This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. As voters went to the polls across the US last week, I was in Ashburn, Virginia, part of what’s known as Data Center Alley—the world’s largest data center hub. It’s also where the backlash now sweeping the country arguably first began taking shape. Driving through it is surreal. Concrete monolithic buildings loom along every major road, with names like Skybox and CloudHQ. It’s accepted wisdom in Big Tech that the war against data centers must be about…
Author: Michael
Anthropic says the new models “show improvements in areas like coding, reasoning, and vision,” as well as in communicating more clearly with users.
By now, it’s obvious that Donald Trump has never had a secret he couldn’t resist blurting out on television. His latest slip-up — if we can really call it that — happened during an interview with CBS’ new and improved 60 Minutes program on Sunday evening. During the interview, Trump took a bizarre left-turn in the conversation to share news that the White House almost moved to arrest a top tech executive over some vague problems with AI safety. It was a “situation where somebody was reported to us to be doing something bad with AI,” Trump explained, using the…
Nominal, a startup that offers an AI platform for hardware engineering and claims Anduril as a major customer, has raised another big round of financing that triples its valuation.
Subtle differences in brain activity may reveal who is most vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease and who could remain mentally sharp well into old age. Distinct patterns of brain activity may predict Alzheimer’s disease years before memory problems or hallmark brain changes appear. Stanford Medicine researchers have developed a scoring system that identifies people at greater […]
Reconstructing impact events on Earth and other planetary bodies, including the moon, is crucial for understanding how the solar system evolved and how planets develop.
France’s foreign minister blamed Iran for launching at least two waves of cyberattacks targeting industrial refrigerated and freezer units across France and wider Europe.
The US military has published a Request for Information on a federal procurement website signaling interest in deploying a “proliferated cislunar constellation” consisting of an unspecified number of satellites performing an undisclosed mission in the vicinity of the Moon. The announcement follows statements in recent months from the Space Force’s acquisitions chief for advanced programs, Maj. Gen. Stephen Purdy, that the military was getting serious about extending its reach to the Moon. The Space Force’s most distant satellites today are in geostationary orbit, some 22,000 miles (36,000 kilometers) over the equator, collecting routine surveillance and missile warning data. Most recently,…
Kari Schleher, an assistant professor in the University of New Mexico’s Department of Anthropology and faculty curator of archaeology at UNM’s Maxwell Museum, recently published research examining whether archaeologists can determine the sources of azurite, a vivid blue copper mineral that was used by the Ancestral Pueblo people starting at least 1,400 years ago.
Organic pollutants such as pesticides and industrial chemicals commonly pose risks to aquatic ecosystems, even in protected rivers and streams, according to a new study by RPTU University Kaiserslautern-Landau, based on the analysis of more than 180 million water measurements from the French long-term monitoring program “Naïades.” The research shows that pollutants are detectable in nearly all of the water bodies examined and that groups of substances often overlooked in earlier studies contribute significantly to environmental risks.