Formula 1 held its Italian Grand Prix at Monza this past weekend. It’s the third-oldest purpose-built racetrack on the planet, and even includes an old and rather dangerous-looking oval that, while no longer in use, is accessible on foot if you feel like exploring. It’s a deceptively simple-looking track where it’s all about top speed and nailing your braking into the four heavy deceleration zones. Downforce is actually an impediment here, and that means the pecking order that we have become familiar with this season got a little upended.

That was apparent from free practice on Friday, topped by the Ferraris of Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, with Carlos Sainz’s Williams in third. Verstappen looked quick in his Red Bull, armed with a new Monza-spec rear wing that made his car cut through the air even more efficiently. The McLarens of title contenders Oscar Piastri and Lando Norris got faster through the practice sessions, with the Williams of Alex Albon and Sainz continuing to look strong.

Things often get messy when the cars have to funnel through the first chicane.
Credit:
Alessio Morgese/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Qualifying did not go well for the Williams drivers. The time constraints of the qualifying sessions meant neither Albon nor Sainz was able to get their tires into the right temperature window, and the two were relegated in Q2. Hopes of a home pole for Ferrari—and a repeat of last year’s win—were not to be, as Leclerc could manage only fourth on the grid. Hamilton was just over a tenth of a second slower in fifth, but would have to take a grid penalty as a consequence of last weekend’s Dutch Grand Prix.

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If you already have a Ring doorbell or camera, adding a Ring Chime can make a big difference, especially if your phone isn’t always within reach. Right now, the current-gen Ring Chime Pro is on sale for $44.99 on StackSocial—25% off— making it an affordable upgrade for anyone looking to hear doorbell or motion alerts throughout their home. It plugs directly into a wall outlet, connects to your 2.4GHz wifi, and starts working within minutes. Setup is simple, and it works seamlessly with all Ring doorbells and cameras, no matter which model you own. The standard Ring Chime is sold out, but the Ring Chime Pro is also a wifi repeater, which extends the wifi signal in your home.

This Ring Chime offers a few thoughtful updates over the last versions. The design is sleeker, and there’s now an LED indicator that helps with setup and gives quick feedback on its power status. You can choose from a range of customizable chime tones and adjust the volume to suit the room. So, whether you’re in a noisy kitchen or a quiet office, you can tailor alerts to your environment. There’s also a snooze option in the Ring app—perfect for when you want peace and quiet during a meeting or nap.

That said, this doesn’t include a Ring Home subscription (which runs from $4.99/mo to $19.99/mo), so you won’t get cloud video history or AI-based alerts unless you sign up separately. But if you just want to hear when someone’s at the door or moving around your front yard, it does the job well. It weighs less than a pound, blends easily into most wall outlets, and doesn’t require any wiring or drilling. For under $30, it’s a solid companion for any Ring system, especially in homes where phones aren’t always nearby or notifications get missed.

Meta allegedly suppressed research that suggested kids were exposed to certain dangers when using its VR headsets, according to a report by The Washington Post. Current and former employees have presented documents to Congress that describe incidents in which children were groomed by adult predators in VR, but allege that internal reports were edited to omit the worst of these offenses. Meta has denied these allegations.

Two of these researchers claim they met with a German family in which a child younger than ten had been approached by strangers online while using a Meta VR headset. Some of these strangers allegedly sexually propositioned the child. When the employees issued the harrowing report, their boss allegedly ordered that the aforementioned claims be deleted. When the internal report was eventually published, it spoke of some parents being scared of this type of thing but didn’t mention the above incident.

The trove of documents presented to Congress reportedly indicate guidance from Meta’s legal team instructing researchers to avoid collecting data about children using VR devices. The memo suggests this is “due to regulatory concerns,” likely referring to fallout from congressional hearings that took place in 2021.

The documents also include warnings from employees that children younger than 13 were bypassing age restrictions to use VR headsets. However, Meta has since lowered the minimum age down to ten.

Meta spokeswoman Dani Lever told The Post that the documents were “stitched together to fit a predetermined and false narrative” and that the company doesn’t prohibit research about children under 13. “We stand by our research team’s excellent work and are dismayed by these mischaracterizations of the team’s efforts,” she said.

The company didn’t confirm or deny the events regarding the family in Germany, but said that if the anecdote was deleted from the official record it was to ensure compliance with a US federal law governing the handling of children’s personal data or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from the EU.

