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"DOGE cuts to USDA may open door to invasive species, higher food prices."

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Russ Roberts (https://hawaiisciencejournal.blogspot.com).

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DOGE cuts to USDA may open door to invasive species, higher food prices

USDA layoffs threaten food safety

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Before he was abruptly fired last month, Derek Copeland worked as a trainer at the US Department of Agriculture’s National Dog Detection Training Center, preparing beagles and Labrador retrievers to sniff out plants and animals that are invasive or vectors for zoonotic diseases, like swine fever . Copeland estimates the NDDTC lost about a fifth of its trainers and a number of other support staff

Farewell Photoshop? Google’s new AI lets you edit images by asking.

Google launches Gemini 2.0 Flash

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There's a new Google AI model in town, and it can generate or edit images as easily as it can create text—as part of its chatbot conversation. The results aren't perfect, but it's quite possible everyone in the near future will be able to manipulate images this way. Last Wednesday, Google expanded access to Gemini 2.0 Flash's native image-generation capabilities, making the experimental feature a

New EV battery boasts 5-min charge time, adding 250 miles of range

BYD unveils 5-minute EV charging

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Time and again, studies and surveys identify the time it takes to charge an electric vehicle as one of the most significant hurdles affecting EV adoption. For generations, drivers have gotten used to being able to refuel their cars in five minutes using energy-dense liquid hydrocarbons, and plenty of them balk at the idea of having to drive a car where recharging a battery takes half an hour or m

Today

Even the worst mass extinction had its oases

Permian extinction reshaped Earth's ecosystems

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About 252 million years ago, volcanic eruptions triggered the End-Permian Mass Extinction , also known as the Great Dying. About 96 percent of marine species were wiped out—but were things just as grim on land? Scientists have debated whether this event caused nearly as much terrestrial destruction. Now, researchers from the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology (NIGPAS) of the Chinese Ac

People in this career are better at seeing through optical illusions

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Optical illusions are great fun, and they fool virtually everyone. But have you ever wondered if you could train yourself to unsee these illusions? Our latest research suggests that you can. Optical illusions tell a lot about how people see things. For example, look at the picture below. The Ebbinghaus illusion. Credit: Hermann Ebbinghaus The two orange circles are identical, but the one on the r

Here’s the secret to how Firefly was able to nail its first lunar landing

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Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost science station accomplished a lot on the Moon in the last two weeks. Among other things, its instruments drilled into the Moon's surface, tested an extraterrestrial vacuum cleaner, and showed that future missions could use GPS navigation signals to navigate on the lunar surface. These are all important achievements, gathering data that could shed light on the Moon'

Yesterday

Report: mRNA vaccines are in RFK Jr’s crosshairs; funding in question

NIH limits vaccine hesitancy research

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Federal support for mRNA vaccine research appears in jeopardy after KFF Health News reported Sunday that officials at the National Institutes of Health have directed scientists to remove all references to the lifesaving technology from their grant applications. All such research is now under direct scrutiny from health secretary and long-time anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. A senior o

Researchers engineer bacteria to produce plastics

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Plastics are great, except when it comes to making or disposing of them. Production generally requires the use of chemicals derived from fossil fuels, and so helps to continue our reliance on them. And the final products are generally not biodegradable, so they tend to stick around despite breaking down into ever smaller fragments . Biology might ultimately provide a solution, however. Researcher

“Awful”: Roku tests autoplaying ads loading before the home screen

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Owners of smart TVs and streaming sticks running Roku OS are already subject to video advertisements on the home screen. Now, Roku is testing what it might look like if it took things a step further and forced people to watch a video ad play before getting to the Roku OS home screen. Reports of Roku customers seeing video ads automatically play before they could view the OS’ home screen started a

Trump plan to fund Musk’s Starlink over fiber called “betrayal” of rural US

Evan Feinman exits broadband program

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A federal broadband official departed the US government with a warning that a Trump administration plan will strand rural Americans with worse Internet access in order to help Elon Musk secure public money for Starlink. "Stranding all or part of rural America with worse Internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer is yet another in a long line of betrayals by Washington," wrot

