“Forget search engines, AI assistants, and smartphones — Google’s next release could be a swarm of millions of mosquitoes. Through its parent company Alphabet, Google is seeking federal approval to release 32 million mosquitoes in California and Florida over the next two years. It’s part of an ongoing initiative called the Debug Project, which aims to control mosquito populations to cut down on mosquito-borne diseases. While adding millions of more mosquitoes to the equation might sound counterintuitive, the Debug Project is all about adding so-called ‘good bugs’ to the ‘bad bug’ population.” | | Streaming services giveth, and streaming services randomly yoink your favorite shows into the void. Keeprix is your anti-disappearance hack, letting you download movies and series from basically everywhere so they live on your laptop, not at the mercy of licensing deals and corporate mood swings. Offline, ad-free, and permanently yours. Goodbye subscriptions, goodbye licensing roulette. [Ad] | | “An ‘independent label’ in South Carolina is churning out mountains of AI slop featuring AI-generated ‘Viking rappers’ — alongside suave Christian rockers, for some reason — and blasting it across social media sites and music streamers, where it’s doing some serious numbers. We first came across the AI-generated Vikings by way of short, 30-second clips posted to Facebook. The AI-generated videos feature a line-up of ripped, heavily-tattooed men and women whose long hair is often seen in dreadlocks or braided into cornrows. (Although — yes — they are all white.) The videos frequently showcase the characters in modern-looking recording studios, scenes which are intermixed with AI-generated footage of them standing with Viking-coded animals like wolves and ravens, wearing furs on mountaintops, or standing in front of tattered flags over grim-looking battlefields.” | | “Neuropsychology researchers at LMU have discovered a rhythm in the midbrain that could serve as a biophysiological signature for specific states of consciousness. The thalamus is a deep-lying structure in the center of the brain that gathers and relays signals from many different areas of the brain. It functions like a gate for perception and attention and is thought to play a key role in supporting conscious states. In a study … [a team] has discovered a previously unknown rapid activity pattern in the human thalamus.” | | No pressure, but you do realize this is your only brain, and you’re feeding it one language forever, right? Babbel gives you lifetime access to 14 languages built for actual conversations: Ten-minute lessons, real-world topics, speech recognition, and progress that sticks whether you’re traveling, working, or just tired of sounding like a tourist. Buy it once, come back whenever, and let future you quietly flex in multiple languages. [Ad] | | “A $2,500 pair of humanoid robot legs built from 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf components is not going to win marathons just yet. But such relatively inexpensive hardware could enable researchers to more easily test and train AI-powered robotics software in a physical body during real-world experiments. … ‘If you are looking for the most advanced humanoid robot, this is not it,’ wrote Virgile Batto, a robotics engineer at Hugging Face, in a blog post coauthored with other colleagues. ‘If you are looking for a humanoid you can build, understand, repair, instrument, simulate, and use for learning experiments, this is the robot we are trying to make.’” | |
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