2025-10-01 06:52:14
AI poses an obvious danger to millennia-long human fight to find the truth. Large language model "hallucinations," vocal deepfakes, and now increased use of video deepfakes have all had a blurring effect on facts, letting bad actors around the globe brush off even recorded events as mere "fake news."
The danger is perhaps most acute in the political realm, where deepfake audio and video can make any politician say or appear to do anything. In such a climate, our most senior elected officials have a special duty to model truth-seeking behavior and responsible AI use.
But what's the fun in that, when you can just blow up negotiations over a budget impasse by posting a deepfake video of your political opponents calling themselves "a bunch of woke pieces of shit" while mariachi music plays in the background? Oh—and did I mention the fake mustache? Or the CGI sombrero?
2025-10-01 06:29:20
Without explanation, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention under the Trump administration has reverted from using the disease name "mpox" to the obsolete "monkeypox," which the world abandoned in 2022 because it was seen as racist and stigmatizing.
Mpox is the name of the disease caused by Orthopoxvirus monkeypox, a relative of smallpox and cowpox that has exploded to global prominence in recent years. In 2022 and 2024, the spread of mpox caused the World Health Organization to declare international public health emergencies.
Amid the attention, health officials became acutely aware of the problematic name.
2025-10-01 06:15:57
Amazon’s voice assistant is hanging on by a thread. And that thread is generative AI—or, in Amazon’s case, Alexa+.
Amazon hasn’t had a problem getting people to buy cheap, Alexa-powered gadgets. However, the Alexa in millions of homes today doesn’t make Amazon money. It’s largely used for simple tasks unrelated to commerce, like setting timers and checking the weather. As a result, Amazon’s Devices business has reportedly been siphoning money, and the clock is ticking for Alexa to prove its worth.
Alexa+, a subscription-based generative AI service ($20 per month or included with Prime, which starts at $15/month), is supposed to solve Amazon's woes with Alexa. More conversational and powerful than the original Alexa, Alexa+ is designed to play a more central role in user transactions, enabling, in theory, Amazon to finally make money from voice assistants after 11 years.
2025-10-01 05:30:58
As OpenAI tells it, the company has been consistently rolling out safety updates ever since parents, Matthew and Maria Raine, sued OpenAI, alleging that "ChatGPT killed my son."
On August 26, the day that the lawsuit was filed, OpenAI seemed to publicly respond to claims that ChatGPT acted as a "suicide coach" for 16-year-old Adam Raine by posting a blog promising to do better to help people "when they need it most."
By September 2, that meant routing all users' sensitive conversations to a reasoning model with stricter safeguards, sparking backlash from users who feel like ChatGPT is handling their prompts with kid gloves. Two weeks later, OpenAI announced it would start predicting users' ages to improve safety more broadly. Then, this week, OpenAI introduced parental controls for ChatGPT and its video generator Sora 2. Those controls allow parents to limit their teens' use and even get access to information about chat logs in "rare cases" where OpenAI's "system and trained reviewers detect possible signs of serious safety risk."
2025-10-01 05:14:15
Many of the most interesting bodies in our Solar System aren't planets, but the moons that orbit them. They have active volcanoes, hydrocarbon oceans, geysers, and moon-wide oceans buried under icy crusts. And, as far as we can tell, the physics of the processes that produce large planets should make moon formation inevitable. Given how common planets are, our galaxy should be teeming with moons.
Yet, despite some tantalizing hints, we've not found a clear indication of a moon orbiting an exoplanet. What we have found are a few very young exoplanets that appear to have moon-forming disks around them. Now, the James Webb Space Telescope has obtained a spectrum of the ring-forming disk around a giant super-Jupiter, and found that it's rich in small carbon-based molecules. That's despite the fact that the star it's orbiting seems to have a planet-forming disk that's mostly water.
We search for exo-moons and moon-forming disks using completely different methods. To spot an actual moon, we rely on its gravitational influence. At some points in its orbit, it will be towing its planet forward to speed up its orbit; at others, it will be holding its planet back. This introduces subtle variations in the timing of when the planet arrives in front of the star from Earth's perspective.
2025-10-01 04:49:54
It's a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across each month. In the past, we've featured year-end roundups of cool science stories we (almost) missed. This year, we're experimenting with a monthly collection. September's list includes how prebunking can restore public trust in election results; why ghost sharks grow weird forehead teeth; and using neutrinos to make a frickin' laser beam, among other highlights.
Credit:
Superior Electoral Court of Brazil /Public domain
False claims of voter fraud abounded in the wake of the 2020 US general election, when Joe Biden defeated incumbent Donald Trump for the presidency. Trump himself amplified those false claims, culminating in the violent attack on the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Two years later, Brazil faced a similar scenario in the wake of its 2022 general election in which voters ousted incumbent President Jair Bolsonaro. Once again, claims of fraud ran rampant as Bolsonaro supporters stormed their country's capital.