Sobering revenue stats of 70K mobile apps show why devs beg for subscriptions

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If you're frustrated by some of your favorite apps pestering you to sign up for a subscription, some new data may help you empathize with their developers more. According to revenue data from "over 75,000" mobile apps, the vast majority have a hard time making $1,000 per month. The data is detailed in RevenueCat's 2025 State of Subscription Apps report. RevenueCat makes a mobile app subscription

Windows 11 updates are accidentally getting rid of Copilot, at least for now

Windows updates uninstall Copilot app

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Microsoft's Windows updates over the last couple of years have mostly been focused on adding generative AI features to the operating system, including multiple versions of the Copilot assistant. Copilot has made it into Windows 11 (and even, to a more limited extent, the aging Windows 10) as a native app, and then a wrapper around a web app, and soon as a native app again . But this month's Windo

UK online safety law Musk hates kicks in today, and so far, Trump can’t stop it

UK enforces fines on social media

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Enforcement of a first-of-its-kind United Kingdom law that Elon Musk wants Donald Trump to gut kicked in today , with potentially huge penalties possibly imminent for any Big Tech companies deemed non-compliant. UK's Online Safety Act (OSA) forces tech companies to detect and remove dangerous online content, threatening fines of up to 10 percent of global turnover. In extreme cases, widely used p

Why wait? Google is already dismantling Assistant as it switches to Gemini.

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Google Assistant is not long for this world. Google confirmed what many suspected last week, that it will transition everyone to Gemini in 2025 . Assistant holdouts may find it hard to stay on Google's old system until the end, though. Google has confirmed some popular Assistant features are being removed in the coming weeks. You may not miss all of them, but others could force a change to your d

A tough race for the rookies as F1 starts 2025 in Australia

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Formula 1's four-wheeled circus got underway this past weekend in Melbourne, Australia. Held on the roads around a lake in Albert Park, the track is one of F1's trickier challenges, made more so on Sunday thanks to rain that eased off before the start of the race, only to return with a vengeance a dozen or so laps before the end. It proved to be a tough day for four of the sport's six new drivers

Physicists unlock another clue to brewing the perfect espresso

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Many variables can affect the quality of a steaming cup of espresso, including so-called "channeling" during the brewing process, in which the water doesn't seep uniformly through the grounds but branches off in various preferential paths instead. This significantly reduces the extraction yield and thus the quality of the final brew. Scientists from the University of Warsaw have gleaned insights

Alphabet spins off laser-based Internet backbone provider Taara

Alphabet spins off Taara startup

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Alphabet is spinning out laser-based Internet company Taara from its “moonshot” incubator, hoping to turbocharge the start-up that provides high-bandwidth services to hard-to-reach areas in competition with Elon Musk’s Starlink network of satellites. Taara is the latest project to spring from X—Alphabet’s experimental hub that produced AI lab Google Brain and Waymo’s self-driving cars—and has its

The 2025 Cadillac Escalade IQ first drive: 460 miles on a single charge

Cadillac unveils electric Escalade IQL

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Cadillac provided flights from Los Angeles to San Fransisco and accommodation so Ars could drive the Escalade IQ. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. SAN FRANCISCO—Newsflash: The new electric Cadillac Escalade IQ weighs over 9,000 lbs, or a fair amount more than 4,000 kilograms. For context, that figure works out to almost exactly half again as much as the 682 hp (509 kW) Escalade V that

Old Bolt, new tricks: Making an EV into a backup power station with an inverter

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Back when EV enthusiasm was higher, there were fits and starts of vehicle-to-home concepts and products. If EVs and their ginormous batteries are expensive, resource-intensive purchases, the thinking went, maybe we should get something more out of them than just groceries and school pick-ups. Maybe we could find other things for that huge battery to do during the 95 percent of time it spends park

Mar 16, 2025

Large enterprises scramble after supply-chain attack spills their secrets

3 TTPs

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tj-actions/changed-files GitHub Action compromised

Open source software used by more than 23,000 organizations, some of them in large enterprises, was compromised with credential-stealing code after attackers gained unauthorized access to a maintainer account, in the latest open source supply-chain attack to roil the Internet. The corrupted package, tj-actions/changed-files , is part of tj-actions , a collection of files that's used by more than

