For years, many bosses have been adamant that employees use AI at all costs — despite research suggesting there’s little to gain from it in terms of productivity, evidence that flies in the face of the tech industry’s repeated promises of a workplace revolution brought on by the tech. But now that execs are drowning in meaningless “workslop,” they’re starting to sing a very different tune. As Business Insider reports, one CEO of a tech recruiting company suddenly found herself being inundated with Slack messages from employees that they’d clearly generated using AI, leading her to implement a new policy that strictly forbids the practice for internal communications. She’s not the first. One anonymous CEO got so fed up, they threatened to “fire the next person” who blasted them with unedited ChatGPT slop, as Inc reported earlier this year. Instead of fundamentally reshaping white collar industries for the better, it’s finally dawning on bosses that the extensive and often counterproductive use of AI tools could be doing far more harm than good. Case in point, in a new study published in the journal The Leadership Quarterly, a team of researchers led by Hebrew University of Jerusalem PhD student Samuel Meyers…

MBARI’s first 4K footage of a barreleye fish offers a rare chance to study how its unusual eyes work in the ocean’s dim twilight zone. The day’s deep-sea research was over when a fish with a transparent head came into view. Research Specialist Shannon Johnson spotted it as MBARI’s pilots were “flying” the remotely operated […]

The Mediterranean Sea still holds species unknown to science. One of them is Copula lucentia, a tiny jellyfish measuring just a few millimeters. Discovered off El Campello, in Alicante, it was formally described in 2024 by a research team at the University of Alicante (UA) Marine Laboratory in Dénia, which forms part of the university’s Ramón Margalef Multidisciplinary Institute for Environmental Research.

The “blue tsunami” that swept over the midterm elections made it clear that voters are sick of tech billionaires meddling in politics, opposed to data center construction, and deeply suspicious of the AI industry. But OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar apparently didn’t get that memo. In an interview with CNBC on Friday, she vowed that OpenAI would keep pouring money into data center construction so it can please its corporate customers — voters be damned. “When I think about the midterms, I need to keep thinking about how do we keep investing to meet that customer demand,” Friar told CNBC’s Sara Eisen in the interview. “It starts early with having built relationships with all of the hyperscalers, and it will continue to mean that we raise capital.” While Eisen is focused on “customer demand,” she should probably start paying attention to what voters are asking for. Across 41 local ballot measures on restricting AI data centers, voters supported all but one, Ballotpedia data showed. 56 percent of Americans considered AI and data centers a crucial or major factor in how they voted, according to NBC News exit polls. Meanwhile, Democratic challengers flipped seats in multiple states while campaigning against…

Glaciers are often thought of as unyielding blocks of ice that slowly carve out the landscape as they move downhill by gravity. But sometimes their slow crawl becomes a surge that sees them move orders of magnitude faster than their usual speed.

Earlier this week, wildlife veterinarian Dr. Priya Patel and her colleagues at the Cape Wildlife Center in Barnstable, Massachusetts had to deal with something they had never seen before: a raccoon with an arrow sticking out of its face.  But the saga really began several days before then, when an individual in Plymouth, Massachusetts called the Cape Wildlife Center to let them know that they had spotted the injured raccoon. The wildlife center team told the caller to contact the local animal control to apprehend the raccoon, who had no intention of making it easy.  It took animal control around one week to catch the trash panda. Patel, who is also the medical director of the wildlife center, tells Popular Science that she was a “very feisty raccoon,” even while inside of her cage. “So we decided to sedate her right away in the cage so that there was less stress for her, and then we were safe getting her out.”  Once the snoozing raccoon had been removed from the cage, the team realized that whatever was sticking out of her face was also sticking out the back of her head. Patel and her colleagues quickly took X-ray images, which…

After delivering a hard blow to the MAGA-aligned Republican party in this week’s midterm elections, signs are emerging that the new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate are planning to crack down hard on the tech industry that closely aligned itself with Donald Trump’s second administration. According to Reuters, Democrats are already preparing a barrage of new legislation taking aim at AI, particularly the labs that create frontier models and the data centers that power them. The new regulations will reportedly include controls aimed at protecting residents from rising energy prices associated with the data center boom, as well as a bill meant to define what kind of product liability laws AI labs have to follow. While both would be blows to a tech industry which has largely run wild under Trump, holding AI companies liable for harms caused by their products might be a particularly effective way of reining in the excesses of the AI buildout. Concerns around the incoming regulatory regime sparked a massive sell-off of AI-chip related stocks, resulting in the largest single-day loss for the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite in history. Still, there are signs that Democrats want to play nice with business interests. Californian Representative…

