Garbage trucks analyze thousands of homes with AI-powered cameras
Garbage trucks now do more than just pick up tossed-out food scraps and junk. They also snitch on people with unkempt lawns. In at least four states (California, Georgia, South…
September 2026
LLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI watermarking is used
In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text,…
Mathematician debunks the Parthenon’s famous optical illusions
The Parthenon is undeniably one of history’s most renowned architectural feats,but one detail of its structural genius is a total hoax. For over 2,000 years, scholars and admirers have alleged…
EPA immediately sued over plans to repeal climate rules for power plants
Days after finalizing a rule that would eliminate climate rules for power plants, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was sued by groups who say the EPA’s repeal was shockingly short-sighted…
A dolphin named Bubbles makes other fish vomit, then eats it
Staff at the Lady Elliott Island Eco Resort off the southern Great Barrier Reef in Australia are well acquainted with the shenanigans of a male bottlenose dolphin they’ve nicknamed Bubbles.…
Nonprofit that tracks meteors taken down by “critical blow” from a cyberattack
The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack. “We recently…
Sunken WWI sub is leaking TNT into the North Sea
A World War I submarine that sank nearly 110 years ago has been leaking explosive pollutants into the North Sea for decades. What’s more, ocean researchers say the problem may…
Researchers swap in human brain cells for a mouse’s cortex
In recent years, there has been a lot of excitement about the potential for studying human diseases in what are called “organoids.” These small patches of tissue, formed using stem…
Scientists develop new method for deciphering ancient scrolls
The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that combines “digital unwrapping” with crowdsourced machine learning to decipher the so-called Herculaneum scrolls, badly charred 2,000-year-old papyri too fragile to be physically…
How chimps teach their kids tool tricks
Chimpanzees are known to use rudimentary tools when foraging for food. According to a new paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, this learned behavior is passed down from adults…