Mar 15, 2025

Behind the scenes of The Electric State

Electric State movie disappoints critics

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Anthony and Joe Russo's new sci-fi adventure film, The Electric State , is adapted from the graphic novel by Swedish artist/designer Simon Stålenhag . So naturally the directors wanted to create their own distinctive look and tone—complete with a colorful array of quirky misfit robots who team up with their human counterparts to take down an evil corporation. (Some spoilers below but no major rev

A “biohybrid” robotic hand built using real human muscle cells

3D-printed artificial muscles developed

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Biohybrid robots work by combining biological components like muscles, plant material, and even fungi with non-biological materials. While we are pretty good at making the non-biological parts work, we’ve always had a problem with keeping the organic components alive and well. This is why machines driven by biological muscles have always been rather small and simple—up to a couple centimeters lon

The Wheel of Time is back for season three, and so are our weekly recaps

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Andrew Cunningham and Lee Hutchinson have spent decades of their lives with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson's Wheel of Time books, and they previously brought that knowledge to bear as they recapped each first season episode and second season episode of Amazon's WoT TV series. Now we're back in the saddle for season three—along with insights, jokes, and the occasional wild theory. These recap

For climate and livelihoods, Africa bets big on solar mini-grids

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To the people of Mbiabet Esieyere and Mbiabet Udouba in Nigeria’s deep south, sundown would mean children doing their homework by the glow of kerosene lamps, and the faint thrum of generators emanating from homes that could afford to run them. Like many rural communities, these two villages of fishermen and farmers in the community of Mbiabet, tucked away in clearings within a dense palm forest,

Why SNES hardware is running faster than expected—and why it’s a problem

SNES consoles reportedly gain speed

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Ideally, you'd expect any Super NES console—if properly maintained—to operate identically to any other Super NES unit ever made (in the same region, at least). Given the same base ROM file and the same set of precisely timed inputs, all those consoles should hopefully give the same gameplay output across individual hardware and across time. The TASBot community relies on this kind of solid-state

Mar 14, 2025

Crew-10 launches, finally clearing the way for Butch and Suni to fly home

SpaceX Crew-10 launch delayed inspections

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A Falcon 9 rocket launched four astronauts safely into orbit on Friday evening, marking the official beginning of the Crew-10 mission to the International Space Station. Although any crew launch into orbit is notable, this mission comes with an added bit of importance as its success clears the way for two NASA astronauts, Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, to finally return home from space after a

2025 iPad Air hands-on: Why mess with a good thing?

Apple launches new iPads Macs

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There’s not much new in Apple’s latest refresh of the iPad Air, so there’s not much to say about it, but it’s worth taking a brief look regardless. In almost every way, this is identical to the previous generation. There are only two differences to go over: the bump from the M2 chip to the slightly faster M3, and a redesign of the Magic Keyboard peripheral. If you want more details about this tab

US measles cases reach 5-year high; 15 states report cases, Texas outbreak grows

New measles case in B.C

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The US has now recorded over 300 measles cases just three months into 2025, exceeding the yearly case counts for all years after 2019. The bulk of this year's cases are from an outbreak that erupted in an undervaccinated county in West Texas in late January, which has since spread to New Mexico and Oklahoma . As of the afternoon of March 14, Texas reports 259 cases across 11 counties, 34 hospital

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28

Amazon disables local voice processing

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Since Amazon announced plans for a generative AI version of Alexa, we were concerned about user privacy . With Alexa+ rolling out to Amazon Echo devices in the coming weeks, we’re getting a clearer view of the privacy concessions people will have to make to maximize usage of the AI voice assistant and avoid bricking functionality of already-purchased devices. In an email sent to customers today,

Researchers astonished by tool’s apparent success at revealing AI’s “hidden objectives”

Claude 3.7 Sonnet revolutionizes AI interactions

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In a new paper published Thursday titled " Auditing language models for hidden objectives ," Anthropic researchers described how custom AI models trained to deliberately conceal certain "motivations" from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, due to their ability to adopt different contextual roles they call "personas." The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively s

