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…
SpaceX is gearing up for another Starship launch after three straight disappointing test flights. STARBASE, Texas—A beehive of aerospace technicians, construction workers, and spaceflight fans descended on South Texas this weekend in advance of the next test flight of SpaceX’s gigantic Starship rocket, the largest vehicle of its kind…
If you think climate change is a hoax, you might believe wind turbines poison groundwater. When Donald Trump recently claimed, during what was supposed to be a press conference about a European Union trade deal, that wind turbines were a “con job” that drive whales “loco,” kill birds and…
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…
Hobbyist training AI on Victorian texts gets an unexpected history lesson from his own creation. A hobbyist developer building AI language models that speak Victorian-era English “just for fun” got an unexpected history lesson this week when his latest creation mentioned real protests from 1834 London—events the developer didn’t…
The company claims that a text query now burns the equivalent of 9 seconds of TV. So far this year, electricity use in the US is up nearly 4 percent compared to the same period the year prior. That comes after decades of essentially flat use, a change that…
The X-37B spaceplane is flying missions few would have foreseen when the program began. The US military’s reusable winged spaceship rocketed back into orbit Thursday night atop a SpaceX rocket, kicking off a mission that will, among other things, demonstrate how future spacecraft can navigate without relying on GPS…
Neuroscientists find people who don’t enjoy music, study their brain activity. “I was talking with my colleagues at a conference 10 years ago and I just casually said that everyone loves music,” recalls Josep Marco Pallarés, a neuroscientist at the University of Barcelona. But it was a statement he…
“There’s really something special about the way moon jellies swim.” Climate change is warming ocean waters, making the environment more acidic thanks to the absorption of carbon monoxide from the atmosphere. This endangers various marine species, and monitoring those changes is vitally important. But it can be challenging to…
The $30,000 TV brings a new, colorful conversation to home theaters. Samsung provided ground transportation from Brooklyn, New York, to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, so Ars could demo its Micro RGB TV. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. ENGLEWOOD CLIFFS, New Jersey—Micro LED is still years away, but…
