Anthropic seems hellbent on making itself one of the most hated companies among white collar workers. The AI lab behind the chatbot Claude has announced a new feature, “Smart Reports,” which is meant to allow managers to scrape and analyze their employee’s workaday interactions with Anthropic ‘s various AI products. According to Anthropic’s Smart Reports support page, the tool will let bosses generate summaries based on “how a team uses Claude” in order to “report on the work getting done” throughout the day. Anthropic claims that its system will anonymize sessions, though it remains to be seen how secure this system is in practice. (Anthropic’s previous foray into “anonymized” data was a privacy disaster, as the information was easily de-anonymized using common large language models.) Smart Reports isn’t just about monitoring individual chat sessions. As Anthropic’s support page makes clear, management can use Smart Reports to sort their workers’ AI output by overall cost as well as the chatbot’s output, allowing direct oversight over employee’s perceived efficiency when using AI tools. The new feature seems to be part of Anthropic’s drive to scoop up enterprise-level contracts as it looks ahead to its IPO. Corporate customers account for a reported 80…

Some bird species act as “double mutualists” for a common mistletoe, both pollinating its flowers and dispersing its seeds. These double mutualists play an effective role in mistletoe reproduction.

Expert Counter-Strike players could make ideal candidates for fast-paced emergency service response jobs requiring split-second decision-making, according to a new University of Sheffield study aiming to debunk myths about video games.

CrowdStrike said it will buy Fiddler AI, which makes AI agent observability software, and Dreadnode, which helps companies automate AI security testing.

In a short space of time, artificial intelligence has become a whiz at designing proteins, molecular machines that perform various functions such as speeding up reactions, producing fluorescent signals and breaking down plastic. But getting AI to design the specific protein you want usually requires the user to have a strong understanding of molecular structures and geometric constraints to guide the models correctly.

AI is screening résumés, prompting some managers to hire fewer entry-level workers and leading others to expect beginners to tackle more advanced work, Northeastern University’s AI & Society Survey found. The report is the latest in a series that opened with an analysis of how people across the political spectrum view AI training.

In 2025, a local crabber reached out to professor Romuald Lipcius with some news: He’d been catching stone crabs in the Chesapeake Bay. Native to Florida, the species had reached its northernmost documented occurrence to date. News got out, and William & Mary’s VIMS & Batten School were flooded with additional sightings from the public. Some were legitimate; many were mistaken identities.

At a moment when Anthropic’s compute margins should be getting better, they’re getting worse.

Visigothic and Vandal forces marched into Italy and conquered Rome; the Huns spread fear and terror on their campaigns through Western Europe; the Franks expanded their domain southward—the fifth century was an era of profound, often violent upheavals in Europe, and at the same time one of great mobility. Researchers from the Institute of Clinical Molecular Biology (IKMB) at Christian-Albrechts-University in Kiel and the Lower Saxony Institute for Historical Coastal Research (NIhK) have now identified a specific example of this mobility in the Fallward burial ground in what is now the district of Cuxhaven.

Celebrities are shilling AI companies. Lionel Messi, probably among the top five most famous people on Earth right now, just did a World Cup ad campaign for OpenAI. Some genuinely seem to be hooked on the beguiling guidance of the tech. Others just seem to be chasing another big payday. But why does it keep happening, even in the face of massive public backlash? There are fewer better places to start than with Charles Porch, a man who was recently profiled in New York Magazine, which christened him “OpenAI’s Hollywood Whisperer.” Porch worked at Instagram for 15 years, where his job was basically convincing cool famous people to use the platform, turning it into the cultural powerhouse that it is today. In 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman hired Porch to do the same thing for ChatGPT. Among his list of A-list stars he’s brought into the AI fold is actress Gwyneth Paltrow, whom he arranged a dinner with Altman in September (after a public freakout about rumors of the dinner caused it to be postponed). A self-styled “tech optimist,” Porch described himself as “not a business-development guy or the brand guy,” but the “relationships person that’s bringing everyone along on…

Now is your chance to own as many pieces of film history as your bank account will allow. Numerous items from filmmaker Stanley Kubrick’s personal archive are hitting the auction block for the first time. Equipment, props, scripts, and more will go up for bid directly from the Stanley Kubrick Film Archives at Bonhams in London this February.  Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999) was one of Hollywood’s most respected and influential filmmakers. His most impactful films include 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Shining (1980), and Eyes Wide Shut (1999). His films pushed boundaries and left a lasting impression that extended far beyond the screen. “His movies have stood the test of time and will continue to be relevant to our shared humanity as long as people love the art of great cinema,” Katharina Kubrick, an actor and Kubrick’s daughter, said in a statement. “We are proud to be able to share with you some of the items from this unique collection, which we hope will find new homes and be cherished until it is time to pass them on to the next generation of film lovers.” Auction highlights include: Stanley Kubrick’s Director’s Chair Kubrick’s director’s chair. Image:…

Also co-founder and president Chris Yu told TechCrunch that he wanted to prioritize autonomous vehicles.