That one prohibits companies from collecting personal information without consent, but the researchers maintain they received consent from the child’s mother. They also say they received a signed contract from the mother at the start of the interview.

A Senate Judiciary subcommittee is scheduled to discuss these allegations at a hearing later in the week. This particular subcommittee examines laws and regulations regarding online safety.

It was recently revealed that Meta is opening up its Horizon Worlds VR hangout app to preteens, so long as they get parental approval. This led the Senate Judiciary Committee to pen a letter demanding information as to the presence of minors on the app and the company’s alleged failures to protect the privacy and safety of children.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/meta-reportedly-suppressed-research-about-how-dangerous-its-vr-headsets-are-for-kids-162509006.html?src=rss

Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late ’00s. The community was working to get around Apple’s onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That “master library” would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.

At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today’s addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.

All at once, then slowly

GitHub user Olsro, the originator of the iPod Clickwheel Games Preservation Project, tells Ars that he lucked into contact with three people who had large iPod game libraries in the first month or so after the project’s launch last October. That includes one YouTuber who had purchased and maintained copies of 39 distinct games, even repurchasing some of the upgraded versions Apple sold separately for later iPod models.

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University of Luxembourg mathematicians tested whether GPT-5 could extend a qualitative fourth-moment theorem to include explicit convergence rates, a previously unaddressed problem in the Malliavin-Stein framework. The September 2025 experiment, prompted by claims GPT-5 solved a convex optimization problem, revealed the AI made critical errors requiring constant human correction.

GPT-5 overlooked an essential covariance property easily deducible from provided documents. The researchers compared the experience to working with a junior assistant needing careful verification. They warned AI reliance during doctoral training risks students losing opportunities to develop fundamental mathematical skills through mistakes and exploration.

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OpenAI is throwing its resources behind a mostly AI-generated animated film that was the brainchild of one of the company’s employees. As first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the film will be called Critterz and will follow forest creatures who go on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger. Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI, started designing the characters three years ago with the intention of making a short film using OpenAI’s DALL-E image-generation tool.

The goal of the film is, in part, to show that animated films can be made for less money and in less time with AI. The team behind the film has set a budget of less than $30 million and a production schedule of only nine months. Both are a fraction of what it takes to produce a typical Hollywood animated picture. According to Nelson, OpenAI is hoping that if Critterz is successful, it might pave the way for adoption of more AI in the industry.

London-based Vertigo Films will produce the film along with Native Foreign, a studio in Los Angeles that specializes in using AI alongside more traditional video production methods. Native Foreign previously produced a faux Planet Earth-style short film, also titled Critterz, written and directed by Nelson. It used DALL-E to create all the visuals for the short, which Native Foreign then brought to life with (limited) animation.

The production team will hire human voice actors for the film’s characters and will hire artists to draw sketches that will then be fed into OpenAI’s chat and image-generating tools. The script for Critterz was penned by some of the same writers behind Paddington in Peru. The team aims to premiere the film at next year’s Cannes Film Festival in May.

Over the last few years, many Hollywood workers have fought to protect their livelihoods against AI encroachment. In 2023, after a protracted strike, SAG-AFTRA reached an agreement that would require “informed consent and compensation” should a studio wish to use AI-generated likenesses of any current or deceased SAG-AFTRA members. All of this comes against the backdrop of enormous lawsuits against AI companies by creatives and studios alike.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-tech-to-be-used-to-in-a-full-length-animated-film-155921502.html?src=rss

There are myriad questions about how NASA’s budget process will play out in the coming weeks, with the start of the new fiscal year on October 1 looming.

For example, the Trump administration may seek to shut off dozens of science missions that are either already in space or in development. Although Congress has signaled a desire to keep these missions active, absent a confirmed budget, the White House has made plans to turn off the lights.

Some answers may be forthcoming this week, as the House Appropriations Committee will take up the Commerce, Justice, and Science budget bill on Wednesday morning. However great uncertainty remains about whether there will be a budget passed by October 1 (unlikely), a continuing resolution, or a government shutdown.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Two cultivated meat companies have filed a lawsuit against officials in Texas over the law that bans the sales of lab-grown meat in the state for two years. California-based companies UPSIDE Foods, which makes cultivated chicken, and Wildtype, which makes cultivated salmon are suing Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas Department of State Health Services, Texas Health and Human Services, and Travis County, accusing them of government overreach.

