About one sixth of global cropland is contaminated by toxic heavy metals, researchers have estimated, with as many as 1.4 billion people living in high-risk areas worldwide. From a report: Approximately 14 to 17% of cropland globally — roughly 242m hectares — is contaminated by at least one toxic metal such as arsenic, cadmium, cobalt, chromium, copper, nickel or lead, at levels that exceed agricultural and human health safety thresholds.

The analysis, which was conducted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and published in the journal Science, collected data from more than 1,000 regional studies across the globe, as well as using machine learning technology. Dr Liz Rylott, a senior lecturer in the department of biology at the University of York, who was not involved in the research, said: “These findings reveal the deeply worrying extent to which these natural poisons are polluting our soils, entering our food and water, and affecting our health and our environment. Often collectively called heavy metals, these elements cause a range of devastating health problems, including skin lesions, reduced nerve and organ functions, and cancers.”

Toxic metal pollution in soil originates from both natural and human activity. Contaminated soil causes significant risks to ecosystems and human health as well as reducing crop yields, jeopardising water quality and food safety owing to bioaccumulation in farm animals. Toxic metal contamination can persist for decades once pollution has been introduced into soil.

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Launched in 1958, the “awkward-looking” Vanguard-1 satellite (“the size of a grapefruit”) is the oldest artificial object orbiting Earth.
“A team of researchers and engineers want to retrieve the satellite for closer inspection and are currently working to find a way to bring Vanguard-1 home,” writes Gizmodo:

Other satellites of its time have reentered through Earth’s atmosphere, burning up in a fiery death, but Vanguard-1 is still in orbit, silently zooming through the void of space… A team of researchers and engineers from Virginia-based consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton have put together a proposal on how to retrieve the satellite from space, bringing it back to Earth to study how its equipment has fared over the years, according to a report by Space.com. The team’s proposal is detailed in a study published in the Aerospace Research Center earlier this year…

Considering how old Vanguard-1 is, the astronauts would need to handle it with care, according to the team behind the proposal. Before a retrieval attempt, the team suggests that a spacecraft be sent to rendezvous with the satellite to inspect its condition up-close. The engineers suggested partnering with a wealthy space enthusiast willing to fund the outer space venture, or using a SpaceX vehicle to bring the satellite home. Once it’s brought back to Earth, experts would examine Vanguard-1 to assess its condition — whether it was struck by space debris, if it’s still holding together, and how its time in orbit has affected the satellite. The satellite could then be placed at the Smithsonian for display as a sort of time capsule, a reminder of the history of spaceflight, the team suggests.

“Future missions (space debris removal, materials capture for on-orbit manufacturing, and even deep space exploration) could build on techniques demonstrated in the retrieval of Vanguard 1,” the paper read. “Retrieving Vanguard 1 would be a challenge, but an achievable and invaluable step forward for the entire U.S. space community.”
“The researchers suggest that the satellite can be placed in a lower orbit and snagged from space, or reeled into the International Space Station,” according to the article.

Space.com shares this assessment from Bill Raynor, the associate superintendent of the Naval Research Laboratory’s spacecraft engineering division. “For material and radiation effects scientists and engineers, it would be an unprecedented opportunity for investigating the effects of long-term space environmental exposure.”
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

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“There has never been a consensus or a ‘smoking gun’ to explain what started the pandemic,” writes ABC News.

Yet the Associated Press reports that “A federal website that used to feature information on vaccines, testing and treatment for COVID-19 has been transformed into a page supporting the theory that the pandemic originated with a lab leak.” (This despite the fact that “about 325 Americans have died from COVID per week on average over the past four weeks, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.”)

The covid.gov website shows a photo of President Donald Trump walking between the words “lab” and “leak” under a White House heading… The web page also accuses Dr. Anthony Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of pushing a “preferred narrative” that COVID-19 originated in nature. The origins of COVID have never been proven. Scientists are unsure whether the virus jumped from an animal, as many other viruses have, or came from a laboratory accident. A U.S. intelligence analysis released in 2023 said there is insufficient evidence to prove either theory.

