Enlarge / NatGeo Explorer Albert Lin sits on the edge of a cliff during his quest to find the lost city of the Cloud Warriors in Peru. (credit: National Geographic/Disney/Rochio Lira)

National Geographic Explorer Albert Lin is something of a modern-day Indiana Jones, traveling to remote locations all over the globe to take part in a variety of archaeological missions. His most recent expeditions are chronicled in the new NatGeo documentary series, Lost Cities Revealed with Albert Lin, premiering on Thanksgiving Day. The episode (“The Warrior King”) follows Lin as he navigates a sacred mountain and a flooded tomb underneath a pyramid in the Sudanese desert, hunting for the lost capital of the Kingdom of Kush.

A California native, Lin holds a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He subsequently founded UCSD’s Center for Human Frontiers, which focuses on harnessing technology to augment human potential. So it’s not surprising that he first made a name for himself by combining satellites, aerial remote sensing (drones), and Lidar mapping with more traditional ground exploration to hunt for the missing tomb of Genghis Khan in 2009.

The Valley of the Khans Project also successfully employed crowdsourcing (via more than 10,000 online volunteers) to help analyze the resulting satellite and aerial photography images, looking for unusual features across the vast landscape. That led to the confirmation of 55 archaeological sites in the region, a 2011 NatGeo documentary,  and a 2014 scientific paper detailing the benefits of so-called “collective reasoning” to archaeology.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

It may have been a chaotic week at OpenAI, but the company has somehow still found time to roll out a product. “ChatGPT with voice” is available to free users of the ChatGPT app. This feature launched for paying users in September, and if you haven’t heard, it’s a full-blown voice assistant. The feature is still slowly rolling out to devices; on my Android phone, I don’t have a “headphone” icon anywhere, even with a Plus subscription.

When you have the feature, you can open the app, press the “headphone” icon, ask a question, and a stilted robot voice will read out a reply. It’s just like the voice assistants from Apple, Amazon, or Google, but this one is powered by a large language model. ChatGPT’s voice model is purely a question-and-answer type of voice assistant, though. Usually, these things are handy for what they can do on your behalf—make a phone call, control a smart home, take a note, or make a calendar appointment—but this can only answer questions.

ChatGPT with voice is now available to all free users. Download the app on your phone and tap the headphones icon to start a conversation.

Sound on pic.twitter.com/c5sCFDAWU6

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 21, 2023

Google and Amazon are rebooting their voice assistants to use large language models, so ChatGPT’s voice functionality is definitely a preview of the future. The demo about buying pizza for a large group is more complicated than the current Big Tech voice assistants can handle. ChatGPT’s response is also longer-winded than most voice assistants, giving a 66-word, 23-second answer describing the imagined pizza-eating scenario in excruciating detail.

Enlarge / Apple’s AirPods Max, a close analog to what Sonos plans to launch in April. (credit: Apple)

Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman isn’t just reporting about the inner workings of Apple; he’s breaking news about upcoming Sonos products. In a report published Tuesday, Gurman revealed that Sonos is months away from releasing a competitor to high-end wireless headphones after years of vague rumors.

Additionally, Sonos is reportedly working on a Roku Ultra- or Apple TV 4K-like set-top box that would allow users to watch video from a wide range of streaming TV apps.

The Bloomberg article says the device will cost between $150 and $200 and will be a small black box. We’ve seen some prior reports that flesh this out a bit; Sonos has been working on something called Home Theater OS (which would be Android-based) for some time, and voice control is said to be a key feature. Sonos is also considering launching its own streaming video service. The device will support Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision, and it will seamlessly work with Sonos’ existing home theater speakers.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto)

A Florida judge, Reid Scott, has ruled that there’s “reasonable evidence” to conclude that Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk knew of defects in Autopilot systems and failed to fix them. Testimony from Tesla engineers and internal documents showed that Musk was “intimately involved” in Tesla’s Autopilot program and “acutely aware” of a sometimes-fatal defect—where Autopilot repeatedly fails to detect cross traffic, Scott wrote.

“Knowing that the Autopilot system had previously failed, had limitations” and, according to one Tesla Autopilot systems engineer, “had not been modified, Tesla still permitted the ‘Autopilot’ system to be engaged on roads that encountered areas of cross traffic,” Scott wrote.

Because a jury could perhaps consider that a “conscious disregard or indifference to the life” of Tesla drivers, Scott granted a motion to seek punitive damages to Kim Banner, whose husband Jeremy was killed in 2019 when his “Model 3 drove under the trailer of an 18-wheeler big rig truck that had turned onto the road, shearing off the Tesla’s roof,” Reuters reported. Autopilot allegedly failed to warn Jeremy or respond in any way that could have avoided the collision, like braking or steering the vehicle out of danger, Banner’s complaint said.

The first-of-its-kind cluster—in five women all linked to one infected man—raises the possibility that a new strain of syphilis bacteria has adapted to more easily cause systemic syphilis, particularly disease that affects the eyes and central nervous system. A report of the cluster and what it might mean is published today by Michigan health officials in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

Eye syphilis, aka ocular syphilis, is not new. Syphilis bacteria, Treponema pallidum (formerly Spirochaeta pallida) are known to be able to spread to the eye, as well as the inner ear, and central nervous system when the sexually transmitted infection is left untreated. This spread can lead to blindness, deafness, and life-threatening neurosyphilis if it remains untreated.

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In August, the Department of Health and Human Services announced 10 drugs selected for the first round of Medicare price negotiations—a landmark effort established by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to try to drag down the country’s uniquely astronomical prescription drug prices.

Pharmaceutical companies publicly balked—and also sued—then eventually came to the table. But it was far from their first protest of the Democrat-led effort to reform drug pricing in the US, which pays far more for prescription drugs than other high-income countries.

In 2022, the pharmaceutical industry’s top lobbying group, PhRMA, gave a record $7.5 million to the GOP-linked dark money group, American Action Network (AAN), which spent millions on advertising that year opposing drug pricing reforms, some of which made it into the Inflation Reduction Act.

Enlarge / Risk of Rain was the work of two college students and GameMaker. (credit: Gearbox Publishing)

That changed this fall, when popular pick Unity went from a remarkable anybody-can-make-a-game tool to a developer-enraging, threat-generating, CEO-resignation mess. CD Projekt Red, maker of The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077, made a point of stating that its next games would be built with the Unreal Engine, not its in-house REDengine. After Cities: Skylines 2 launched with notably rough performance, deep decompilation analysis found a bunch of seemingly Unity-related, or at least Unity-adjacent, issues.

That’s why this news about another big change in a popular game engine is so striking: it’s generally good. GameMaker (formerly Game Maker Studio), a 2D engine that was acquired by browser firm Opera in 2021, has simplified its licensing structure, declaring it “Free for Non-Commercial Use.”