The big story How environmental DNA is giving scientists a new way to understand our world February 2024Environmental DNA is a relatively inexpensive, widespread, potentially automated way to observe the diversity and... Read more »

Ryakitimbo has collected voice data in Kiswahili in Tanzania, Kenya, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She tells me she wanted to collect voices from a socioeconomically diverse set of Kiswahili speakers... Read more »

Quote of the day “Shawty crunk, so fresh, so clean.” —Mark Zuckerberg, Meta CEO-turned rapper, debuts a reworked version of 2002 rap hit Get Low in a tribute to his wife, the... Read more »

As I covered last week, Trump’s election will almost certainly result in less progress on cutting emissions than we might have seen under a more climate-focused administration. But arguably an even bigger... Read more »

Neuronpedia, a platform for mechanistic interpretability, partnered with DeepMind in July to build a demo of Gemma Scope that you can play around with right now. In the demo, you can test... Read more »

Agentic AI is not just another tool in the scientific toolkit but a paradigm shift: by allowing autonomous systems to not only collect and process data but also to independently hypothesize, experiment,... Read more »

Back in 2022, the tech community was buzzing over image-generating AI models, such as Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and OpenAI’s DALL-E 2, which could follow simple word prompts to depict fantasylands or whimsical... Read more »

Yet it is “simplistic to think that if you have a real security problem in the wild and you’re trying to design a protection tool, the answer should be it either works... Read more »

Teaching robots to navigate new environments is tough. You can train them on physical, real-world data taken from recordings made by humans, but that’s scarce, and expensive to collect. Digital simulations are... Read more »