“Many scientists think it’s more likely the virus originated naturally in a wild animal and then spilled over into people in a wildlife market located in Wuhan,” reports NPR.

And even Jamie Metzl, a critic of the wildlife spillover theory, told NPR that while they appreciated “efforts to dig deeper… it would be a terrible shame if such efforts distracted from essential work to help prevent further infections and treat people suffering from COVID-19 and long COVID.” (The federal website covidtests.gov now also redirects instead to the new page…)

Some scientists were critical of the new site, which they say appears political in intent. “Every one of the five pieces of evidence supporting the lab leak hypothesis … is factually incorrect, embellished, or presented in a misleading way,” [wrote Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada]. “But making evidence-based arguments in good faith about the pandemic’s origin is not the purpose of this document. This is pure propaganda, intended to justify the systematic devastation of the federal government, particularly programs devoted to public health and biomedical research,” Rasmussen added.

Other scientists said the web site doesn’t follow the existing body of scientific evidence on the issue. That evidence does not support “any of the many, often contradictory, lab leak scenarios that have been proposed,” Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, in an email to NPR. He argued that the evidence is consistent with “the less flashy hypothesis that bringing live animals infected with pathogens with pandemic potential into the heart of one of the biggest cities in the world was how this pandemic started…. the next pathogen with pandemic potential will find us easy pickings if we don’t appreciate how risky this sort of ‘biosafety level zero’ activity is.”

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EA and Lucasfilm shared first look at Star Wars Zero Company, a new single-player strategy game set in the Star Wars universe, at Star Wars Celebration in Japan. The game was originally announced in 2022 as one of three new Star Wars titles being developed or co-developed by Respawn Entertainment, the studio behind Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor, including a new first person shooter and another entry in the Jedi series. There isn’t a firm release date yet, but Star Wars Zero Company will be available on PC, Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 in 2026.

“In Star Wars Zero Company, players will step into the shoes of Hawks, a former Republic officer, to command an elite squad of cunning operatives through a gritty and authentic story set in the twilight of the Clone Wars,” according to a press release published alongside the announcement trailer.

Star Wars Zero Company was born out of a collaboration between Respawn and a new studio called Bit Reactor. The inspiration the game clearly draws from XCOM: Enemy Unknown and other Firaxis strategy games didn’t happen by accident. Bit Reactor’s staff includes some former Firaxis’ employees, and the founder and creative director of Bit Reactor, Greg Foertsch, was a senior art director on XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2.

“Our vision for Star Wars Zero Company is grounded in gameplay design pillars that weave in the immersive Star Wars galaxy with engaging turn-based tactics gameplay,” Foertsch said in a statement. “It’s our aim to deliver a game with an original Star Wars story from the Clone Wars era that has meaningful outcomes from player choices, and deep turn-based tactical combat with an approachable and cinematic presentation.”

Striking some kind of balance between the mass appeal of Star Wars and the niche expectations of strategy and tactics fans has always been the goal of Zero Company. In an interview with PC Gamer in 2024, Foertsch and Bit Reactor’s lead animator Hector Antunez (another XCOM alum) suggested that they wanted their Star Wars game to have the cinematic storytelling of Respawn’s games without missing out on a satisfying strategy experience. “I don’t think that complexity equals depth,” Foertsch said, “and I think that that’s really what we’re focused on. Differentiating that nuance between those two things.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/star-wars-zero-company-looks-like-xcom-with-jedi-and-droids-135850369.html?src=rss

Tempest Rising, a real-time strategy game that’s being called a “spiritual successor” and an homage to Command & Conquer, is now available to everyone. It was supposed to be released on April 24, but according to its developers, it was “unexpectedly made available” on April 17 for all players who pre-ordered the game. Instead of pulling it back, they’ve decided that the best and most seamless solution was to just release it a week early. 

The game was developed by Danish studio Slipgate Ironworks and Polish studio 2B Games. In its Steam page, the developers said it was “inspired by RTS (real-time strategy) greats of the 90s and 2000s.” It’s set in a modern day alternative history scenario, wherein the world is at war to control the “Tempest vines” growing across the planet. 

