Focused search for science

8+ min ago (711+ words) The AI Sports Coach: A Double-Edged Sword As an AI/ML expert, I've always been fascinated by the potential of AI to revolutionize the sports industry. The concept of an AI Sports Coach, which uses machine learning algorithms to provide personalized coaching and training recommendations to athletes, is particularly intriguing. However, I firmly believe that this technology is not yet ready to be unleashed upon the sports world. My concern lies not in the potential of AI to improve athletic performance, but rather in the potential for it to create a culture of dependency and complacency among athletes. When an AI system takes over the coaching process, athletes may lose the opportunity to develop the critical thinking and problem-solving skills that are essential for success in sports. They may rely too heavily on the system's recommendations, rather than learning to…...

8+ min ago (707+ words) Monday features plenty of clouds, a few early storms, and some afternoon storms on a gusty breeze in the East Coast metro area as a front approaches." The Gulf Coast will see clouds and showers on a blustery breeze." Look for more clouds than sun and some storms in the Keys." Expect an increasing risk of dangerous rip currents at the Atlantic and Gulf beaches. Monday's highs will be mainly in the mid-80s in the East Coast metro area and in the low-80s along the Gulf Coast and the Keys " but look for temperatures to drop quickly in the evening. Tuesday will bring morning lows in the low- to mid-60s on the mainland." Look for more clouds than sun during the day, and the East Coast metro area will also see a few afternoon showers in spots." Expect an elevated risk of…...

8+ min ago (230+ words) Google is working on a Motion Cues feature in Android, following in the footsteps of Apple's own feature. This tool should reduce motion sickness when using your Android phone in a moving vehicle. Now, we've discovered that Google has renamed the feature ahead of its release. We conducted a teardown of the latest Google Play Service beta (version 25.49.31 beta) and discovered that Google has renamed Motion Cues. The feature is now named Motion Assist. Check out the screenshot below, which reflects the new name. It's unclear why Google has changed the name of this motion sickness feature. We're guessing the company did this to differentiate itself from Apple's Vehicle Motion Cues feature. There's no word on when Motion Assist will come to Pixel phones, but similar options are already available on new phones from several OEMs. Phones like the OnePlus…...

9+ min ago (539+ words) A brutal confluence of environmental change and human fishing habits left tens of thousands of adult African penguins off South Africa's coast without enough food to survive, reducing their population by around 95 percent in just eight years, a new study reveals. "These declines are mirrored elsewhere," says University of Exeter conservation biologist Richard Sherley, adding that the species has "undergone a global population decline of nearly 80 percent in the last 30 years." Each year, African penguins (Spheniscus demersus) spend about 20 days on land to molt their worn-out feathers so they can stay waterproof and insulated. Related: Amazon Lakes Became Hotter Than a Hot Tub, Killing Hundreds of Dolphins They usually fatten up in preparation for this fasting period, but between 2004 and 2011, stocks of their main food, Sardinops sagax sardines, plummeted to about 25 percent of their peak. "If food is too hard…...

9+ min ago (876+ words) In this blog we will get started with some basic Reinforcement Learning terminology. We will talk about how a state differs from an observation which is a key aspect in RL world. I'm gonna use "RL" to indicate that I'm referring to Reinforcement Learning in future blogs. Let's get started. Ever felt like your senses were playing tricks on you? You mishear a song lyric or you see a shape in the shadows that isn't really there. We humans navigate the world through an imperfect filter of perception. It turns out, most advanced AIs and robots share the exact same problem. When we train an AI to act in the world'whether it's a robot arm, a self-driving car or a character in a video game, we have to come across a deep philosophical question: What is real, and what is…...

10+ min ago (563+ words) The steel structure sealing off the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site has suffered so much damage that it's no longer containing radiation effectively, the International Atomic Energy Agency said on Friday. The agency, or IAEA, wrote in an update that its team had visited the protective shield in the prior week and found that it "had lost its primary safety functions, including the confinement capability." This shield is known as the New Safe Confinement, or NSC, which was installed in 2016 as a second protective layer to stop the spread of radioactive material from Reactor Four of the Chernobyl power plant. Damage to the shield increases the risk of leaks, which are difficult to contain because radioactive materials, such as gas and dust, can easily disperse widely and remain hazardous for extended periods. The NSC fully encases an original, smaller concrete structure…...

14+ min ago (1181+ words) Encrypted messengers are having a second wave. Apps like WhatsApp, iMessage and Signal made end-to-end encryption (E2EE) a default expectation. But most still hinge on phone numbers, centralized servers and a lot of metadata, such as who you talk to, when, from which IP and on which device. That is what Vitalik Buterin is aiming at in his recent X post and donation. He argues the next steps for secure messaging are permissionless account creation with no phone numbers or Know Your Customer (KYC) and much stronger metadata privacy. In that context he highlighted Session and SimpleX and sent 128 Ether (ETH) to each to keep pushing in that direction. Session is a good case study because it tries to combine E2E encryption with decentralization. There is no central message server, traffic is routed through onion paths, and user IDs are keys instead…...

15+ min ago (82+ words) KCRG-TV9 First Alert Storm Team Meteorologist AJ Rickman has your latest First Alert Forecast, featuring a cold night ahead. First Alert Forecast: Sunday Evening, December 7th No. 1 Iowa continues dominant season start by cruising past No. 5 Colorado Mesa "I'm so grateful': Iowa City looking for volunteers to remove snow from driveways of those unable to Iowa will play in the ReliaQuest Bowl against Vanderbilt Snow blankets eastern Iowa, hundreds of plows work to clear roads across the state...

18+ min ago (289+ words) Apple and Google have sent a new round of cyber threat notifications to users around the world, the companies said this week, announcing their latest effort to insulate customers against surveillance threats. Apple and the Alphabet-owned Google are two of several tech companies that regularly issue warnings to users when they determine they may have been targeted by state-backed hackers. Apple said the warnings were issued on Dec. 2 but gave few further details about the alleged hacking activity and did not address questions about the number of users targeted or say who was thought to be conducting the surveillance. Apple said that "to date we have notified users in over 150 countries in total." Apple's statement follows Google's Dec. 3 announcement that it was warning all known users targeted using Intellexa spyware, which it said spanned "several hundred accounts across various countries,…...

20+ min ago (1622+ words) It's an hour until you're free for the weekend, and you're trying to knock out one last ticket before you escape into whatever assuredly action-packed plans await you. You spot a seemingly harmless task: "Add Middle Initial to User Name Display." You chuckle. Easy. A palate cleanser. A victory lap. You assign the ticket, flip it from New to Active, and let your IDE warm up while you drift into a pleasant daydream about not being here. But then the search results begin to appear. Slowly. Line by line. And your reverie begins to rot. Incredulous, your chuckle hardens into a throat-scraping noise somewhere between a laugh and a cry. That tiny, spiraling task is a perfect microcosm of a continuous debate across engineering circles: when does abstraction help, and when does it become a hindrance? I recently stumbled across…...