An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from MIT Technology Review: Today, researchers announced yet another version of the human genome map, which they say combines the complete DNA of 47 diverse individuals -- Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, among other groups -- into one giant genetic atlas that they say better captures the surprising genetic diversity of our species. The new map, called a "pangenome," has been a decade in the making, and researchers say it will only get bigger, creating an expanding view of the genome as they add DNA from another 300 people from around the globe. It was published in the journal Nature today. People's genomes are largely alike, but it's the hundreds of thousands of differences, often just single DNA letters, that explain why each of us is unique. The new pangenome, researchers say, should make it possible to observe this diversity in more detail than ever before, highlighting so-called evolutionary hot spots as well as thousands of surprisingly large differences, like deleted, inverted, or duplicated genes, that aren't observable in conventional studies. The pangenome relies on a mathematical concept called a graph, which you can imagine as a massive version of connect-the-dots. Each dot is a segment of DNA. To draw a particular person's genome, you start connecting the numbered dots. Each person's DNA can take a slightly different path, skipping some numbers and adding others.

One payoff of the new pangenome could be better ways to diagnose rare diseases, although practical applications aren't easy to name. Instead, scientists say it's mainly giving them insight into some of the "dark matter" of the genome that's previously been hard to see, including strange regions of chromosomes that seem to share and exchange genes. For now, most biologists and doctors will stick to the existing "reference genome," the one first produced in draft form in 2001 and gradually improved. It answers most questions researchers are interested in, and all their computer tools work with it. The reason a reference genome is important is that when a new person's genome is sequenced, that sequence is projected onto the reference in order to organize and read the new data. Yet since the current reference is just one possible genome, missing bits that some people have, some information can't be analyzed and is usually ignored. Researchers call this effect "reference bias" or, more simply, the streetlamp problem. You don't see where you don't look.

Officials with NIH said they hoped the new update to the genome map would make gene research more "equitable." That's because the more different your genome is from the current reference, the more information about you could be missed. The existing reference is largely the DNA of one African-American man, although it includes segments from several other people as well. "If the genome you want to analyze has sequences that are not in that reference, they will be missed in the analysis," says Deanna Church, a consultant with the business incubator General Inception, who previously held a key role at NIH managing the reference genome. "In reality, the notion that there is a 'human genome' is really the problem," she says. "The current version is the simplest model you can make. It made sense when we started ... But now we need better models."

Google has announced the Pixel Tablet after teasing it during last year's Google I/O conference. The Verge reports: The Pixel Tablet is designed from the ground up to be good at what people typically use tablets for: watching video or playing games in the comfort of their own home. It is not, however, making any statements about the future of computing. The looks of the Pixel Tablet are relatively generic. It has an 11-inch, 16:10, 2560 x 1600 pixel LCD display, even bezels all around, and a matte back. It comes in three colors: white, dark green, and light pink, with the dark green model featuring a black bezel. Though it looks like plastic from a distance, the Pixel Tablet has an aluminum frame with a nanotexture coating, not unlike what Google did with the Pixel 5 smartphone.

Bundled in the box with the Pixel Tablet is a magnetic speaker dock. This serves multiple purposes and is meant to prevent the dreaded "dead tablet in a drawer" syndrome: it's a place to store the Pixel Tablet when it's not in use; it charges the battery; and it has a louder, fuller speaker better suited for communal listening than the speakers that are built into the tablet. If you're playing music or watching a video on the tablet when you put it on the dock, it will seamlessly transfer the audio to the dock's speaker. Pull the tablet off the dock while something is playing, and it will instantly switch to the tablet's speakers.

When mounted on the speaker dock, the Pixel Tablet looks an awful lot like the Nest Hub Max, a $250 smart display that Google released back in 2019. But make no mistake, the Pixel Tablet is an Android tablet and not a smart display -- it runs completely different software and has different capabilities compared to the Nest Hub. That said, when the tablet is docked on the speaker, it can show a slideshow of images from your Google Photos albums just like the Nest Hub. It also has a quick access button to the Google Home app so you can control smart home devices, and it can accept voice commands from a distance for hands-free Google Assistant queries. The lock screen won't show any personal information like notifications -- for that, you'll have to unlock the tablet to access the accounts that are set up on it. The $499 slab is available for preorder starting today, and will begin shipping on June 20th.

