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Putin’s forces barely inch along on a battlefield saturated with drones

Putin’s forces barely inch along on a battlefield saturated with drones

The New York Times reports: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has sought to convince President Trump that his troops are marching toward inevitable victory in Ukraine, arguing that Kyiv should hand over the entire eastern Donbas region to avoid impending defeat. But the situation on the battlefield tells a different story. After making gains late last year, the Russian military has slowed to a crawl. In some parts of Ukraine, it has lost territory. At its average monthly rate…

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Are you as easily fooled as AI? Depends what you see in this image

Are you as easily fooled as AI? Depends what you see in this image

This optical illusion from the natural world is testing the limits of computer vision. Learn more: https://t.co/geC0qeRePT #ScienceMagArchives pic.twitter.com/RKajt7r1zk — Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) May 10, 2026 Science reports: If you see a curled leaf in the image above, you’ve fallen for the intricate camouflage of the green fruit-piercing moth (Eudocima salaminia)—a citrus-loving insect that uses the ruse to hide from predators. But don’t feel too bad: Even artificial intelligence (AI) is easily fooled, according to a study published today in…

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Trolling, memes and deepfakes: How AI is thickening the fog of war

Trolling, memes and deepfakes: How AI is thickening the fog of war

Gretel Kahn reports for Reuters Institute: War has never been fought only on the ground. Clausewitz’s concept of the “fog of war” once described the uncertainty and confusion that cloud battlefield decision-making. Errol Morris’ 2003 documentary made the phrase a shorthand for the moral and informational ambiguities of modern conflict. But in the digital age, where war is also filmed, edited and promoted online, the fog is getting thicker and wars, more difficult to cover. The conflict between the United…

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Using AI for just ten minutes might make you lazy and dumb, study shows

Using AI for just ten minutes might make you lazy and dumb, study shows

Wired reports: Using AI chatbots for even just for 10 minutes may have a shockingly negative impact on people’s ability to think and problem-solve, according to a new study from researchers at Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, and UCLA. Researchers tasked people with solving various problems, including simple fractions and reading comprehension, through an online platform that paid them for their work. They conducted three experiments, each involving several hundred people. Some participants were given access to an AI assistant capable…

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Congress is doing little to prepare for job losses caused by AI

Congress is doing little to prepare for job losses caused by AI

The New York Times reports: Economists aren’t sure if or when artificial intelligence will cause widespread job losses. But they do agree on one thing: The federal safety net isn’t ready for such a shock. The nearly century-old unemployment system, which provides out-of-work Americans with up to 26 weeks of benefits in most states, is unlikely to cover many of the workers who are most at risk of being displaced by A.I., labor experts warn. Job-retraining programs and other forms…

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How microplastics are likely contributing to heating the planet

How microplastics are likely contributing to heating the planet

The Washington Post reports: Microplastics lurk in nearly every corner of the globe. Scientists have found the tiny particles in rivers and lakes, in agricultural soil and in the oceans. They have infiltrated our food and water, cleaning products and cosmetics, even our own bodies. But do they also play a role in hastening the warming of the planet? It’s a question researchers inch closer toward answering in a new study published Monday that finds these minuscule pieces of plastic…

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The race to mine critical minerals for AI and clean energy is creating ‘sacrifice zones’ that harm water and health of world’s poor

The race to mine critical minerals for AI and clean energy is creating ‘sacrifice zones’ that harm water and health of world’s poor

An artisanal miner holds a cobalt stone at a mine near Kolwezi, Congo, in 2022. About 20,000 people work there among toxic materials. Junior Kannah/AFP via Getty Images By Abraham Nunbogu, United Nations University and Kaveh Madani, United Nations University There is a troubling contradiction at the heart of the global transition to a cleaner, greener, tech-driven future: Modern technologies – everything from AI to wind turbines, as well as cellphones, electric vehicles and defense systems – depend on critical…

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Silicon Valley may summon a permanent underclass through its own market logic

Silicon Valley may summon a permanent underclass through its own market logic

Jasmine Sun writes: Most people I know in the A.I. industry think the median person is screwed, and they have no idea what to do about it. I live in San Francisco, among the young researchers earning million-dollar salaries and the start-up founders competing to build the next unicorn. While Silicon Valley has long warned about the risk of rogue A.I., it has recently woken up to a more mundane nightmare: one in which many ordinary people lose their economic…

