TechCrunch looks at Mechanize, an ambitious new startup “whose founder — and the non-profit AI research organization he founded called Epoch — is being skewered on X…”
Mechanize was launched on Thursday via a post on X by its founder, famed AI researcher Tamay Besiroglu. The startup’s goal, Besiroglu wrote, is “the full automation of all work” and “the full automation of the economy.”
Does that mean Mechanize is working to replace every human worker with an AI agent bot? Essentially, yes. The startup wants to provide the data, evaluations, and digital environments to make worker automation of any job possible. Besiroglu even calculated Mechanize’s total addressable market by aggregating all the wages humans are currently paid. “The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year,” he wrote.
Besiroglu did, however, clarify to TechCrunch that “our immediate focus is indeed on white-collar work” rather than manual labor jobs that would require robotics…
Besiroglu argues to the naysayers that having agents do all the work will actually enrich humans, not impoverish them, through “explosive economic growth.” He points to a paper he published on the topic. “Completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can’t even imagine today,” he told TechCrunch.
TechCrunch wonders how jobless humans will produce goods — and whether wealth will simply concentrate around whoever owns the agents.
But they do concede that Besiroglu may be right that “If each human worker has a personal crew of agents which helps them produce more work, economic abundance could follow…”
“Using electrochemistry, University of Oregon researchers have developed a way to make iron metal for steel production without burning fossil fuels…” the University of Oregon wrote last year. “Decarbonizing this step would do roughly as much to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as converting every gas-guzzling vehicle on the roads to electric… If scaled up, the process could help decarbonize one of the largest and most emissions-intensive industries worldwide,” replacing carbon-spewing industrial blast furnaces.
Paul Kempler, their research assistant chemistry professor, added “The reason we got excited about this chemistry, is that our reactants are two things that are very cheap: saltwater and iron oxide.” And this week he announced that “We actually have a chemical principle, a sort of guiding design rule, that will teach us how to identify low-cost iron oxides that we could use in these reactors.”
“Those reactions conveniently also produce chlorine, a commercially valuable byproduct,” writes SciTechDaily, in a new follow-up report this week:
In their latest study, the researchers focused on improving the process by identifying which types of iron oxides make the reaction more cost-effective, an essential step toward scaling the method for industrial use…. In lab tests, the difference was striking: “With the really porous particles, we can make iron really quickly on a small area,” Goldman said. “The dense particles just can’t achieve the same rate, so we’re limited in how much iron we can make per square meter of electrodes….”
To take their process beyond the lab, Kempler’s lab is working with researchers in other fields. A collaboration with civil engineers at Oregon State University is helping them better understand what’s needed for the product to work in real-world applications. And collaboration with an electrode manufacturing company is helping them address the logistical and scientific challenges of scaling up an electrochemical process. “I think what this work shows is that technology can meet the needs of an industrial society without being environmentally devastating,” Goldman said.
“We haven’t solved all the problems yet, of course, but I think it’s an example that serves as a nucleation point for a different way of thinking about what solutions look like. We can continue to have industry and technology and medicine, and we can do it in a way that’s clean — and that’s awesome!”
“The time has come for me to step away,” ArcoLinux lead Erik Dubois posted last week. (“After eight years of dedication to the ArcoLinux project and the broader Linux community…”)
‘Learn, have fun, and enjoy’ was our motto for the past eight years — and I really had fun doing all this,” Dubois says in a video version of his farewell post. “And if we reflect back on this teaching and the building and promoting of Linux, it was fun. But the time has come for me to step away…”
Over its eight years ArcoLinux “accomplished several important milestones,” reports Linux magazine, “such as creating over 5,000 educational videos; the creation of ArcoInstall; the Carli education project; the Arch Linux Calamares Installer (ALCI); the ArcoPlasma, ArcoNet, ArcroPro, and Ariser variants; and much more.”
According to Dubois, they weren’t just creating a distribution but a mindset.
Dubois says that the code will remain online so others can learn from, fork, or remix the distro. He also indicated that ArcoLinux will supply users with a transition package to help them convert their existing ArcoLinux systems to Arch Linux. That package will remove ArcoLinux branding, replace pacman.conf with an Arch and Chaotic-AUR focused config file, and change the arcolinux-mirrorlist to a single source.
It’s FOSS News describes ArcoLinux as one of those “user-friendly Arch-based distros that give you a bleeding-edge experience.”
The reasoning behind this move, as shared by Erik, is his advancing age and him realizing that he doesn’t have the same level of mental focus or stamina he used to have before. He has found himself making small mistakes, the kind that can negatively affect a major undertaking like this… Come July 1, 2025, the transition period will end, marking a stop to all development, including the deactivation of the ArcoLinux social media handles. The Telegram and Discord communities will stay a bit longer but will close up eventually.
“I want to leave ArcoLinux while it’s still strong, and while I can look back with pride at everything we’ve accomplished together,” Dubois says in their post…
Discover magazine reports that a team of researchers have produced evidence that the ancient building blocks for water have been here on earth “since early in the planet’s history, according to a study published in the journal Icarus.”