End of Life: Gemini will completely replace Google Assistant later this year

Gemini replaces Google Assistant 2025

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Pour one out for Google Assistant, the sometimes helpful but often frustrating digital assistant Google launched in 2016. In its place, users will encounter Gemini, the generative AI Google has been integrating into every product in its portfolio . Later this year, Google will make Gemini its only supported assistant, forcing most of its users to abandon Assistant once and for all. The Gemini bra

I threw away Audible’s app, and now I self-host my audiobooks

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We’re an audiobook family at House Hutchinson, and at any given moment my wife or I are probably listening to one while puttering around. We've collected a bit over 300 of the things—mostly titles from web sources (including Amazon's Audible ) and from older physical "books on tape" (most of which are actually on CDs). I don't mind doing the extra legwork of getting everything into files and then

RCS texting updates will bring end-to-end encryption to green bubble chats

RCS gains end-to-end encryption

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One of the best mostly invisible updates in iOS 18 was Apple's decision to finally implement the Rich Communications Services (RCS) communication protocol , something that is slowly helping to fix the generally miserable experience of texting non-iPhone users with an iPhone. The initial iOS 18 update brought RCS support to most major carriers in the US, and the upcoming iOS 18.4 update is turning

Small charges in water spray can trigger the formation of key biochemicals

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We know Earth formed roughly 4.54 billion years ago and that the first single cell lifeforms were present roughly 1 billion years after that. What we don’t know is what triggered the process that turned our planet from a barren ball of rock into a world hosting amazing abundance of lifeforms. “We’re trying to understand how do you go from non-life to life. Now I think we have made a real contribu

The same day Trump bought a Tesla, automaker moved to disrupt trade war

Tesla warns of tariff risks

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Elon Musk's Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump's trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses and hurting the economy. In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump's tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of

To avoid the Panama Canal, Relativity Space may move some operations to Texas

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As he consolidates control over Relativity Space, new owner and chief executive Eric Schmidt is planning significant changes at the launch company, including a likely move to the Lone Star State. Schmidt's recent acquisition of the California-based company, which has largely evolved away from its 3D-printing origins to becoming a more conventional rocket developer, has solved Relativity's primary

Used Tesla prices tumble as embarrassed owners look to sell

Tesla used car prices plummet

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Tesla has a real image problem. Once, it was the beloved brand for the environmentally aware car buyer; more than that, it was the hottest thing in town. Hundreds of thousands of fans paid thousand-dollar deposits and then waited for up to two years for a chance to buy a Model 3, with others paying hefty markups to people at the front of the queue. Back then, of course, Tesla CEO Elon Musk claime

US measles outlook is so bad health experts call for updating vaccine guidance

RFK Jr. promotes vitamin A for measles

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With measles declared eliminated from the US in 2000 and national herd immunity strong, health experts have recommended that American children get two doses of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine—the first between the ages of 12 and 15 months and the second between the ages of 4 and 6 years, before they start school. Before 12 months, vulnerable infants in the US have been protected in

Google joins OpenAI in pushing feds to codify AI training as fair use

OpenAI seeks regulatory relief for AI

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In spite of sky-high costs and little in the way of profits, generative AI systems continue to proliferate. The Trump administration has called for a national AI Action Plan to guide America's burgeoning AI industry, and OpenAI was happy to use that as an opportunity to decry the negative effect of copyright enforcement on AI development. Google has also released its policy proposal, which agrees

Scoop: Origami measuring spoon incites fury after 9 years of Kickstarter delay hell

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An attention-grabbing Kickstarter campaign attempting to reinvent the measuring spoon has turned into a mad, mad, mad, mad world for backers after years of broken promises and thousands of missing spoons. The mind-boggling design for the measuring spoon first wowed the Internet in 2016 after a video promoting the Kickstarter campaign went viral and spawned widespread media coverage fawning over t

New Reddit controls let you block your most-hated advertisers for a year

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Reddit has shown a growing commitment to promoting ads on its platform, especially since going public a year ago. But in the interest of not completely alienating customers with incessant, irrelevant, or personally offensive ads, the social media company is giving users the ability to block advertisers for a year. In a Reddit post last night, a Reddit employee known as cozy_sheets said that click

