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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In what feels like another life, Donald Trump ran for presidential election on the promise of "draining the swamp," in a direct appeal to the masses of workers and the poor of the US who knew something wasn't quite right with the status quo. It worked, sparking a nationwide movement backing a man whose immense fortune had been built on union busting, labor exploitation, and government handouts from the poor to the rich in short, on the backs of the very workers he swore to protect.Now that Trump is the status quo, those voters are learning once again what a shrewd business man he is. Case in point, his chief lackey Elon Musk is in charge of gutting the federal government and its various social safety programs and it sounds like he's looking to hand off the gig to the totally stable hands of artificial intelligence.New reporting byWiredhas revealed that Musk's DOGE is putting together a team to totally redo the Social Security Administration's computer systems from COBOL, an old but trustworthy code language undergirding the entire Social Security program. Experts say the process is a major undertaking with some huge risks, which probably explains why it hasn't been done yet a 2014 report by the SSA noted that the system contains some 60 million lines of code.The plan is headed by Steve Davis, one of Musk's faithful enforcers, and will apparently encompass migrating the entire system onto a more modern contemporary language within a matter of months.With that timeframe, the venture is likely to rely on generative AI, a source told Wired a horrifying prospect given that even the most advanced AI models still struggle to solve the majority of programming tasks. Add to that a team of inexperienced tech bros, and the SSA system responsible for over 65 million payments is poised for disaster."DOGE thinks if they can say they got rid of all the COBOL in months, then their way is the right way and we all just suck for not breaking shit," an SSA source told Wired.It's not just the government that still runs on COBOL. A 2017 Reuters study on the coding language found that COBOL is a major pillar of the US financial industry, making up 43 percent of banking systems. At the time, some 95 percent of ATM transactions depended on COBOL, and software experts still note that 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies actively use it.If COBOL is so ubiquitous, then why the sudden rush to scrap it all and start fresh when it comes to social security?On the surface, this definitely falls on Musk's "work fast, break things" ethos, paired with Trump's beloved austerity policies. Indeed, the private equity buzzards are already circling over the SSA. That said, DOGE didn't come up with the idea to gut social spending that's a time-honored tradition of capitalism's elites and it certainly isn't the first administration to chip away at Social Security.Whatisnew is the callous disregard with which this administration is treating the most vulnerable in America, in what basically amounts to a PR campaign for DOGE. An AI-enabled SSA crash might not mean much to the richest man in the history of the world, but the millions of people relying on the already flailing system to dispense retirement funds, disability, and Medicare benefits don't share his luxury.As Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley pined: "The cruelty is the point."Share This Article

California has finally done it. For the first time in six years, the "glory hole" has been activated, .Please, people. There's no innuendo here. We're, of course, referring to the iconic and distinctly designed spillway in the North Bay's Lake Berryessa, a reservoir next to the Monticello Dam."It's called a glory hole spillway. That's really what the engineers called it and we shortened it to glory hole," local historian, scientist, and journalist Peter Kilkus told CBS. "Some people say, 'Oh, that's really beautiful.' Some people say, 'That's frightening.'"The drain's actual name is no less suggestive: the Morning Glory Hole spillway.But what's the deal with this thing? In a nutshell, it's an enormous 70-feet wide drain or "passive spillway," in the technical nomenclature. Whenever the water levels in the dammed-off lake exceed 440 feet, the water spills into the drain, directing overflow into an underground discharge channel.While in action, the "glory hole" looks almost otherworldly, like some portal to a magical aquatic realm or maybe a glitch in our ever-crumbling reality simulation. There's not supposed to just be a hole in the middle of water, damn it!It's not something you see every day, in other words. "Yeah, it's a big tourist draw," Kilkus,who runs the site Lake Beryessa News, told CBS. "In fact, on a heavy day on the weekend, you can't even park here."And it's rarely used. Before winding back up in February, the drain last saw action in 2019 and 2017, the Los Angeles Times reported. Before that, it was unused since 2005, Chris Lee, general manager for the Solano County Water Agency, told the newspaper.The hole and its home's histories are intertwined. Lake Berryessa was created with the construction of the Monticello Dam in 1957 (grimly burying a small community that existed there, according to Kilkus) and the hole was the only solution that could make it work. Typically, dams have spillways built into them, or right beside, churning out towering cliffs of water. But in the canyon that the dam's saddled between, there's no room for such a design. As a compromise, engineers placed a drain in the middle of the lake, plunging the water straight down some 200 feet before making a 90-degree turn and releasing the overflow into Putah Creek."Yes, this is fairly rare,"Kilkus told the broadcaster. "There are only two in California, and there are a couple others in Europe, but they're very rare."More on aquatic curiosities: Iceberg Breaks Off Antarctica, Revealing Tentacled Creatures BeneathShare This Article

