Cornell University makes an announcement. “Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like ‘synergistic leadership,’ or ‘growth-hacking paradigms’ may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.”

Published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, research by cognitive psychologist Shane Littrell introduces the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR), a tool designed to measure susceptibility to impressive-but-empty organizational rhetoric… Corporate BS seems to be ubiquitous – but Littrell wondered if it is actually harmful. To test this, he created a “corporate bullshit generator” that churns out meaningless but impressive-sounding sentences like, “We will actualize a renewed level of cradle-to-grave credentialing” and “By getting our friends in the tent with our best practices, we will pressure-test a renewed level of adaptive coherence.” He then asked more than 1,000 office workers to rate the “business savvy” of these computer-generated BS statements alongside real quotes from Fortune 500 leaders…

The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making. The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements. Moreover, those who were more likely to fall for corporate BS were also more likely to spread it.
Essentially, the employees most excited and inspired by “visionary” corporate jargon may be the least equipped to make effective, practical business decisions for their companies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

One of our favorite TV shows last year was Daredevil: Born Again, Marvel’s revival of the hugely popular series in the Netflix Defenders universe. Who could resist the magical combination of Charlie Cox as Matt Murdock/Daredevil and Vincent D’Onofrio as his nemesis, crime lord Wilson Fisk/Kingpin? The series quickly earned critical raves and a second season. And Marvel has released a short trailer in advance of the S2 premiere later this month.

(Some spoilers below for the first season.)

Sure, the fans were shocked when the pilot episode killed off Matt’s best friend and law partner, Foggy Nelson (Elden Hensen), in the first 10 minutes, with his grief-stricken law partner, Karen Page (Deborah Ann Woll), taking her leave from the firm by the pilot’s end. But that creative choice cleared the decks to place the focus squarely on Matt’s and Fisk’s parallel arcs. Matt decided to focus on his legal work while Fisk was elected mayor of New York City, intent on leaving his criminal life behind. But each struggled to remain in the light as the dark sides of their respective natures fought to be released. The result was an entertaining, character-driven series that feels very much a part of its predecessor while still having its own distinctive feel.

Read full article

Comments

Palantir’s CEO was blunt. “If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone’s white-collar job… and you’re going to screw the military — if you don’t think that’s going to lead to the nationalization of our technology, you’re retarded…”

And OpenAI’s Sam Altman is thinking about the same thing, writes long-time Slashdot reader destinyland:

“It has seemed to me for a long time it might be better if building AGI were a government project,” Sam Altman publicly mused last week… Altman speculated on the possibility of the government “nationalizing” private AI companies into a public project, admitting more than once he’s wondered what would happen next. “I obviously don’t know,” Altman said — but he added that “I have thought about it, of course” Altman’s speculation hedged that “It doesn’t seem super likely on the current trajectory. That said, I do think a close partnership between governments and the companies building this technology is super important.”
Could powerful AI tools one day slip from the hands of private companies to be controlled by the U.S. government? Fortune magazine’s AI editor points out that “many other breakthroughs with big strategic implications — from the Manhattan Project to the space race to early efforts to develop AI — were government-funded and largely government-directed.” And Fortune added that last week the Defense Department threatened Anthropic with the Defense Production Act, which allows the president to designate “critical and strategic” goods for which businesses must accept the government’s contracts. Fortune speculates this would’ve been “a sort of soft nationalization of Anthropic’s production pipeline”. Altman acknowledged Saturday that he’d felt the threat of attempted nationalization “behind a lot of the questions” he’d received when answering questions on X.com.

How exactly will this AI build-out be handled — and how should AI companies be working with the government? In a sprawling ask-me-anything session on X that included other members of OpenAI leadership, one Missouri-based developer even broached an AGI-government scenario directly with OpenAI’s Head of National Security Partnerships, Katherine Mulligan. If OpenAI built an AGI — something that even passed its own Turing test for AGI — would that be a case where its government contracts compelled them to grant access to the Defense Department?
“No,” Mulligan answered. At our current moment in time, “We control which models we deploy”

The article notes 100 OpenAI employees joined with 856 Google employees in an online letter titled “We Will Not Be Divided” urging their bosses to refuse their models’ use in domestic mass surveillance and autonomously killing without human oversight.

But Adafruit’s managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone ) sees analogies to America’s atomic bomb-building Manhattan Project, and “what happened when the scientists who built the thing tried to set conditions on how the thing would be used.” (The government pressured them to back down, which he compares to the Pentagon’s designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk” before offering OpenAI a contract “with the same red lines, just worded differently”.)
Ironically, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei frequently recommends the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Alvarezsaurids were mostly small-bodied theropods that paleontologists originally misinterpreted as early flightless birds, only to later recognize them as an ant-eating lineage of non-avian dinosaurs. For years, we suspected that Alvarezsaurids underwent a rare process of evolutionary miniaturization directly coupled to a diet of social insects like ants and termites. It was a tidy hypothesis: They got smaller to become more efficient at catching ants.