“This law has nothing to do with protecting public health and safety and everything to do with protecting conventional agriculture from innovative out-of-state competition,” said Paul Sherman, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that is representing UPSIDE Foods and Wildtype. “That is not a legitimate use of government power.” In June, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 261, which bans the sale of lab-grown meat in Texas for two years. Lab-grown meat, also known as cell cultivated meat or cultured meat, is made from taking animal cells and growing them in an incubator or bioreactor until they form an edible product.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune:
The percentage of young Gen Z employees between the ages of 21 and 25 has been cut in half at technology companies over the past two years, according to recent data from compensation management software business Pave with workforce data from more than 8,300 companies.
These young workers accounted for 15% of the workforce at large public tech firms in January 2023. By August 2025, they only represented 6.8%. The situation isn’t pretty at big private tech companies, either — during that same time period, the proportion of early-career Gen Z employees dwindled from 9.3% to 6.8%. Meanwhile, the average age of a worker at a tech company has risen dramatically over those two and a half years. Between January 2023 and July 2025, the average age of all employees at large public technology businesses rose from 34.3 years to 39.4 years — more than a five year difference. On the private side, the change was less drastic, with the typical age only increasing from 35.1 to 36.6 years old…

“If you’re 35 or 40 years old, you’re pretty established in your career, you have skills that you know cannot yet be disrupted by AI,” Matt Schulman, founder and CEO of Pave, tells Fortune. “There’s still a lot of human judgment when you’re operating at the more senior level…If you’re a 22-year-old that used to be an Excel junkie or something, then that can be disrupted. So it’s almost a tale of two cities.” Schulman points to a few reasons why tech company workforces are getting older and locking Gen Z out of jobs. One is that big companies — like Salesforce, Meta, and Microsoft — are becoming a lot more efficient thanks to the advent of AI. And despite their soaring trillion-dollar profits, they’re cutting employees at the bottom rungs in favor of automation. Entry-level jobs have also dwindled because of AI agents, and stalling promotions across many agencies looking to do more with less. Once technology companies weed out junior roles, occupied by Gen Zers, their workforces are bound to rise in age.
Schulman tells Fortune Gen Z also has an advantage: that tech corporations can see them as fresh talent that “can just break the rules and leverage AI to a much greater degree without the hindrance of years of bias.”
And Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor for LinkedIn, tells Fortune there’s promising tech-industry entry roles in AI ethics, cybersecurity, UX, and product operations. “Building skills through certifications, gig work, and online communities can open doors….
“For Gen Z, the right certifications or micro credentials can outweigh a lack of years on the resume. This helps them stay competitive even when entry level opportunities shrink.”

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Somewhere in Houston, four research volunteers “will soon participate in NASA’s year-long simulation of a Mars mission,” NASA announced this week, saying it will provide “foundational data to inform human exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond.”

The 378-day simulation will take place inside a 3D-printed, 1,700-square-foot habitat at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston — starting on October 19th and continuing until Halloween of 2026:

Through a series of Earth-based missions called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog), NASA aims to evaluate certain human health and performance factors ahead of future Mars missions. The crew will undergo realistic resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, isolation and confinement, and other stressors, along with simulated high-tempo extravehicular activities. These scenarios allow NASA to make informed trades between risks and interventions for long-duration exploration missions.

“As NASA gears up for crewed Artemis missions, CHAPEA and other ground analogs are helping to determine which capabilities could best support future crews in overcoming the human health and performance challenges of living and operating beyond Earth’s resources — all before we send humans to Mars,” said Sara Whiting, project scientist with NASA’s Human Research Program at NASA Johnson. Crew members will carry out scientific research and operational tasks, including simulated Mars walks, growing a vegetable garden, robotic operations, and more. Technologies specifically designed for Mars and deep space exploration will also be tested, including a potable water dispenser and diagnostic medical equipment…

This mission, facilitated by NASA’s Human Research Program, is the second one-year Mars surface simulation conducted through CHAPEA. The first mission concluded on July 6, 2024.

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Four years ago a small Microsoft Research team started creating an analog optical computer. They used commercially available parts like sensors from smartphone cameras, optical lenses, and micro-LED lights finer than a human hair. “As the light passes through the sensor at different intensities, the analog optical computer can add and multiply numbers,” explains a Microsoft blog post.