Scientists have captured rare 4K footage of a fish with a transparent head. Spotted nearly 2,000 feet beneath the Pacific Ocean, this bizarre little creature looks almost unreal. And at just six inches long, it’s much smaller than you might expect. Meet the Macropinna microstoma, also called barreleye fish. This one is a deep-sea creature with a fluid-filled dome covering the top of its head. Inside this transparent chamber sit two enormous tubular eyes that normally point upward, helping the fish search for food in the dimly lit waters of the ocean’s twilight zone. Researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) recently got an unusually close look at this elusive species. It’s not something that happens often. Across nearly 40 years of deep-sea exploration, the institute has encountered the barreleye just 11 times. This latest sighting gave scientists their first opportunity to record the animal in 4K. A Rare Fish Appeared Out Of Nowhere The encounter happened around 55 miles (90 kilometers) off the California coast, during an eight-day expedition aboard MBARI’s research vessel David Packard. The team was actually searching for gelatinous marine animals, including jellyfish and siphonophores, when their underwater robot, Doc Ricketts, began heading back…

Medieval health and sanitation efforts involved deliberate interventions; however, some of these measures had the opposite effect, leading to an increased spread of disease in Trondheim.

Researchers have identified a new extinct species of megapode, a chicken relative that weighed roughly 3.9 kg, from one fragment of leg bone found on the Indonesian island of Flores. Named Megapodius rokusi, the bird was several times heavier than the only megapode living on the island today. The bone came from Liang Bua, the same cave where Homo floresiensis was found. Megapodes, also called incubator birds or mound-builders, are medium-sized to large terrestrial birds with large legs and feet that end in sharp claws. They bury their eggs and rely on environmental heat rather than body heat to incubate them. The find matters for a few reasons, from its size to its location. It is the first fossil megapode described from Wallacea, the island region between mainland Asia and Australia, and it adds a new name to a group whose odd geography has long puzzled scientists. One Fragment, One New Species The fossil is the lower half of a right tarsometatarsus, a lower leg bone. It was excavated in 2009 at Liang Bua, from sediments dated to roughly 190,000 to 120,000 years ago. The specimen is larger than the same bone in any known living or extinct species of…

An alternative model in which the universe is 26.7 billion years old and needs neither dark matter nor dark energy has held up against several major cosmology tests, according to a new University of Ottawa study. The research, titled “A Big Bang Nucleosynthesis Consistency Test of the CCC+TL Cosmology,” is published in the journal Universe.

Geoffrey Hinton is regarded as a godfather of AI, but he deserves equal recognition for being one of the most disappointed parents of all time. Sounding as gloomy about his own creation as ever, the Nobel prize-winning computer scientist suggested in a new interview with The Guardian that humankind might have “been better off never developing it.” He pointed to the recent hacking sprees by rogue AI agents as one cause for concern, in which AI models from companies like OpenAI autonomously broke out of their sandboxes and launched cyberattacks on, or tampered with, government and corporate systems.   It’s only a matter of time, he says, before the AIs, on their own or under the direction of nefarious actors, sabotage our energy infrastructure and cause a Chernobyl-style disaster that would wake people up to the tech’s dangerous power. “Either later this year or next year we’ll see Chernobyl, and that may be enough to make people really pay attention,” he told The Guardian. Hinton doesn’t necessarily mean a nuclear accident. In the type of event he’s imagining, an AI-powered attack on an energy-generating system “causes a massive brownout” that takes down the world financial system, or power grids, for an…

A star cluster concealed behind thick clouds of dust near the Milky Way’s center may be 13.4 billion years old, placing it among the oldest known stellar groups in our galaxy. New observations have helped astronomers determine the age and distance of VVV CL001, a faint globular cluster whose origins have remained difficult to establish. Globular clusters contain some of the oldest stars in the Milky Way, with populations typically dating back 10 billion to 13 billion years. Their ages and chemical compositions preserve evidence of the conditions under which the galaxy began to form. Metal-poor clusters are particularly valuable because they can help astronomers establish limits on the galaxy’s age. VVV CL001 was discovered in 2010 through the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea survey and confirmed as a cluster in 2019. Located toward the crowded galactic bulge, it has presented an observational challenge. Its faintness, surrounding dust and unusual motion relative to nearby stars have complicated attempts to determine its distance and orbital history. Powerful Telescopes Reveal Previously Unidentified Stars A research team led by J. Olivares Carvajal of the INAF Capodimonte Astronomical Observatory combined near-infrared observations from the FourStar Infrared Camera, mounted on the 6.5-meter Magellan Baade…