That's one way to get people to not vandalize your car.Cyber CilliousInstead of cruising around in a regular old Cybertruck, a Tesla fanboy decided to mash it up with a Model 3 and reader, it's pretty cringe.Unlike the Cybertruck that gave it its distinctive front fender and its cringey name, the "CyberRoadster," vlogger David Andreyev better known by his handle, "Cyber Hooligan" gave his version a shiny red paint job that is, at very least, better looking than the dull metallic silver of the OG.While it luckily manages to look nothing like a Cybertruck, it has some serious Dodge Charger vibes and even if a Charger is less flagrantly annoying these days than a Cybertruck, it's still as basic as the cop favorite cruiser.After nearly three years of work that included at least one scrapped bubblegum pink paint job, Andreyev finally unveiled his final product a few months back. Since then, the self-styled Cyber Hooligan has been relishing the attention he gets driving around Los Angeles in his flashy and freakish car.Looky-LoosIn his latest video, which appears to have been shot entirely in and around malls and shopping centers, onlookers crane their necks, take photos, and even run into things when trying to get a better look at the CyberRoadster. It's unclear, however, if they're marveling in pleasure or, like us, are appalled by the angular creation before their eyes.On the r/TeslaLounge Subreddit, one user suggested that the onlooker reactions we see in Cyber Hooligan's videos are legit."Hes in my area and Ive seen it roll through our outdoor mall," the user wrote of the "gorgeous" CyberRoadster. "The crowd it draws is crazy, looks like really nothing else, he did a great job.""I love it," another declared before, hilariously, admitting that they also love "Grand Theft Auto."Love it or hate it, Andreyev's Franken-car certainly is eye-catching and it probably doesn't draw as much ire as an OG Cybertruck would, either.Share This Article

Image by Getty / FuturismOn both sides of the East River, well-heeled New Yorkers have for a few years been shelling out for the tranquility promised by Bathhouse, a high-concept spa company that boasts thermal pools heated by Bitcoin mining.As Curbed reports, however, visitors and former employees at both of the spa's two locations claim to have experienced everything from mold and vermin on pipes and floors to unidentifiable "black particles" in pools and post-bath urinary tract infections.The latest fracas regarding the "evil crypto baths," as local outletHell Gate called Bathhouse last year, began earlier this month when a Reddit user claimed that they got a UTI after going into two "kinda dirty and gross"-looking tubs at the company's location in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood."I thought it would be fine," the user wrote, "but then I ended up with a UTI."Days prior, the poster claimed, another friend went to Bathhouse's other location in Manhattan and "also ended up with a UTI." In response, another, since-deleted user claimed that they too had gotten the same infection within 48 hours of their last time at the Williamsburg location which, it bears noting, has been the subject of 17 calls to New York City's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene since 2022."I'm sure that it came from [B]athhouse," the responder wrote. "The water just felt ick to me, especially that lukewarm pool. Maybe they aren't using enough chlorine or something?"After that, the Bathhouse floodgates opened in kind. From complaints about hair floating in pools and fellow visitors' "horrible" hygiene exacerbated, no doubt, by many of them not showering to a secondhand claim about a friend who got ringworm after going to the Williamsburg spa, it seemed that the only thing dirtier than Bathhouse was the rumor mill surrounding it.As these things tend to go, the gossip made its way to TikTok, where Justine Smith, a woman who claims to be a former "body scrubber" at the Williamsburg location, had mold problems and had photos to back up her accusations. In an interview withCurbed, Smith said that the issue was so bad, she and her coworkers would try to cover the smell with essential oils. It didn't always work, the woman said, and sometimes she'd catch customers making sour faces "because there's a stench in the room."Another former employee, whose name was not shared, showedCurbed videos of wormy-looking insects crawling around the brick walls and floor tiles. Those videos, the employee claimed, were shot in one of the rooms that houses the spa's steam baths.NYC's health department toldCurbed that it's investigating the recent claims six of those 311 calls were, notably, made in the last week and has, per records the website viewed, sent Bathhouse a letter about a mold complaint.As for Bathhouse itself, it says these many allegations of grossness at its facilities are little more than gossip."The health and safety of our customers is our number one priority and always has been," the company told Curbed in a statement. "These rumors are blatant and defamatory lies which seem intended to harm our business."Share This Article