Pinpointing when and where Earth’s hydrogen is an essential key to understanding how life arose on the planet. Without hydrogen, there’s no water, and without water, life can’t exist here. Ironically, researchers turned to a meteorite containing hydrogen to prove that such former bodies did not provide the H2 ingredient of water’s H2O recipe. They examined a rare type of meteorite — known as an enstatite chondrite — that was built similarly to early Earth 4.5 billion years ago and the team discovered hydrogen present in the chemical. The logic is that if this material resembling early Earth’s composition can contain hydrogen, so too could the young planet….
Since the proto-Earth was made of material similar to enstatite chondrites, by the time the immature planet had grown large enough to be struck by asteroids, it would have already stashed enough hydrogen to explain Earth’s present-day water supply.Although this study likely won’t resolve the debate over Earth’s original water source, it tilts the ta ble toward an internal, not external one. “We now think that the material that built our planet — which we can study using these rare meteorites — was far richer in hydrogen than we thought previously,” James Bryson, an Oxford professor and an author of the paper, said in a press release. “This finding supports the idea that the formation of water on Earth was a natural process, rather than a fluke of hydrated asteroids bombarding our planet after it formed.”
A new Star Wars movie — starring Ryan Gosling and directed by Shawn Levy — will be released in 2027, the two announced Friday at the “Star Wars Celebration” (a fan event in Japan). CNN reports:
Set to begin production this fall, the movie will be set approximately five years after “Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker,” released in 2019, but will sit outside the Skywalker story as a standalone film. “The film… is an entirely new adventure featuring all-new characters set in a period of time that has not been explored on screen,” said a statement from Lucasfilm, the owner of the “Star Wars” franchise…
“The script is just so good, the story, it has so much adventure, so much heart and original character. It’s an opportunity to shine the light into a side of the universe that we may not have seen,” Gosling said. Levy, the director of “Deadpool & Wolverine,” told the crowd the film would have all the “fun of ‘Star Wars'” but it would be done “in ways that are new and original….”
The next movie in the franchise, “The Mandalorian & Grogu,” a spin-off of “The Mandalorian” series, directed by Jon Favreau, will hit cinemas in May 2026.
USA Today notes that more new Star Wars movies have also been announced:
Daisy Ridley is set to star in a film that will see her character, Rey, building a new Jedi Order after the events of “The Rise of Skywalker.” [This is sometimes referred to as “Star Wars Episode X: New Jedi Order.”]
“Logan” filmmaker James Mangold has also been tapped to direct a movie about the dawn of the Jedi, and [Dave] Filoni is directing one said to “close out the interconnected stories” told in the live-action Disney+ shows like “The Mandalorian.”
The Trump administration is “taking measures to restrict the sale of AI chips by Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Intel,” especially in China, reports the New York Times. But that’s triggered a series of dominoes. “In the two days after the limits became public, shares of Nvidia, the world’s leading AI chipmaker, fell 8.4%. AMD’s shares dropped 7.4%, and Intel’s were down 6.8%.” (AMD expects up to $800 million in charges after the move, according to CNBC, while NVIDIA said it would take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion.)
The Times notes hopeful remarks Thursday from Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, during a meeting with the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade. “We’re going to continue to make significant effort to optimize our products that are compliant within the regulations and continue to serve China’s market.” But America’s chipmakers also have a greater fear, according to the article: “that their retreat could turn the Chinese tech giant Huawei into a global chip-making powerhouse.”
“For the U.S. semiconductor industry, China is gone,” said Handel Jones, a semiconductor consultant at International Business Strategies, which advises electronics companies. He projects that Chinese companies will have a majority share of chips in every major category in China by 2030… Huang’s message spoke to one of his biggest fears. For years, he has worried that Huawei, China’s telecommunications giant, will become a major competitor in AI. He has warned U.S. officials that blocking U.S. companies from competing in China would accelerate Huawei’s rise, said three people familiar with those meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
If Huawei gains ground, Huang and others at Nvidia have painted a dark picture of a future in which China will use the company’s chips to build AI data centers across the world for the Belt and Road Initiative, a strategic effort to increase Beijing’s influence by paying for infrastructure projects around the world, a person familiar with the company’s thinking said…
Nvidia’s previous generation of chips perform about 40% better than Huawei’s best product, said Gregory C. Allen, who has written about Huawei in his role as director of the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But that gap could dwindle if Huawei scoops up the business of its American rivals, Allen said. Nvidia was expected to make more than $16 billion in sales this year from the H20 in China before the restriction. Huawei could use that money to hire more experienced engineers and make higher-quality chips. Allen said the U.S. government’s restrictions also could help Huawei bring on customers like DeepSeek, a leading Chinese AI startup. Working with those companies could help Huawei improve the software it develops to control its chips. Those kinds of tools have been one of Nvidia’s strengths over the years.
TechRepublic identifies this key quote from an earlier article:
“This kills NVIDIA’s access to a key market, and they will lose traction in the country,” Patrick Moorhead, a tech analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, told The New York Times. He added that Chinese companies will buy from local rival Huawei instead.
“Seismologist Deborah Kilb was wading through California earthquake records from the past four decades when she noticed something odd,” reports CNN, “a series of deep earthquakes that had occurred under the Sierra Nevada at a depth where Earth’s crust would typically be too hot and high pressure for seismic activity…”
Kilb flagged the data to Vera Schulte-Pelkum, a research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences and an associate research professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder… Using the newfound data, the researchers imaged the Sierra Nevada through a technique known as receiver function analysis, which uses seismic waves to map Earth’s internal structure. The scientists found that in the central region of the mountain range, Earth’s crust is currently peeling away, a process scientifically known as lithospheric foundering. Kilb and Schulte-Pelkum reported the findings in December in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.