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A dark-money campaign is paying influencers to frame Chinese AI as a threat to Americans

A dark-money campaign is paying influencers to frame Chinese AI as a threat to Americans

Wired reports: In an Instagram video posted on April 1, lifestyle influencer Melissa Strahle poses outdoors before an American flag as soft instrumental music plays. “AI lets me focus on what matters most,” she tells her 1.4 million followers. “We need to invest in American-made AI to ensure America leads the way in innovation and job creation.” Strahle labeled the post an advertisement, but she didn’t disclose what organization had paid for it. It turns out the funding came from…

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U.S. government ramps up mass surveillance with help of AI tech, data brokers – and your apps and devices

U.S. government ramps up mass surveillance with help of AI tech, data brokers – and your apps and devices

The U.S. government is using AI to speed analysis of government and commercial data about you. Anton Petrus/Moment via Getty Images By Anne Toomey McKenna, Penn State On a Saturday morning, you head to the hardware store. Your neighbors’ Ring cameras film your walk to the car. Your car’s sensors, cameras and microphones record your speed, how you drive, where you’re going, who’s with you, what you say, and biological metrics such as facial expression, weight and heart rate. Your…

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The AI industry is discovering how much it is hated by the public

The AI industry is discovering how much it is hated by the public

The New Republic reports: On April 10, the house of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was attacked with a Molotov cocktail by 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama. The suspect, who was arrested the same day, had written a manifesto warning of the existential threat of artificial intelligence. In his missive, he advocated for killing the CEOs of AI companies, and he referred to himself as “butlerian jihadist” on Instagram (a reference to a war against machines in Frank Herbert’s Dune universe). Three days…

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Palantir posts corporate manifesto denouncing pluralism in defense of ‘the West’

Palantir posts corporate manifesto denouncing pluralism in defense of ‘the West’

TechCrunch reports: Surveillance and analytics company Palantir recently posted what it called a “brief” 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp’s book “The Technological Republic.” Written by Karp and Palantir’s head of corporate affairs, Nicholas Zamiska, “The Technological Republic” was published last year and described by its authors as “the beginnings of the articulation of the theory” behind Palantir’s work. (One critic said it was “not a book at all, but a piece of corporate sales material.”) The company’s ideological bent…

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One‑way attack drones: Low‑cost, high‑tech weapons ‘democratize’ precision warfare

One‑way attack drones: Low‑cost, high‑tech weapons ‘democratize’ precision warfare

Iran’s Shahed drone is essentially a poor man’s cruise missile. AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky By Michael C. Horowitz, University of Pennsylvania and Lauren Kahn, Georgetown University Wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have propelled drones into the headlines. The word “drone” now stretches to cover everything from hobbyist camera rigs available on Amazon to the Predator and Reaper systems the United States has relied on to fight terrorist organizations over the past 20 years. A common ancestor in the animal…

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We’re speaking less every day

We’re speaking less every day

BBC Science Focus reports: The spoken word is in decline, according to new research from the universities of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) and Arizona. Psychologists discovered that, since 2005, the average person has spoken less each year than the year before, by approximately 338 fewer words per day. That’s equivalent to a yearly loss of around 120,000 words per person, representing thousands of lost human interactions. “Small changes in daily behaviour accumulate over time,” said first author Dr Valeria Pfeifer, assistant…

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The biggest advance in AI since the LLM — why Claude Code changes everything

The biggest advance in AI since the LLM — why Claude Code changes everything

  Gary Marcus writes: Claude Code, an impressive and possibly game-changing “coding agent” for programmers to write code faster is the single biggest advance in AI since the LLM. And the thing is, Claude Code is NOT a pure LLM. And it’s not pure deep learning. Not even close. That changes everything. The source code leak proves it. Tucked away at its center is a 3,167 line kernel called print.ts. print.ts is a pattern matching. And pattern matching is supposed…

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Anthropic’s Claude Mythos finds thousands of zero-day flaws across major systems

Anthropic’s Claude Mythos finds thousands of zero-day flaws across major systems

The Hacker News reports: Artificial Intelligence (AI) company Anthropic announced a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing that will use a preview version of its new frontier model, Claude Mythos, to find and address security vulnerabilities. The model will be used by a small set of organizations, including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Broadcom, Cisco, CrowdStrike, Google, JPMorgan Chase, the Linux Foundation, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Palo Alto Networks, along with Anthropic, to secure critical software. The company said it’s forming this…

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