Sharks have long been believed to be silent, stalking their prey and wolfing them down without comment. They're ruthless and efficient.But a team of marine biologists in New Zealand are challenging that assumption. In a new study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, the researchers report that they've recorded the first ever instance of a shark actively producing a sound, in the form of sharp, abrupt clicks.The sharks that produced the noise were rig sharks, a species which are common to the coastal waters of New Zealand. Locals often refer to the relatively small sharks, which grow up to five feet long, as "lemon fish" (not to be confused with much more formidable lemon sharks) or simply "rigs."Lead author Carolin Nieder said that she made the discovery while handling the rig sharks during her research into their hearing capabilities."At first we had no idea what it was because sharks were not supposed to make any sounds," Nieder, who works at the famed Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Scientific American. "I remember coming home and just thinking more and more about how weird those sounds were."To confirm it wasn't a fluke, Nieder and her colleagues gathered ten juvenile rig sharks, separately placing them into tanks equipped with microphones. As the sharks were either being gently held or transferred between tanks, all of them emitted the high frequency, sub-second clicks, the researchers found.The clicks occurred underwater, and almost always as the sharks were moving their body in some way. Brief as the clicks were, they reached anappreciable volume of 156 decibels.Some species of fish use their swim bladders to generate noise by vibrating them. Marine mammals like whales use vocal cords. But sharks don't possess a specific organ for making sounds. In the rigs' case, it appears that they're making the noise by snapping together their dense rows of flattened teeth, which are specialized to chomp through shells.Notably, the sharks didn't produce the clicks while swimming or feeding. Their high frequency also puts the sounds outside the rig shark's limited hearing range, making it unlikely that they use the noises to communicate."I think it's more likely that they would make those noises when they get attacked," Nieder told the New York Times. Other fish snap their teeth or jaws in an attempt to ward off predators, she added.To be sure, the circumstances that the recordings were made in raise questions about whether these are sounds that the sharks would produce in the wild. But the fact that they were made at all warrants further investigation."This study opens up the possibility of these smaller sharks 'sounding the alarm,'" Neil Hammerschlag, president of Atlantic Shark Expeditions and executive director of the not-for-profit Shark Research Foundation, ."While we really don't know if the sound produced by the rig sharks was simply a byproduct of being handled... it does open up some new questions, possibilities and avenues for future research."More on marine life: Behold Rare Footage of What Narwhals Actually Use Their Tusks ForShare This Article

Recent waves of Tesla protests and vandalism have made clear the growing discontent among US taxpayers of all stripes. While Elon Musk and Donald Trump slash through federal government jobs and social welfare programs, voters are demanding accountability and an end to Musk's unchecked rampage.That might be a long way off, if Musk has anything to say about it. And unfortunately for us, he's one of the few who does.In an interview with Fox News, Musk railed against anyone targeting his company, threatening that the government will be investigating the protests."The people pushing the propaganda... those are the real villains here," he seethed in response to a question about what the protests mean to him. "We're gonna go after them, and the president's made that clear, we're going to go after them, the ones providing the money, the ones pushing the lies and propaganda, we're going after them."Musk and his faithful stenographers have repeatedly conflated vandalism and protests against Tesla as "violence," in a rhetorical shift that coincides with federal law enforcement agencies under Trump expanding the definition of "terrorism" to include taking part in peaceful demonstrations and writing op-eds. That has been used to justify a number of extrajudicial kidnappings and deportations, like the unlawful arrest of Columbia PhD student Mahmoud Khalil by plainclothes federal agents earlier this month.Whether Tesla protestors will face the same threat of being disappeared is anyone's guess, but it's a jarring signal given the US state's increasingly cruel stance toward immigrants, students, and critics.Musk's ominous warning also comes days after Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the formation of an FBI taskforce to investigate damage and vandalism done to Tesla vehicles, sparking major concerns that the state is officially acting as the watchdog to an unelected oligarch's profit-driven ventures.For her part, Bondi parroted Musk's more devoted reply guys in claiming that