Enlarge (credit: atakan/Getty Images)

The phenomenon appears to stem from the way the models’ algorithms are trained with broad swathes of web content, a key part of what makes them work, likely making it hard to prevent. “It’s not even clear how you fix this problem,” says Martin Vechev, a computer science professor at ETH Zürich in Switzerland who led the research. “This is very, very problematic.”

Enlarge / Whatever is in those Wonder Flower, I want some. (credit: Nintendo)

Back in 1995, Nintendo released Yoshi’s Island, which included the game’s seventh level, “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy.” After a relatively sedate and predictable first half, the last part of “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy” introduces the floating white puffballs that give the level its name (and its cult status among Mario fans). While touching most enemies in Yoshi’s Island causes damage or instant death, touching a fuzzy simply makes the entire level start to bob up and down like a series of ocean waves, as a wide-eyed Yoshi staggers back and forth like he’s 10 shots deep into an epic bender.

Read 23 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Source: Ars Technica – Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the most inventive 2D Mario in decades

This slide from a presentation by Lee Feinberg, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, shows concepts for a space telescope fitting inside the volumes of a SpaceX Starship rocket and a Blue Origin New Glenn rocket. (credit: NASA/Lee Feinberg)

A consensus among leading American astronomers is that NASA’s next wave of great observatories should take advantage of game-changing lift capabilities offered by giant new rockets like SpaceX’s Starship.

Launching a follow-on to the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) on Starship, for example, could unshackle the mission from onerous mass and volume constraints, which typically drive up complexity and cost, a panel of three astronomers recently told the National Academies’ Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“The availability of greater mass and volume capability, at lower cost, enlarges the design space,” said Charles Lawrence, the chief scientist for astronomy and physics at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We want to take advantage of that.”

Enlarge / A box of Paxlovid, the Pfizer antiviral drug. (credit: Getty | Europa Press News)

After raising the price of COVID-19 vaccines more than fourfold this year, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told investors Monday that the company will also likely hike the price of its lifesaving COVID-19 antiviral treatment, Paxlovid, raising further concern about access and health care costs.

The price of the drug is already $530 for a treatment course. That’s what the US government paid for the drug in the emergency phase of the pandemic. But, as the drug moves from government distribution to the commercial market this year, the price is expected to increase. So far, it’s unclear what the new price will be.

In a company investor call Monday, Bourla said only that the “pandemic price” of $530 is likely to be “lesser” than the commercial price and that negotiations are beginning.

Apple has announced a new version of its popular Pencil peripheral for the iPad. Simply dubbed “Apple Pencil” yet again, it is the cheapest option to carry the name yet.

The new Pencil is priced at $79; that’s $20 cheaper than the first-generation Apple Pencil and $50 cheaper than the second generation. Apple says it will work with any iPad model with a USB-C port.

In fact, the new Pencil itself has a USB-C port. That means you’ll use a USB-to-USB cable to charge it on your iPad, Mac, USB-C iPhone, charging brick, or what have you. The USB-C port is subtly hidden behind a sliding cap. This is clearly a big improvement over the awkward “plug your Pencil into the iPad’s port” solution of old.

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

A glimpse at some of Home Assistant’s Mazda data potential, before it was removed. (credit: Phish / CX70 Forum)

One CX60 driver had a charger that would only power on when it confirmed his car was plugged in and would alert him if he left the trunk open. Another used Home Assistant to control their charger based on the dynamic prices of an Agile Octopus energy plan. Yet another had really thought it through, using Home Assistant to check the gas before their morning commute, alert them if their windows were down before rain was forecast, and remotely unlock and start the car in cold conditions. The possibilities were vast, and purportedly beyond what Mazda’s official app offered.

Mazda, however, had issues with the project, which was largely the free-time work of one software developer, Brandon Rothweiler. In a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notice sent to GitHub, Mazda (or an authorized agent) alleges that Rothweiler’s integration:

Enlarge (credit: Qualcomm)

The Android ecosystem is hurtling toward a RISC-V future. The puzzle pieces for the up-and-coming CPU architecture started falling into place this past year when Google announced official RISC-V support in Android and plans to make it a “tier 1 platform” on equal footing with Arm. With the OS support underway, what we need now is hardware, and Qualcomm is stepping up to announce the first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC.

It doesn’t have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it’s developing a “RISC-V Snapdragon Wear” chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to “commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US.” For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone’s first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it’s the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out “will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance.”