Metal detectorists working a known landmine zone in South Korea found something far older than any modern hazard: a bronze handgun some 600 years old. It is now identified as the oldest gunpowder weapon ever discovered in the country. The object is called the Hwangja Hwatong, which translates as the yellow-character hand cannon, or yellow-character fire tube. It came from Mount Geumjeongsan, in the historic city of Naju, a site known to be hazardous. Surviving firearms from this stretch of Korean history are exceptionally rare, which is why the find has drawn so much attention. A short inscription on the barrel has already given researchers plenty to work with, from the gun’s specifications to the name of the person who made it. A Discovery Made During Safety Sweeps The piece was first uncovered in November 2023, during routine safety sweeps ahead of a trail installation. It lay roughly 174 miles south of Seoul. Physically, the gun is modest, because it runs just under 10 inches long and weighs slightly over two pounds. The National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage and the Naju Research Institute later examined it with X-rays and a metallurgical study. According to a translated statement from the…

A single bad night’s sleep may be easier on a healthy older brain than a younger one, though regularly missing sleep still carries risks. Sleep quality often declines with age, yet older adults can seem less affected by a single bad night than younger people. Understanding that apparent mismatch means looking at how the brain […]

To protect their future harvests, Western Canadian farmers need to manage soil acidity across their entire multiyear rotation rather than crop by crop, long-term research from the University of Alberta suggests.

Whether you work from home, have to schlep into an office, or both, chances are you spend a fair bit of time on video calls. For any job where you work with colleagues, clients, or contractors, video calls are par for the course now—and that’s before you get into video meetings you might have in your spare time, for book clubs or family reunions. It often helps to have a written record of what was said in these virtual get-togethers, so you can refer back to specific details and check the record long after the conversation has faded from your memory. And, thanks in part to advances in AI, there are now a ton of apps around that can recognize human speech, turn it into digital text, and present you with a transcription—almost in real time, in some cases. Use the built-in tools Just about every video meeting app out there has its own transcription tool included, so this is one option. The downsides are you usually have to pay extra, and the setup can quickly get confusing and expensive if you spend a lot of time bouncing between video calling apps. This works best if you spend all your…

Escalating hacks affecting blood labs and grocery stores show the very real risks to critical infrastructure that come from basic security lapses involving internet-connected devices.

The ‘Great Unconformity’ has puzzled scientists since its discovery in the 1870s

While many scientists have long held that Mars is “geologically dead” inside, new research is adding to the growing body of evidence to the contrary. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Science Advances, an international team of researchers examined data collected by the European and Russian ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter in 2021, which found that Mars is slowly belching hydrogen chloride gas. The researchers suggest this gas is being released from hot magma deep beneath its surface after discovering intriguing new fissures along a massive volcano, indicating the planet may be geologically active after all — or at least it was until relatively recently. The research could have significant implications for the possibility of ancient life on the Red Planet, hinting at a far warmer and thicker atmosphere — and an abundance of liquid water on its surface — in its not-too-distant past. “Our findings suggest that Mars has retained enough internal heat to support volcanic activity until recently, and possibly still does,” said colead author and Polish Academy of Sciences professor Daniel Mège in a statement about the research. While scientists have long observed variations in hydrogen chloride emissions across the Red Planet that coincide…

It’s not easy to extract iron from its ore. But the peoples of the ancient city of Great Zimbabwe—the capital of a thriving kingdom in southern Africa between 1000 to 1700 AD—were masters. At sites near the city’s stone ruins, clusters of iron-smelting furnaces survive today as mounds of rubble. At Mashava, a village 25 miles northwest, fragments bear fingermarks of those who long ago smoothed the structures’ clay interiors. Some of the furnaces were nearly an adult’s arm span in width, with walls thick and strong to contain the heat of more than 2,100° Fahrenheit needed to smelt iron. Unlike other furnaces that required workers to force air into them with bellows, these were designed to suck air in, then out through a chimney, no human labor required. This would have made it significantly easier to produce the iron, which was fashioned into hoes, axes, and arrowheads.Read full article Comments