The icy surface of Ceres may be concealing an extensive history of salt accumulation. New research suggests that water ice can mask salt-rich deposits while a natural process gradually concentrates salts at the surface of the dwarf planet, offering an explanation for one of its persistent geological mysteries. A Hidden Process Is Reshaping the Surface of Ceres Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has puzzled scientists since NASA’s Dawn spacecraft revealed bright deposits scattered across its dark terrain. These unusual formations, including the prominent bright regions inside Occator Crater, contain salts that provide clues about the dwarf planet’s chemical and geological evolution. Yet their appearance raises a fundamental question: how did some regions become so rich in salt while others retained significant amounts of water ice? The new research suggests that these contrasting landscapes may develop through the gradual redistribution of ice rather than requiring the original deposits to contain exceptionally high concentrations of salt. When salty ice is exposed to the surface environment of Ceres, its water component can sublimate, changing directly from solid ice into vapor. This process can leave salts behind, progressively increasing their concentration in exposed material. Some of the…

With their mysterious glow and swirling veils of color, auroras enchant even experienced researchers. When a particularly intense solar storm reached Earth on the night of May 10, 2024, and relevant websites predicted auroras even for southern Lower Saxony, several researchers from the Technical University of Braunschweig, the Fraunhofer Institute for Surface Engineering and Thin Films IST, the University of Göttingen, and the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) took to the outdoors.

Should an area be fenced off, should animals be sterilized or relocated—or, as a last resort, selectively culled? As the long-running controversy over white-tailed deer in the Montreal suburb of Longueuil’s Michel-Chartrand Park has shown, managing wildlife in peri-urban parks isn’t just about the science. Emotions, trust and how decisions are communicated also play a role.

Schools choosing to restrict AI altogether will no longer be able to access Google Search, as AI features are now integrated into the search engine.

If a dangerous asteroid were headed toward Earth, one defense could be a nuclear detonation to blast one side with X-rays and nudge it off course. But new simulations suggest that for a lumpy, irregular asteroid, exactly where those X-rays hit could make a huge difference.

W.E.B. Du Bois’ standing as a distinguished social scientist, with a distinguished body of work, has been subjected to the same marginalizing forces he examined in his pioneering scholarship on race, culture and Black social thought.

Scientists have identified a new species of copepod living in a small limestone cave in Bermuda, a creature collected years before anyone confirmed what it was. Named Tetragoniceps bermudensis, it is the first known cave-dwelling member of its genus anywhere in the world. Its discovery has also prompted a call to protect the fragile site where it was found. Bermuda’s Walsingham cave system is home to a rich variety of animals found nowhere else on Earth. Researchers from the University of Cambridge, the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences, and the Senckenberg am Meer German Centre for Marine Biodiversity Research have now added one more species to that list. Copepods are among the most diverse crustaceans, living in habitats from freshwater ponds to the open ocean. They are some of the most abundant animals in marine plankton and play a vital role in global food webs. Still, much of their diversity remains unknown, especially in hard-to-reach environments like underground chambers. From a Narrow Passage to a New Species The copepod was first collected in 2016 by Sahar Khodami, Pedro Martinez Arbizu, and Leocadio Blanco-Bercial, of the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Sciences and the Senckenberg am Meer German Centre for Marine Biodiversity…

Using advanced laser spectroscopy on extremely rare radioactive material, researchers have uncovered new insights into the structure of heavy atomic nuclei. The nucleus of fermium-255 is far from spherical. Scientists have now determined its shape for the first time, finding that it is strongly elongated, much like a rugby ball. The high-precision measurements, published in […]

Schools across the country have long grown dependent on Google, from its eponymous search engine to services like Gmail and Chromebooks, the company’s cheap laptops that have become commonplace in classrooms. But it’s a fraught relationship that’s now seriously being tested as teachers start to suspect that the AI use is wreaking havoc on the impressionable minds of their students. The tech has been shown to erode young people’s critical thinking skills, cause their testing skills to plummet, and — at the extreme end — drive them into isolation and AI psychosis. Google is now putting on brass knuckles to keep its AI in schools, saying that it’ll be unwilling to support schools that move to block AI entirely. As the New York Times reports, the tech giant is revoking access to Google Search, the most important gateway to information on the open web, for any schools looking to restrict AI. It’s a spiteful move that could greatly deteriorate the company’s already tenuous relationship with educators. Put differently, Google is holding schools hostage by withholding its number one bargaining chip from any institution willing to say no to AI. The decision could force teachers’ and administrators’ hands as they watch…

The mayor’s comments come after the entertainment giant’s data breach last year, which exposed James Dolan’s surveillance.