Former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi was sentenced to two years in prison for insider trading. Decrypt reports: Ishan Wahi, 32, and his associates -- including his brother, Nikhil -- made over $1.5 million from investing in new digital assets just before they were listed by America's biggest crypto exchange. Wahi was able to use his knowledge of incoming assets to buy them and then quickly sell them, to make huge profits. When the San Francisco-based exchange lists new coins and tokens, they quickly shoot up in value, a phenomenon known as "the Coinbase effect."

The Indian national tried to flee the country after being quizzed by Coinbase, the Department of Justice said. But he was stopped from boarding a flight to India by American cops. Wahi pleaded guilty in February to two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud brought against him by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York. Wahi, his brother and his friend, Sameer Ramani, were also hit with civil charges by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "[Wahi] violated the trust placed in him by his employer" by sharing the secret listings," said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams. "Today's sentence should send a strong signal to all participants in the cryptocurrency markets that the laws decidedly do apply to them."

Disney CEO Bob Iger said the company will add Hulu content to its Disney+ streaming app, adding that it will also raise the price of its ad-free streaming service later this year. CNBC reports: CEO Bob Iger said the company would soon begin offering a "one app experience" in the U.S. that incorporates Hulu content into its flagship streaming service, Disney+. Standalone options for all of Disney's platforms, including ESPN+, will remain. "This is a logical progression of our DTC offerings that will provide greater opportunities for advertisers, while giving bundle subscribers access to more robust and streamlined content resulting in greater audience engagement and ultimately leading to a more unified streaming experience," Iger said during Wednesday's earnings call.

Iger attributed the move toward a one-app location for both Disney+ and Hulu content to the "advertising potential for the combined platform." While Hulu has long offered an ad-supported option for subscribers, Disney+ launched the cheaper tier last year. Disney will begin to roll out the one-app offering by the end of the calendar year, and Iger said the company would share further details at a later time. In the company's fiscal second quarter earnings, the company reported $21.82 billion in revenue, up 13% from the same period last year and beating estimates. It did, however, shed 4 million Disney+ subscribers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Amazon is engaging with Times Internet to explore the acquisition of MX Player, one of the largest on-demand video streaming services in India, according to four sources familiar with the matter, as the American e-commerce group eyes expanding its entertainment ambitions in the key overseas market. The deliberations are remarkable for MX Player, which was acquired by the Indian conglomerate Times Internet for $140 million in 2018. The video app, popular for supporting a wide range of video formats and reliability on low-cost Android smartphones, has expanded to original content in recent years and has amassed more than 300 million users globally.

MX Player has gained wide adoption in markets such as India in part by offering its wide video catalog that includes access to live cable TV channels at no charge to consumers. Instead the service makes most of its revenue through ads. MX Player was one of the earliest video apps to expand into short-video format, cashing in on an opportunity created in the aftermath of New Delhi banning TikTok in the country in mid-2020. MX Player eventually merged that business with ShareChat's short-video offering Moj in a deal worth $900 million. [...] MX Player, which offers its premium offerings in many international markets, claims it has over 150 million active users in India. The firm last raised a venture round in 2019, when it received an investment of $110.8 million in a funding round led by Tencent. That round valued MX Player at $500 million.

"The AI takeover of Google Search starts now," writes The Verge's David Pierce. At Google I/O today, the company demoed a new opt-in feature called Search Generative Experience (SGE). The new experience generates AI "snapshots" that appear at the top of the search results page consisting of an AI-generated summary about your query, with links to sources of information and shopping. From the report: To demonstrate, Liz Reid, Google's VP of Search, flips open her laptop and starts typing into the Google search box. "Why is sourdough bread still so popular?" she writes and hits enter. Google's normal search results load almost immediately. Above them, a rectangular orange section pulses and glows and shows the phrase "Generative AI is experimental." A few seconds later, the glowing is replaced by an AI-generated summary: a few paragraphs detailing how good sourdough tastes, the upsides of its prebiotic abilities, and more. To the right, there are three links to sites with information that Reid says "corroborates" what's in the summary.

