Archive: October 2016

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A study led by the University of Portsmouth has achieved unprecedented precision in detecting tiny shifts in light displacements at the nanoscale. This is relevant in the characterization of birefringent materials and in high-precision measurements of rotations. The quantum sensing breakthrough is published in the journal Physical Review A, and has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of daily life, industry, and sc

As someone who built a large fortune over the last few decades, I couldn’t help but notice artificial intelligence is something young people now perceive as a source of adversity. Well, roomful of 22-year-olds, let me tell you something about adversity: I myself faced a great deal of adversity back when I was building my large fortune, and when I encountered adversity, I simply turned that adversity into opportunity, which I believe to be your duty vis-a-v

The Shift to Smarter SurveillanceTraditional video surveillance systems often fail to meet the needs of dynamic, modern environments. Whether it’s a retail chain looking to analyse customer behaviour or a factory monitoring equipment safety, the tools of yesterday aren’t enough to address today’s demands.The shift towards smarter surveillance involves integrating modular, AI-driven systems that:Adapt to your specific needs,Automate tedious tasks like foota

Ideal plant architecture for sugarcane and other cereal crops. Credit: IGDB In an article published in Molecular Plant on April 8, researchers led by Prof. Wang Bing and Prof. Li Jiayang from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology (IGDB) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have proposed an innovative concept of "ideal plant architecture for sugarcane" and discussed the challenges, opportunities, and strategies for shaping it. This article

Despite an expected record-breaking IPO, SpaceX will still have to follow the rules and wait at least a year before it’s added to the S&P 500, the benchmark behind many Americans’ retirement funds S&P Dow Jones Indices announced Thursday that it is keeping its eligibility rules intact for the S&P 500 and several other major indexes. Indexes are benchmarks that track specific slices of the stock market. The best known is the S&P 500, which tracks 500 of the

Schematic of our hybrid sentiment analysis pipeline: transformer encoders generate fixed-length embeddings that feed into machine learning classifiers. Credit: Procedia Computer Science (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.procs.2025.03.161 Artificial intelligence is accelerating at breakneck speed, with larger models dominating the scene—more parameters, more data, more power. But here is the real question: Do we really need bigger to be better? We challenged that assu

Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which owns Starlink satellite internet service, is offering 50% off internet plans around Memphis, Tennessee, according to a statement the company posted online Tuesday. The company didn’t specifically explain why it’s offering the discount, but it might have something to do with community anger over data centers owned by xAI, which SpaceX purchased earlier this year. The company did note that it owns data centers in Memphis and nearby

If you’re a law enforcement agency trying to warn the public about the harms of recreational drug use, the last thing you should do is make a music video glamorizing drug use. On Friday—the International Day Against Drug Abuse and International Trafficking—the Hong Kong Correctional Services Department (CSD) released an AI-generated anti-drug PSA. The only problem was that by giving the ad the same sparkly vibe as a Coca-Cola commercial, the agency uninten

The federal government managed to temporarily ban Anthropic’s latest AI model from being used by foreign nationals and reportedly held up the release of OpenAI’s updated GPT-5.6 Sol for security concerns, but it seems the latest version of Grok must have just skated right through. Grok 4.5, the first release of an AI model under the newly formed SpaceXAI, was made available to the public on Wednesday. Elon Musk’s rocket/social media/AI company claims Grok

Overall workflow of multi-temporal urban green space vegetation visualization analysis framework. Credit: 2025 Anqi Hu et al., Landscape Ecology The benefits of urban green spaces in cities, in terms of ecological sustainability, climate modification, and human well-being, have been known for decades. More recently, additional economic and restorative payoffs from diverse and colorful plantings have been recognized. Now, a research team from Japan has deve

Microsoft wants to limit AI agents’ permissions when they stray from the job Microsoft’s Guardian Agents in Project Perception adapt as agent activity, risk, security context and organizational policy change. They help security teams understand why risk changed, investigate relevant evidence, recommend or apply containment measures and use what they learn to strengthen policies. People retain control over objectives and consequential decisions. Microsoft a

Open-source AI models from China are once again causing a crisis in America, leading to accusations of stolen training data and threats of closing the border to foreign-origin tech. With tensions high, some tech executives are looking to broker peace before the Trump administration declares war on open-source on behalf of America’s precious closed-source models produced by labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went so far as to create an

87% say their AI controls need to work better The AI running inside large companies has stopped waiting for permission. Across five categories of AI, from chatbots to process automation, more than half of 3,600 business decision-makers say the systems their teams use can act within defined rules without routine review, or finish whole processes with no human approval. 87% of those same respondents say their organization needs a better way to approve, monit

Illustration by Tag Hartman-Simkins / Futurism. Source: Disney / Getty Images Famous copyright tyrant Disney is now bending over for the AI industry and signing away its precious intellectual property. On Thursday, the entertainment conglomerate announced a new licensing agreement with OpenAI that will allow it to use Disney’s iconic characters and properties to generate clips on Sora, OpenAI’s video generating app that lets you deepfake friends and celebr

Reddit was one of the first major platforms to sell access to its wealth of (user-generated) content to AI companies looking for training data. It also was, for a long while, one of the most-cited sources to appear in AI-generated responses. So it’s pretty jarring to see the company’s citation rate plummet to near-zero on ChatGPT, per PromptWatch data, all while Reddit ramps up its own embrace of AI—including turning posts into podcasts. The precipitous de

Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images OpenAI is finally sunsetting GPT-4o, a controversial version of ChatGPT known for its sycophantic style and its central role in a slew of disturbing user safety lawsuits. GPT-4o devotees, many of whom have a deep emotional attachment to the model, have been in turmoil — and copycat services claiming to recreate GPT-4o have already cropped up to take the model’s place. Consider just4o.chat, a service that expressly mar