They envision the technology scaling to a computer that for certain problems is 100X faster and 100X more energy efficient — running AI workloads “with a fraction of the energy needed and at much greater speed than the GPUs running today’s large language models.” The results are described in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature, according to the blog post:

At the same time, Microsoft is publicly sharing its “optimization solver” algorithm and the “digital twin” it developed so that researchers from other organizations can investigate this new computing paradigm and propose new problems to solve and new ways to solve them. Francesca Parmigiani, a Microsoft principal research manager who leads the team developing the AOC, explained that the digital twin is a computer-based model that mimics how the real analog optical computer [or “AOC”] behaves; it simulates the same inputs, processes and outputs, but in a digital environment — like a software version of the hardware. This allowed the Microsoft researchers and collaborators to solve optimization problems at a scale that would be useful in real situations. This digital twin will also allow other users to experiment with how problems, either in optimization or in AI, would be mapped and run on the analog optical computer hardware. “To have the kind of success we are dreaming about, we need other researchers to be experimenting and thinking about how this hardware can be used,” Parmigiani said.

Hitesh Ballani, who directs research on future AI infrastructure at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, U.K. said he believes the AOC could be a game changer. “We have actually delivered on the hard promise that it can make a big difference in two real-world problems in two domains, banking and healthcare,” he said. Further, “we opened up a whole new application domain by showing that exactly the same hardware could serve AI models, too.” In the healthcare example described in the Nature paper, the researchers used the digital twin to reconstruct MRI scans with a good degree of accuracy. The research indicates that the device could theoretically cut the time it takes to do those scans from 30 minutes to five. In the banking example, the AOC succeeded in resolving a complex optimization test case with a high degree of accuracy…

As researchers refine the AOC, adding more and more micro-LEDs, it could eventually have millions or even more than a billion weights. At the same time, it should get smaller and smaller as parts are miniaturized, researchers say.

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An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:
Microsoft’s Azure cloud services have been disrupted by undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea, the US tech giant says.
Users of Azure — one of the world’s leading cloud computing platforms — would experience delays because of problems with internet traffic moving through the Middle East, the company said. Microsoft did not explain what might have caused the damage to the undersea cables, but added that it had been able to reroute traffic through other paths.

Over the weekend, there were reports suggesting that undersea cable cuts had affected the United Arab Emirates and some countries in Asia…. On Saturday, NetBlocks, an organisation that monitors internet access, said a series of undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea had affected internet services in several countries, including India and Pakistan.

“We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East,” Microsoft said in their status announcement — while stressing that traffic “that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted”.

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As America’s trade talks with China were set to begin last July, a “puzzling” email reached several U.S. government agencies, law firms, and trade groups, reports the Wall Street Journal. It appeared to be from the chair of a U.S. Congressional committee, Representative John Moolenaar, asking recipients to review an alleged draft of upcoming legislation — sent as an attachment. “But why had the chairman sent the message from a nongovernment address…?”

“The cybersecurity firm Mandiant determined the spyware would allow the hackers to burrow deep into the targeted organizations if any of the recipients had opened the purported draft legislation, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.”

It turned out to be the latest in a series of alleged cyber espionage campaigns linked to Beijing, people familiar with the matter said, timed to potentially deploy spyware against organizations giving input on President Trump’s trade negotiations. The FBI and the Capitol Police are investigating the Moolenaar emails, and cyber analysts traced the embedded malware to a hacker group known as APT41 — believed to be a contractor for Beijing’s Ministry of State Security… The hacking campaign appeared to be aimed at giving Chinese officials an inside look at the recommendations Trump was receiving from outside groups. It couldn’t be determined whether the attackers had successfully breached any of the targets.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman declined to provide details but said the bureau was aware of the incident and was “working with our partners to identify and pursue those responsible….” The alleged campaign comes as U.S. law-enforcement officials have been surprised by the prolific and creative nature of China’s spying efforts. The FBI revealed last month that a Beijing-linked espionage campaign that hit U.S. telecom companies and swept up Trump’s phone calls actually targeted more than 80 countries and reached across the globe…

The Moolenaar impersonation comes as several administration officials have recently faced impostors of their own. The State Department warned diplomats around the world in July that an impostor was using AI to imitate Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s voice in messages sent to foreign officials. Federal authorities are also investigating an effort to impersonate White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, the Journal reported in May… The FBI issued a warning that month that “malicious actors have impersonated senior U.S. officials” targeting contacts with AI-generated voice messages and texts.
And in January, the article points out, all the staffers on Moolenaar’s committee “received emails falsely claiming to be from the CEO of Chinese crane manufacturer ZPMC, according to people familiar with the episode.”