Rocket Report: ULA confirms cause of booster anomaly; Crew-10 launch on tap

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch updates

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Welcome to Edition 7.35 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX's steamroller is still rolling, but for the first time in many years, it doesn't seem like it's rolling downhill. After a three-year run of perfect performance—with no launch failures or any other serious malfunctions—SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has suffered a handful of issues in recent months. Meanwhile, SpaceX's next-generation Starship rocket

Outbreak turns 30

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Back in 2020, when the COVID pandemic was still new, everyone was "sheltering in place" and bingeing films and television. Pandemic-related fare proved especially popular, including the 1995 medical disaster-thriller Outbreak , starring Dustin Hoffman. Chalk it up to morbid curiosity , which some researchers have suggested is an evolved response mechanism for dealing with threats by learning from

Apple’s $349 iPad 11 is missing a lot, but it’s still all the iPad most people need

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Apple released a new version of the basic $349 iPad this week, though you could be forgiven for not noticing. The new 11th-generation iPad (also known as the "iPad (A16)" or just plain-old "iPad") looks identical to the previous version, it was introduced in a single paragraph buried in the middle of an iPad Air announcement, and the company didn't offer to send any to reviewers. The one I have I

Mar 13, 2025

UMass disbands its entering biomed graduate class over Trump funding chaos

UMass Chan implements hiring freeze

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With federal research funding imperiled by brutal cuts under the Trump administration, biomedical graduate programs nationwide are making tough decisions that will scale back the next generation of scientists. On Wednesday, news broke that UMass Chan Medical School—a public school in the University of Massachusetts system—has rescinded all offers of admission to biomedical graduate students for t

AI search engines cite incorrect sources at an alarming 60% rate, study says

AI search engines often inaccurate

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A new study from Columbia Journalism Review's Tow Center for Digital Journalism finds serious accuracy issues with generative AI models used for news searches. The research tested eight AI-driven search tools equipped with live search functionality and discovered that the AI models incorrectly answered more than 60 percent of queries about news sources. Researchers Klaudia Jaźwińska and Aisvarya

Athena landed in a dark crater where the temperature was minus 280° F

Athena lunar mission ends in failure

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The Athena spacecraft was not exactly flying blind as it approached the lunar surface one week ago. The software on board did a credible job of recognizing nearby craters, even with elongated shadows over the terrain. However, the lander's altimeter had failed. So while Athena knew where it was relative to the surface of the Moon, the lander did not know how far it was above the surface. An impor

What happens when DEI becomes DOA in the aerospace industry?

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Last month a nonprofit that recognizes exceptional undergraduate women and gender minorities with space and aviation internships, the Brooke Owens Fellowship, announced its latest class of "Brookies." This ninth class of 45 students was selected from more than 400 applications, and they will fan out to aerospace companies across the country, from large firms such as SpaceX and Blue Origin to smal

Google has a fix for your broken Chromecast V2 unless you factory reset

Chromecast outage affects users globally

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Google's venerable 2015 Chromecast attempted to self-destruct earlier this week, upsetting a huge number of people who were still using the decade-old streaming dongles. Google was seemingly caught off guard by the devices glitching out all at the same time, but it promised to address the problem, and it has. Google says it has a fix ready to roll out, and most affected devices should be right as

Meta plans to test and tinker with X’s community notes algorithm

Meta tests Community Notes using X algorithm

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Meta plans to test out X's algorithm for Community Notes to crowdsource fact-checks that will appear across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. In a blog , Meta said the testing in the US would begin March 18, with about 200,000 potential contributors already signed up. Anyone over 18 with a Meta account more than six months old can also join a waitlist of users who will "gradually" and "randomly"

In one dog breed, selection for utility may have selected for obesity

Labrador obesity gene linked to humans

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Labrador retrievers are common pets, but they also work as service dogs, aiding people with sight or hearing impairments. Unfortunately, the breed is particularly prone to getting overweight, and this tendency apparently is more severe in Labradors purpose-bred for service. To figure out the reasons behind this, researchers at Cambridge University investigated potential obesity genes in Labrador

