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Category: Technology

Fungi could be the answer to breaking down plastic junk

Fungi could be the answer to breaking down plastic junk

Ars Technica reports: Plastic is becoming a plague on Earth. Not only are landfills bursting with it, but it has also polluted our oceans to the point that a tiny creature that had apparently made microplastics part of its diet was named Eurythenes plasticus. Can we possibly hold back the spread of a material that piles up faster than it could ever decay? There might be an answer, and that answer is fungus. Researchers from the University of Kelaniya and…

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Musk secretly shut down Starlink to foil a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian ships, new biography reveals

Musk secretly shut down Starlink to foil a Ukrainian drone attack on Russian ships, new biography reveals

CNN reports: Elon Musk secretly ordered his engineers to turn off his company’s Starlink satellite communications network near the Crimean coast last year to disrupt a Ukrainian sneak attack on the Russian naval fleet, according to an excerpt adapted from Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the eccentric billionaire titled “Elon Musk.” As Ukrainian submarine drones strapped with explosives approached the Russian fleet, they “lost connectivity and washed ashore harmlessly,” Isaacson writes. Musk’s decision, which left Ukrainian officials begging him to…

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Racism in online gaming is rampant. The toll on youth mental health is adding up

Racism in online gaming is rampant. The toll on youth mental health is adding up

USA Today reports: Not long ago, Amanda Calhoun, a periodic gamer, considered buying a video game with online multiplayer capability to play with other gamers online. But as she scrolled through the game’s reviews, she found complaints over the frequency with which the N-word was used by some on the platform. She decided not to buy it. For Calhoun, who is Black, the discovery was distressing, not just personally but professionally given her work in child and adolescent psychiatry. With so many…

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If AI becomes conscious, how will we know?

If AI becomes conscious, how will we know?

Science reports: In 2021, Google engineer Blake Lemoine made headlines—and got himself fired—when he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he’d been testing, was sentient. Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, especially so-called large language models such as LaMDA and ChatGPT, can certainly seem conscious. But they’re trained on vast amounts of text to imitate human responses. So how can we really know? Now, a group of 19 computer scientists, neuroscientists, and philosophers has come up with an approach: not a single definitive…

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Beijing is coming for the metaverse

Beijing is coming for the metaverse

Politico reports: China wants to define how a new, promising technology called the metaverse works — and it is pushing proposals that bear an eerie resemblance to the country’s controversial social credit systems, proposals reviewed by POLITICO showed. The proposals, drafted by the state-owned telecoms operator China Mobile, floated a “Digital Identity System” for all users of online virtual worlds, or metaverses. They recommended that the digital ID should work with “natural characteristics” and “social characteristics” that include a range…

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How the U.S. government came to rely on Elon Musk — and is now struggling to rein him in

How the U.S. government came to rely on Elon Musk — and is now struggling to rein him in

Ronan Farrow writes: Last October, Colin Kahl, then the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon, sat in a hotel in Paris and prepared to make a call to avert disaster in Ukraine. A staffer handed him an iPhone—in part to avoid inviting an onslaught of late-night texts and colorful emojis on Kahl’s own phone. Kahl had returned to his room, with its heavy drapery and distant view of the Eiffel Tower, after a day of meetings with officials…

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Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating?

Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating?

Ross Andersen writes: On a Monday morning in April, Sam Altman sat inside OpenAI’s San Francisco headquarters, telling me about a dangerous artificial intelligence that his company had built but would never release. His employees, he later said, often lose sleep worrying about the AIs they might one day release without fully appreciating their dangers. With his heel perched on the edge of his swivel chair, he looked relaxed. The powerful AI that his company had released in November had…

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Light pollution and drought are pushing fireflies toward extinction

Light pollution and drought are pushing fireflies toward extinction

CBS News reports: Fireflies are the romantics of the insect world. In the summer months, they emerge from the ground with love on the brain. They only live for two to three weeks once they’ve become full adults and in that time they don’t even eat. They’re too busy flirting. Fireflies — or lightning bugs, depending on where you grew up — are one of the only insects with elaborate courtship dialogues, said Avalon Owens, a research fellow at Harvard….