RISC-V represents a big threat to the Arm CPU architecture that currently dominates all mobile devices. RISC-V architecture is open source, which can make it cheaper and more flexible than Arm. If companies want to design their own chips, they can do that without paying a licensing fee to Arm. Since the architecture is open source, it’s possible to create a fully open source chip. If you’re a chip-design firm, you can make your own proprietary chip designs and license them, making you a competitor to Arm’s chip-design business.

Enlarge (credit: Intel)

Intel’s new desktop processor generations haven’t always come with significant generational improvements in recent years, as the company has struggled with new manufacturing tech that enables big leaps in performance and power efficiency. For every major jump—the 12th-generation CPUs, codenamed Alder Lake, come to mind—you usually get several faster but less-than-thrilling iterations.

Intel is officially launching its 14th-generation desktop processors today, and they’re firmly in that iterative, non-thrilling group, even compared to last year’s 13th-generation chips. The good news for price-conscious PC builders is that they’ll continue to work in all current 600- and 700-series motherboards after a BIOS update, and Intel isn’t launching a series of new motherboards to accompany them—there aren’t many compelling reasons to upgrade from a 12th-gen setup to a 14th-gen one, but it’s an available option.

Even the branding Intel is using here signifies that the processors are a throwback—next-gen Meteor Lake chips for laptops and all of Intel’s other chips are losing the generational and i3/i5/i7/i9 branding in favor of “Core” and “Core Ultra.” By Intel’s admission, the last gasp of the 14th-generation branding here is a nod to how similar they are to the 13th-generation chips that preceded them (and, for that matter, the 12th-gen ones before that).

Enlarge / Moments like this are practically worth the price of admission. (credit: Insomniac / Sony)

As much as we liked 2020’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, the game provided only minor tweaks to the successful formula established by Insomniac’s original 2018 take on everyone’s favorite wall-crawler. Spider-Man 2 is a slightly meatier sequel, with a bigger version of New York City to explore and a few welcome improvements in presentation and gameplay. Even so, the game still fits quite comfortably into the “more of the same” side of the sequel equation.

But we can’t say we’re too upset about this state of affairs. The basic open-world superheroics of Insomniac’s Spider-Man are so strong that this sequel can get by quite capably with a bit of tinkering at the margins. After three full games, it turns out we’re still not tired of defending Insomniac’s take on New York City.

A strained team-up

Pretty much every piece of pre-release hype for Spider-Man 2 focused on how the pairing of two separate Spider-Men–Peter Parker and Miles Morales–would implicitly lead to twice as much fun. It’s unfortunate, then, that the long-promised team-up feels more than a little forced here.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

According to Kelly Blue Book, US car buyers bought 313,086 battery EVs between the months of July and September 2023, compared to just 209,030 BEVs for the same three months of last year. Add in the 882 Toyota Mirai hydrogen fuel cell EVs and 68 Hyundai Nexo FCEVs that found homes in Q3 2023 and that’s a 50.1 percent increase, year on year.

The cumulative totals for all of 2023 so far are also looking healthy. KBB estimates that 873,082 BEVs have been bought this year, versus 586,965 for the first nine months of 2022. Add in about 2,800 FCEVs compared to around 1,000 last year, and clean vehicle sales grew 49 percent, year on year.

Enlarge / The winning entry: a rodent optic nerve head with astrocytes (yellow), contractile proteins (red), and retinal vasculature (green). (credit: Hassanain Qambari and Jayden Dickson)

Millions of Americans with diabetes (about 1 in 5) face the risk of eventual blindness due to diabetic retinopathy, a condition that affects blood vessels in the retina, the light-sensitive tissue in the back of the eye. It’s a difficult condition to spot in its earliest stages, since many people don’t show immediate symptoms (although one 2021 study identified key biomarkers that potentially could one day help with early identification). By the late stages, the damage is often irreversible.

Hassanain Qambari’s research at the Lions Eye Institute in Perth, Australia, focuses on early detection and possible reversal of diabetic retinopathy, including taking precise images of the tiny micron-sized vessels in the eye. With colleague Jayden Dickson’s assistance, he created the winning image in the 2023 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition, depicting an optic nerve head in a rodent in exquisite detail.