The hypothesis lined up with previous speculation that the area had undergone lithospheric foundering, which happens when Earth’s outermost layer sinks into the lower layer of the mantle. Now, the study authors believe that the process is ongoing and is currently progressing to the north of the mountain range, according to the study… What’s happening under the Sierra Nevada could offer rare insight into how the continents formed, Schulte-Pelkum said. The finding could also help scientists identify more areas where this process is happening as well as provide a better understanding of earthquakes and how our planet operates, she added…
Evidence for this process has been hard to come by. It is not visible from above ground, and it’s an extremely slow process. Scientists theorize that the south Sierra finished the process of lithospheric foundering about 4 million to 3 million years ago, according to the study. It appears that these natural events happen occasionally around the world, Schulte-Pelkum said. “Geologically speaking, this is a pretty quick process with long periods of stability in between. … This (lithosphere foundering) probably started happening a long time ago when we started building continents, and (the continents) have gotten bigger over time. So it’s just sort of this punctuated, localized thing,” she added…
Further study within this area could also help scientists better understand how the Earth evolves on long timescales. If the lithospheric foundering continues underneath the mountain range, one can speculate that the land will continue to stretch vertically, changing the way the landscape looks now [said Mitchell McMillan, a research geologist and postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech, who was not involved with the study]. But that could take anywhere from several hundred thousand to a few million years, he added.
CNN looks at “one field that’s really benefitting” from the use of AI: “the discovery of new medicines”.
The founder/CEO of London-based LabGenius says their automated robotic system can assemble “thousands of different DNA constructs, each of which encodes a completely unique therapeutic molecule that we’ll then test in the lab. This is something that historically would’ve had to have been done by hand.” In short, CNN says, their system lets them “design and conduct experiments, and learn from them in a circular process that creates molecular antibodies at a rate far faster than a human researcher.”
While many cancer treatments have debilitating side effects, CNN notes that LabGenius “reengineers therapeutic molecules so they can selectively target just the diseased cells.”
But more importantly, their founder says they’ve now discovered “completely novel molecules with over 400x improvement in [cell] killing selectivity.”
A senior lecturer at Imperial College London tells CNN that LabGenius seems to have created an efficient process with seamless connections, identifying a series of antibodies that look like they can target cancer cells very selectively “that’s as good as any results I’ve ever seen for this.” (Although the final proof will be what happens when they test them on patients..) “And that’s the next step for Labgenius,” says CNN. “They aim to have their first therapeutics entering clinics in 2027.”
Finally, CNN asks, if it succeeds is their potential beyond cancer treatment? “If you take one step further,” says the company’s CEO/founder, “you could think about knocking out senescent cells or aging cells as a way to treat the underlying cause of aging.”
Beijing held what’s being called the world’s first half-marathon for robots, allowing bipedal bots to compete alongside human runners, and as one might expect, ridiculousness ensued. The robots, which had human operators running with them, for the most part struggled to make it through the course at all, let alone complete the full 13 miles within the four-hour cutoff time. “One fell at the starting line,” Bloomberg reports. “Another’s head fell off and rolled on the ground. And one collapsed and broke into pieces.” They may not be gold medalists just yet, but the videos sure are entertaining.
According to Bloomberg, 21 robots participated in the race, but the winner — X Humanoid’s five-foot-ten Tiangong Ultra — was one of only four to make it all the way to the end in the allotted time. And at two hours and 40 minutes, its finishing time was more than double that of the winning human runners.
The teams were allowed to do battery swaps (Tiangong Ultra reportedly finished on its third battery) and even switch out their robots mid-race for substitutes, though doing that came with time penalties. Along with Tiangong Ultra, which ran at around five miles per hour, the robot runners included Noetix Robotics’ N2, a Gundam-inspired robot, a “female-looking” bot called Huan Huan, and the 30-inch-tall Little Giant robot made by local college students, Bloomberg reports. Many of them were wearing human running shoes.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/a-bunch-of-robots-ran-a-half-marathon-alongside-humans-and-it-was-incredibly-goofy-215134524.html?src=rss
Billions of years ago Mars “had a warm, habitable climate with liquid water in lakes and flowing rivers,” writes Ars Technica.
But “In order for Mars to be warm enough to host liquid water, there must have been a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” says Benjamin Tutolo, a researcher at the University of Calgary. “The question we’ve been asking for at least 30 years was where the record of all this carbon is.”
Tutolo led a new study of rock samples collected by the Curiosity rover that might have answered this question…
Curiosity rover was called Mars Science Laboratory for a reason. It went to the red planet fitted with a suite of instruments, some of which even the newer Perseverance was lacking. These enabled it to analyze the collected Martian rocks on the spot and beam the results back to Earth. “To get the most bang for the buck, NASA decided to send it to the place on Mars called the Gale Crater, because it was the tallest stack of sediments on the planet,” Tutolo says. The central peak of Gale Crater was about 5 kilometers tall, created by the ancient meteorite impact… The idea then was to climb up Mount Sharp and collect samples from later and later geological periods at increasing elevations, tracing the history of habitability and the great drying up of Mars.
