Distillation technique lets copycats mimic Gemini at a fraction of the development cost. On Thursday, Google announced that “commercially motivated” actors have attempted to clone knowledge from its Gemini AI chatbot by simply prompting it. One adversarial session reportedly prompted the model more than 100,000 times across various non-English…
Wiped out in its native range by invasive pathogens, the trees may make a comeback. Very few people alive today have seen the Appalachian forests as they existed a century ago. Even as state and national parks preserved ever more of the ecosystem, fungal pathogens from Asia nearly wiped…
The material properties change gradually from base to tip for better navigation, more precise manipulation. An elephant’s trunk is a marvelous thing, flexible enough to bend and stretch as it forages for food, but also stiff enough to grasp and maneuver even delicate objects like peanuts or a tortilla…
A week with the new Leaf in frigid weather did not cool our feelings for the car. Years before the Chevrolet Bolt or Tesla Model 3, the Nissan Leaf was a good-faith attempt by a major automaker to bring electric vehicles to the mass market. But even in its…
Alongside new endgame content, Blizzard says the Warlock is coming to other Diablo games soon. It’s not every day that a classic PC game gets a new content expansion 25 years after its last major update. But that’s what happened last night, as Blizzard suddenly released new “Reign of…
SpaceX’s crew missions will now launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida is accustomed to getting makeovers. It got another one Wednesday with the removal of the Crew Access Arm used by astronauts to board their rides to space.…
The administration’s “reasoning” for doing so has little connection to reality. On Wednesday, a fossil-fuel lobbying group called the Washington Coal Club awarded President Trump a trophy that named him the “Undisputed Champion of Clean, Beautiful Coal.” Trump took advantage of the opportunity to take his latest shot at…
ClickFix bait, combined with advanced Castleloader malware, is installing Lumma “at scale.” Last May, law enforcement authorities around the world scored a key win when they hobbled the infrastructure of Lumma, an infostealer that infected nearly 395,000 Windows computers over just a two-month span leading up to the international…
He became one of the first to visualize personal computing by painting vivid cover art. On February 1, Robert Tinney, the illustrator whose airbrushed cover paintings defined the look and feel of pioneering computer magazine Byte for over a decade, died at age 78 in Baker, Louisiana, according to…
Guano dramatically boosted the production of maize, and the surplus helped fuel the Chincha Kingdom’s economy. The pre-Inca Chincha Kingdom (circa 1000-1400 CE), along Peru’s southern coast, was one of the most wealthy and influential of its time before falling to the Inca and Spanish empires. Scientists have long…