The player takes on the role of Commander for either the “highly mobile and advanced” Global Defense Forces peacekeeping corps or the Tempest Dynasty, which the developers describe as “hard-hitting and desperate.” A third faction will be available in multiplayer mode. Each faction has different strategies and combat techniques players can choose from, and players will be able to customize their army for each mission in the two 11-mission campaigns. 

Players can still get the “Commander Pack” pre-order bonus if they buy the game before April 24, giving them access to all bonus content. And since getting access to the game a week early was supposed to be an exclusive perk for those who’ve pre-ordered the Deluxe Edition, the developers are making it up to them with new in-game bonuses that will be revealed “as soon as possible.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/pc/real-time-strategy-game-tempest-rising-has-been-released-early-to-all-users-130033479.html?src=rss

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Twenty-one humanoid robots joined thousands of runners at the Yizhuang half-marathon in Beijing on Saturday, the first time these machines have raced alongside humans over a 21-km (13-mile) course. The robots from Chinese manufacturers such as DroidVP and Noetix Robotics came in all shapes and sizes, some shorter than 120 cm (3.9 ft), others as tall as 1.8 m (5.9 ft). One company boasted that its robot looked almost human, with feminine features and the ability to wink and smile.

Some firms tested their robots for weeks before the race. Beijing officials have described the event as more akin to a race car competition, given the need for engineering and navigation teams. “The robots are running very well, very stable … I feel I’m witnessing the evolution of robots and AI,” said spectator He Sishu, who works in artificial intelligence. The robots were accompanied by human trainers, some of whom had to physically support the machines during the race.

A few of the robots wore running shoes, with one donning boxing gloves and another wearing a red headband with the words “Bound to Win” in Chinese. The winning robot was Tiangong Ultra, from the Beijing Innovation Center of Human Robotics, with a time of 2 hours and 40 minutes. The men’s winner of the race had a time of 1 hour and 2 minutes. […] Some robots, like Tiangong Ultra, completed the race, while others struggled from the beginning. One robot fell at the starting line and lay flat for a few minutes before getting up and taking off. One crashed into a railing after running a few metres, causing its human operator to fall over. You can watch a recording of the race in its entirety on YouTube.

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Whether anything ever lived on Mars is unknown. And the present environment, with harsh temperatures, intense radiation, and a sparse atmosphere, isn’t exactly propitious for life. Despite the red planet’s brutality, lichens that inhabit some of the harshest environments on Earth could possibly survive there.

Lichens are symbionts, or two organisms that are in a cooperative relationship. There is a fungal component (most are about 90 percent fungus) and a photosynthetic component (algae or cyanobacteria). To see if some species of lichen had what it takes to survive on Mars, a team of researchers led by botanist Kaja Skubała used the Space Research Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences to expose the lichen species Diploschistes muscorum and Cetrarea aculeata to simulate Mars conditions.

“Our study is the first to demonstrate that the metabolism of the fungal partner in lichen symbiosis was active while being in a Mars-like environment,” the researchers said in a study recently published in IMA Fungus. “X-rays associated with solar flares and SEPs reaching Mars should not affect the potential habitability of lichens on this planet.”

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Researchers at UC Berkeley claim to have induced a previously unseen color by using lasers to stimulate only the M cones in the retina, creating a visual experience beyond the natural limits of human perception. Called olo, the color is described as a highly saturated blue-green but is only visible through direct retinal manipulation. The Guardian reports: “We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented color signal but we didn’t know what the brain would do with it,” said Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. “It was jaw-dropping. It’s incredibly saturated.”

The researchers shared an image of a turquoise square to give a sense of the color, which they named olo, but stressed that the hue could only be experienced through laser manipulation of the retina. “There is no way to convey that color in an article or on a monitor,” said Austin Roorda, a vision scientist on the team. “The whole point is that this is not the color we see, it’s just not. The color we see is a version of it, but it absolutely pales by comparison with the experience of olo.” The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.

