This week, the US and China, the two world leaders on AI, finally started talks meant to keep the whole world safe from emerging safety risks. But whether meetings between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping can lead to a reliable global governance framework for AI depends on how much the fierce rivals are actually willing to cooperate.

It’s clear Trump wants it to seem like discussions are going well. Before Trump and Xi meet on Thursday and Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that both sides had already discussed setting up a new AI safety notification mechanism. If China agrees to participate, that would create an open line for either side to send alerts when their country’s AI systems pose threats or behave unpredictably. The same channel, Bessent said, could allow the countries to share their “vision of common goals.”

However, the proposal comes at a time when China may not be ready to trust the US to have AI safety conversations that aren’t about limiting China’s capabilities. Not only has Trump steadily increased export controls that explicitly seek to block China from accessing technology to advance AI, but Congress is mulling bills that would cut the country off from more chips and hardware. Adding to tensions, just two weeks ago, Trump’s Justice Department accused six of China’s leading AI makers of stealing from US frontier labs, which China has strongly disputed.

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This week, the US and China, the two world leaders on AI, finally started talks meant to keep the whole world safe from emerging safety risks. But whether meetings between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping can lead to a reliable global governance framework for AI depends on how much the fierce rivals are actually willing to cooperate.

It’s clear Trump wants it to seem like discussions are going well. Before Trump and Xi meet on Thursday and Friday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that both sides had already discussed setting up a new AI safety notification mechanism. If China agrees to participate, that would create an open line for either side to send alerts when their country’s AI systems pose threats or behave unpredictably. The same channel, Bessent said, could allow the countries to share their “vision of common goals.”

However, the proposal comes at a time when China may not be ready to trust the US to have AI safety conversations that aren’t about limiting China’s capabilities. Not only has Trump steadily increased export controls that explicitly seek to block China from accessing technology to advance AI, but Congress is mulling bills that would cut the country off from more chips and hardware. Adding to tensions, just two weeks ago, Trump’s Justice Department accused six of China’s leading AI makers of stealing from US frontier labs, which China has strongly disputed.

Read full article

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Apple’s latest Apple Watches, the Series 12 and the Ultra 4, should be the “best” smartwatches the company has to offer. While they’re minor upgrades over the Series 11 and Ultra 3, there are some key improvements, including the new S11 chip and a heart rate monitor that checks your pulse every five seconds. If you picked up one of these watches, you might have put these new upgrades to the test—that is, if your watch didn’t restart on you.

As reported by MacRumors, Apple’s latest smartwatches appear prone to unexpected restarts. That’s according to numerous posts on the site’s forums, with users saying their watches abruptly show a blank screen with the Apple logo. There doesn’t appear to be any particular action that triggers it: Users say their watches rebooted when recording a workout, using Siri AI, editing watch faces, or using the Maps app. Many users on this Reddit thread share similar experiences with their new watches. Some users dug deeper, pulling their Apple Watches’ diagnostics at the time of rebooting. Rather than a specific function, the culprit appears to be a timeout with the Neural Engine, the hardware that processes Apple’s AI features.

Users tried multiple workarounds themselves: One Redditor simply turned the watch off and on themself, and the issue never returned; others tried resetting the watch as new, but experienced rebooting again. MacRumors highlighted one case where a user received a replacement from Apple, and it, too, rebooted unexpectedly. It does appear to be an issue with the Series 12 and Ultra 4, and, luckily, Apple figured it out.

watchOS 27.0.1 fixes unexpected reboots with Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4

On Wednesday, Apple unexpectedly released watchOS 27.0.1. The update has a brief changelog, with only one new addition: “This update provides bug fixes for your Apple Watch, including fixing an issue where Apple Watch may restart unexpectedly.” Apple didn’t clarify exactly what it changed to fix the issue, but at least the reboots should be over.

This update is only for Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 users, so don’t expect to see it unless you have one of Apple’s newest wearables. If you do, make sure to install it as soon as possible to avoid dealing with these unexpected restarts. To install watchOS 27.0.1, head to the Apple Watch app, then tap My Watch and go to General > Software Update.

More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert.

Whatever happened to those barrels?

Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor. Surprisingly, this isn’t necessarily a subversion of the original plan… The International Atomic Energy Agency recommends that low-level waste be disposed of in robust containment in isolation for at least a few hundred years — but back in the mid-20th century, the recommendations were a little different. The contemporaneous guidelines recommended that containers needed to reach the seafloor intact and remain sealed only long enough for the short-lived radionuclides to decay. After that, the remaining waste was expected to slowly escape and disperse through the surrounding ocean. Not everything in the barrels would conveniently decay away, however. They contained a radioactive hodgepodge, including cesium-137, plutonium isotopes, and tritium, some of which can persist for thousands of years…

[A] few years ago, nuclear engineer Patrick Chardon and marine geologist Javier Escartín of the French National Center for Scientific Research started to wonder what had become of the dumped waste. That question eventually became NODSSUM — Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring — an interdisciplinary project bringing together nuclear physics, geology, oceanography, biology, and marine chemistry to find the barrels and investigate what, if anything, they were doing to the surrounding environment…. [T]he barrels also appeared to function as tiny oases on the otherwise sparsely populated sandy seafloor. Anemones had attached themselves to the barrels. Sponges, sea cucumbers, fish, and crustaceans lived around them, with crabs apparently particularly fond of the artificial shelters…

Instruments aboard the ship detected significant signals of cobalt-60 and niobium-94, which the researchers could specifically link to the dumped waste… [Samples are now being analyzed] There is precedent, however, to suggest that even striking levels of radioactivity around a source don’t necessarily spread very far. A recent study of the sunken Soviet submarine Komsomolets found radionuclide levels hundreds of thousands of times above background immediately around the leaking reactor — but those levels dropped sharply within just a few meters as the material dispersed through the seawater. The NODSSUM team similarly found that, despite the significant radioactive signals around the barrels, activity levels weren’t high enough to pose major radiation-protection problems for the scientists handling the samples. [Their three-person submersible] Nautile and the instruments it carried showed no signs of contamination.
The real achievement was mapping the exact location of the barrels. “None of this means the waste is harmless,” the article concludes — but it also doesn’t mean we’re about to be overrun by radioactive crabs.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.