On the way, the carbon missed by the satellites was finally found…
It turned out the samples contained roughly between 5 and 10 percent of siderite… The siderite found in the samples was also pure, which Tutolo thinks indicates it has formed through an evaporation process akin to what we see in evaporated lakes on Earth. This, in turn, was the first evidence we’ve found of the ancient Martian carbon cycle. “Now we have evidence that confirms the models,” Tutolo claims. The carbon from the atmosphere was being sequestered in the rocks on Mars just as it is on Earth. The problem was, unlike on Earth, it couldn’t get out of these rocks… A large portion of carbon that got trapped in Martian rocks stayed in those rocks forever, thinning out the atmosphere.
“While it’s likely the red planet had its own carbon cycle, it was an imperfect one that eventually turned it into the lifeless desert it is today,” the article points out.
But the study still doesn’t entirely explain what warmed the atmosphere of Mars — or why Martian habitability “was seemingly intermittent and fluctuating”.
For combining machine learning with astronomy, high school senior Matteo Paz won $250,000 in the Regeneron Science Talent Search, reports Smithsonian magazine:
The young scientist’s tool processed 200 billion data entries from NASA’s now-retired Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope. His model revealed 1.5 million previously unknown potential celestial bodies…. [H]e worked on an A.I. model that sorted through the raw data in search of tiny changes in infrared radiation, which could indicate the presence of variable objects.
Working with a mentor at the Planet Finder Academy at Caltech, Paz eventually flagged 1.5 million potential new objects, accoridng to the article, including supernovas and black holes.
And that mentor says other Caltech researchers are using Paz’s catalog of potential variable objects to study binary star systems.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.
Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 (as the then-COO of Canonical). He currently runs developer relations at MongoDB (after holding similar positions at AWS and Adobe).
This week he contributed an opinion to piece to InfoWorld arguing that DeepSeek “may have originated in China, but it stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face with an accompanying paper detailing its development.”
Soon after, a range of developers, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), scrambled to replicate DeepSeek’s success but this time as open source software. BAAI, for its part, launched OpenSeek, an ambitious effort to take DeepSeek’s open-weight models and create a project that surpasses DeepSeek while uniting “the global open source communities to drive collaborative innovation in algorithms, data, and systems.”
If that sounds cool to you, it didn’t to the U.S. government, which promptly put BAAI on its “baddie” list. Someone needs to remind U.S. (and global) policymakers that no single country, company, or government can contain community-driven open source… DeepSeek didn’t just have a moment. It’s now very much a movement, one that will frustrate all efforts to contain it. DeepSeek, and the open source AI ecosystem surrounding it, has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot of technological brilliance into something much bigger — and much harder to stop. Tens of thousands of developers, from seasoned researchers to passionate hobbyists, are now working on enhancing, tuning, and extending these open source models in ways no centralized entity could manage alone.
For example, it’s perhaps not surprising that Hugging Face is actively attempting to reverse engineer and publicly disseminate DeepSeek’s R1 model. Hugging Face, while important, is just one company, just one platform. But Hugging Face has attracted hundreds of thousands of developers who actively contribute to, adapt, and build on open source models, driving AI innovation at a speed and scale unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs.
Hugging Face by itself could be stopped. But the communities it enables and accelerates cannot. Through the influence of Hugging Face and many others, variants of DeepSeek models are already finding their way into a wide range of applications. Companies like Perplexity are embedding these powerful open source models into consumer-facing services, proving their real-world utility. This democratization of technology ensures that cutting-edge AI capabilities are no longer locked behind the walls of large corporations or elite government labs but are instead openly accessible, adaptable, and improvable by a global community.
“It’s Linux all over again…” Asay writes at one point. “What started as the passion project of a lone developer quickly blossomed into an essential, foundational technology embraced by enterprises worldwide,” winning out “precisely because it captivated developers who embraced its promise and contributed toward its potential.”
We are witnessing a similar phenomenon with DeepSeek and the broader open source AI ecosystem, but this time it’s happening much, much faster…
Organizations that cling to proprietary approaches (looking at you, OpenAI!) or attempt to exert control through restrictive policies (you again, OpenAI!) are not just swimming upstream — they’re attempting to dam an ocean. (Yes, OpenAI has now started to talk up open source, but it’s a long way from releasing a DeepSeek/OpenSeek equivalent on GitHub.)
Like giant bones planted in the earth, clusters of tree trunks, stripped clean of bark, are appearing along the Chesapeake Bay on the United States’ mid-Atlantic coast. They are ghost forests: the haunting remains of what were once stands of cedar and pine. Since the late 19th century, an ever-widening swath of these trees have died along the shore. And they won’t be growing back.
These arboreal graveyards are showing up in places where the land slopes gently into the ocean and where salty water increasingly encroaches. Along the United States’ East Coast, in pockets of the West Coast, and elsewhere, saltier soils have killed hundreds of thousands of acres of trees, leaving behind woody skeletons typically surrounded by marsh.
What happens next? That depends. As these dead forests transition, some will become marshes that maintain vital ecosystem services, such as buffering against storms and storing carbon. Others may become home to invasive plants or support no plant life at all—and the ecosystem services will be lost. Researchers are working to understand how this growing shift toward marshes and ghost forests will, on balance, affect coastal ecosystems.