A newly identified Arctic Ocean bacterium may have an unusual way of making the building blocks it needs to grow. Using acetone, a common chemical in seawater, the bacteria incorporate carbon dioxide (CO₂) into their metabolisms, allowing them to survive in waters where nutrients and usable organic matter are scarce.

High temperatures change how mealybugs feed, and that could help explain why some pasture mealybug infestations do far more damage than others, according to early findings from Texas A&M AgriLife Research scientists.

New toxicology tests of Incan mummies found the kids were given not just cocaine, but alcohol and chemicals found in ayahuasca before the ceremony

High in the mountains of northwestern Tibet, an ancient ice cap has preserved something scientists are only beginning to understand. New research suggests that ice buried within it may be more than 128,000 years old, extending the region’s known climate record by over 100,000 years. The discovery comes from the Guliya ice cap, where researchers examined ice cores collected during two separate expeditions in 1992 and 2015. Despite the 23-year gap, both sets of samples revealed remarkably similar chemical patterns. According to The Ohio State University, the findings, published in Science Advances, raise new questions about how mountain glaciers survived dramatic climatic transitions. Earlier research suggested that the Guliya ice record extended only into the middle Holocene, making the newly identified ice considerably older than scientists previously believed. A 23-Year Mystery Finally Uncovered The research team, led by Lonnie Thompson, a professor of earth sciences and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center, compared ice cores recovered from the Tibetan Plateau in 1992 and 2015. “When did ice start forming on the planet and what did those natural processes of loss look like?” he said in a statement. “We need to know those things, and the only way…

Physicists have found evidence of a particle decay so rare that it is expected to occur only around once in every 10 billion “beauty” particles. The result, from the upgraded LHCb experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), follows a search spanning more than 40 years and brings physicists closer to exploring the “Zeptoverse”—an unexplored world that exists at distances of a billionth of a trillionth of a meter, or a “zeptometer,” where new particles and forces of nature may be hiding.

Recent media reports of alleged sexual assaults by teenage boys draw attention to an uncomfortable truth: Young people sometimes perpetrate harmful sexual behavior against their peers.

Apple’s new App Store rules will require 18+ ratings for dating apps and AI companions that offer sexual or romantic content.

A new breakthrough in lithium separation could help overcome major challenges in extracting this essential battery material. A new technology developed at The University of Texas at Austin could make lithium extraction faster and more environmentally friendly by separating the valuable element from other dissolved substances with exceptional precision. The approach uses artificial channels so […]

If you are of a certain age, you might remember an innocent time when the honey badger (Mellivora capensis) took over the internet. Viral videos showing the feisty mammals that “don’t care” and punching above their weight made the honey badger a poster species for fearlessness. That same spirit appears to be alive and well in a bear named Arrow. The U.S. Forest Service team at Tongass National Forest has awarded the black bear (Ursus americanus) with the 2026 Honey Badger Award.  Arrow is designated by a scar on his ear, and a thin white bit of fur by his nose that resembles a mustache. According to the rangers, Arrow has also always been a fearless bear. He suffered an injury to his back left leg during a fight with a black bear named Tatonka in 2019. He still walks with a limp, but that has not dampened his resolve.  “This year, Arrow challenged and backed down two different brown bears,” the rangers write. “Usually, brown bears are dominant over black bears due to the significant size disparity. But there are so many fish to be had at Anan Creek, the bigger bears frequently choose avoidance over violence.” Meet Bears…

Tree planting provides wood, biomass and climate benefits, but the location where those new forests are established matters. An international study by researchers in Spain, Chile and Finland shows that converting nonforested land into planted forests can increase wildfire activity, with contrasting outcomes across temperate regions.

Archaeologists in southeastern Bulgaria have unearthed a marble relief showing the goddess Cybele beside three nymphs, a pairing that researchers call unusual. The carving came from a pagan temple destroyed by fire about 1,500 years ago. It may help explain who was worshipped there and how long the rites lasted. The discovery was made at Balak Dere, an archaeological site near Ivaylovgrad. The excavation was led by archaeologist Ivaylo Kanev, and his team from Bulgaria’s National Museum of History finished its latest round of work there in October. Balak Dere is no newcomer to research. Archaeologists have been investigating it since 2004, turning up buildings, coins and other objects that show how the settlement changed over hundreds of years. But, how did certain religious traditions manage to survive as the world around the temple underwent profound changes? A Combination Not Seen Before According to Arkeonews, the marble relief depicts the ancient mother goddess Cybele together with three nymphs. Researchers say this grouping has not previously been identified in comparable archaeological finds, which is a big part of why the piece stands out. The figures come from different corners of the divine world. Cybele was a goddess associated with nature, mountains…

A distant comet following a millennia-long orbit could provide valuable insights into how future space missions identify and study these elusive objects. A space telescope built to study distant galaxies has discovered a previously unknown comet approximately 1.3 billion kilometers (808 million miles) from Earth. The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope captured the object in […]

Yale research scientist Saúl Domínguez-Guerrero didn’t set out to catch “evolution in the act” when he traveled to the Caribbean with a team of Yale researchers a few years ago. At the time, the team from the lab of evolutionary biologist Martha Muñoz planned to do fieldwork on Caribbean anoles, colorful, tree-dwelling lizards native to warmer regions of the Americas.