Now, a recently discovered fossil of one of the smallest alvarezsaurids ever found suggests that the evolution of miniature dinosaurs likely wasn’t as neat and linear as we thought. This new species, called Alnashetri cerropoliciensis, probably did not feed on ants at all. “It was a pursuit predator actively hunting insects and small mammals,” said Peter Makovicky, a paleontologist at the University of Minnesota.

The oddball

Alverezsaurids, found mostly in the Late Cretaceous rocks of Asia and South America, had short forelimbs tipped with a single oversized thumb claw built for digging. They also had minute teeth and sensory adaptations akin to those in modern nocturnal birds—everything necessary to work on termite mounds. “The explanation of their small body size has been tied to this specialization,” Makovicky explained.

Read full article

Comments

Would you move sunrise to 9 a.m. in Detroit? Or to 4:11 a.m. in Seattle…
Though both options have problems, “There’s no law we can pass to move the sun to our will,” argues the president of the nonprofit “Save Standard Time”. The Associated Press explains why America remains stuck in that annual ritual making clocks “spring forward, fall backward…”

The U.S. has tinkered with the clock intermittently since railroads standardized the time zones in 1883. So has a lot of the world. About 140 countries have had daylight saving time at some point; about half that many do now. About 1 in 10 U.S. adults favor the current system of changing the clocks, according to an AP-NORC poll conducted last year. About half oppose that system, and some 4 in 10 didn’t have an opinion.

If they had to choose, most Americans say they would prefer to make daylight saving time permanent, rather than standard time. ince 2018, 19 states — including much of the South and a block of states in the northwestern U.S. — have adopted laws calling for a move to permanent daylight saving time. There’s a catch: Congress would need to pass a law to allow states to go to full-time daylight saving time, something that was in place nationwide during World War II and for an unpopular, brief stint in 1974. The U.S. Senate passed a bill in 2022 to move to permanent daylight saving time. A similar House bill hasn’t been brought to a vote.

U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Republican from Alabama who introduces such a bill every term, said the airline industry, which doesn’t want the scheduling complexity a change would bring, has been a factor in persuading lawmakers not to take it up. U.S. Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, is proposing another approach. “Why not just split the baby?” he asked. “Move it 30 minutes so it would be halfway between the two.” Steube thinks his bill could get bipartisan support. The change would make the U.S. out of sync with most of the world — though India has taken a similar approach and in Nepal, the time is 15 minutes ahead of India.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

First, Hyundai “is discontinuing its most affordable electric sedan after just three years on the market,” reports USA Today. After being introduced in 2022, the Hyundai Ioniq 6 “quickly gained the admiration of automotive critics because of its affordable pricing and capable performance specs.” But now, Hyundai “is axing the most affordable versions of the EV, leaving consumers with only one Ioniq 6 option.”

Hyundai will continue to produce the Ioniq 6 N performance trim, which is the quickest and most powerful iteration of the Ioniq 6. It’s also the most expensive. The South Korean automaker is getting rid of lower Ioniq 6 trims due to “disappointing sales and tariff considerations,” according to Cars.com. Hyundai sold 10,478 Ioniq 6 models in 2025, dropping 15% from 12,264 units in 2024, a company sales report stated. Hyundai’s Ioniq 6 is mainly produced in South Korea, so it faces high import tariffs.

Sales increased for their earlier IONIQ 5 model, reports the EV blog Electrek, “up 14% through the first two months of 2026, with 5,365 units sold… Meanwhile, IONIQ 6 sales slid 77% with only 229 units sold in February.”

Elsewhere they report that Kia’s EV6 and EV9 “didn’t fare much better with sales down 53% (600 units sold) and 40% (819 units sold), respectively.” Now a Kia spokesperson tells Car and Driver that the 2025 EV6 GT and 2026 EV9 GT “will be delayed until further notice.” They attributed the move to “changing market conditions,” but added that this delay “does not impact the availability of other trims in the EV6 and EV9 lineups.”

More from Electrek:

The news comes after Kia already said it was delaying the EV4, its entry-level electric sedan, “until further notice.” It was expected to arrive in the US this year alongside the EV3, Kia’s compact electric SUV that’s already a top-seller in the UK, Europe, and other overseas markets.

While Hyundai didn’t directly say it, since the EV3, EV4, EV6 GT, and Hyundai IONIQ 6 are built in Korea, the Trump administration’s import tariffs and other policy changes are likely the biggest reason to blame here. Kia and Hyundai, like many others, are hesitant to bring new EVs to the US due to the changes. The IONIQ 6, EV6 GT, and EV9 GT join a string of other models that have either been postponed or canceled altogether.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

“It took Anthropic’s most advanced artificial-intelligence model about 20 minutes to find its first Firefox browser bug during an internal test of its hacking prowess,” reports the Wall Street Journal.

The Anthropic team submitted it, and Firefox’s developers quickly wrote back: This bug was serious. Could they get on a call? “What else do you have? Send us more,” said Brian Grinstead, an engineer with Mozilla, Firefox’s parent organization.
Anthropic did. Over a two-week period in January, Claude Opus 4.6 found more high-severity bugs in Firefox than the rest of the world typically reports in two months, Mozilla said… In the two weeks it was scanning, Claude discovered more than 100 bugs in total, 14 of which were considered “high severity…” Last year, Firefox patched 73 bugs that it rated as either high severity or critical.

