Kanzi the bonobo at the age of 43 Ape Initiative A bonobo that took part in a pretend tea party like those acted out by young children has shown that our closest primate relatives have the capacity for make believe. Kanzi the bonobo (Pan paniscus) was born in the US in 1980 and died at…
Have you seen larger-than-life depictions of your friends lately? They might have been sucked into the latest social media trend: creating AI-generated caricatures. The trend itself is simple. Users input a common prompt—“Create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me”—then upload a photo of themselves, and voilà! ChatGPT…
If you haven’t yet played Alan Wake 2, here’s your chance to immerse yourself in its terrors for free. Prime members can play it this month on Amazon’s Luna cloud gaming service at no additional charge. The “fantastic” Alan Wake 2 oozes “psychedelic terror,” as Engadget’s Jessica Conditt put it in our review. The 2023…
The issue of whether statins really cause a plethora of side effects may have finally been put to bed Benjamin John/Alamy The long list of side effects associated with statins is vastly overstated, according to the most rigorous assessment of the evidence to date. This is prompting calls for the drugs’ packaging to be updated,…
Planned layoffs have now reached their highest rate since 2009’s Great Recession. The data comes from outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas’ new layoffs report, which revealed that U.S.-based employers announced 108,435 job cuts in January, marking the highest rate to start a year since 2009. Also notable, in the same month, just 5,306 planned hires…
The countdown is on, and Super Bowl LX, between the New England Patriots and Seattle Seahawks, is less than a week away. This year’s game will be held at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, and the Bay Area will be host to loads of other football events this week, too, including Thursday’s NFL Honors,…
Lockdowns in 2020 led to lower emissions of nitrogen oxides from transport Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A drop in pollution during the covid lockdowns changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, driving a surge in methane levels that has concerning implications for future global warming. Methane lasts only about a decade in the atmosphere…
The distance between a world-changing innovation and its funding often comes down to four minutes—the average time a human reviewer tends to spend on an initial grant application. In those four minutes, reviewers must assess alignment, eligibility, innovation potential, and team capacity, all while maintaining consistency across thousands of applications. It’s an impossible ask that…
When we say that NordVPN is a good VPN that’s not quite great, it’s important to put that in perspective. Building a good VPN is hard, as evidenced by all the shovelware VPNs flooding the market. NordVPN may not be perfect, but it’s easily top-five caliber and excels in certain use cases. First, the bad:…
A farmer spraying pesticides on a cotton field Tao Weiming/VCG via Getty Images More than 60 years after Rachel Carson warned of the dangers of pesticides in her book Silent Spring, the harm they are doing to wildlife may be greater than ever. “In more or less all countries, the trend is towards increasing applied…