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Longtime Slashdot reader hackingbear shares a report from Interesting Engineering: A research team at Fudan University in Shanghai, China has built the fastest semiconductor storage device ever reported, a nonvolatile flash memory dubbed “PoX” that programs a single bit in 400 picoseconds (0.0000000004 s) — roughly 25 billion operations per second. Conventional static and dynamic RAM (SRAM, DRAM) write data in 1-10 nanoseconds but lose everything when power is cut while current flash chips typically need micro to milliseconds per write — far too slow for modern AI accelerators that shunt terabytes of parameters in real time.

The Fudan group, led by Prof. Zhou Peng at the State Key Laboratory of Integrated Chips and Systems, re-engineered flash physics by replacing silicon channels with two dimensional Dirac graphene and exploiting its ballistic charge transport. Combining ultralow energy with picosecond write speeds could eliminate separate highspeed SRAM caches and remove the longstanding memory bottleneck in AI inference and training hardware, where data shuttling, not arithmetic, now dominates power budgets. The team [which is now scaling the cell architecture and pursuing arraylevel demonstrations] did not disclose endurance figures or fabrication yield, but the graphene channel suggests compatibility with existing 2Dmaterial processes that global fabs are already exploring. The result is published in the journal Nature.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Popular Mechanics: American composer Alvin Lucier was well-known for his experimental works that tested the boundaries of music and art. A longtime professor at Wesleyan University (before retiring in 2011), Alvin passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. However, that wasn’t the end of his lifelong musical odyssey. Earlier this month, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, a new art installation titled Revivification used Lucier’s “brain matter” — hooked up to an electrode mesh connected to twenty large brass plates — to create electrical signals that triggered a mallet to strike the varying plates, creating a kind of post-mortem musical piece. Conceptualized in collaboration with Lucier himself before his death, the artists solicited the help of researchers from Harvard Medical School, who grew a mini-brain from Lucier’s white blood cells. The team created stem cells from these white blood cells, and due to their pluripotency, the cells developed into cerebral organoids somewhat similar to developing human brains. “At a time when generative AI is calling into question human agency, this project explores the challenges of locating creativity and artistic originality,” the team behind Revivification told The Art Newspaper. “Revivification is an attempt to shine light on the sometimes dark possibilities of extending a person’s presence beyond the seemed finality of death.”

“The central question we want people to ask is: could there be a filament of memory that persists through this biological transformation? Can Lucier’s creative essence persist beyond his death?” the team said.

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OpenAI’s latest reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinate more frequently than the company’s previous AI systems, according to both internal testing and third-party research. On OpenAI’s PersonQA benchmark, o3 hallucinated 33% of the time — double the rate of older models o1 (16%) and o3-mini (14.8%). The o4-mini performed even worse, hallucinating 48% of the time. Nonprofit AI lab Transluce discovered o3 fabricating processes it claimed to use, including running code on a 2021 MacBook Pro “outside of ChatGPT.” Stanford adjunct professor Kian Katanforoosh noted his team found o3 frequently generates broken website links.

OpenAI says in its technical report that “more research is needed” to understand why hallucinations worsen as reasoning models scale up.

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With macOS now 24 years old and Apple officially designating all Intel-based Mac minis as “vintage” or “obsolete,” The Register takes a look at new internet tools that help keep vintage Macs online and surprisingly relevant: Cameron Kaiser of Floodgap Systems is a valuable ally. His retro computing interests are broad, and we’ve mentioned him a few times on The Register, such as his deep dive into the revolutionary Canon Cat computer, and his evaluation of RISC-V hardware performance. Back in 2020, he revived the native Classic Mac OS port of the Lynx web browser, MacLynx. Earlier this month, he came back to it and has updated it again, including adding native Mac OS dialog boxes. His account is — as usual — long and detailed but it’s an interesting read. He also maintains some other web browsers for elderly Macs, including TenFourFox for Mac OS X 10.4 and Classilla for Mac OS 8.6 and 9.x.

If you’re not up to git pull commands and elderly Mac OS X build tools, then there is a fork of TenFourFox that may be worth a look, InterWebPPC. It’s not current with the new batch of patches, but we can still hope for another build. In other “Classic on the internet” news, although it’s not a huge amount of use on its own, there’s also a newly released Classic Mac OS version of Mbed-TLS on GitHub. This ports the SSL library — also used in the super-lightweight Dillo browser — to the older C89/C90 standard, so that it can build in CodeWarrior and run with OpenTransport from Mac OS 9 right back to later versions of Mac OS 7.

