Futurism (RSS)

Aquatic Omens
Beware the three horsemen of the ocean apocalypse: extreme heat, acidification, and deoxygenation. New research, , has shown how this "triple threat" has drastically intensified over the past several decades, pushing our oceans ever closer to the brink in what is yet another clear consequence of climate change.

Though nothing's set in stone, the findings exhibit eerie parallels to the precursors of previous mass extinctions.

"If you look at the fossil record you can see there was this same pattern at the end of the Permian, where two-thirds of marine genera became extinct," Andrea Dutton, a climate scientist at the University of Wisconisin-Madison who was not involved in the study, ...

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Five Bars
A remote tribe in the Amazon rainforest is getting to experience the wonders of the internet for the first time, thanks to Elon Musk's satellite network . But, by connecting to the rest of the world, it sounds like the Marubo people are beginning to pick up some of our modern bad habits.

The New York Times may sound a bit familiar: young people poring over social media feeds, streaming soccer games, and of course, gossiping over WhatsApp. Evenings are spent lounging around on their phones and playing first-person shooters and other video games.

"When it arrived, everyone was happy," said Tsainama Marubo, 73. "But now, things have gotten worse."

Some of the...

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Rest in Space
Jeremiah Corner was a lifelong fan of "Star Trek."

In 2022, he succumbed to an aggressive autoimmune disease, leaving his wife Uli to decide what to do with his cremated remains, as .

After doing some research, Corner found the perfect solution after discovering space burial company Celestis.

"Space?! I can shoot him into space?" Corner recalled in an interview with KOMO News.

Fitting End
Having your loved one's cremated remains launched into near-space doesn't come cheap, costing anywhere from $3,500 to $13,000 in the case of a deep sp...

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Priorities
Generative AI still poses  to the digital media industry and many of its . But should AI win out as the journalism industry's future guiding force, there might be one incredible silver lining: fringe right-wing outlets getting left in the dust.

As , a growing number of high-profile publishers — a list including , ...

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Exec Execution
CEOs better start endearing themselves to their employees real quick, because oh boy: the case for replacing them with AI .

"Some people like the social aspects of having a human boss," Phoebe Moore, professor of management and the futures of work at the University of Essex Business School, . "But after COVID, many are also fine with not having one."

The idea of subbing bosses for bots is the flipside to all those fears about AI , which often focus on the fact — quite justifiably — that it'll be regular grunts being shown the door in favor of intelligent automation.

But since c-suite execs ...

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Fading Out
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's (JAXA) — which is the sole ongoing mission to the planet Venus — may be on its last legs.

In an , 's Institute of Space and Astronautical Science said that it lost contact with Akatsuki "after an operation in late April due to an extended period of low attitude stability control mode."

But it's not a lost cause yet, and the institute is "currently making efforts to reestablish communication with the spacecraft."

Should the probe remain silent, however, its loss will mean that humanity will be cut off from its sole source of up-close observations of the strange, hellish planet.

Twin Connection
Officially known as the Venus...

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Making Stuff Up
You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out ? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)

Well, according to an with Google CEO Sundar Pichai published earlier this week, just before criticism of the outputs really took off, these "" are an "inherent feature" of  AI large language ...

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Ticket Takers
The Department of Justice is suing Ticketmaster and Live Nation, the monolithic ticketing enterprise that merged in 2010, over its alleged industry monopoly that's and make it harder for artists, fans, venues, and competitors to get butts in seats.

In a , which was filed in Manhattan and includes sign-offs from 30 state and district attorneys general, the DOJ declared that it seeks to break up the ticketing monolith's monopoly on the industry.

The behemoth that is Live Nation-Ticketmaster has from the very start been under government antitrust scrutiny given that the two biggest ticketing companies in the US merged i...

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Thinging Cowboy
The Spotify Car Thing wasn't exactly a hit when it — its production ceased within a year of its release. But many people with an older vehicle have come to rely on the quirky piece of hardware because it was a convenient way of controlling music without your phone.