Google calls this the "AI snapshot." All of it is by Google's large language models, all of it sourced from the open web. Reid then mouses up to the top right of the box and clicks an icon Google's designers call "the bear claw," which looks like a hamburger menu with a vertical line to the left. The bear claw opens a new view: the AI snapshot is now split sentence by sentence, with links underneath to the sources of the information for that specific sentence. This, Reid points out again, is corroboration. And she says it's key to the way Google's AI implementation is different. "We want [the LLM], when it says something, to tell us as part of its goal: what are some sources to read more about that?"

A few seconds later, Reid clicks back and starts another search. This time, she searches for the best Bluetooth speakers for the beach. Again, standard search results appear almost immediately, and again, AI results are generated a few seconds later. This time, there's a short summary at the top detailing what you should care about in such a speaker: battery life, water resistance, sound quality. Links to three buying guides sit off to the right, and below are shopping links for a half-dozen good options, each with an AI-generated summary next to it. I ask Reid to follow up with the phrase "under $100," and she does so. The snapshot regenerates with new summaries and new picks. "This is the new look of Google's search results page," concludes Pierce. "It's AI-first, it's colorful, and it's nothing like you're used to. It's powered by some of Google's most advanced LLM work to date, including a new general-purpose model called PaLM 2 and the Multitask Unified Model (MUM) that Google uses to understand multiple types of media."

"In the demos I saw, it's often extremely impressive. And it changes the way you'll experience search, especially on mobile, where that AI snapshot often eats up the entire first page of your results."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Atlas: It's at least as good as our best customer service representative, and it's probably on average better," said Wendy's CIO Kevin Vasconi to the Wall Street Journal. After successful early tests, the fifth biggest fast food chain in the USA will start using AI chatbots to interact with drive-thru customers next month. The company has been working with Google on a number of machine learning and AI tools behind the scenes, and is now extending that partnership to begin deploying a Large Language Model (LLM) generative AI system built on the Vertex AI platform, that's custom-trained to take over from human workers, taking drive-thru orders and talking with customers.

Verbal AI tech has advanced in leaps and bounds -- not that you'd know it trying to talk to my Google Home, mind you -- and the two companies have worked together to train up a system called FreshAI. This model understands the entire menu, including the street slang for certain orders, and it's capable of having conversations -- within a set of "guardrails" -- as well as taking custom orders and answering questions. It integrates with the company's point of sale systems and has been trained to follow the rules the company currently gives to its human drive thru window staff. Wendy's will begin with a pilot program at a site in the Columbus, Ohio, area next month, expecting that some customers won't realize they're not talking to a human. From there, the company hopes to expand to include other drive-thru locations.

Zero interaction with employees during a transaction no longer guarantees freedom from the moral quandary of how much to tip. From a report: Prompts to leave 20% at self-checkout machines at airports, stadiums, cookie shops and cafes across the country are rankling consumers already inundated by the proliferation of tip screens. Business owners say the automated cues can significantly increase gratuities and boost staff pay. But the unmanned prompts are leading more customers to question what, exactly, the tips are for. "They're cutting labor costs by doing self-checkout. So what's the point of asking for a tip? And where is it going?" says Ishita Jamar, a senior at American University in Washington, D.C., who has noticed more self-serve tip cues at restaurants she frequents.

Tipping researchers and labor advocates say so-called tip creep is a way for employers to put the onus for employee pay onto consumers, rather than raising wages themselves. Companies say tips are an optional thanks for a job well done. Businesses "are taking advantage of an opportunity," says William Michael Lynn, who studies consumer behavior and tip culture as a professor at Cornell University's Nolan School of Hotel Administration. "Who wouldn't want to get extra money at very little cost if you could?" Square, whose technology powers many iPad point-of-sale machines, says tipped transactions were up 17% year-over-year at full-service restaurants and 16% at quick-service restaurants in the fourth quarter of 2022.

Many experts believe fusion power remains decades away. Microsoft thinks it could be just around the corner. From a report: In a deal that is believed to be the first commercial agreement for fusion power, the tech giant has agreed to purchase electricity from startup Helion Energy within about five years. Helion, which is backed by OpenAI founder Sam Altman, committed to start producing electricity through fusion by 2028 and target power generation for Microsoft of at least 50 megawatts after a year or pay financial penalties. The commitment is a bold one given that neither Helion nor anyone else in the world has yet produced electricity from fusion. "We wouldn't enter into this agreement if we were not optimistic that engineering advances are gaining momentum," said Microsoft President Brad Smith.

