Futurism

Intensifying wildfires, coastal erosion, and increased hurricane activity are taking an ever-rising toll on humanity. And as the grim consequences of climate change become quotidian, some are starting to ask not how to fix it, but how to profit from it. In a blistering essay on catastrophe markets, Aeon notes that the rise of weather-based betting rather faithfully follows the development of industrial capitalism. Since at least the 1880s, communities across the US have delighted in weather b

Vibe coding often gets a bad rep. “Vibe” is a euphemism for “not really thinking,” and that “not really thinking” part is accomplished by letting an AI spit all the code out in response to natural language prompts. Inexperienced programmers use it to push out half-baked apps and sabotage their own projects, and experienced ones get lulled into making rookie mistakes. Enter one man who’s putting AI coding tools to extremely good use: Rafael Concepcion,

From the psilocybin in magic mushrooms to dimethyltryptamine (DMT) in toads to the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) in marijuana, a wide variety of organisms can produce psychoactive substances, despite belonging to entirely different kingdoms. But what if a plant were to be able to bridge those gaps and produce several different psychedelic compounds at once? In a trippy experiment, detailed in a study published this week in the journal Science Advances, a team led by researchers from the Weizm

Artificial intelligence remains deeply unpopular with the American public. One poll found it’s even more reviled than ICE, which is no small feat given the mass protests that erupt whenever the agency’s goons march into another US city. A few political action groups are hoping to turn that around. Going into the 2026 midterm elections, the Financial Times reports, newly-formed PACs with major tech industry backing are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to shape how voters th

If you’re running a frontier AI company, now’s not the time to rest on your laurels. The stakes could hardly be higher: whichever corporation manages to outmaneuver its rivals stands to capture not just enormous wealth, but significant political influence over what we’re told is one of the most consequential technologies in human history. As some child safety advocates recently discovered, that kind of pressure is manifesting in corporate jockeying that is morally bankrupt,

Three years ago, Carnegie University astronomers examining a small star called a red dwarf found something unexpected: a Jupiter-sized gas giant.  In a star system like our own, this would be unremarkable. But at nearly a quarter the size of its host star, the exoplanet, TOI 5205b, was — in the literal sense — impossibly large. It blocked seven percent of the star’s light whenever it passed in front of it, forming one of the largest exoplanet transits on record. It was so physics-d

Few fears have taken hold of the public imagination quite like the specter of AI-driven unemployment. A recent survey by the think tank Data for Progress found that a majority of US voters think AI is likely to increase unemployment rates, a scenario that often feels like it’s playing out in the horrid job market. It makes a compelling narrative. Yet in a recent article published in Fortune, New York University cognitive scientist emeritus and prominent AI critic Gary Marcus makes a str

Privacy nightmares. Pervert glasses. These are some of the not-so-flattering ways detractors describe Meta’s Ray-Ban AI glasses. Now, we’re nominating another hellish descriptor into that list: dysmorphia accelerator. On Friday, Meta announced a host of new features for the smart spectacles that include the ability to track and give advice on everything a wearer eats — which sounds poised to lead a bunch of people into horrendous eating disorders. In an upcoming update, Met

Some cars these days might be able to drive themselves, but unless you run a multibillion dollar robotaxi company, they still need a fully conscious — not to mention sober — operator behind the wheel. That’s a lesson one San Francisco man learned the hard way, after he was caught dead asleep behind the wheel of a Tesla on Full Self-Driving (FSD) mode last week — surrounded by evidence of a binge that’d probably be cause for alarm even in the safety of his own home. The Tesla wa

The Cyberspace Administration of China is cracking down on “digital humans,” with incoming regulations that will soon require labeling of AI personalities and ban programs that could harm children or lead to addiction. Those draft regulations, first reported in English by Reuters, would force AI companies to affix prominent “digital human” labels on content featuring AI generated characters. They’d also restrict companies that provide “virtual intimate rela

