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How the cavefish lost its eyes—again and again

Mexican tetras in pitch-black caverns had no use for the energetically costly organs. Time and again, whenever a population was swept into a cave and survived long enough for natural selection to have its way, the eyes disappeared. “But it’s not that everything has been lost in cavefish,” says…

With AI chatbots, Big Tech is moving fast and breaking people

Why AI chatbots validate grandiose fantasies about revolutionary discoveries that don’t exist.  Allan Brooks, a 47-year-old corporate recruiter, spent three weeks and 300 hours convinced he’d discovered mathematical formulas that could crack encryption and build levitation machines. According to a New York Times investigation, his million-word conversation history with…

An inner-speech decoder reveals some mental privacy issues

Words you’ll never speak still cause activity in the brain’s speech centers. Most experimental brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) that have been used for synthesizing human speech have been implanted in the areas of the brain that translate the intention to speak into the muscle actions that produce it. A patient…