Fusion powers the sun and stars, and has the potential to provide nearly limitless amounts of carbon-free power if someone can harness it on earth. The International Atomic Energy Agency expects electricity from fusion to be produced in the second half of the century. Helion is building a prototype that it says will demonstrate the ability to produce electricity through fusion next year. "The goal is not to make the world's coolest technology demo," Mr. Altman said in an interview. "The goal is to power the world and to do it extremely cheaply." Mr. Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI -- the artificial-intelligence startup behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT -- said having a first customer is critical for keeping Helion grounded in the realities of business, including working with clients, utilities and electric-grid operators.

Google today officially launched its first foldable smartphone, the Pixel Fold. From a report: The design affords a lot more screen real estate. The internal display is 7.6 inches, with a 6:5 aspect ratio. The resolution is 2208 x 1840 OLED at 380ppi, with a refresh rate of up to 120Hz. [...] The bar on the rear of the device houses a three-camera system: a 48-megapixel main, 10.8-megapixel ultrawide and a 10.8-megapixel telephoto with 5x optical Zoom and 20x Super Res Zoom. The front-facing camera, meanwhile, is 9.5 megapixels. The real secret sauce in the Pixel Fold experience is, unsurprisingly, the software. Google has, after all, been working on it for at least half a decade. The app continuity when switching between the external and internal screens is quite seamless, allowing you to pick where you left off as you change screen sizes. Naturally, Google has optimized its most popular third-party apps for the big screen experience, including Gmail and YouTube. The system is powered by the same Tensor G2 chip you'll find in the Pixel 7, 7a and Pixel tablet.

The first UK baby created with DNA from three people has been born after doctors performed a groundbreaking IVF procedure that aims to prevent children from inheriting incurable diseases. From a report: The technique, known as mitochondrial donation treatment (MDT), uses tissue from the eggs of healthy female donors to create IVF embryos that are free from harmful mutations their mothers carry and are likely to pass on to their children. Because the embryos combine sperm and egg from the biological parents with tiny battery-like structures called mitochondria from the donor's egg, the resulting baby has DNA from the mother and father as usual, plus a small amount of genetic material -- about 37 genes -- from the donor.

The process has led to the phrase "three-parent babies," though more than 99.8% of the DNA in the babies comes from the mother and father. Research on MDT, which is also known as mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT), was pioneered in the UK by doctors at the Newcastle Fertility Centre. The work aimed to help women with mutated mitochondria to have babies without the risk of passing on genetic disorders. People inherit all their mitochondria from their mother, so harmful mutations in the "batteries" can affect all of the children a woman has.

An anonymous reader shares a report: YouTube Premium subscribership grew to a record 80 million users in 2022, and Google responded by announcing it would be investing more into its subscription offerings in 2023. What we didn't realize at the time was how that could mean handicapping its free offerings to get more people to pay for its services. When watching videos yesterday, one Redditor encountered a popup informing them that "Ad blockers are not allowed on YouTube." The message offered a button to "Allow YouTube ads" in the person's ad blocking software and went on to explain that ads make the service free for billions of users and that YouTube Premium offers an ad-free experience. It even provided a button to easily sign up for a YouTube Premium membership.

Google, in a blog post: PaLM 2 is a state-of-the-art language model with improved multilingual, reasoning and coding capabilities.

Multilinguality: PaLM 2 [PDF] is more heavily trained on multilingual text, spanning more than 100 languages. This has significantly improved its ability to understand, generate and translate nuanced text -- including idioms, poems and riddles -- across a wide variety of languages, a hard problem to solve. PaLM 2 also passes advanced language proficiency exams at the "mastery" level.
Reasoning: PaLM 2's wide-ranging dataset includes scientific papers and web pages that contain mathematical expressions. As a result, it demonstrates improved capabilities in logic, common sense reasoning, and mathematics.
Coding: PaLM 2 was pre-trained on a large quantity of publicly available source code datasets. This means that it excels at popular programming languages like Python and JavaScript, but can also generate specialized code in languages like Prolog, Fortran and Verilog.

