Several countries are seeing a decline in PhD enrollments as high living costs, stagnant stipends and limited job prospects deter students from pursuing doctoral degrees. Australia recorded an 8% drop in domestic PhD enrollments from 2018 to 2023 despite population growth of 7%, while Japan’s numbers fell to 15,014 in Read more…
Chinese animated film Ne Zha 2 has broken multiple box office records, becoming China’s highest-grossing film of all time and the first non-Hollywood movie to surpass $1 billion in a single market. Helmed by Yang Yu, known as Jiaozi, the film hit the big screen during the lucrative Chinese New Read more…
In August 1990, two hikers in Scotland captured photographs of a mysterious diamond-shaped aircraft accompanied by a Harrier jet, but the images and story were suppressed by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) for decades. Was it a prank, a hoax, an optical illusion or something else entirely? The Guardian’s Daniel Read more…
An anonymous reader shares a report: For a man who’s spent his career battling to make France more pro-business, Europe’s prospects on AI are worrying: an oversight that could cost the bloc dearly. “We are not in the race today,” French President Emmanuel Macron told CNN’s Richard Quest in an Read more…
A new paper [PDF] from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.” “[A] key irony of automation is that Read more…
The unemployment rate in America’s information technology sector rose from 3.9% in December to 5.7% in January, meanwhile last month’s overall jobless rate was just 4%, they point out, calling it “the latest sign of how automation and the increasing use of artificial intelligence are having a negative impact on Read more…