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Robo-taxis are legal now

Robo-taxis are legal now

Anna Wiener writes: The California Public Utilities Commission—a state agency that regulates power, water, and telecommunications companies, as well as movers, taxicabs, rideshare services, and self-driving cars—is headquartered in a large, curved building on Van Ness Avenue, in San Francisco, that looks a bit like a sun visor. Last Thursday morning, a small group of protesters gathered on the steps in advance of the commission’s vote on whether to allow the autonomous-vehicle companies Cruise and Waymo to expand their fleets,…

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The dawn of a new climate industry

The dawn of a new climate industry

Robinson Meyer writes: What does the new American climate policy look like? Last week, we got a better sense. On Friday, the Biden administration unveiled a massive investment — more than $1.2 billion — that aims to create a new industry in the United States out of whole cloth that will specialize in removing carbon from the atmosphere. As President Joe Biden’s climate law hits its one-year anniversary, the investment shows the audacity, the potential, and — ultimately — the…

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Louis DeJoy: From Trump villain to Biden’s clean energy buddy

Louis DeJoy: From Trump villain to Biden’s clean energy buddy

Politico reports: During the summer of 2020, there were few bigger Democratic super villains than Louis DeJoy. The postmaster general was accused of masterminding an attempt to steal the election for former President Donald Trump by subverting mail-in voting in the midst of the pandemic. He was hauled up to Capitol Hill to defend his policies. When Joe Biden won, it was generally assumed that his days were numbered. Now, nearly three years later, DeJoy isn’t just still standing atop…

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Is carbon capture and storage a viable climate solution?

Is carbon capture and storage a viable climate solution?

Inside Climate News reports: Carbon capture and storage refers to a suite of technologies that remove carbon dioxide from smokestack emissions and then compress the climate-warming gas for injection underground. The idea is not new, but has gotten lots of attention and tens of billions of dollars in funding in recent years as governments look to accelerate efforts to cut climate pollution. The technologies could, theoretically, help reduce emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants and industrial operations like cement and steel…

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Yes, AI models can get worse over time

Yes, AI models can get worse over time

Scientific American reports: When OpenAI released its latest text-generating artificial intelligence, the large language model GPT-4, in March, it was very good at identifying prime numbers. When the AI was given a series of 500 such numbers and asked whether they were primes, it correctly labeled them 97.6 percent of the time. But a few months later, in June, the same test yielded very different results. GPT-4 only correctly labeled 2.4 percent of the prime numbers AI researchers prompted it with—a complete…

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Elon Musk’s unmatched power in satellite internet technology

Elon Musk’s unmatched power in satellite internet technology

The New York Times reports: On March 17, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the leader of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, dialed into a call to discuss Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Over the secure line, the two military leaders conferred on air defense systems, real-time battlefield assessments and shared intelligence on Russia’s military losses. They also talked about Elon Musk. General Zaluzhnyi raised the topic of Starlink, the satellite internet technology…

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U.S. hunts Chinese malware that could disrupt military operations and civilian infrastructure

U.S. hunts Chinese malware that could disrupt military operations and civilian infrastructure

The New York Times reports: The Biden administration is hunting for malicious computer code it believes China has hidden deep inside the networks controlling power grids, communications systems and water supplies that feed military bases in the United States and around the world, according to American military, intelligence and national security officials. The discovery of the malware has raised fears that Chinese hackers, probably working for the People’s Liberation Army, have inserted code designed to disrupt U.S. military operations in…

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Events that never happened could influence the 2024 presidential election – a cybersecurity researcher explains situation deepfakes

Events that never happened could influence the 2024 presidential election – a cybersecurity researcher explains situation deepfakes

The volatile mix of deepfakes and political campaigns is a good reason to be on guard. Sean Anthony Eddy Creative/E+ via Getty Images By Christopher Schwartz, Rochester Institute of Technology Imagine an October surprise like no other: Only a week before Nov. 5, 2024, a video recording reveals a secret meeting between Joe Biden and Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The American and Ukrainian presidents agree to immediately initiate Ukraine into NATO under “the special emergency membership protocol” and prepare for a nuclear…

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