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Enlarge / Tesla shares rose by almost 11 percent in premarket trading despite the disastrous financial results. Tesla had a terrible first quarter of 2024, according to its financial results posted yesterday. We already knew that it was a bad three months in terms of delivering cars—the automaker built tens of thous...

Enlarge / SpaceX landed its 300th booster on Tuesday. SpaceX launches have become extremely routine. On Tuesday evening, SpaceX launched its 42nd rocket of the year, carrying yet another passel of Starlink satellites into orbit. Chances are, you didn't even notice. All the same, the cumulative numbers are mind-boggl...

The Senate last night approved a bill that orders TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the company within 270 days or lose access to the US market. The House had already passed the bill, and President Biden signed it into law today. The "Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act" was approved...

Enlarge / Night view of company logos in Nestlé Avanca Dairy Products Plant on January 21, 2019, in Avanca, Portugal. This plant produces Cerelac, Nestum, Mokambo, Pensal, Chocapic and Estrelitas, among others. In high-income countries, Nestlé brand baby foods have no added sugars them, in line with recommendations ...

Hackers abused an antivirus service for five years in order to infect end users with malware. The attack worked because the service delivered updates over HTTP, a protocol vulnerable to attacks that corrupt or tamper with data as it travels over the Internet. The unknown hackers, who may have ties to the North Korea...

Enlarge / The Thermonator robot flamethrower dog. If you've been wondering when you'll be able to order the flame-throwing robot that Ohio-based Throwflame first announced last summer, that day has finally arrived. The Thermonator, what Throwflame bills as "the first-ever flamethrower-wielding robot dog" is now avai...

Enlarge / I have hundreds of UUIDs and I must scream. The modern "smart" TV asks a lot of us. In exchange for connecting you to a few streaming services you use, a TV will collect data, show ads, and serve as another vector for bad actors. In a few reported cases, though, a modern connected TV has been blamed for at...

Kremlin-backed actors have stepped up efforts to interfere with the US presidential election by planting disinformation and false narratives on social media and fake news sites, analysts with Microsoft reported Wednesday. The analysts have identified several unique influence-peddling groups affiliated with the Russi...

Home Assistant, until recently, has been a wide-ranging and hard-to-define project. The open smart home platform is an open source OS you can run anywhere that aims to connect all your devices together. But it's also bespoke Raspberry Pi hardware, in Yellow and Green. It's entirely free, but it also receives funding...

Enlarge / A cropped portion of a ca. 1980 ad for the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard, which allowed Apple II users to run the CP/M operating system. Last week, chip manufacturer Zilog announced that after 48 years on the market, its line of standalone DIP (dual inline package) Z80 CPUs is coming to an end, ceasing sales on J...

Enlarge / OnLeak's renders of the Pixel 9 Pro XL, the Pixel 9 Pro, and the Pixel 9. The usual timeline would put the Google Pixel 9 at something like five months away from launching, but that doesn't mean it's too early to leak! Real-life pictures of the "Pixel 9 Pro" model have landed over at Rozetked. This prototy...

Enlarge / Artist's illustration of Dragonfly soaring over the dunes of Titan. NASA has formally approved the robotic Dragonfly mission for full development, committing to a revolutionary project to explore Saturn's largest moon with a quadcopter drone. Agency officials announced the outcome of Dragonfly's confirmati...

Enlarge / The final letter from George Mallory from Camp I, Mount Everest, to his wife Ruth Mallory, May 27, 1924. In June 1924, a British mountaineer named George Leigh Mallory and a young engineering student named Andrew "Sandy" Irvine set off for the summit of Mount Everest and disappeared—just two casualties of ...

Kremlin-backed hackers have been exploiting a critical Microsoft vulnerability for four years in attacks that targeted a vast array of organizations with a previously undocumented backdoor, the software maker disclosed Monday. When Microsoft patched the vulnerability in October 2022—at least two years after it came ...

Enlarge / This image taken by NASA's Orion spacecraft shows its view just before the vehicle flew behind the Moon in 2022. Although NASA is unlikely to speak about it publicly any time soon, the space agency is privately considering modifications to its Artemis plan to land astronauts on the surface of the Moon late...

Intermittent fasting, aka time-restricted eating, can help people lose weight—but the reason why may not be complicated hypotheses about changes from fasting metabolism or diurnal circadian rhythms. It may just be because restricting eating time means people eat fewer calories overall. In a randomized-controlled tri...

Enlarge / A sample image from Microsoft for "VASA-1: Lifelike Audio-Driven Talking Faces Generated in Real Time." On Tuesday, Microsoft Research Asia unveiled VASA-1, an AI model that can create a synchronized animated video of a person talking or singing from a single photo and an existing audio track. In the futur...

Enlarge / An AI-generated image from DALL-E 2 created with the prompt "A painting by Grant Wood of an astronaut couple, american gothic style." When OpenAI's DALL-E 2 debuted on April 6, 2022, the idea that a computer could create relatively photorealistic images on demand based on just text descriptions caught a lo...

Google is doing a major re-org of Android, Chrome, and the Google hardware division: They're merging! Google Hardware SVP Rick Osterloh will lead the new "Platforms and Devices” division. Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's previous head of software platforms like Android and ChromeOS, will be headed to "some new projects"...

Enlarge / Miami Beach, Fire Rescue ambulance at Mt. Sinai Medical Center hospital. ] Since 2021, federal law has required hospitals to publicly post their prices, allowing Americans to easily anticipate costs and shop around for affordable care—as they would for any other marketed service or product. But hospitals h...

X's chatbot Grok is supposed to be an AI engine crunching the platform's posts to surface and summarize breaking news, but this week, Grok's flaws were once again exposed when the chatbot got confused and falsely accused an NBA star of criminal vandalism. "Klay Thompson Accused in Bizarre Brick-Vandalism Spree," Gro...

The US Constitution's Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination does not prohibit police officers from forcing a suspect to unlock a phone with a thumbprint scan, a federal appeals court ruled yesterday. The ruling does not apply to all cases in which biometrics are used to unlock an electronic device bu...

I’d wager a guess that we are, as a species, rather fond of our home planet (our wanton carbon emissions notwithstanding). But the ugly truth is that the Earth is doomed. Someday, the Sun will enter a stage that will make life impossible on the Earth’s surface and eventually reduce the planet to nothing more than a ...

The US AI Safety Institute—part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—has finally announced its leadership team after much speculation. Appointed as head of AI safety is Paul Christiano, a former OpenAI researcher who pioneered a foundational AI safety technique called reinforcement learning f...