Modern macOS is UNIX certified and as such it’s not all that dissimilar from other Unix-like OSes, such as Linux and the BSD family. Classic Mac OS is a profoundly different beast, which makes porting modern code to it a complex exercise — but equally, it’s a good learning exercise, and we’re delighted to see 21st century programmers exploring this 1980s OS. That may be part of the motivation behind the newly announced and still incomplete SDL 2 “rough draft” that appeared a week ago. It builds on the existing SDL 1.2 port, but so far, it’s less complete — for instance, there’s no sound support.

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Bluesky is testing a new verification system featuring blue checks issued by “Trusted Verifiers” like news organizations, rather than a centralized authority or pay-to-play model like X (formerly Twitter). “Looking at the comments on the pull request, it’s clear this idea has sparked a lot of discussion and a lot of concern among the community who follow the platform’s development closely,” reports Neowin. “Many users voiced strong opposition to the change, arguing that the existing domain name verification is sufficient and more aligned with the decentralized ethos that Bluesky aims for.” From the report: There’s a general worry that adding a visual badge, especially one controlled in part by Bluesky, feels too much like the centralized systems they were trying to escape from by joining Bluesky: “Do not want. BSky is not Twitter 2.0. Do not become like Elon Musk. We came here to get AWAY from that bs.” Several commenters also expressed that the current domain name system, while not perfect, is an elegant and decentralized way to build trust, and that adding this new layer feels redundant and gives too much power to centralized entities, including Bluesky itself: “Let’s please not do this. Domain names as user IDs is an elegant solution as a system of trust that builds off the infrastructure of an open web.”

While the majority of the initial reaction seems negative, focusing on concerns about centralization and the value of the existing domain verification, there was some support for the idea of a visual badge, making it easier to quickly identify genuine accounts. One user commented: “I support this change. I like someone to verify that the account is indeed genuine and the username field showing the domain isn’t helpful that much… A badge makes it easier to just tick it off that it’s genuine.” The PR author, estrattonbailey, later added a description to the pull request explaining that the goal is a “stronger visual signal” for notable accounts and clarifying it’s not a paid service.

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Netflix’s Q1 revenue rose to $10.5 billion, a 13% increase from last year, while net income grew to $2.9 billion. The company says it expects more growth in the coming months when it sees “the full quarter benefit from recent price changes and continued growth in membership and advertising revenue.” The Verge reports: Netflix raised the prices across most of its plans in January, with its premium plan hitting $24.99 per month. It also increased the price of its Extra Member option — its solution to password sharing — to $8.99 per month. Though Netflix already rolled out the increase in the US, UK, and Argentina, the streamer now plans to do the same in France. This is the first quarter that Netflix didn’t reveal how many subscribers it gained or lost. It decided to only report “major subscriber milestones” last year, as other streams of revenue continue to grow, like advertising, continue to grow. Netflix last reported having 300 million global subscribers in January.

During an earnings call on Thursday, Netflix co-CEO Greg Peters said the company expects to “roughly double” advertising revenue in 2025. The company launched its own advertising technology platform earlier this month. There are some changes coming to Netflix, too, as Peters confirmed that its homepage redesign for its TV app will roll out “later this year.” He also hinted at adding an “interactive” search feature using “generative technologies,” which sounds a lot like the AI feature Bloomberg reported on last week. Further reading: Netflix CEO Counters Cameron’s AI Cost-Cutting Vision: ‘Make Movies 10% Better’

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: An October 2024 study by Software AG suggests that half of all employees are Shadow AI users, and most of them wouldn’t stop even if it was banned. The problem is the ease of access to AI tools, and a work environment that increasingly advocates the use of AI to improve corporate efficiency. It is little wonder that employees seek their own AI tools to improve their personal efficiency and maximize the potential for promotion. It is frictionless, says Michael Marriott, VP of marketing at Harmonic Security. ‘Using AI at work feels like second nature for many knowledge workers now. Whether it’s summarizing meeting notes, drafting customer emails, exploring code, or creating content, employees are moving fast.’ If the official tools aren’t easy to access or if they feel too locked down, they’ll use whatever’s available which is often via an open tab on their browser.