“Members of the CA/Browser Forum have voted to slash cert lifespans from the current one year to 47 days,” reports Computerworld, “placing an added burden on enterprise IT staff who must ensure they are updated.”
In a move that will likely force IT to much more aggressively use web certificate automation services, the Certification Authority Browser Forum (CA/Browser Forum), a gathering of certificate issuers and suppliers of applications that use certificates, voted [last week] to radically slash the lifespan of the certificates that verify the ownership of sites.
The approved changes, which passed overwhelmingly, will be phased in gradually through March 2029, when the certs will only last 47 days.
This controversial change has been debated extensively for more than a year. The group’s argument is that this will improve web security in various ways, but some have argued that the group’s members have a strong alternative incentive, as they will be the ones earning more money due to this acceleration… Although the group voted overwhelmingly to approve the change, with zero “No” votes, not every member agreed with the decision; five members abstained…
In roughly one year, on March 15, 2026, the “maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 200 days. This accommodates a six-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 200 days,” according to the passed ballot. The next year, on March 15, 2027, the “maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 100 days. This accommodates a three-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 100 days.” And on March 15, 2029, “maximum TLS certificate lifespan shrinks to 47 days. This accommodates a one-month renewal cadence. The DCV reuse period reduces to 10 days.”
The changes “were primarily pushed by Apple,” according to the article, partly to allow more effective reactions to possible changes in cryptography.
And Apple also wrote that the shift “reduces the risk of improper validation, the scope of improper validation perpetuation, and the opportunities for misissued certificates to negatively impact the ecosystem and its relying parties.”
Thanks to Slashdot reader itwbennett for sharing the news.
It’s an interesting time to be a long-running science fantasy media property in the streaming TV age. Star Trek is in the grip of an existential crisis as it (wrongly) fears it’s too old-aged to be relevant. Star Wars became a battlefield in the culture war and, to duck all future bad faith criticism, gave us The Rise of Skywalker. And then there’s Doctor Who, which is somehow managing to plough a 62-year furrow and still fill it with original ideas. Don’t believe me? This week the Doctor and Belinda go up against a sentient cartoon holding the patrons of a 1950s cinema hostage.
James Pardon / BBC Studios / Disney / Bad Wolf
It’s 1952 in a sparsely populated cinema as the audience watches a breathless newsreel on the power of the atomic bomb. The projectionist flips over to a Merrie Melodies-style cartoon of Mr. Ring-A-Ding (voiced by Alan Cumming), an old-timey song-and-dance character. Just then, a beam of moonlight shines through the window, reflecting off a teaspoon and strikes the screen. Mr. Ring-A-Ding comes to life, talking directly to the scoffing audience before emerging into the theater to the sound of screams.
Meanwhile, the Doctor and Belinda are in the TARDIS trying to work out why it’s refusing to land on May 24, 2025. Belinda asks why he doesn’t just take the ship back to his home planet for a fix, but she doesn’t get a satisfactory answer. Instead, the Doctor has built a gadget that will help pull the TARDIS back to the present day, it just needs to land in a few other places first. The pair wind up in Miami in 1952 and while the Doctor initially insists Belinda stay indoors, she’s eager to see what it’s like.
They step out into the night (slash early morning) of 1952 Miami, outside the cinema from the pre-credits, albeit three months after Mr. Ring-A-Ding came to life. Since then, the theater has been locked shut, with the 15 patrons in the audience going missing; the projectionist, Reginald Pye, has stayed behind to act as caretaker, playing films to an empty room.
They visit the diner across the street and meet the mother of one of the missing patrons, Mrs. Lowenstein, who fills in the backstory. They head into the cinema and Mr. Ring-A-Ding makes it clear he’s about to trap them in film before a Mr. Ring-A-Ding short stays playing on the screen. While he’s distracted, the Doctor and Belinda hot-foot it to the projection room where they meet Pye, who has been looking after the cinema patrons, all of whom have been trapped in a strip of film.
Pye has been keeping Mr. Ring-a-Ding alive and appeased by playing movies for him every night. But the sinister cartoon has also given Pye something in return: He has a film of his late wife who Mr. Ring-A-Ding can bring back as a “real” person, at least for a few moments each night. Following on the theme of coercion from last week, the carrot is also a stick, since Mr. Ring-A-Ding also threatens to destroy that film if Pye steps out of line.
Naturally, Mr. Ring-A-Ding isn’t just a beloved old-timey cartoon character but a god, one of the same pantheon as the Toymaker, Maestro and Sutekh. His real identity is Lux Imperator, or Lord of Light, and he’s determined to consume all the light he can, including the most delicious (potential) meal of all — the atom bomb he’s been learning about in the newsreels. To prevent the Doctor and Belinda frustrating his plans, he manages to trap them in a cartoon.
The Doctor and Belinda are turned into two-dimensional drawings, with two-dimensional minds and characterizations. In their panic, they confess their anxieties, including the Doctor’s worries he can’t get Belinda home. As they do so, they acquire physical depth until they return to their normal selves, and then break (okay, knocking over) the fourth wall into… someone’s living room.