The giant lay flat on its back, still inside the hole that had once held it upright. It was an enormous piece of stone. Measuring about 10 feet (3.04 meters) long, 5.5 feet (1.68 meters) wide and more than 2 feet (0.74 meters) thick, the slab weighed an estimated 9.7 metric tons, roughly the weight of two African elephants. Whoever carved it had given it a human form, complete with a belt around its waist. There are even signs it may once have been painted. Archaeologists call it a statue-menhir, and it turned up this year in Champigny-sur-Marne, just east of Paris. The discovery was part of something much bigger: a 6,500-year-old cemetery containing 11 graves, around 30 large stone blocks and an unusual earthen monument that appeared to be a burial mound. Except there was nobody buried inside. A Stone Giant in a Paris Suburb The excavation took place at 134–148 rue de Verdun, a plot earmarked for a new housing development. Before construction began, France’s preventive archaeology institute, Inrap, was brought in at the request of the regional archaeology service to investigate what lay beneath the ground. The remains date to the Middle Neolithic, between about 4750 and…

The water we drink may hold clues to a rare heart condition in children, but whether naturally occurring lithium plays a role in its development remains unknown. A dangerously fast heartbeat can begin with an extra strand of heart muscle that forms before birth. The strand creates an abnormal electrical connection, allowing the heart’s rhythm […]

We asked a statistics expert how difficult it would be to find a needle in a haystack—the answer is: just as hard as you think

The governor-elect of Texas Gina Hinojosa made it clear on the campaign trail that she would work to rein in data centers and billionaire tech barons. And now that she’s headed into office, that means playing hardball with SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. “We can have a strong working relationship with Elon Musk and his companies, but it has to be on our terms,” Hinojosa said Thursday in an interview with CNN, as quoted by Bloomberg. “It cannot be just running over the people of Texas, and that’s what changes now that I will be governor.” A central part of Hinojosa’s campaign was demanding an immediate moratorium on new data center construction until lawmakers have established tighter regulations and stronger protections for local communities. In the Thursday interview, Hinojosa reiterated her commitment to placing more stringent regulations on data centers by saying she would “balance” it with keeping Texas a business-friendly state.  She also shared that she’s already making moves to crack down on Musk. Amid speculation that Texas officials have been considering a sale of state park land to SpaceX, Hinojosa said she spoke to the head of the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department to “request that no…

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For people across South Asia, especially in northern India, Diwali celebrations coincide with the return of hazardous winter air, raising concerns about how to celebrate safely.

Quantum researchers show how materials inevitably absorb light

Meteorologists said Friday they were observing an unprecedented early disruption of the polar vortex, raising the risk of cold snaps across the Northern Hemisphere, though there remains significant uncertainty.

A Pakistani astronaut will join the crew of China’s Shenzhou 24 spacecraft on a mission that would make him the first foreign national to board Beijing’s space station, state media reported Saturday.

It would seem difficult to miss a 15,000-pound (6,804-kilogram) baby, but for months scientists who study rare whales did just that, and now they couldn’t be happier.

Panda lovers are expected to line up Friday at Zoo Atlanta to see a new pair of giant pandas make their public debut.

A newly described dinosaur, Infernogallus jamesi, had chewing muscles suited to mashing soft food, which makes it the first known dinosaur to specifically eat fruit. The turkey-sized animal lived in the Hell Creek Formation, right alongside T. rex and Triceratops. The findings were published in Nature Communications. The Cretaceous is usually pictured as a world of ravenous carnivores and lumbering herbivores. But another kind of dinosaur was evolving at the same time, one that began eating the plants that had started to flower and produce fruit. The discovery comes from paleontologists at Stony Brook University, the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) and the North Dakota Geological Survey, led by Dr. Gregory Funston. Their analysis of the animal’s chewing muscles revealed an arrangement seen today only in fruit-eating parrots. A Small “Hell Chicken” From Famous Company The name Infernogallus means “hell chicken,” a nod to where the fossils turned up: the Hell Creek Formation, which stretches across Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. As said in the paper, the material includes a nearly complete, articulated skull and a partial skeleton, now on display at the ROM. The animal belonged to the caenagnathids, a group of toothless, feathered dinosaurs. It weighed about…

The early bird gets the worm. Here are the best Black Friday deals for 2026 you can already get right now.