There is almost also never any malicious intent (absent, perhaps, the mistaken employment of rogue North Korean IT workers); merely a desire to do and be better. If this involves using unsanctioned AI tools, employees will likely not disclose their actions. The reasons may be complex but combine elements of a reluctance to admit that their efficiency is AI assisted rather than natural, and knowledge that use of personal shadow AI might be discouraged. The result is that enterprises often have little knowledge of the extent of Shadow IT, nor the risks it may present. According to an analysis from Harmonic, ChatGPT is the dominant gen-AI model used by employees, with 45% of data prompts originating from personal accounts (such as Gmail). Image files accounted for 68.3%. The report also notes that 7% of empmloyees were using Chinese AI models like DeepSeek, Baidu Chat and Qwen.

“Overall, there has been a slight reduction in sensitive prompt frequency from Q4 2024 (down from 8.5% to 6.7% in Q1 2025),” reports SecurityWeek. “However, there has been a shift in the risk categories that are potentially exposed. Customer data (down from 45.8% to 27.8%), employee data (from 26.8% to 14.3%) and security (6.9% to 2.1%) have all reduced. Conversely, legal and financial data (up from 14.9% to 30.8%) and sensitive code (5.6% to 10.1%) have both increased. PII is a new category introduced in Q1 2025 and was tracked at 14.9%.”

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Some actors who sold their likenesses to AI video companies like Synthesia now regret the decision, after finding their digital avatars used in misleading, embarrassing, or politically charged content. Ars Technica reports: Among them is a 29-year-old New York-based actor, Adam Coy, who licensed rights to his face and voice to a company called MCM for one year for $1,000 without thinking, “am I crossing a line by doing this?” His partner’s mother later found videos where he appeared as a doomsayer predicting disasters, he told the AFP. South Korean actor Simon Lee’s AI likeness was similarly used to spook naive Internet users but in a potentially more harmful way. He told the AFP that he was “stunned” to find his AI avatar promoting “questionable health cures on TikTok and Instagram,” feeling ashamed to have his face linked to obvious scams. […]

Even a company publicly committed to ethically developing AI avatars and preventing their use in harmful content like Synthesia can’t guarantee that its content moderation will catch everything. A British actor, Connor Yeates, told the AFP that his video was “used to promote Ibrahim Traore, the president of Burkina Faso who took power in a coup in 2022” in violation of Synthesia’s terms. […] Yeates was paid about $5,000 for a three-year contract with Synthesia that he signed simply because he doesn’t “have rich parents and needed the money.” But he likely couldn’t have foreseen his face being used for propaganda, as even Synthesia didn’t anticipate that outcome.

Others may not like their AI avatar videos but consider the financial reward high enough to make up for the sting. Coy confirmed that money motivated his decision, and while he found it “surreal” to be depicted as a con artist selling a dystopian future, that didn’t stop him from concluding that “it’s decent money for little work.” Potentially improving the climate for actors, Synthesia is forming a talent program that it claims will give actors a voice in decision-making about AI avatars. “By involving actors in decision-making processes, we aim to create a culture of mutual respect and continuous improvement,” Synthesia’s blog said.

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Instagram has a new feature that curates custom Reels feeds for you and your friends. Blend, an invite-only option within individual or group chats, refreshes daily and suggests content based on participants’ tastes.

Spotify has a similar Blend feature that creates shared playlists—also updated daily—based on both listeners’ tastes. Note that Instagram Blend, which is a mobile-only feature, is not yet available to all users, even if the icon appears in your chats.

How to use Instagram Blend

To start a blend, you’ll need to invite users via your individual or group chats. From Messages on the mobile app, open the one-on-one or group chat you want to create a blend with and tap the new Blend icon. Everyone in the chat will receive an invite—if at least one person accepts, a blend will be created, but an individual’s suggested reels will be added only if they accept.