A Mozilla blog post calls Firefox “one of the most scrutinized and security-hardened codebases on the web. Open source means our code is visible, reviewable, and continuously stress-tested by a global community.” So they’re impressed — and also thankful Anthropic provided test cases “that allowed our security team to quickly verify and reproduce each issue.”
Within hours, our platform engineers began landing fixes, and we kicked off a tight collaboration with Anthropic to apply the same technique across the rest of the browser codebase… . A number of the lower-severity findings were assertion failures, which overlapped with issues traditionally found through fuzzing, an automated testing technique that feeds software huge numbers of unexpected inputs to trigger crashes and bugs. However, the model also identified distinct classes of logic errors that fuzzers had not previously uncovered…

We view this as clear evidence that large-scale, AI-assisted analysis is a powerful new addition in security engineers’ toolbox. Firefox has undergone some of the most extensive fuzzing, static analysis, and regular security review over decades. Despite this, the model was able to reveal many previously unknown bugs. This is analogous to the early days of fuzzing; there is likely a substantial backlog of now-discoverable bugs across widely deployed software.

“In the time it took us to validate and submit this first vulnerability to Firefox, Claude had already discovered fifty more unique crashing inputs” in 6,000 C++ files, Anthropic says in a blog post (which points out they’ve also used Claude Opus 4.6 to discover vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel).

“Anthropic “also rolled out Claude Code Security, an automated code security testing tool, last month,” reports Axios, noting the move briefly rattled cybersecurity stocks…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Steven Spielberg directed his last Jurassic Park movie nearly 30 years ago, notes ScreenRant. But the 79-year-old filmmaker now brings us The Dinosaurs, a four-part documentary on Netflix where he’s executive producer:

The first few reviews are in, and the results lead to a perfect 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s worth noting that the rating will likely fluctuate since there are only six reviews. So far, critics all agree that the new Netflix docuseries is a breathtaking visual of history’s most majestic creatures, and Morgan Freeman’s soothing narration elevates the experience. Most importantly, the reviews note that the story is intimate, making the dinosaurs feel real with their personalities.
“Audience” reviewers gave it a lower score of 67%.

“There is a sense of drama and emotional weight which permeates through the entire series as it tells the story of the dinosaurs from start to the present day. The ending brought tears to my eyes…”

“Wow, what a sleeper! Flat graphics, looks like video game animations. Unrelatable story lines. Don’t waste your time. Honestly would you even look twice if Spielberg’s name wasn’t on it?”
“This show was honestly incredible… It was a 10/10 series that I absolutely adored highly recommended to anyone who loves and has an interest of the ancient world.”
“I’m sorry, but the dinos of Prehistoric Planet are far superior, and were achieved on a much smaller budget. Their dinos look absolutely real, and you are convinced you’re watching a documentary with real animals”

ScreenRant notes Netflix’s debut of The Dinosaurs’ “aligns perfectly” with the arrival of all four Jurassic World movies on Netflix, where they’re already dominating Netflix’s “Top 10” charts for the U.S.

“Witness the rise and the fall of nature’s greatest empire,” narrator Morgan Freeman says in the trailer…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA heralded a new study published Friday documenting a first for humanity — “the first time a human-made object has measurably altered the path of a celestial body around the Sun.”

It was 2022’s DART mission where NASA crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid — and the experiment “could have implications for protecting Earth from future asteroid strikes,” writes ScienceNews:

A spacecraft slowed the orbit of a pair of asteroids around the sun by more than 10 micrometers per second… Within a month, researchers showed that the impact shortened Dimorphos’ 12-hour orbit by 32 minutes. Some of the rocks knocked off of Dimorphos fled the vicinity completely, escaping the gravitational influence of the Dimorphos-Didymos pair, says planetary defense researcher Rahil Makadia of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Those rocky runaways took some momentum away from the duo and changed their joint motion around the sun.

To figure out how much that motion was affected, astronomers watched the asteroids pass in front of distant stars, dimming some of the stars’ light like a tiny eclipse. These blinks, called stellar occultations, can be visible from anywhere on Earth and are predictable in advance… Calculating how far off occultation timings were from predictions revealed that the asteroids’ orbit around the sun was about 150 milliseconds slower than before the DART impact…

Didymos and Dimorphos are not a threat to Earth, Makadia says, and weren’t before DART. But knowing how a deliberate impact changes one asteroid’s orbit can help make defense plans against another, “in case we need to do a kinetic impact for real.”
The researchers spent nearly two and a half years to collect 22 measurements of the asteroid’s post-crash position, relying on amateur astronomers “to go out into the middle of nowhere and observe the necessary stellar occultations,” acvcording to their paper. Planetary defense researcher even tells ScienceNews “There was an observer who drove two days each way into the Australian outback to get these measurements.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.