An AI companion site is hosting sexually charged conversations with underage celebrity bots
Ex-Human pointed to Botify AI’s terms of service, which state that the platform cannot be used in ways that violate...
World
OpenAI just released GPT-4.5 and says it is its biggest and best chat model yet
Unlike reasoning models such as o1 and o3, which work through answers step by step, normal large language models like...
How a volcanic eruption turned a human brain into glass
“It’s an extraordinary finding,” says Matteo Borrini, a forensic anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, who was...
The Download: Amazon’s quantum chip, and preventing battery fires
The must-reads I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology. 1 An unidentified disease has...
The best time to stop a battery fire? Before it starts.
The reignition is yet another reminder of how difficult fires in lithium-ion batteries can be to deal with. They burn...
The Download: Introducing the Relationships issue
Relationships are the stories of people and systems working together. Sometimes by choice. Sometimes for practicality. Sometimes by force. Too...
Job titles of the future: Pharmaceutical-grade mushroom grower
Backed by more than $22 million in investment, Optimi received a drug establishment license in 2024 from Canadian regulators to...
Welcome to robot city
That began to change with the partnership between the shipyard and the university. In the ’90s, that relationship got a...
Technology shapes relationships. Relationships shape technology.
Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg all sat shoulder to shoulder, almost as if on display, in...
The AI Hype Index: Falling in love with chatbots, understanding babies, and the Pentagon’s “kill list”
Separating AI reality from hyped-up fiction isn’t always easy. That’s why we’ve created the AI Hype Index—a simple, at-a-glance summary...
Tiny tubes wrap around brain cells
The devices are made from thin sheets of a soft polymer called azobenzene, which roll when exposed to light. Researchers...
An environmentally friendly alternative to plastic microbeads
By changing the composition of these materials’ building blocks, researchers can optimize properties such as hydrophobicity (ability to repel water),...
The man who reinvented the hammer
In the early 2000s, while working at a company then called Nanotechnologies, Schroder was applying the concept of pulsed power,...
The poetry of data
These poems are just a few of the many in Muschenetz’s latest book that wrestle with contemporary social issues using...
Studying the uninvited guests
Mitchell has been working with samples collected by a local biotech company developing biotherapeutics for the gut. Its probiotic products,...
The Download: workplace surveillance, and fighting EV fires
Working today—whether in an office, a warehouse, or your car—can mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with...
One option for electric vehicle fires? Let them burn.
McGoldrick was encountering fires like this more and more often. The previous year, he says, several rowhouses were badly burned...
Your boss is watching
But however carefully it’s implemented, the very existence of electronic monitoring may make it difficult for employees to feel safe...
The Download: dismantling US science leadership, and reproductive care cuts
The foundations of America’s prosperity are being dismantled Ever since World War II, the US has been the global leader...
8,000 pregnant women may die in just 90 days because of US aid cuts
Without information on and access to a range of contraceptive options, unintended pregnancies result. These have the potential to limit...