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AI Overviews have lowered click-through traffic to Daily Mail sites by as much as 89%, the publisher told a UK government body that regulates competition. So they’ve joined other top news organizations (including Guardian Media Group and the magazine trade body the Periodical Publishers Association) in asking the regulators “to make Google more transparent and provide traffic statistics from AI Overview and AI Mode to publishers,” reports the Guardian:

Publishers — already under financial pressure from soaring costs, falling advertising revenues, the decline of print and the wider trend of readers turning away from news — argue that they are effectively being forced by Google to either accept deals, including on how content is used in AI Overview and AI Mode, or “drop out of all search results”, according to several sources… In recent years, Google Discover, which feeds users articles and videos tailored to them based on their past online activity, has replaced search as the main source of click-throughs to content. However, David Buttle, founder of the consultancy DJB Strategies, says the service, which is also tied to publishers’ overall search deals, does not deliver the quality traffic that most publishers need to drive their long-term strategies. “Google Discover is of zero product importance to Google at all,” he says. “It allows Google to funnel more traffic to publishers as traffic from search declines … Publishers have no choice but to agree or lose their organic search. It also tends to reward clickbaity type content. It pulls in the opposite direction to the kind of relationship publishers want.”

Meanwhile, publishers are fighting a wider battle with AI companies seeking to plunder their content to train their large language models. The creative industry is intensively lobbying the government to ensure that proposed legislation does not allow AI firms to use copyright-protected work without permission, a move that would stop the “value being scraped” out of the £125bn sector. Some publishers have struck bilateral licensing deals with AI companies — such as the FT, the German media group Axel Springer, the Guardian and the Nordic publisher Schibsted with the ChatGPT maker OpenAI — while others such as the BBC have taken action against AI companies alleging copyright theft. “It is a two-pronged attack on publishers, a sort of pincer movement,” says Chris Duncan, a former News UK and Bauer Media senior executive who now runs a media consultancy, Seedelta. “Content is disappearing into AI products without serious remuneration, while AI summaries are being integrated into products so there is no need to click through, effectively taking money from both ends. It is an existential crisis.”

“At the moment the AI and tech community are showing no signs of supporting publisher revenue,” says the chief executive of the UK’s Periodical Publishers Association…

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“I have not pulled this, I’m annoyed by having to even look at this, and if you actually expect me to pull this I want a real explanation and not a useless link,” Linus Torvalds posted Friday on the Linux kernel mailing list.
Phoronix explains:

It’s become a common occurrence seeing “Link: ” tags within Git commits for the Linux kernel that point to the latest Linux kernel mailing list patches of the same patch… Linus Torvalds has had enough and will be more strict against accepting pull requests that have link tags of no value. He commented yesterday on a block pull request that he pulled and then backed out of:

“And dammit, this commit has that promising ‘Link:’ argument that I hoped would explain why this pointless commit exists, but AS ALWAYS that link only wasted my time by pointing to the same damn information that was already there. I was hoping that it would point to some oops report or something that would explain why my initial reaction was wrong.

“Stop this garbage already. Stop adding pointless Link arguments that waste people’s time. Add the link if it has *ADDITIONAL* information….

“Yes, I’m grumpy. I feel like my main job — really my only job — is to try to make sense of pull requests, and that’s why I absolutely detest these things that are automatically added and only make my job harder.”
A longer discussion ensued…

Torvalds: [A] “perfect” model might be to actually have some kind of automation of “unless there was actual discussion about it”. But I feel such a model might be much too complicated, unless somebody *wants* to explore using AI because their job description says “Look for actual useful AI uses”. In today’s tech world, I assume such job descriptions do exist. Sigh…

Torvalds: I do think it makes sense for patch series that (a) are more than a small handful of patches and (b) have some real “story” to them (ie a cover letter that actually explains some higher-level issues)…

Torvalds also had two responses to a poster who’d said “IMHO it’s better to have a Link and it _potentially_ being useful than not to have it and then need to search around for it.”

