“Plant seeds can sense the vibrations generated by falling raindrops,” reports ScienceAlert, “and respond by waking from their state of dormancy to welcome the water, new research shows…. to germinate in ‘anticipation’ of the coming deluge.”The finding, discovered by MIT mechanical engineers Nicholas Makris and Cadine Navarro, offers the first direct evidence that seeds and seedlings can sense...

Cisco has released an open-source tool “to trace the origins of AI models,” reports SC World, “and compare model similarities for great visibility into the AI supply chain.”[Cisco’s Model Provenance Kit] is a Python toolkit and command-line interface (CLI) that looks at signals such as metadata and weights to create a “fingerprint” for AI models that can then be compared to other model...

All 20 of America’s state-run healthcare marketplace sites “include advertising trackers that share information with Big Tech companies,” reports Gizmodo, citing a report from Bloomberg:Per the report, seven million Americans bought their health insurance through state exchanges in 2026, and many of them may have had personal information shared with companies, including Meta, TikTok, Snap,...

CNN reports on a “sudden surge of claimed sightings” of “unidentified figures averaging 8 feet tall in wooded areas” along Ohio’s Mahoning River.”And it stopped just as quickly as it started,” says Jeremiah Byron, host of the Bigfoot Society Podcast, which collected and mapped the reports …. Byron doesn’t take every report at face value, making sure he talks to people directly before...

A chain of 30 U.S. newspapers including the Sacramento Bee, the Miami Herald and the Idaho Statesman “has started to use a new AI tool that can summarize traditional articles and spit out different versions for different audiences,” reports the New York Times. And the chain’s reporters “are not happy about it.”Journalists in many of the company’s newsrooms are now withholding their bylines from...

America’s school districts “spent billions on technology during the pandemic,” reports the Washington Post.”But now some states are limiting in-school screen time because of concerns about its impact on children.”Nationwide [U.S.] schools invested at least $15 billion and possibly as much as $35 billion from federal pandemic relief funds on laptops, learning software and other technology...

A four-foot humanoid robot named Gabi has become a monk at a Buddhist temple in Seoul, participating in a modified initiation ceremony where it pledged to respect life, obey humans, act peacefully toward other robots and objects. “Robots are destined to collaborate with humans in every field in the future,” Hong Min-suk, a manager at the Jogye Order, the largest sect of Buddhism in South Korea,...

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Cold War spies planted bugs in walls, lamps, and telephones. Now, scientists warn, the cables themselves could listen in. A fiber optic technique used to detect earthquakes can also pick up the faint vibrations of nearby speech, researchers reported this week here at the general assembly of the European Geosciences Union. Freely available...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Walking into Mexico City’s sprawling central Zocalo is a dizzying experience. At one end of the plaza, the capital’s cathedral, with its soaring spires, slumps in one direction. An attached church, known as the Metropolitan Sanctuary, tilts in the other. The nearby National Palace also seems off-kilter. The teetering of many of the...