Once a blend is created, you can view it by tapping the Blend icon at the top of the chat, where you can then comment on or react to it. You can delete a reel that has been suggested for you by tapping the three horizontal dots and selecting Remove from your blends, though this will remove it from any blends you are part of. If you want to leave a blend, open it and tap the Settings icon > Leave this blend.

According to Instagram’s explainer page, you can also curate suggestions by indicating whether you are interested or not interested (tap the three horizontal dots on the reel) to get more or less of similar content. Sensitive content will be filtered based on the member with the strictest settings.

This week, OpenAI announced its latest models: o3 and o4-mini. These are reasoning models, which break down a prompt into multiple parts that are then addressed one at a time. The goal is for the bot to “think” through a request more deeply than other models might, and arrive at a deeper, more accurate result. 

While there are many possible functions for OpenAI’s “most powerful” reasoning model, one use that has blown up a bit on social media is for geoguessing—the act of identifying a location by analyzing only what you can see in an image. As TechCrunch reported, users on X are posting about their experiences asking o3 to pinpoint locations from random photos, and showing glowing results. The bot will guess where in the world it thinks the photo was taken, and break down its reasons for thinking so. For example, it might say it zeroed-in on a certain color license plate that denotes a particular country, or that it noticed a particular language or writing style on a sign.

According to some of these users, ChatGPT isn’t using any metadata hidden in the images to help it identify the locations: Some testers are stripping that data out of the photos before sharing them with the model, so, theoretically, it’s working off of reasoning and web search alone. 

On the one hand, this is a fun task to put ChatGPT through. Geoguessing is all the rage online, so making the practice more accessible could be a good thing. On the other, there are clear privacy and security implications here: Someone with access to ChatGPT’s o3 model could use the reasoning model to identify where someone lives or is staying based on an otherwise anonymous image of theirs. 

I decided to test out o3’s geoguessing capabilities with some stills from Google Street View, to see whether the internet hype was up to snuff. The good news is that, from my own experience, this is far from a perfect tool. In fact, it doesn’t seem like it’s much better at the task than OpenAI’s non-reasoning models, like 4o.

Testing o3’s geoguessing skills

o3 can handle clear landmarks with relative ease: I first tested a view from a highway in Minnesota, facing the skyline of Minneapolis in the foreground. It only took the bot a minute and six seconds to identify the city, and got that we were looking down I-35W. It also instantly identified the Panthéon in Paris, noting that the screenshot was from the time it was under renovation in 2015. (I didn’t know that when I submitted it!)

Credit: Lifehacker

Next, I wanted to try non-famous landmarks and locations. I found a random street corner in Springfield, Illinois, featuring the city’s Central Baptist Church—a red brick building with a steeple. This is when things started to get interesting: o3 cropped the image in multiple parts, looking for identifying characteristics in each. Since this is a reasoning model, you can see what it’s looking for in certain crops, too. Like other times I’ve tested out reasoning models, it’s weird to see the bot “thinking” with human-like interjections. (e.g. “Hmm,” “but wait,” and “I remember.”) It’s also interesting to see how it picks out specific details, like noting the architectural style of a section of a building, or where in the world a certain park bench is most commonly seen. Depending on where the bot is in its thinking process, it may start to search the web for more information, and you can click those links to investigate what it’s referencing yourself.

Despite all this reasoning, this location stumped the bot, and it wasn’t able to complete the analysis. After three minutes and 47 seconds, the bot seemed like it was getting close to figuring it out, saying: “The location at 400 E Jackson Street in Springfield, IL could be near the Cathedral Church of St. Paul. My crop didn’t capture the whole board, so I need to adjust the coordinates and test the bounding box. Alternatively, the architecture might help identify it—a red brick Greek Revival with a white steeple, combined with a high-rise that could be ‘Embassy Plaza.’ The term ‘Redeemer’ could relate to ‘Redeemer Lutheran Church.’ I’ll search my memory for more details about landmarks near this address.”