Owning a home is billed as a way to build wealth, but amid climate-related disasters, for many, it’s beginning to feel like a trap.

Sequoia pioneered the scouts model and many VC firms followed suit, but a consensus now seems to be forming that the model has reached limits in its current form.

Can you guess the puzzle writer’s secret formula?

After spending two years getting cozy with the White House, Big Tech is suddenly trying to make friends with Democrats, and the open question is whether that image makeover can hold up against what states, local communities, and the markets are about to do.

It took around 480,000 trucks to haul away 4.8 million metric tons (5.3 million tons) of rubble across western Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa tore through the Caribbean in 2025, United Nations satellites showed.

The deal highlights the challenges of developing massive AI data centers.

Simulations suggest that one type of qubit could reveal its state through its own electric current, helping researchers monitor quantum computers with less disturbance and fewer components. Like a bit in an ordinary computer, a qubit stores information using states labeled 0 and 1. A qubit can also be prepared in a superposition, a quantum […]

A figure in red trudges across a blanket of white. Snow squeaks under the scientist’s feet, too dry to be slick or soft. Only a line of flags and a few large buildings—the scientist’s destination—break up the landscape. The sun hovers on the horizon, never quite setting against a blue sky devoid of clouds.

A simple chemical treatment could overcome a persistent weakness in next-generation solid-state batteries. Scientists in China have developed a thin protective coating that could help overcome a major obstacle to longer-lasting, high-capacity batteries. In laboratory tests, solid-state batteries using the treated lithium metal retained 82.3% of their initial capacity after 300 charging cycles, compared with […]

Spring is the season of blooming flowers and buzzing bees.

OpenAI has reportedly raised an additional $11 billion as part of a funding round that hasn’t closed yet but is expected to in the coming weeks.

Tesla’s massive EV is the second within the last year to get the ax, while smaller vehicles are proliferating. It could be a huge benefit for the US battery supply chain.

Few insects have a more gruesome lifestyle than Darwin wasps. Rather than simply hunting other animals, these parasitic wasps lay their eggs on or inside living hosts, including caterpillars, beetles and spiders. Their larvae then feed on their hosts, gradually consuming them and eventually killing them.

At least nine bus riders were injured when a wayward delivery robot plowed into oncoming traffic in Estonia. The incident happened in the capital city Tallinn, in the middle of rush-hour traffic. As Estonian public broadcaster ERR reported, a delivery robot operated by the company Starship Technologies blundered into an intersection during a “no walk” signal, bringing it squarely into the path of an oncoming bus. Reacting to the obstacle darting out into the road, the bus driver hit the brakes, sending passengers tumbling. The driver’s quick reaction might have actually spared the robot, as the device reportedly continued on its delivery route after colliding with the front of the bus. “The robot fled, if you can put it that way,” as one Tallinn Transport official told ERR. As the spokesperson put it, the robot’s actions may legally constitute fleeing the scene of a traffic incident, meaning Starship Technologies could very well be on the hook for the incident. “If a participant in a traffic accident leaves the scene without fulfilling the obligations prescribed by law, this may constitute an offense,” the transportation official explained. It wouldn’t the company’s first brush with the law. In Arizona, a 73-year-old woman is…

Traditional lenses and mirrors focus light using curved surfaces. Metasurfaces can achieve similar functions with a flat layer of nanoscale structures that locally control the phase of light. Extending these flat optics into the ultraviolet could support compact systems for high-resolution imaging, spectroscopy, and sensing, but it introduces a fundamental materials problem: many of the materials used to make metasurfaces strongly absorb UV light.

Metabolites are consumed by enzymes to produce other vital molecules as well as to control metabolite levels. But how do cells avoid consuming too much? Researchers from the MPI of Biochemistry, with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and the de Duve Institute in Brussels, have deciphered such molecular regulation in tryptophan metabolism. The essential amino acid tryptophan binds to a second site on the enzyme TDO2, distinct from where it is consumed. This sequesters a region needed by two effectors, the kinase CK2 and the ubiquitin ligase CUL1–β-TrCP, which act sequentially to signal TDO2 degradation. The findings are now published in Molecular Cell.