The Doctor and Belinda are greeted by a trio of Doctor Who fans watching the episode who are shocked and delighted to meet their heroes. The fans, Hassan Chowdry (Samir Arrian), Lizzie Abel (Bronté Barbé) and Robyn Gossage (Steph Lacey) explain, uh, Doctor Who to the Doctor. The season’s subconscious theme of Steven Moffat envy continues, with the trio saying their favorite episode is “Blink.” Robyn also points out that the end of the episode is pretty obvious given that celluloid is highly explosive. There’s even time for the fans to be called annoying — a facet they (like all “good” Doctor Who fans) will admit to with a heavy dose of self-awareness.
The trio ready to kick the Doctor out as the episode hits the 30-minute mark, which means it’s time for the third act. But they’re also sad, realizing that they’re the fictitious ones, not the Doctor and Belinda, as they don’t have surnames. They know the characters that don’t have surnames are unimportant, incidental figures in the story that will die when the time travelers crawl back through the screen. (Aside: They do in the closing credits, something that Davies’ alluded to in his most recent column for Doctor Who Magazine talking about the realities of giving one-shot characters names for the credits.)
The Doctor and Belinda return to the cinema, where the previously kind Mrs. Lowenstein has hauled a police officer in to arrest the pair for trespassing in a whites-only cinema. The Doctor fairly instantly calls BS, especially since the police officer is wearing a New York-style uniform: They’re still in the film, and when they break out, the Doctor and Belinda meet Lux / Mr. Ring-A-Ding once again. Lux magically summons up long lengths of filmstrips that act like ropes, wrapping them around his wrists and raising him up high. He turns on the projector which draws the Doctor’s regeneration out as light, projected onto Mr. Ring. A Ding.
Belinda, meanwhile, heads off to a storage cupboard, pulls out lots of film and throws it on the floor. But Reginald the projectionist won’t give her the matches she needs to start the fire until, uh, the ghost of his wife, briefly returning as a solid person, hands him the matches. Belinda then blows a hole in the roof of the cinema big enough to expose Mr. Ring-A-Ding to sunlight, which causes him to exponentially grow until he’s not just bigger than the planet but bigger than the universe itself. Or something.
In the daylight of Miami, Belinda asks the Doctor how exactly Lux / Mr. Ring-A-Ding was destroyed. “We’re 60 percent water and we can still drown,” he explains as the formerly trapped patrons of the cinema emerge from their three month imprisonment. The Doctor and Belinda have bonded over their shared worries, and Belinda is a lot more comfortable with her slightly longer route home. As they head into the TARDIS, Mrs. Flood greets the crowd and tells them if they want to see a really exciting sight, they should watch the ship disappear. Sadly, she adds, it’s a “limited run,” which will end on May 24th.
BBC Studios / Disney / Bad Wolf
Eight disconnected thoughts about “Lux.”
Density
Like “The Robot Revolution” before it, “Lux” is packed full of concepts and themes that could easily be the sole subject of a story. This thematic density has always been a part of Doctor Who — a show that has often worn its deep political and literary ambitions on its sleeve — but it can be both a blessing and a curse.
Just think about the sheer number of ideas this one episode is playing with, touching upon:
How time travel as a plot device can be implicated by race.
How media habits and consumption have changed in the last century.
How human nature hasn’t changed in the last century.
How awful it is to be held hostage by your own desire.
What it would be like if a fictional character discovered they were fictional.
That’s a hell of a lot of stuff to get through in 45 minutes, even if you’re not going to explore any of them. Though it may be a thrilling high-wire act Davies is pulling off, the result doesn’t have anything weighty to say. Not that I expect or need every episode to be About Something In A Very Special Way, but these themes aren’t meant to be just window dressing.
Ironically, and to contradict what I just wrote, I found “Lux” to be far more enjoyable than “The Robot Revolution.” Free of the burden of having to introduce Belinda and lay down the shape of this year’s overarching storyline, the episode is able to focus on just being itself. Everything here joins up in a more satisfying way, and the emotional beats, while rushed, at least make sense.
Rhyming history
As soon as Ncuti Gatwa was held aloft by moving filmstrips, I realized how closely the scene mirrored the conclusion of “The Devil’s Chord.” I’m not surprised, given both episodes feature the Doctor fighting a member of the Pantheon’s roster of rogue gods. After all, our heroes turn up in what is ostensibly the past of our living memory (‘60s last year, ‘50s here) to battle a god using pop culture as a vehicle (music then, cinema now). For the filmstrips here, Maestro dragged the Doctor and Ruby around Abbey Road with ribbons of music notation.
Soft Elbows
In the few times Doctor Who has acknowledged its fanbase, it’s with a loving elbow to their ribcages. It helps that the series is so tied to the UK’s cultural DNA that everyone is a fan, even if they’re not a fan. Perhaps more importantly, Davies, Moffat and Chibnall were all prominent fans before they had TV careers. All of us are capable of conceding we are (or can be) bloody annoying at times and insufferably smug at others.
One thing did occur to me: All three times Doctor Who has acknowledged its fanbase — Whizzkid in “Greatest Show”, the members of LINDA in “Love and Monsters” and here — the themes are the same. Doctor Who fans are always kind-hearted, a little bit annoying and they get taken advantage of by a bad faith figure (Captain Cook, Victor Kennedy and Lux). Isn’t that interesting?
Importance
A key trait of Ncuti Gatwa’s Doctor is his compassion, even going so far as to kiss a Roomba to apologize for turning it off. When Hassan, Lizzie and Robyn say they’re “not important” as surname-less side characters, it irked me that the Doctor didn’t push back.