It was a frightening time.

A child died after contracting the disease amid the largest national measles outbreak in more than three decades

Despite a visibly degrading job market and widespread anxiety around AI automation, empirical evidence definitively linking the two phenomena has been hard to come by. Until now, at least. New reporting by the Financial Times details two new sources of data pointing to AI’s impact on the labor market. First, there was a new analysis by US-based financial researcher Eric Basmajian, who recently wrote in a post on social media that “AI productivity gains are showing up” in jobs data — with the caveat that only about 15 percent of jobs seem to be impacted so far. “The three heaviest AI adopters (information, professional services, finance) went from a 2.2 percent productivity trend to 5.0 percent since 2022,” Basmajian explained, pointing to incremental gains in workplace productivity coinciding with a high AI adoption rate. The very next day after Basmajian’s post, what appears to be an internal Goldman Sachs report began circulating on social media. It warned that the “AI labor market impact” has been spreading beyond tech work — a field that has already been hit hard as generative AI becomes a common tool for writing software code. The report shows a rising trend between an industry’s AI exposure…

When the Greek army reached Thermopylae in 480 BC to block the Persian invasion, the wall it planned to fight behind was already old. According to Herodotus, it had been built long before, and most of it lay in ruins by the time King Leonidas and his allies hurried to rebuild it. Some 2,500 years later, that same wall is getting a second repair job. Greece’s Ministry of Culture has begun stabilizing and restoring the Phocian Wall, the stone barrier near the spot where the battle’s final phase unfolded, through the local antiquities authority of Phthiotida. The wall itself is not a new discovery. Archaeologists have known where it stands since the 1930s. What is new is the excavation that came before the restoration, which exposed the fortification’s full outline for the first time in decades and showed that people returned to the site long after the Spartans died there. A Wall Older Than the Battle The wall stands in the middle narrows of the pass, where the hot springs that gave Thermopylae its name (“Hot Gates”) still flow. It was never meant to stop Persians. The Phocians built it in the 6th century BC to hold back raids by…

From hallucinations to partisan bias, artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are not helpful when it comes to Election Day.

University at Buffalo scientists have found evidence that different species of yeast have shared genes originally acquired from an ancient virus—and the guts and droppings of beetles may have helped make it happen.

During his renowned excavations at the Shanidar Cave in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, American archaeologist Ralph Solecki located burial sites containing pollen and flower fragments from various species of wildflowers. He interpreted this as evidence that Neanderthals may have placed flowers around their dead at their burial sites around 60,000 years ago.

On Nov. 4, TechCrunch Founder Summit 2026 brings founders and VCs to Boston’s SoWa Power Station for practical insights and connections. Register before prices increase at the door.

Synthetic voices can restore speech, enable scams and outlive their owners. These uses raise questions about trust, consent and control.

When fishers are out working their boats, they are typically targeting a specific type of fish. However, other species often end up in their nets or trawls as well. This is known as “bycatch”—seafood for which the fishers receive no payment. Although it is illegal to discard bycatch back into the sea, it still happens.

Stanford engineers and colleagues designed a chip that can take a muddled mixture of light from multiple lasers and output clean beams of light. It’s the first time researchers have demonstrated a device that can take in mixed, or partially coherent, light and sort its photons into a clear set of separate beams.

Researchers have digitally rebuilt the face of a man who was beheaded after death and buried near a Roman fort in Scotland almost 2,000 years ago. Chemical analysis suggests he grew up in southern Britain, far from where he was laid to rest. But why he was there, and why his head was removed? The reconstruction is the work of researchers at National Museums Scotland and the independent U.K.-based forensic anthropologist Christopher Rynn, who built it from the shape of the man’s skull. The result shows a man with dark eyes and dark hair, depicted without a beard, a choice based on what was common at the time. The find is unusual in its own right. John H. Reid, an archaeologist at the Trimontium Trust who was not involved in the excavations, told Live Science that Scotland’s soil seldom preserves human skeletons, which makes a Roman-era burial an uncommon discovery. A Life Written in Bone The man was probably about 50 years old when he died, at some point between A.D. 142 and 165. His remains were buried near the Roman fort at Inveresk, on Scotland’s east coast just southeast of what is now Edinburgh. His skeleton suggests an active…

The inventive instrument maker collapsed into inso

WA Police are using live facial recognition techno

The wireless implant rids mice’s bodies of e