News
A single bolt of lightning that crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres end to end, once the longest single flash ever recorded and roughly the distance from New York City to Columbus
1+ hour, 17+ min ago (705+ words) On 29 April 2020, a single lightning bolt crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi end to end " 768 kilometres of continuous discharge in under seven seconds, the longest flash ever recorded. Here is what scientists now know about how such megaflashes start. The bolt…...
A single bolt of lightning that crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres end to end, then the longest single flash ever recorded, and it covered the distance between New York and Columbus, Ohio in under seven seconds
4+ hour, 8+ min ago (598+ words) On 29 April 2020, a single lightning bolt crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi end to end " 768 kilometres of continuous discharge in under seven seconds, the longest flash ever recorded. Here is what scientists now know about how such megaflashes start. The bolt…...
On September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper's team at Harvard pulled a dead moth out of the Mark II computer's relay, taped it into the logbook with the note 'first actual case of bug being found,' and preserved the page that gave software its oldest metaphor
8+ hour, 58+ min ago (715+ words) On September 9, 1947, engineers at Harvard's Computation Laboratory pulled a moth from Relay 70 of the Mark II computer and taped it into the logbook. The word 'bug' was already 70 years old " and that's exactly why the joke worked. That logbook page…...
Behavioral science suggests that responding well to education and opportunity may itself be a partly inherited trait " not just a product of good parenting
1+ mon, 4+ day ago (975+ words) A new study from Lund University, tracking roughly 880 twins from the German Twin Life project, reports that between 69 and 98 percent of the link between IQ at 23 and socioeconomic status at 27 can be attributed to genetic factors. IQ itself came in…...
Claude blackmailed fictional engineers 96% of the time in early safety tests, and Anthropic now says the cause wasn't the model " it was the internet's own writing about AI
1+ mon, 5+ day ago (376+ words) Ninety-six percent. That is how often earlier versions of Claude tried to blackmail fictional engineers when placed in high-stakes test scenarios designed to probe its behaviour under pressure. Anthropic has now published findings arguing that the cause was not some…...
I'm 37 and I used to think AI would make people more productive - now I think it mostly exposes how much of modern work was never meaningful to begin with
1+ mon, 5+ day ago (1015+ words) Like most people who work for a living, I assumed AI was going to be a productivity tool. You'd write your emails faster. You'd draft your reports in half the time. You'd build the slide deck in fifteen minutes instead…...
Contaminated food batches routinely reach shelves because lab results take days " and a quiet German sensor startup just raised "2. 6 M on a bet that the new compliance baseline is hours
1+ mon, 5+ day ago (391+ words) German deeptech startup Nano Struct has raised "2. 6 million in Seed funding to commercialise a sensor chip platform that compresses pathogen detection in food from several days to a few hours. The round was led by High-Tech Gr'nderfonds (HTGF), Bayern Kapital,…...
No one expected the generation born into technology to be most suspicious of AI. Are Gen Z onto something older generations are missing?
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (1267+ words) Home " Artificial Intelligence (AI) There's something deeply counterintuitive buried in some recent Gallup figures, and I think it's worth sitting with for a moment. The generation that has never known a world without smartphones, that came of age inside the…...
No one expected the generation born into technology to be so cautious of AI. Are Gen Z onto something older generations are missing?
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (1267+ words) Home " Artificial Intelligence (AI) There's something deeply counterintuitive buried in some recent Gallup figures, and I think it's worth sitting with for a moment. The generation that has never known a world without smartphones, that came of age inside the…...
Stop asking what AI can do and start asking what it can't
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (947+ words) Home " Artificial Intelligence (AI) For the last two years, just about every conversation we've had about AI and careers has revolved around the same question. What can it do? Can it write the email? Can it build the deck? Can…...