Even as PaLM 2 is more capable, it's also faster and more efficient than previous models -- and it comes in a variety of sizes, which makes it easy to deploy for a wide range of use cases. We'll be making PaLM 2 available in four sizes from smallest to largest: Gecko, Otter, Bison and Unicorn. Gecko is so lightweight that it can work on mobile devices and is fast enough for great interactive applications on-device, even when offline. This versatility means PaLM 2 can be fine-tuned to support entire classes of products in more ways, to help more people.

At I/O today, we announced over 25 new products and features powered by PaLM 2. That means that PaLM 2 is bringing the latest in advanced AI capabilities directly into our products and to people -- including consumers, developers, and enterprises of all sizes around the world. Here are some examples:

PaLM 2's improved multilingual capabilities are allowing us to expand Bard to new languages, starting today. Plus, it's powering our recently announced coding update.
Workspace features to help you write in Gmail and Google Docs, and help you organize in Google Sheets are all tapping into the capabilities of PaLM 2 at a speed that helps people get work done better, and faster.
Med-PaLM 2, trained by our health research teams with medical knowledge, can answer questions and summarize insights from a variety of dense medical texts. It achieves state-of-the-art results in medical competency, and was the first large language model to perform at "expert" level on U.S. Medical Licensing Exam-style questions. We're now adding multimodal capabilities to synthesize information like x-rays and mammograms to one day improve patient outcomes. Med-PaLM 2 will open up to a small group of Cloud customers for feedback later this summer to identify safe, helpful use cases.

Google is adding a smorgasbord of new features to its AI chatbot Bard, including support for new languages (Japanese and Korean), easier ways to export text to Google Docs and Gmail, visual search, and a dark mode. Most significantly, the company is removing the waitlist for Bard and making the system available in English in 180 countries and territories. From a report: It's also promising future features like AI image generation powered by Adobe and integration with third-party web services like Instacart and OpenTable. Collectively, the news is a shot in the arm for Bard, which was released two months ago for select users in the US and UK. The chatbot -- which Google still stresses is an experiment and not a replacement to its search engine -- has compared poorly to rivals like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's new Bing chatbot. Notably, Bard made a factual error in its first-ever public demo (though this problem is common to all such bots). Now, Google is adding a lot of new features as well as upgrading Bard to use its new PaLM 2 language model. This should improve its general answers and usability.

Google says the upgraded Bard is particularly good at tackling coding queries, including debugging and explaining chunks of code in more than 20 languages, so some of today's upgrades are focused on this use case. These include the new dark mode, improved citations for code (which will not only offer sources but also explain the snippets), and a new export button. This can already be used to send code to Google's Colab platform but will now also work with another browser-based IDE, Replit (starting with Python queries).

Google's latest Photos trick is a feature it's calling Magic Editor, which uses generative AI to let you make major edits to a photo without professional tools. From a report: Google shared a couple examples of Magic Editor in action that are both pretty cool. In one, a photo of a person in front of a waterfall, Google entirely moves the person further to the side of the photo, erases people in the background, and makes the sky a prettier blue. In another photo, Magic Editor scoots a child on a bench closer to the middle of the photo, which generates "new" parts of the bench and balloons to the left to fill in the space. In this example, Google again makes the sky more vibrant.

A man in China's Gansu province has been detained for allegedly using ChatGPT to generate a fake story about a train crash, marking China's first arrest in an AI-related probe as Beijing tightens deepfake technology. From a report: The story, which claimed the crash killed nine construction workers in a city in China's northwestern Gansu, gained more than 15,000 clicks after being published on social media on April 25, Pingliang city's local police bureau reported. China's new rules for deepfake bar service providers and users from using such technology to produce, release and fabricate untrue information. The rules, which took effect from Jan. 10, are designed to curb the use of generative AI technology to alter online content.

Roughly 4.4 million people will soon receive checks from TurboTax, following a 50-state settlement with parent company Intuit for allegedly steering millions of low-income Americans away from free tax-filing services. From a report: Customers affected by the settlement will receive an email about the settlement and checks will automatically be mailed throughout this month. Most customers will get about $30, with some customers that used TurboTax for three consecutive years getting up to $85. A website has also been set up for more information. "TurboTax's predatory and deceptive marketing cheated millions of low-income Americans who were trying to fulfill their legal duties to file their taxes," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a press release. "Today we are righting that wrong and putting money back into the pockets of hardworking taxpayers who should have never paid to file their taxes." She announced the settlement last year, saying that Intuit "unfairly charged" people and forced the company to stop its "free, free, free" ad campaign because it falsely lured customers with the promise of free tax preparation services.