there's an operation "behind the scenes to coordinate and fund these crimes" against Tesla, though she fell short of offering any evidence. So far, the widespread hatred for Tesla and its CEO has shown itself to be totally organic hard earned by Musk's tampering with the federal government, on top of his cryptofascist antics.The now-nationally coordinated Tesla Takedown protests are ramping up, meanwhile, with over 200 demonstrations planned around the world on Saturday. Whether Musk likes it or not, taxpayers are finding that Tesla may be the only avenue left to seek accountability for the billionaire's actions. It's worked so far a recent survey has found that two-thirds of Americans say they wouldn't drive a Tesla, as Tesla's stocks plummet for the ninth straight week."I think there's some real evil out there, and we have to overcome it," Musk said in his interview. "They're pushing these lies, and why do they push these lies? I think we need to hold people responsible for pushing these lies."More on Tesla protests: Hundreds Protest Outside Tesla Dealership, Storm BuildingShare This Article

More Measles CommitteeMar 29, 9:45 AM EDT/byVictor TangermannGovernment Hires Crackpot to "Study" Nonexistent Link Between Vaccines and Autism"If you are worried about vaccine-preventable disease, this is such a clear setback."Mar 29, 9:45 AM EDT/Victor TangermannImage by Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesDevelopmentsDespite a mountain of scientific evidence concluding there's no link between autism and vaccines, noted anti-vaccine figure and health secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. is trying to double down on the long-debunked theory.As the Washington Post reports, fellow anti-vaccine crackpot David Geier who has published articles claiming that mercury in vaccines is tied to autism, and was previously reprimanded by state authorities in Maryland for practicing medicine without a license is joining Kennedy's department as a "senior data analyst" to work on a study once again examining the topic of autism and vaccines.It's yet another sign that the Trump administration is chasing conspiracy theories to undermine the country's vaccination efforts, a dangerous game that could result in an escalation of health crises down the road.The optic are particularly poor given the ongoing outbreak of measles in numerous states, an extremely preventable respiratory disease for which we've had highly effective vaccines for decades. Kennedy had already misled parents into overusing Vitamin A, leading to liver damage and yellowed skin in children.Geier's reported involvement with the health department has terrified public health experts."If we increase vaccine hesitancy and immunization rates go down further, we will see more vaccine-preventable disease outbreaks," Duke Global Health Institute director Christopher Beyrer told the New York Times. "Thats how it works."Meanwhile, Kennedy described the fellow anti-vaxxer, who holds a bachelor's degree in biology and no medical degree, as a "brilliant, extremely knowledgeable researcher with deep expertise on mercury."The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has been ordered to kick off a large-scale study to reexamine long-debunked links between vaccines and autism. To experts, that's a massive waste of resources that flies in the face of scientific evidence.Despite Kennedy endorsing Geier's research for many years, scientists have long discredited his findings, as the NYT reports. To date, there simply isn't any convincing scientific evidence linking vaccines and autism."The committee concludes that the evidence favor rejection of a causal relationship between [measles, mumps, and rubella] vaccine and autism," the Institute of Medicine wrote in a 2004 review of a purported link between vaccines and autism.In short, Geier isn't just a poor pick for the job; he could prove extremely dangerous with any meaningful amount of influence inside the federal government."To me, the big shame is that with budget cuts, we are not ramping up research into what is actually causing autism," former head of the Washington office of the CDC Edward Hunter told the NYT. "And if you are worried about vaccine-preventable disease, this is such a clear setback."Share This ArticleImage by Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesRead This Next

Memory BoostMar 29, 6:45 AM EDT/byVictor TangermannNew "Brain Cleaning" Technique Improves Memory in Aging MiceIt's an "exciting new frontier in the treatment of brain disorders."Mar 29, 6:45 AM EDT/Victor TangermannImage by Getty / FuturismNeuroscience/Brain ScienceA team of researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that accelerating the brain's waste removal system could have tremendous implications for our memory.As detailed in a study published in the journal Cell last week, the team found that by boosting the natural process of the brain cleansing itself of waste, they were able to improve memory in older mice.Around a decade ago, scientists found that as the brain ages, a network of vessels surrounding it, known as the meningeal lymphatics, starts to slow down.The system drains fluid and waste into the body's lymph nodes, where immune system cells constantly monitor for signs of disease or infection. But when it's impaired enough due to old age, the brain's resident immune cells, called microglia, have to jump into action instead, which