizarre song essentially cast the serially-adultering president-elect in the role of an American Jesus."From the towers to the White House lawn, hes been the light when hope was gone," the fake Barron sings. "With every word, with every stand, he fights to save this promised land.""Never seen a family work so hard to Make America Great Again.!" one reply reads. "You deserved to win, congratulations!""Barron where are all the Beautiful songs that first hit YouTube, now wheres to be found??" another likely bot queries. "I just love your singing, is there a CD out to purchase?"Some human viewers are definitely being taken in, though; a video that went viral a few months ago showed two baffled elderly people insisting that a similar video of Barron singing as a younger cameraperson tries to explain that it's not.The entire experience of listening to these megachurch jam knockoffs offers an uncanny look into the world of conservative AI slop and it portends a grim future.Share This Article

"You couldn't open the doors."Horrific EndFour people were killed in Toronto after the Tesla they were riding in crashed into a pillar and burst into flames.A fifth rider, an unidentified woman in her twenties, narrowly survived the crash after a bystander smashed open a window, allowing her to escape the burning vehicle.According to the heroic bystander's account, the Tesla Model Y's electronic doorsmay have been at fault for why the passengers were trapped inside the electric vehicle."You couldn't open the doors," the rescuer, Rick Harper, told the Toronto Star in a new interview. "I would assume the young lady would have tried to open the door from the inside, because she was pretty desperate to get out." Harper added that he didn't realize there were others trapped inside because the smoke was so thick."I don't know if that was the battery or what," Harper said. "But she couldn't get out."Death TrapPolice said the crash, which took place on October 24, occurred after the driver lost control of the vehicle, struck a guardrail, and then slammed into a pillar, per the CBC, catching fire upon impact.Authorities are still investigating the crash and fire. But the details that we have so far implicate to some degree the electronic doors used by Tesla and other automakers, which require power to open.The Elon Musk-owned automaker has a troubling history of owners getting locked in their cars without power. Some of these cases may be down to user error, since most Teslas come with manual release levers.However, these emergency measures have been criticized for being poorly designed and unintuitively placed for certain models, often requiring intimate knowledge of the car something that most owners, let alone a passenger in a panic, aren't likely to have.Moreover, with the Model Y in particular, not all vehicles come with manual releases for the rear doors, as Tesla warns in the car's manual. It's unclear if the Model Y involved in the crash was equipped with the emergency feature.Fire HazardThis isn't the first time that occupants have died after being allegedly trapped in a Tesla.In 2019, a father of five was burned alive in his Model S after the car's auto-retracting door handles failed to deploy, his family alleged in a lawsuit, preventing bystanders and first responders from setting him free from the intense blaze.Another driver nearly suffered the same fate in 2021. When his Tesla Model S caught fire, he claimed he was briefly stuck inside due to the vehicle's malfunctioning high tech door handles, though he eventually managed to escape.Considering that EV battery fires are some of the most formidable out there and often take tens of thousands of gallons of water and hours of work to extinguish, a reliable way of getting out of one of these vehicles in a pinch is the least you could ask for.Share This Article