Torvalds: No. Really. The issue is “potentially — but very likely not — useful” vs “I HIT THIS TEN+ TIMES EVERY SINGLE F%^& RELEASE”.
There is just no comparison. I have literally *never* found the original submission email to be useful, and I’m tired of the “potentially useful” argument that has nothing to back it up with. It’s literally magical thinking of “in some alternate universe, pigs can fly, and that link might be useful”

Torvalds: And just to clarify: the hurt is real. It’s not just the disappointment. It’s the wasted effort of following a link and having to then realize that there’s nothing useful there. Those links *literally* double the effort for me when I try to be careful about patches…

The cost is real. The cost is something I’ve complained about before… Yes, it’s literally free to you to add this cost. No, *YOU* don’t see the cost, and you think it is helpful. It’s not. It’s the opposite of helpful. So I want commit messages to be relevant and explain what is going on, and I want them to NOT WASTE MY TIME.

And I also don’t want to ignore links that are actually *useful* and give background information. Is that really too much to ask for?

Torvalds points out he’s brought this up four times before — once in 2022.

Torvalds: I’m a bit frustrated, exactly because this _has_ been going on for years. It’s not a new peeve.

And I don’t think we have a good central place for that kind of “don’t do this”. Yes, there’s the maintainer summit, but that’s a pretty limited set of people. I guess I could mention it in my release notes, but I don’t know who actually reads those either.. So I end up just complaining when I see it.

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USA Today has an update on the curtailing of “mirror life” research:

Kate Adamala had been working on something dangerous. At her synthetic biology lab, Adamala had been taking preliminary steps toward creating a living cell from scratch with one key twist: All the organism’s building blocks would be flipped. Changing these molecules would create an unnatural mirror image of a cell, as different as your right hand from your left. The endeavor was not only a fascinating research challenge, but it also could be used to improve biotechnology and medicine. As Adamala and her colleagues talked with biosecurity experts about the project, however, grave concerns began brewing. “They started to ask questions like, ‘Have you considered what happens if that cell gets released or what would happen if it infected a human?'” said Adamala, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. They hadn’t.

So researchers brought together dozens of experts in a variety of disciplines from around the globe, including two Nobel laureates, who worked for months to determine the risks of creating “mirror life” and the chances those dangers could be mitigated. Ultimately, they concluded, mirror cells could inflict “unprecedented and irreversible harm” on our world. “We cannot rule out a scenario in which a mirror bacterium acts as an invasive species across many ecosystems, causing pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans,” the scientists wrote in a paper published in the journal Science in December alongside a 299-page technical report…

[Report co-author Vaughn Cooper, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies how bacteria adapt to new environments] said it’s not yet possible to build a cell from scratch, mirror or otherwise, but researchers have begun the process by synthesizing mirror proteins and enzymes. He and his colleagues estimated that given enough resources and manpower, scientists could create a complete mirror bacteria within a decade. But for now, the world is probably safe from mirror cells. Adamala said virtually everyone in the small scientific community that was interested in developing such cells has agreed not to as a result of the findings.

The paper prompted nearly 100 scientists and ethicists from around the world to gather in Paris in June to further discuss the risks of creating mirror organisms. Many felt self-regulation is not enough, according to the institution that hosted the event, and researchers are gearing up to meet again in Manchester, England, and Singapore to discuss next steps.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

How do AI tools impact college students? 231 students in an object-oriented programming class participated in a study at Estonia’s University of Tartu (conducted by an associate professor of informatics and a recently graduated master’s student).

They were asked how frequently they used AI tools and for what purposes. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and Spearman’s rank correlation analysis was performed to examine the strength of the relationships. The results showed that students mainly used AI assistance for solving programming tasks — for example, debugging code and understanding examples. A surprising finding, however, was that more frequent use of chatbots correlated with lower academic results. One possible explanation is that struggling students were more likely to turn to AI. Nevertheless, the finding suggests that unguided use of AI and over-reliance on it may in fact hinder learning.
The researchers say their report provides “quantitative evidence that frequent AI use does not necessarily translate into better academic outcomes in programming courses.”
Other results from the survey:

47 respondents (20.3%) never used AI assistants in this course.
Only 3.9% of the students reported using AI assistants weekly, “suggesting that reliance on such tools is still relatively low.”
“Few students feared plagiarism, suggesting students don’t link AI use to it — raising academic concerns.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.