Google’s Gemini AI can now see your search history

Google Gemini enhances personalized AI

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Google is continuing its quest to get more people to use Gemini, and it's doing that by giving away even more AI computing. Today, Google is releasing a raft of improvements for the Gemini 2.0 models , and as part of that upgrade, some of the AI's most advanced features are now available to free users. You'll be able to use the improved Deep Research to get in-depth information on a topic, and Go

OpenAI declares AI race “over” if training on copyrighted works isn’t fair use

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OpenAI is hoping that Donald Trump's AI Action Plan, due out this July, will settle copyright debates by declaring AI training fair use—paving the way for AI companies' unfettered access to training data that OpenAI claims is critical to defeat China in the AI race. Currently, courts are mulling whether AI training is fair use, as rights holders say that AI models trained on creative works threat

Google is bringing every Android game to Windows in big gaming update

Google Play enhances PC gaming

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The annual Game Developers Conference is about to kick off, and even though Stadia is dead and buried , Google has a lot of plans for games. It's expanding tools that help PC developers bring premium games to Android, and games are heading in the other direction, too. The PC-based Play Games platform is expanding to bring every single Android game to Windows. Google doesn't have a firm timeline f

AI coding assistant refuses to write code, tells user to learn programming instead

25% of YC startups use AI code

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On Saturday, a developer using Cursor AI for a racing game project hit an unexpected roadblock when the programming assistant abruptly refused to continue generating code, instead offering some unsolicited career advice. According to a bug report on Cursor's official forum, after producing approximately 750 to 800 lines of code (what the user calls "locs"), the AI assistant halted work and delive

Microsoft’s new AI “Copilot for Gaming” struggles to justify its existence

Xbox introduces AI gaming Copilot

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Last year, Microsoft showed off a pair of concept videos highlighting how "real-time conversations with your AI companion copilot" might one day provide personalized guidance and companionship while playing a solo game of Minecraft . Now, Microsoft is announcing that it will roll out "Copilot for Gaming" as an "ultimate gaming sidekick" that will be available via mobile app preview for Xbox Insid

Epic Games is addressing one of Windows-on-Arm’s last big app compatibility gaps

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Using a Windows PC with an Arm-based Snapdragon processor in it feels a lot like using a regular-old Intel or AMD PC these days, thanks to the work developers have put in to get their apps running natively on Arm chips and the work Microsoft has done on Windows' Prism technology for translating x86 apps to run on Arm processors . But some of the old compatibility gaps remain. For example, while m

Trump’s EPA clearly shows it doesn’t understand the assignment

EPA rolls back environmental regulations

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If there can be such a thing as bureaucratic “shock and awe,” Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin tried to unleash it Wednesday. He unveiled the Trump administration’s widely anticipated assault on regulation on all fronts at once, announcing 31 separate actions to roll back restrictions on air and water pollution, hand over more authority to states and relinquish EPA’s manda

The EPA is scrapping fuel economy regs, claiming it will bring back US jobs

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The US Environmental Protection Agency is throwing out fuel economy regulations that were planned to go into effect from 2026 through 2032. The new regulations would have required automakers to sell many more electric vehicles than they currently do, although due to lobbying, the previous administration softened the rules to allow for more plug-in hybrid EVs alongside battery EVs. This was widely

Civilization VII, one month later: The community and developers chime in

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A month ago, Civilization VII launched to generally positive critical reviews, but user reviews on Steam and Metacritic weren’t nearly so positive, at least at first. Take a look at the Civilization subreddit, and you’ll see a general consensus: The bones of this game are great, and even most of the radical changes to the classic formula (like breaking the game into much more distinct ages) are a

Anthropic CEO floats idea of giving AI a “quit job” button, sparking skepticism

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Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei raised a few eyebrows on Monday after suggesting that advanced AI models might someday be provided with the ability to push a "button" to quit tasks they might find unpleasant. Amodei made the provocative remarks during an interview at the Council on Foreign Relations, acknowledging that the idea "sounds crazy." "So this is—this is another one of those topics that’s goi

Space Force wants six kinds of space weapons—including anti-satellite lasers

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DENVER—The US Space Force lacks the full range of space weapons China and Russia are adding to their arsenals, and military leaders say it's time to close the gap. Gen. Chance Saltzman, the Space Force's