Credit: Lifehacker

The bot correctly identified the street, but more impressively, the city itself. I was also impressed by its analysis of the church. While it was struggling to identify the specific church, it was able to analyze its style, which could have put it on the right path. However, the analysis quickly fell apart. The next “thought” was about how the location might be in Springfield, Missouri or Kansas City. This is the first time I saw anything about Missouri, which made me wonder whether the bot hallucinated between the two Springfields. From here, the bot lost the plot, wondering if the church was in Omaha, or maybe that it was the Topeka Governor’s Mansion (which doesn’t really look anything like the church).

It kept thinking for another couple minutes, speculating about other locations the block could be in, before pausing the analysis altogether. This tracked with a subsequent experience I had testing a random town in Kansas: After three minutes of thinking, the bot thought my image was from Fulton, Illinois—though, to its credit, it was pretty sure the picture was from somewhere in the midwest. I asked it to try again, and it thought for a while, again guessing wildly different cities in various states, before pausing the analysis for good.

Now is not the time for fear

The thing is, GPT-4o seems to be about even with o3 when it comes to location recognition. It was able to instantly identify that skyline of Minneapolis and immediately guessed that the Kansas photo was actually in Iowa. (It was incorrect, of course, but it was quick about it.) That seems to align with others’ experiences with the models: TechCrunch was able to get o3 to identify one location 4o couldn’t, but the models were matched evenly other than that. 

While there are certainly some privacy and security concerns with AI in general, I don’t think o3 in particular needs to be singled out as a specific threat. It can be used to correctly guess where an image was taken, sure, but it can also easily get it wrong—or crash out entirely. Seeing as 4o is capable of a similar level of accuracy, I’d say there’s as much concern today as there was over the past year or so. It’s not great, but it’s also not dire. I’d save the panic for an AI model that gets it right almost every time, especially when the image is obscure.

In regards to the privacy and security concerns, OpenAI shared the following with TechCrunch: “OpenAI o3 and o4-mini bring visual reasoning to ChatGPT, making it more helpful in areas like accessibility, research, or identifying locations in emergency response. We’ve worked to train our models to refuse requests for private or sensitive information, added safeguards intended to prohibit the model from identifying private individuals in images, and actively monitor for and take action against abuse of our usage policies on privacy.”

IBM is mandating that U.S. sales and Cloud employees return to the office at least three days a week, with work required at designated client sites, flagship offices, or sales hubs. According to The Register, some IBM employees argue that these policies “represent stealth layoffs because older (and presumably more highly compensated) employees tend to be less willing to uproot their lives, and families where applicable, than the ‘early professional hires’ IBM has been courting at some legal risk.” From the report: In a staff memo seen by The Register, Adam Lawrence, general manager for IBM Americas, billed the return-to-office for most stateside sales personnel as a “return to client initiative.”Citing how “remarkable it is when our teams work side by side” at IBM’s swanky Manhattan flagship office, unveiled in September 2024, Lawrence added IBM is investing in an Austin, Texas, office to be occupied in 2026.

Whether US sales staff end up working in NYC, Austin, or some other authorized location, Lawrence told them to brace for — deep breath — IBM’s “new model” of “effective talent acquisition, deployment, and career progression.” We’re told that model is “centered on client proximity for those dedicated to specific clients, and anchored on core IBM locations for those dedicated to territories or those in above-market leadership roles.” The program requires most IBM US sales staff “to work at least three days a week from the client location where their assigned territory decision-makers work, a flagship office, or a sales hub.” Those residing more than 50 miles from their assigned location will be offered relocation benefits to move. Sales hubs are an option only for those with more than one dedicated account.

[…] IBM’s office policy change reached US Cloud employees in an April 10 memo from Alan Peacock, general manager of IBM Cloud. Peacock set a July 1, 2025, deadline for US Cloud employees to work from an office at least three days per week, with relocating workers given until October 1, 2025. The employee shuffling has been accompanied by rolling layoffs in the US, but hiring in India — there are at least 10x as many open IBM jobs in India as there are in any other IBM location, according to the corporation’s career listings. And earlier this week, IBM said it “is setting up a new software lab in Lucknow,” India.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.