can tax and overwhelm the brain.By targeting the meningeal lymphatics, the researchers are hoping to overcome a major hurdle for other therapies designed to battle age-related cognitive issues and neurodegenerative conditions, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease. Unlike therapies that struggle to get past the blood-brain barrier, this latest approach targets areas outside of the brain to gain access."The physical blood-brain barrier hinders the efficacy of therapies for neurological disorders," said Washington University pathology and immunology professor Jonathan Kipnis in a statement about the research. "By targeting a network of vessels outside of the brain that is critical for brain health, we see cognitive improvements in mice, opening a window to develop more powerful therapies to prevent or delay cognitive decline."In an experiment, the team placed two identical black rods in a cage with old mice to let them play with them. On the next day, the same mice received one of these rods, as well as a silver rectangular prism. The idea is that older mice will spend roughly the same amount of time playing with either type of object, while younger mice will be more drawn to the novel trinket.The team then used a treatment to boost the growth and function of the lymphatic vessels in some of the old mice. As a result, the researchers observed that they were spending more time playing with the shiny new object suggesting their memory had improved, compared to other old mice that didn't receive the treatment."A functioning lymphatic system is critical for brain health and memory," said first author and Washington University postdoctoral fellow Kyungdeok Kim in the statement. "Therapies that support the health of the bodys waste management system may have health benefits for a naturally aging brain."The team suggests that the meningeal lymphatics treatment led to a reduction in the production of an immune protein called interleukin 6 (IL-6), which has previously been shown to affect brain health.While plenty of work remains before we can demonstrate that the same approach could work in humans as well, the researchers are hopeful of discovering new ways to slow down the naturally aging brain."Targeting the more easily accessible lymphatic vessels that are located outside the brain may prove to be an exciting new frontier in the treatment of brain disorders," Kipnis said. "We may not be able to revive neurons, but we may be able to ensure their most optimal functioning through modulation of meningeal lymphatic vessels."More on neurodegenerative diseases: Ozempic-Style Drug Slows the Progression of Alzheimer's Disease, Experiment FindsShare This ArticleImage by Getty / FuturismRead This Next

One of the men in charge of running America's money had a Venmo account so publicthat reporters were able to track his payments going back years including the one marked only with an eggplant emoji.In the aftermath ofThe Atlantic's revelation that its editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had been accidentally added to a Signal groupchat by national security adviser Mike Waltz, reporters around the world have gone digging to see just how bad the Trump administration's operations security practices really are.As it turns out, incredibly sloppy. It's been easy to find all kinds of data about the people running this country including, asWired reports, their Venmo accounts.After breaking news that Waltz's Venmo had been public, the magazine revealed that other officials had seemingly also not locked down their accounts on the payment app. In fact, at least four of the men whose Venmo accounts were openly available had also been in Waltz's "Houthis PC small group" chain.Among them was Dan Katz, the Treasury Department's chief of staff. The accountWired believes to be Katz's not only had its contact list visible, but was also linked to the official's wife.The strangest part, however?A 2018 payment sporting an eggplant emoji in its "note" section.As anyone who has used Venmo can attest, putting silly emojis and other goofy missives on payments to friends is par for the course. It's far more likely that Katz was just messing around than that he was paying someone for their "eggplant" though of course, it wouldn't be the first time a prominent politician had been caught in such a predicament on Venmo (in fact, just-retired president Joe Biden had his own Venmo embarrassment a few years back.)Regardless of the meaning behind the emoji, however, it's absolutely unreal that a ranking official in the department that's quite literally is in charge of America's money had his own financial transactions public and visible like that. It's bad enough that all these national security and military guys are getting caught with their pants down, so to speak but for a Treasury official to do so as well suggests a staggering degree of recklessness in the highest echelons of the government.That department and the others implicated in the story didn't respond toWired's attempts to talk, so we can't know with 100 percent certainty that the account was really Katz's. If we had to place a bet on it, however, we'd wager it was legit.If this scandal has taught us anything, it's that these people don't know how to use their privacy settings.More on the Signal debacle: Pentagon Issued Warning About Signal Messaging One Week Before Its Head Was Caught Using ItShare This Article