Now in its 49th year, the annual competition is designed to highlight “stunning imagery from scientists, artists, and photomicrographers of all experiences and backgrounds from across the globe,” according to Nikon’s communications manager, Eric Flem, adding, “I am consistently awed by how these advancements make it possible to create art out of science for the public to enjoy.” Photomicrography involves attaching a camera to a microscope (either an optical microscope or an electron microscope) so that the user can take photographs of objects at very high resolutions. British physiologist Richard Hill Norris was one of the first to use it for his studies of blood cells in 1850, and the method has increasingly been highlighted as art since the 1970s.

Enlarge / The 2022 iPad Air. (credit: Samuel Axon)

First up was an email blast from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman on Sunday. Noting that he had written in July that we would see iPad refreshes before the end of the year, he appeared to walk that back, writing, “a new entry-level iPad, iPad Air and iPad mini are all in development with faster chips, but I don’t believe updates of any significance are imminent.”

He pointed to his prior reporting that Apple plans a major iPad Pro update with an OLED screen next year, but not before 2023’s end.

Enlarge / Let’s see, you landed on my “Google Ads” space, and with three houses… that will be $1,400. (credit: Ron Amadeo / Hasbro)

Dozens of exhibits from the Google antitrust trial are still being hidden from the public, The New York Times Company alleged in a court filing today.

According to The Times, there are several issues with access to public trial exhibits on both sides. The Department of Justice has failed to post at least 68 exhibits on its website that were shared in the trial, The Times alleged, and states have not provided access to 18 records despite reporters’ requests.

Google’s responses to document requests have also been spotty, The Times alleged. Sometimes Google “has not responded at all” to requests to review public exhibits. Other times, Google responds, but “often does not provide the exhibit in its entirety,” The Times claimed, including limiting public access to “particular page(s) of the exhibit shown to a given witness.”

Enlarge / The first words have been deciphered on a charred ancient scroll: “πορφυρας” which means “purple dye” or “cloths of purple.” (credit: Vesuvius Challenge/University of Kentucky)

Hundreds of badly charred ancient Roman scrolls found in a Roman villa have long been believed to be unreadable, but a 21-year-old computer science student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has successfully read the first text hidden within one of the rolled-up scrolls using a machine learning model. The achievement snagged Luke Farritor a $40,000 First Letters prize from the Vesuvius Challenge, a collaboration between private entrepreneurs and academics offering a series of rewards for milestones in deciphering the scrolls.

A second contestant, Youssef Nader, received a smaller $10,000 First Ink prize for essentially being the second person to decipher letters in a scroll. The main prize of $700,000 will be awarded to the first person to read four or more passages from one of the scrolls by December 31, and the founders are optimistic that this goal is achievable in light of these most recent breakthroughs.

As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn’t the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso —contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.

Enlarge (credit: Stack Overflow)

In a post on the Stack Overflow blog, the CEO says the company is on a “path to profitability” and “continued product innovation.” You might think of Stack Overflow as “just a forum,” but the company is working on a direct answer to ChatGPT in the form of “Overflow AI,” which was announced in July. Stack Overflow’s profitability plan includes cutting costs, and that’s the justification for the layoffs. Stack Overflow doubled its headcount in 2022 with 525 people. ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, making for unfortunate timing.

Of course, the great irony of ChatGPT hurting Stack Overflow is that a great deal of the chatbot’s development prowess comes from scraping sites like Stack Overflow. Chatbots have many questions to answer about the sustainability of the web. They vacuum up all this data and give nothing back, so what is supposed to happen when you drive all your data sources out of business?

Enlarge / Cables run into a Cisco data switch. (credit: Getty Images)

“Successful exploitation of this vulnerability allows an attacker to create an account on the affected device with privilege level 15 access, effectively granting them full control of the compromised device and allowing possible subsequent unauthorized activity,” members of Cisco’s Talos security team wrote Monday. “This is a critical vulnerability, and we strongly recommend affected entities immediately implement the steps outlined in Cisco’s PSIRT advisory.”

Under exploitation for 4 weeks

The previously unknown vulnerability, which is tracked as CVE-2023-20198, carries the maximum severity rating of 10. It resides in the Web User Interface of Cisco IOS XE software when exposed to the Internet or untrusted networks. Any switch, router, or wireless LAN controller running IOS XE that has the HTTP or HTTPS Server feature enabled and exposed to the Internet is vulnerable. At the time this post went live, the Shodan search engine showed that as many as 80,000 Internet-connected devices could be affected.