China, the U.S., Russia and others have ramped up their contest over artificial-intelligence-backed weapons and military systems. The buildup has been compared to the dawn of the nuclear weapons age.

Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters “systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free”? It was Anthropic’s experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for their latest experiment, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and...

175 million people in Brazil now use its instant-payment system “Pix”, developed by the country’s central bank for real-time payments using QR codes or keys, and American Banker notes that the central banks of Argentina and Costa Rica also have developed their own widely used digital systems for instant payments.Latin America has been able to build up sleek and effective payment systems in...

Arizona state prosecutors allege Kalshi is running an illegal gambling operation, charging the prediction market with 20 “wagering” misdemeanors. But Friday a federal judge “temporarily barred Arizona from enforcing its gambling laws against predictive market operators,” reports the Associated Press, “and put the brakes on a criminal wagering case that the state has filed against Kalshi. “U.S....

“Breathable oxygen has been created from Moon dust,” reports the Telegraph, “in a world first that paves the way for a lunar base.” Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin “”announced this week that it had developed a reactor that could successfully release oxygen from lunar soil by using an electric current.”Almost half of Moon dust — the thin layer of rock that blankets the lunar surface — is oxygen,...

Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service is making some changes, reports Engadget:It’s no longer possible to buy Ubisoft+ and Jackbox Games subscriptions or standalone games through Luna. Amazon will automatically cancel any active subscriptions bought through Luna at the end of customers’ next billing cycle. If you have a Ubisoft+ subscription that you bought directly from Ubisoft instead, you’ll...

“Only about 2% of visually impaired people in the United States use guide dogs,” notes StudyFinds.com, “partly because breeding and training takes years and fewer than half the dogs in training actually graduate.” But someday there could be another option:What if you could ask your guide dog where the nearest water fountain is and hear it answer back, complete with directions and an estimated...

A 17,000-word expose in the New Yorker reveals “several executives connected to OpenAI have expressed ongoing reservations about Altman’s leadership.” Reporters Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spoke to “a hundred people with firsthand knowledge of how Altman conducts business,” including current and former OpenAI employees and board members. Among other revelations, internal messages from a few...

It’s the first time a major U.S. newsroom has gone on strike partly to demand protections from AI-related layoffs, according to a report from Nieman Lab. They noted that one of the picketer’s signs read “Thoughts not bots,” :On Wednesday, roughly 150 members of the Propublica Guild, one of the largest nonprofit newsroom unions in the country, went on a 24-hour strike. About two dozen Guild...

In 2024 the Verge’s consumer tech reporter paid $173 for a WD Black SN850X 2TB SSD. But “now that same SSD costs $649…” “Like with RAM, demand from the AI industry is swallowing up supply from a limited number of manufacturers, leading to a drastic reduction in the inventory that’s available to consumers” — and skyrocketing prices:The price on my WD Black drive nearly quadrupled since...

Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post — while adding that “the science has been moving in parallel with the court’s recognition.”A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects — on attention, memory and focus — that in some studies...

Critics say social media is engineered to be as addictive as tobacco or gambling, writes the Washington Post — while adding that “the science has been moving in parallel with the court’s recognition.”A growing body of research links heavy social media use not only to declines in mental health but to measurable cognitive effects — on attention, memory and focus — that in some studies...

Phoronix staged “a showdown” between Firefox and Chrome, testing them both on an Intel Panther Lake laptop running Ubuntu 26.04.JetStream 3.0 was announced at the end of March as the latest major web browser benchmark. This updated version of JetStream is focused on intensive portions of modern JavaScript and WebAssembly web applications… Google Chrome 147 came in at 1.47x the performance of...

“Every single Star Trek series has been canceled…” reports ScreenRant. “There is “no Star Trek in production or greenlit for the first time in nearly a decade.” While there were five active Star Trek series just a few years ago, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds filmed its fifth and final season in the fall of 2025, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy “wrapped filming its second and final season at...