But now it's becoming a thing of the past. Just two years after it came out, Spotify has that it's essentially going to brick everyone's Car Things, and there's pretty much nothing that happy owners can do about it.

"As of December 9th, 2024, Car Thing will be discontinued, and will stop operating," Spotify ...

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App in Rabbit's Clothing
Secretive wearables startup Humane with its AI Pin, quickly becoming one of the of all time.

Competitor Rabbit's R1, a similar — albeit cheaper — device that promises to be an AI chatbot-powered friend that can answer pretty much any question you can come up with, didn't fare much better, with a "beautiful mess" that "nobody needs."

"I can't believe this bunny took my money," Mashable's Kimberly Gedeon  in her review t...

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It's a commonly-held assumption that most people who believe in conspiracy theories — and new research backs it up.

There are also classic questions of what's causing what. In a published in the journal Nature Communications, a group of Norwegian psychology researchers found that when they looked over long-term life trajectory data, those who were lonely as teens seemed more likely to ascribe to conspiratorial beliefs later in life than those who had stronger social ties in their youth.

With running rampant over the past four years, there has been, as the University of Oslo researchers note, plenty of resea...

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Cut and Run
Tesla shocked the auto industry this week after its CEO Elon Musk working on its vaunted Supercharger network, a project that's considered instrumental in facilitating EV adoption across the country with its quick and convenient charging stations.

But there's another interesting detail to this story: as , citing previous , before Tesla backed down from the project, it had received more than $17 million in federal grants for its Supercharger network.

In fact, the automaker is the biggest winner of the EV push in th...

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Toasty Times
The Sun is ramping up, which could be a boon for our hopes of exploring Mars on foot — depending on what scientists find.  In preparation for a , NASA scientists will be closely watching how the Sun's peak of volatile activity affects the Martian surface and, by extension, what that means for any astronauts traversing it.

Our star semi-regularly spews its plasma-y innards into space during events like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. But as the Sun approaches its solar maximum, a peak of solar activity that occurs around every 11 years, these events occur far more often, sometimes happening in such brutal succession that they create what's known as a solar storm.

These outbursts pose their own quandaries for our planet, which thankfully has a very robust atmosphe...

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In and Out
AI circles were abuzz over the weekend after users discovered a mysterious new AI model on the website LMSYS Chatbot Arena that seems to rival the capabilities of — or perhaps even surpass in some respects, according to some enthusiastic accounts — OpenAI's GPT-4.

But after just a few days of manic hype and frantic testing, the AI model, known only as "gpt2-chatbot," disappeared on Tuesday. LMSYS later that the AI model had been taken down due to "unexpectedly high traffic."

That could do little to cool the wild speculation. Many believe that "gpt-2" is an early, secret preview of the next model from a major AI company like OpenAI. Fueling the hype, Sam Altman, the CEO of the Microsoft-backed startup, cryptically posted about the mystery model on Monday.

"I do have a soft spot for gpt2," Altman <...

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Bill Blurr
The China National Space Administration (CNSA) has shown off a of its vision of a lunar base, a vastly ambitious plan the country is hoping to realize in a matter of decades.

The showy — albeit dated-looking — render shows plans for the International Lunar Research Station, a Chinese and Russian endeavor that was .

The video is also raising eyebrows for a bizarre cameo: a NASA Space Shuttle taking off from a launch pad in the distance, as .

It's either some next-level humor from the C...

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Range Anxiety
Tesla CEO Elon Musk isn't wasting any time in pulling out of one of his car company's key value propositions: its Supercharger network.

Earlier this week, news emerged that Musk was , including senior director of EV charging Rebecca Tinucci — .

Now, that the EV maker has backed out of four Supercharger location leases across the New York City area that were meant to address overcrowding at existing lots.

In other words, charging your Tesla at a Supercharger could soon get a whole lot more miserable — the direct result of Musk tight...