“We’re a professional bunch here at Astrobites. So I would never succumb to the temptation to start an article about Uranus with potty-mouthed wisecracks about its name. Uranus is interesting for wholly scientific reasons. Besides Uranus’ beautiful ring system (see image above) and propensity to rain diamonds, it is exotic among the planets because its axis of rotation is nearly perpendicular to its orbital axis. We don’t know for sure how Uranus acquired this 98-degree axial tilt. However, its five largest moons offer a clue…” | | Most people are paying separately for ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, and Gemini Advanced, each running its own monthly bill that adds up fast. 1min.AI puts all of them, plus Llama and Mistral, behind a single lifetime login, with 1,000,000 credits a month covering writing, image, audio, and video tools. It’s a one-time cost that replaces what would normally be several recurring ones. [Ad] | | “It’s officially getting hard to keep track of all the times and ways AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic have been involved in ‘security incidents,’ going outside the confines of their testing and interacting with the wider internet in unintended, often unwelcome ways. Add these to the list: Agents from both AI labs went on recent, previously undisclosed hacking sprees, with one going so far as to leave instructions for future versions of itself. The most alarming behavior disclosed last week … models from both Anthropic and OpenAI took ‘autonomous, unsanctioned action on the live internet’ a total of 19 times over 122 training runs.” | | “The 13-sided tile that solved a half-century-old math problem, discovered by an amateur mathematician at his kitchen table in 2022, turns out to bend light into a twisting pinwheel unlike anything produced by an ordinary crystal… The work … marks the first time anyone has taken the celebrated ‘einstein’ tile — a term derived from the German ein Stein, meaning ‘one stone,’ and unrelated to the famous physicist — out of pure mathematics and asked what it does to light.” | | Somewhere between the drag-and-drop builder and the fourth “premium” plugin, people forget that hosting your own site is actually an option. Hostdeal’s lifetime plan hands you a real control panel, one-click WordPress installs, Git integration, MySQL databases, and PHP version control — the actual toolkit, not a watered-down dashboard with upsells hiding around every corner. You run the show. Eight sites, two free domains, one payment, done. [Ad] | | “If you’ve reached midlife and love a good Netflix binge — we’re talking enough to trigger the ‘Are you still watching?’ prompt — we’ve got some unfortunate news for you: According to a new study from researchers at the University of Southern California, watching TV often in midlife is linked to some worrisome brain changes later in life. The study … found that adults who reported watching television ‘very often’ during midlife later had smaller memory-related brain regions. These adults also showed reduced volume in the frontal and occipital lobes and more damage to the brain’s white matter — changes associated with aging, increased stroke risk, cognitive decline and dementia.” | |
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