Clearview AI, the US startup that's attracted notoriety in recent years for a massive privacy violation after it scraped selfies off the Internet and used people's data to build a facial recognition tool it pitched to law enforcement and others, has been hit with another fine in France over non-cooperation with the data protection regulator. From a report: The overdue penalty payment of $5.7M has been issued by the French regulator, the CNIL -- on top of a $22M sanction it slapped the company with last year for breaching regional privacy rules. The European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) sets out conditions for processing personal data lawfully. Clearview has been found to have breached a number of requirements set out in law -- by France's CNIL and several other regional data protection authorities, including authorities in the UK, Italy and Greece, garnering several tens of millions in total fines to date. Whether Clearview will ever pay any of these fines remains an open question, since the US-based company has not been cooperating with EU regulators.

A Delaware judge has dismissed a shareholder lawsuit against financial technology company Block over its 2021 acquisition of majority ownership in Tidal, the music streaming service partly owned by rapper Jay-Z. From a report: A pension fund shareholder alleged that Block founder and CEO Jack Dorsey and the company's board of directors breached their fiduciary duties in agreeing to pay roughly $300 million to take control of Tidal as it was failing financially and the target of an ongoing criminal investigation. Chancellor Kathaleen St. Judge McCormick ruled Tuesday that the pension fund had failed to demand that Block's board pursue legal action itself before filing a derivative lawsuit on behalf of the company. Under Delaware law, shareholders must make such a demand or demonstrate that doing so would be futile because a majority of directors were self-interested, lacked independence or faced a substantial likelihood of liability.

McCormick noted that the demand requirement is a manifestation of Delaware's business judgment rule, under which courts defer to the decision-making of corporate directors unless there is an indication they acted in bad faith. That deference remains even if a corporate decision turns out to be unwise. "It seemed, by all accounts, a terrible business decision," the judge said of Block's acquisition of Tidal. "Under Delaware law, however, a board comprised of a majority of disinterested and independent directors is free to make a terrible business decision without any meaningful threat of liability, so long as the directors approve the action in good faith."

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Mohamed Maslouh, a London-based contractor, was assigned to enter data into Google's internal gHire recruitment system last September, he noticed something surprising. The database contained the profiles of thousands of people in the EU and U.K. whose names, phone numbers, personal email addresses and resumes dated back as far as 2011. Maslouh knew something was amiss, as he had received data-protection training from Randstad, the European human-resources giant that employed him, and was aware of the EU's five-year-old General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which remained part of British law after Brexit.

Under the law, companies in the European Union and U.K. may not hang onto anyone's personal data -- that is, information relating to any identifiable living person -- for longer than is strictly necessary, which generally means a maximum retention time measured in weeks or months. Google may now face investigations over potential violations of the GDPR, after Maslouh filed protected whistleblower complaints with the U.K. Information Commissioner's Office in November and with the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) -- which has jurisdiction over Google's activities in the EU -- in February.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: While General Motors has announced that it plans to phase out CarPlay in its EVs starting in 2024, Ford has just doubled down on long-term CarPlay compatibility. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Ford CEO Jim Farley laid it bare: "In terms of content, we kind of lost that battle 10 years ago," Farley said. "So like get real with it, because you're not going to make a ton of money on content inside the vehicle."

Farley's argument is extremely sound. He is contending that since most people bring their smartphones into their cars with them, that people want the infotainment to be an extension of their phones and not another thing to deal with. On another level, embracing CarPlay and Android Auto cost automakers money to license but that cost is amortized over a large production run. The possibility of having a CarPlay-only infotainment is distant and highly unlikely, as automakers do need their own interface for the high-tech gadgets of today's cars.

And let's be real: CarPlay is one of the best things to happen to modern cars. It simplifies driving, keeps people less distracted by vastly reducing the learning curve, and is just more convenient. Ford is embracing it.

Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Showtime, announced today that it is laying off some 25% of its staff and shutting down MTV News. NPR reports: In addition to reports of a soft ad market, Paramount Global is doing considerable restructuring. Earlier this year, Showtime merged with MTV Entertainment Studios. In an email to staff obtained by NPR, Chris McCarthy, president and CEO of Showtime/MTV Entertainment Studios and Paramount Media Networks, explained the decision-making behind the cuts. While touting the "incredible track record of hits" such as Yellowstone, South Park, and Yellowjackets, McCarthy wrote, "despite this success in streaming, we continue to feel pressure from broader economic headwinds like many of our peers. To address this, our senior leaders in coordination with HR have been working together over the past few months to determine the optimal organization for the current and future needs of our business."

"This is a very sad day for a lot of friends and colleagues," wrote MTV News' Josh Horowitz on Instagram, "Many great people lost their jobs. I was hired by MTV News 17 years ago. I'm so honored to have been a small part of its history. Wishing the best for the best in the business." The news comes on the heels of a disappointing first quarter earnings report for the corporation.

Amazon has launched a new unit, Amazon MGM Studios Distribution, that will allow the company to license Amazon Originals and other titles to third-party media companies, including streaming services and cable TV. TechCrunch reports: For the first time, titles such as âoeThe Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm," "Coming 2 America," "Goliath," "Hunters," "The Tender Bar," "The Tomorrow War," "The Voyeurs" and "Without Remorse," among others, will be sold to other media outlets following their initial run on Prime Video. While the company has distributed shows before, this new venture will be on a much larger scale. Plus, Amazon Originals are mainly exclusive to Prime Video, making it an enticing sale for companies looking to have popular titles on their platforms.

The launch of Amazon MGM Studios Distribution will also allow the company to handle sales of MGM-owned franchises James Bond, Rocky and Creed, as well as "The Handmaid's Tale," "Fargo" and "Vikings." Last year, Amazon acquired MGM for $8.5 billion, giving the company access to more than 4,000 films and 17,000 TV series. [...] According to Chris Ottinger, who will lead Amazon MGM Studios Distribution, the unit will offer flexible bundles, reported Deadline, so sellers can create bundled content packages that work for them. This strategy will likely allow the company to stand out from competitors.

Researchers have developed a "language" called Remmyo, which relies on specific facial muscle movements that can occur during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. People who are capable of lucid dreaming can learn this language during their waking hours and potentially communicate while they are asleep. Ars Technica reports: "You can transfer all important information from lucid dreams using no more than three letters in a word," [sleep expert Michael Raduga], who founded Phase Research Center in 2007 to study sleep, told Ars. "This level of optimization took a lot of time and intellectual resources." Remmyo consists of six sets of facial movements that can be detected by electromyography (EMG) sensors on the face. Slight electrical impulses that reach facial muscles make them capable of movement during sleep paralysis, and these are picked up by sensors and transferred to software that can type, vocalize, and translate Remmyo. Translation depends on which Remmyo letters are used by the sleeper and picked up by the software, which already has information from multiple dictionaries stored in its virtual brain. It can translate Remmyo into another language as it is being "spoken" by the sleeper. "We can digitally vocalize Remmyo or its translation in real time, which helps us to hear speech from lucid dreams," Raduga said.

For his initial experiment, Raduga used the sleep laboratory of the Neurological Clinic of Frankfurt University in Germany. His subjects had already learned Remmyo and were also trained to enter a state of lucid dreaming and signal that they were in that lucid state during REM sleep. While they were immersed in lucid dreams, EMG sensors on their faces sent information from electrical impulses to the translation software. The results were uncertain. Based on attempts to translate planned phrases, Remmyo turned out to be anywhere from 13 to 81 percent effective, and in the interview, Raduga said he faced skepticism about the effectiveness of the translation software during the peer review process of his study, which is now published in the journal Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research and Practice. He still looks forward to making results more consistent by leveling up translation methods in the future. "The main problem is that it is hard to use only one muscle on your face to say something in Remmyo," said Raduga. "Unintentionally, people strain more than one muscle, and EMG sensors detect it all. Now we use only handwritten algorithms to overcome the problem, but we're going to use machine learning and AI to improve Remmyo decoding."