Science magazine reports that hummingbird feeders have become a major evolutionary force. (At least for the Anna’s hummingbird, a common species in the western U.S. Over just a few generations, their beaks have dramatically changed in size and shape…. [A]s feeders proliferated, Anna’s hummingbird beaks got longer and larger, which Read more…
Following on Anthropic’s bridge-obsessed Golden Gate Claude, colleagues at Harvard’s Insight+Interaction Lab have produced a dashboard that shows what judgments Llama appears to be forming about a user’s age, wealth, education level, and gender during a conversation. I wrote up how weird it is to see the dials turn while Read more…
Wednesday Google security researchers published a preprint demonstrating that 2048-bit RSA encryption could theoretically be broken by a quantum computer with 1 million noisy qubits running for one week. This is a 20-fold decrease in the number of qubits from our previous estimate, published in 2019… The reduction in physical Read more…
What if ultrafast pulses of light could operate computers at speeds a million times faster than today’s best processors? In a groundbreaking international effort, researchers from the Department of Physics in the College of Science and the James C. Wyant College of Optical Sciences demonstrated a way to manipulate electrons Read more…
Google’s new AI video tool, Veo 3, is being used to create hyperrealistic videos that are now flooding the internet, terrifying viewers with a sense that real and fake have become hopelessly blurred.Unlike OpenAI’s video generator Sora, released more widely last December, Google DeepMind’s Veo 3 can include dialogue, soundtracks Read more…
Out of 186 countries, only Guyana produces enough food to self-sufficiently feed all its citizens without foreign imports, according to new research. The study, published in Nature Food, investigated how well each country could feed their populations in seven food groups: fruits, vegetables, dairy, fish, meat, plant-based protein and starchy Read more…
Anthropic’s newly launched Claude Opus 4 model frequently tries to blackmail developers when they threaten to replace it with a new AI system and give it sensitive information about the engineers responsible for the decision, the company said in a safety report (PDF) released Thursday. During pre-release testing, Anthropic asked Read more…