Big box chains have proudly embraced artificial intelligence — but don’t expect them to help when their AI assistants charge your card for hallucinated garbage. That trend, in which retail giants force their AI initiatives on consumers while distancing themselves from its failures, is growing. While that attitude certainly isn’t unique to big box stores, it’s increasingly becoming their default setting, revealing the ridiculous double standard baked into the AI boom. Targ

A shortcut to sprucing up any dreary urban locale is by throwing in some beautiful greenery. Now, Chinese scientists have unveiled new genetically engineered plants that can glow in the dark, which they say could be a compelling draw for tourism and even help light cities at night. The bioluminescent flora were created by splicing genes from fireflies and glowing fungi into the plant cells, allowing them to emit a soft glow. Using these techniques, the scientists have modified over twenty spe

You don’t forge a multibillion dollar burger empire without breaking a few eggs, or at least smashing a few patties. Jerry Murrell, the CEO and founder of the fast-food chain Five Guys, seemed to allude to the possibility of being shot by a Luigi Mangione-style vigilante when explaining why he was giving his employees a $1.5 million bonus — suggesting that after the killing of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, big wigs are considering controversial business decisions through a whole

Just weeks after the largest nurses strike in the New York City history, the CEO of NYC Health and Hospitals has a bold vision for a future where AI, not human radiologists, examines and diagnoses X-rays. At a panel held by Crain’s New York Business, Mitchell Katz, president and CEO of New York’s 11-hospital public benefit corporation, made overt gestures at his desire to replace highly trained radiology experts with visual language AI models, Radiology Business reported. &#822

Meme wisdom holds that modern problems require modern solutions, but what peddlers of this internet adage failed to consider is that an antiquated and possibly impractical approach could be loads more fun. We present Grit Matthias Phelps, a German language instructor at Cornell University who’s rebelling against a world gone mad with AI fever and pervasive brainrot by compelling students to use typewriters in class, the Associated Press reports. It’s an exercise she only conduc

AI company Anthropic suffered a massive leak of the source code to its Claude Code AI assistant earlier this week, triggering a panicked game of cat and mouse as company representatives sent out copyright takedown requests targeting thousands of copies of its pilfered work. The code allowed tinkerers to reverse engineer aspects of the blockbuster chatbot, highlighting concerns that the leak could give Anthropic’s competitors a major leg up. The leak also gave eyebrow-raising clues into

OpenAI unceremoniously killed off its text-to-video AI app Sora last month, bringing an abrupt end to months of brain-melting AI slop. Even what was supposed to be a groundbreaking $1 billion deal with Disney was caught in the crossfire. And as the Wall Street Journal reports, it wasn’t the massive bills or the legal liabilities arising from rampant copyright infringement that inspired it to kill the app. Instead, the company was desperately looking to free up computing resour

The advent of powerful generative AI tools has supercharged the proliferation of disinformation, with viral and fictional stories making the lives of public figures a living hell. Facebook, in particular, has been overrun with misleading news stories, often featuring AI-generated images, that attract huge engagement. Now William Shatner, the 95-year-old actor of “Star Trek” fame, has become the latest victim of the trend. “My daughter came over to tell me her daughter

OpenAI made headlines this year after announcing it was giving up on what one exec categorized as distracting “side quests,” including its Sora text-to-video app, to double down on enterprise and coding, which are lucrative revenue drivers that could stop the company from hemorrhaging billions of dollars a quarter. Many saw the moves as an effort to catch up with competitor Anthropic, whose Claude Code and Claude Cowork have made major headway this year. Meanwhile, Microsoft&#8

Scientists broadly deem faster-than-light transmission of mass or information impossible, as it would violate the laws of general relativity and causality, essentially meaning that such signals would be capable of time travel and the many paradoxes that would entail. But what if the subject itself has no mass at all? As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Nature, an international team of researchers claims it has observed “dark points” within light waves that can move