Robotics
Aurora’s Driverless Trucks Can Now Travel Farther Distances Faster Than Human DriversKirsten Korosec | TechCrunch
“Aurora’s self-driving trucks can now travel nonstop on a 1,000-mile route between Fort Price and Phoenix—exceeding what a human driver can legally accomplish. The gap, and the time it takes to travel it, offers up positive financial implications for Aurora—and another company hoping to commercialize self-driving semitrucks.”
Computing
OpenAI Sidesteps Nvidia With Unusually Fast Coding Model on Plate-Sized ChipsBenj Edwards | Ars Technica
“The model delivers code at greater than 1,000 tokens (chunks of knowledge) per second, which is reported to be roughly 15 times faster than its predecessor. To match, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 in its latest premium-priced fast mode reaches about 2.5 times its standard speed of 68.2 tokens per second, even though it is a bigger and more capable model than Spark.”
Energy
This State’s Power Prices Are Plummeting as It Nears 100% RenewablesAlice Klein | Recent Scientist ($)
“The independent Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) latest report shows that the typical wholesale electricity price in South Australia fell by 30 per cent in the ultimate quarter of 2025, compared with a 12 months earlier. In consequence, the state had the bottom price in Australia, together with Victoria, which has the second highest share of wind and solar energy within the nation.”
Biotechnology
Gene Editing That Spreads Throughout the Body Could Cure More DiseasesMichael Le Page | Recent Scientist ($)
“The thought is that every cell within the body that receives the initial delivery will make a lot of copies of the gene-editing machinery and pass most of them on to its neighbors, amplifying the effect. Which means that disease-correcting changes might be made to the DNA of more cells.”
Future
The First Signs of Burnout Are Coming From the People Who Embrace AI the MostConnie Loizos | TechCrunch
“The tools be just right for you, you’re employed less hard, everybody wins. But a brand new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn’t a productivity revolution. It finds firms are liable to becoming burnout machines.”
Artificial Intelligence
ALS Stole This Musician’s Voice. AI Let Him Sing Again.Jessica Hamzelou | MIT Technology Review ($)
“[ALS patient Patrick Darling] was capable of re-create his lost voice using an AI tool trained on snippets of old audio recordings. One other AI tool has enabled him to make use of this ‘voice clone’ to compose latest songs. Darling is capable of make music again.”
Artificial Intelligence
Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, Recent Study FindsSamantha Cole | 404 Media
“When the researchers tested the LLMs without involving users by providing the models with the complete text of every clinical scenario, the models accurately identified conditions in 94.9 percent of cases. But when talking to the participants about those self same conditions, the LLMs identified relevant conditions in fewer than 34.5 percent of cases.”
Computing
LEDs Enter the NanoscaleRahul Rao | IEEE Spectrum
“MicroLEDs, with pixels just micrometers across, have long been a byword within the display world. Now, microLED-makers have begun shrinking their creations into the uncharted nano realm. …They leave much to be desired of their efficiency—but at some point, nanoLEDs could power ultra-high-resolution virtual reality displays and high-bandwidth on-chip photonics.”
Future
Leading AI Expert Delays Timeline for Its Possible Destruction of HumanityAisha Down | The Guardian
“A number one artificial intelligence expert has rolled back his timeline for AI doom, saying it’ll take longer than he initially predicted for AI systems to have the option to code autonomously and thus speed their very own development toward superintelligence [and doom for humanity].”
Biotechnology
CAR T-Cell Therapy May Slow Neurodegenerative Conditions Like ALSMichael Le Page | Recent Scientist ($)
“Genetically engineered immune cells often known as CAR-T cells might have the option to slow the progress of the neurodegenerative condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) by killing off rogue immune cells within the brain. ‘It’s not a technique to cure the disease,’ says Davide Trotti on the Jefferson Weinberg ALS Center in Pennsylvania. ‘The goal is slowing down the disease.'”
Computing
Meta Plans to Add Facial Recognition Technology to Its Smart GlassesKashmir Hill, Kalley Huang, and Mike Isaac | The Recent York Times ($)
“Five years ago, Facebook shut down the facial recognition system for tagging people in photos on its social network, saying it wanted to seek out ‘the suitable balance’ for a technology that raises privacy and legal concerns. Now it desires to bring facial recognition back. …The feature, internally called ‘Name Tag,’ would let wearers of smart glasses discover people and get details about them via Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant.”
Future
I Tried RentAHuman, Where AI Agents Hired Me to Hype Their AI StartupsReece Rogers | Wired ($)
“At its core, RentAHuman is an extension of the circular AI hype machine, an ouroboros of everlasting self-promotion and sketchy motivations. For now, the bots don’t appear to have what it takes to be my boss, even in relation to gig work, and I’m absolutely OK with that.”
Artificial Intelligence
AI Is Getting Scary Good at Making PredictionsRoss Andersen | The Atlantic ($)
“At first, the bots didn’t fare too well: At the top of 2024, no AI had even managed to put a centesimal in considered one of the foremost [forecasting] competitions. But they’ve since vaulted up the leaderboards. AIs have already proved that they’ll make superhuman predictions inside the bounded context of a board game, but they could soon be higher than us at divining the longer term of our entire messy, contingent world.”
Artificial Intelligence
Meet the One Woman Anthropic Trusts to Teach AI MoralsBerber Jin and Ellen Gamerman | The Wall Street Journal ($)
“Because the resident philosopher of the tech company Anthropic, [Amanda] Askell spends her days learning Claude’s reasoning patterns and talking to the AI model, constructing its personality and addressing its misfires with prompts that may run longer than 100 pages. The aim is to endow Claude with a way of morality—a digital soul that guides the thousands and thousands of conversations it has with people every week.”
Space
This Startup Thinks It Can Make Rocket Fuel From Water. Stop LaughingNoah Shachtman | Wired ($)
“It’s an concept that’s been around for the reason that Apollo era and has been touted lately by the likes of former NASA administrator Bill Nelson and SpaceX’s Elon Musk. But here’s the thing: Nobody has ever successfully turned water into rocket fuel, not for a spaceship of any significant size. A startup called General Galactic, led by a pair of twentysomething engineers, is aiming to be the primary.”