Production
Much like last week’s episode, “Lux” is wonderfully well-made with every quarter of the production team operating at their peak. Mr Ring–A-Ding is a triumph, capturing the rubber hose style of animation from that era utterly perfectly. The 2D version is great, and the 3D edition he tries to evolve into at the conclusion is the right sort of horrifying.
Belinda
After “The Robot Revolution,” plenty of fans online suggested Belinda knew a little more than she was meant to. Specifically, she knew the name of the TARDIS despite the Doctor calling it his spaceship earlier in the episode. At the start of “Lux,” Belinda says the Doctor is a Time Lord so his people should be able to fix the malfunctioning TARDIS.
I can see why fans, trained on mystery box shows, would be intent on mining lines of dialog in this fashion. But I think they’re chasing shadows: Davies has never been that sort of writer and probably isn’t going to start seeding his dialog with hints that subtle now. The way I read it, the Doctor has probably gotten used to giving new friends an (off-screen) introduction of the basics.
You could easily imagine a cut-for-necessity scene where the Doctor rattles off the whole “time lord with their own time and space machine” spiel. And you’d expect them not to race toward the more trauma-dump-y elements of their biography, like being the last of them still alive. Belinda was also surprised to see the TARDIS land in 1950s Miami, even after seeing it in space last week. Given the theme of the episode was Belinda slowly embracing her time with the Doctor it makes more sense.
That said, it’s interesting that Davies’ specifically focused on the surnames of minor characters for his column in this month’s Doctor Who Magazine. Naturally, he was wrapping a tease for a future episode inside an anecdote about having to clear even minor character surnames with the show’s legal department. And when the Doctor meets the fans, Robyn points out she knows how the episode ends because she read the leak about it online. I should admit, too, that I read the fairly detailed leak about this episode that included the reveal of this fourth-wall-destroying scene. I would never suggest Davies is playing four-dimensional chess with the audience, but if the detailed leak of this episode came from the production office as a further tweak of the metafiction then, bravo.
Queer representation
The awning outside the cinema is advertising a Rock Hudson movie, and Belinda comments that she learned about the late actor on a HIV training course. He was one of the first people in the public eye to pass away from AIDS, causing a shift in public attitudes. Before Hudson’s death, the US had refused to sanction additional funds to support research into combatting the disease.
Doctor Who has shied away from directly addressing plenty of social issues during its long run, or even allegorically. Despite the vast number of queer people who were involved in its creation and production, such topics were treated as taboo. That the show can now make such a direct reference to Hudson feels refreshing, especially if it prompts some folks to read up on the issue.
The politics of race
There are better qualified writers who can discuss the issues around race and racism that the episode features. “Lux” is set in 1952, two years before Brown v. Board of Education, in a Miami that is segregated. It’s not the first episode of Doctor Who to deal with this, nor the first of Ncuti Gatwa’s tenure that has intentionally highlighted that the Doctor is played by an actor of color.
I suspect that one moment in particular will provoke discussion: When Belinda is outraged to learn the diner is segregated. The Doctor shuts down her objections, saying that he has toppled worlds, and has sometimes lived in worlds and let them “topple themselves.” For the latter, his approach is to “shut up and shine,” suggesting he sits on the respectability politics-end of the spectrum.
It’s perhaps here that we see the limits of what stories Doctor Who can tell given these events took place in our own recent history. The lead character can topple other worlds in any era, but given we’re all aware of human history, can’t act to rid the world of this injustice. Which affirms the theory that the show is fundamentally conservative in nature since one of the Doctor’s main driving forces is to protect the course of history as it presently is.
Mrs. Flood corner
Now we know Mrs. Flood can appear wherever the TARDIS is, so it’s likely she’ll be popping up in every episode, just like Susan Twist did last year. Here, she simply repeated her ominous threat that the Doctor’s time is running out, which is due to happen on May 24th. May 24th is when this season’s seventh and penultimate episode will air.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/tv-movies/doctor-who-lux-review-hope-can-change-the-world-190033447.html?src=rss
Neurotech startup Precision Neuroscience on Thursday announced that a core component of its brain implant system has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, a major win for the four-year-old company… The company’s brain-computer interface will initially be used to help patients with severe paralysis restore functions such as speech and movement, according to its website.
Only part of Precision’s system was approved by the FDA on Thursday, but it marks the first full regulatory clearance granted to a company developing a wireless BCI, Precision said in a release. Other prominent startups in the space include Elon Musk’s Neuralink, and Synchron, which is backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates….
The piece of Precision’s system that the FDA approved is called the Layer 7 Cortical Interface. The microelectrode array is thinner than a human hair and resembles a piece of yellow scotch tape. Each array is made up of 1,024 electrodes that can record, monitor and stimulate electrical activity on the brain’s surface. When it is placed on the brain, Precision says it can conform to the surface without damaging any tissue. The FDA authorized Layer 7 to be implanted in patients for up to 30 days, and Precision will be able to market the technology for use in clinical settings. This means surgeons will be able to use the array during procedures to map brain signals, for instance. It is not Precision’s end goal for the technology, but it will help the company generate revenue in the near term.
Precision’s co-founder and chief science officer also helped co-found Musk’s Neuralink in 2017 before departing the following year, according to the article. He nows says this regulatory clearance “will exponentially increase our access to diverse, high-quality data, which will help us to build BCI systems that work more effectively.”
The Nintendo Switch 2 comes with 256GB of storage onboard. That’s an 8x improvement over the original Switch, but pardon us if we’re not exactly impressed considering that current-generation games on other platforms basically start at about 60GB. Fortunately, you can expand the storage just as you could on the first machine, but not exactly
A NASA spacecraft will make a close approach to an asteroid in the main belt on Sunday afternoon, in the second of several asteroid flybys planned for its 12-year mission to study remnants of the early solar system. The Lucy spacecraft will be 596 miles (960 km) from asteroid Donaldjohanson — named after the paleoanthropologist who discovered the “Lucy” hominin fossil — at the closest point of its pass, which will occur at 1:51PM ET, according to NASA. Lucy will use three instruments to capture detailed observations as the object gets closer, rotating with the asteroid over a few hours to get the full picture. It will stop tracking just before the asteroid is nearest, when it’ll have to shield its instruments due to the position of the sun to prevent damaging them.
The spacecraft previously visited a small asteroid called Dinkinesh in 2023, and its observations revealed that the asteroid is orbited by what’s known as a contact binary, or a peanut-shaped double moon “made of two smaller objects touching each other,” NASA explained at the time. After Donaldjohanson, Lucy will move on to its main targets, a handful of “Trojan” asteroids orbiting the sun in the same path as Jupiter. It’s expected to reach the first of those objects in 2027.
“Every asteroid has a different story to tell, and these stories weave together to paint the history of our solar system,” Tom Statler, Lucy mission program scientist, said in a press release. “The fact that each new asteroid we visit knocks our socks off means we’re only beginning to understand the depth and richness of that history. Telescopic observations are hinting that Donaldjohanson is going to have an interesting story, and I’m fully expecting to be surprised — again.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/science/space/nasas-lucy-spacecraft-is-about-to-have-its-second-close-encounter-with-an-asteroid-180735995.html?src=rss
In NoSQL database news, Arch Linux “is the latest Linux distribution replacing its Redis packages with the Valkey fork,” reports Phoronix.
Valkey is backed by the Linux Foundation, Google, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle, which the article points out is due to Redis’s decision last year to shift the upstream Redis license from a BSD 3-clause to RSALv2 and SSPLv1.
Valkey is replacing Redis in the Arch Linux extra repository and after a two week period the Redis package will be moved out to AUR and receive no further updates. Users are encouraged to migrate to Valkey as soon as possible.
“Russia is automating the spread of false information to fool AI chatbots,” reports the Washington Post. (When researchers checked 10 chatbots, a third of the responses repeated false pro-Russia messaging.)
The Post argues that this tactic offers “a playbook to other bad actors on how to game AI to push content meant to inflame, influence and obfuscate instead of inform,” and calls it “a fundamental weakness of the AI industry.”
Chatbot answers depend on the data fed into them. A guiding principle is that the more the chatbots read, the more informed their answers will be, which is why the industry is ravenous for content. But mass quantities of well-aimed chaff can skew the answers on specific topics. For Russia, that is the war in Ukraine. But for a politician, it could be an opponent; for a commercial firm, it could be a competitor. “Most chatbots struggle with disinformation,” said Giada Pistilli, principal ethicist at open-source AI platform Hugging Face. “They have basic safeguards against harmful content but can’t reliably spot sophisticated propaganda, [and] the problem gets worse with search-augmented systems that prioritize recent information.”
Early commercial attempts to manipulate chat results also are gathering steam, with some of the same digital marketers who once offered search engine optimization — or SEO — for higher Google rankings now trying to pump up mentions by AI chatbots through “generative engine optimization” — or GEO.
Our current situation “plays into the hands of those with the most means and the most to gain: for now, experts say, that is national governments with expertise in spreading propaganda.”
Russia and, to a lesser extent, China have been exploiting that advantage by flooding the zone with fables. But anyone could do the same, burning up far fewer resources than previous troll farm operations… In a twist that befuddled researchers for a year, almost no human beings visit the sites, which are hard to browse or search. Instead, their content is aimed at crawlers, the software programs that scour the web and bring back content for search engines and large language models. While those AI ventures are trained on a variety of datasets, an increasing number are offering chatbots that search the current web. Those are more likely to pick up something false if it is recent, and even more so if hundreds of pages on the web are saying much the same thing…
The gambit is even more effective because the Russian operation managed to get links to the Pravda network stories edited into Wikipedia pages and public Facebook group postings, probably with the help of human contractors. Many AI companies give special weight to Facebook and especially Wikipedia as accurate sources. (Wikipedia said this month that its bandwidth costs have soared 50 percent in just over a year, mostly because of AI crawlers….) Last month, other researchers set out to see whether the gambit was working. Finnish company Check First scoured Wikipedia and turned up nearly 2,000 hyperlinks on pages in 44 languages that pointed to 162 Pravda websites. It also found that some false information promoted by Pravda showed up in chatbot answers.
“They do even better in such places as China,” the article points out, “where traditional media is more tightly controlled and there are fewer sources for the bots.” (The nonprofit American Sunlight Project calls the process “LLM grooming”.)
The article quotes a top Kremlin propagandist as bragging in January that “we can actually change worldwide AI.”
