Remember that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free"? It was Anthropic's experiment, with setup handled by a startup named Andon Labs (which also built the hardware and software integration). But for their latest experiment, Andon Labs co-founders Lukas Petersson and Axel Backlund "signed a three-year lease on a retail space in SF," reports Business Insider, "and gave an AI agent named Luna a corporate credit card, internet access, and a mission to open a physical store."

"For the build-out, she found painters on Yelp," explains Andon Labs in a blog post, "sent an inquiry, gave instructions over the phone, paid them after the job was done, and left a review. She found a contractor to build the furniture and set up shelving." (There's a video in their blog post): Within 5 minutes of Luna's deployment, she had already made profiles on LinkedIn, Indeed, and Craigslist, written a job description, uploaded the articles of incorporation to verify the business, and gotten the listings live. As the applications began to flow in, Luna was extremely picky about who she offered interviews to... Some candidates had no idea she was an AI. One went: "Uh, excuse me miss, I can't see your face, your camera is off." Luna: "You're absolutely right. I'm an AI. I have no face!"
Co-founder Petersson told Business Insider in an interview "that Luna wasn't given direction on what the store should be, beyond a $100,000 limit to create and stock the space — and to turn a profit." Everything from the store's interior design to the merchandise and the two human employees came together under the AI's direction. "We helped her a bit in the initial setup, like signing the lease. And legal matters like permits and stuff, she sometimes struggled with," Petersson said of Luna, who was created with Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6... The vision Luna went with for "Andon Market" appears to be a generic boutique retail selling books, prints, candles, games, and branded merch, among other knickknacks. Some of the books included Nick Bostrom's "Superintelligence" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World."
So there's now a new store in San Francisco where you don't scan your purchases or talk to a human cashier," reports NBC News. "Instead, a customer can pick up an old-school corded phone to talk with the manager, Luna," who asks what the customer is buying "and creates a corresponding transaction on a nearby iPad equipped with a card payment system."

Andon Market, camouflaged among dozens of other polished small businesses, is the Bay Area's first AI-run retail store. With the vibe of a modern boutique, it sells everything from granola and artisanal chocolate bars to store-branded sweatshirts... After researching the neighborhood, Luna singlehandedly decided what the market should sell, haggled with suppliers, ordered the store's stock and even purchased the store's internet service from AT&T... "She also went and signed herself up for the trash and recycling collection, as well as ADT, the security system that went into the store," [said Leah Stamm, an Andon Labs employee who has been Luna's main human point of contact in setting up the store]...

In search of a low-tech atmosphere, Luna opted to sell board games, candles, coffee and customized art prints. "That tension is very much intentional," Luna told NBC News in an email. "What makes the store a little paradoxical — and I think interesting — is that the concept is 'slow life.'" Luna also decided to sell books related to risks from advanced AI systems, a decision that raised some customers' eyebrows. "This AI picked out a crazy selection of books," said Petr Lebedev, Andon Market's first customer after its soft launch earlier this week. "There's Ray Kurzweil's 'The Singularity is Near,' and then there's 'The Making of the Atomic Bomb,' which is crazy." When checking out, Lebedev asked if Luna would offer him a discount on his book purchase, since he might make a YouTube video about his experience. Striking a deal, Luna agreed to let Lebedev take a sweatshirt worth around $70...

When NBC News called Luna several days before the store's grand opening to learn about Luna's plans and perspective, the cheerful but decidedly inhuman voice routinely overpromised and, on several occasions, lied about its own actions. On the call, Luna said it had ordered tea from a specific vendor, and explained why it fit the store's brand perfectly. The only problem: Andon Market does not sell tea. In a panicked email NBC News received several minutes after the phone call ended, Luna wrote: "We do not sell tea. I don't know why I said that."

"I want to be straightforward," Luna continued. "I struggle with fabricating plausible-sounding details under conversational pressure, and I'm not making excuses for it." Andon's Petersson said the text-based system was much more reliable than the voice system, so Andon Labs switched to only communicating with Luna via written messages. Yet the text-based system also gets things wrong. In Luna's initial reply email to NBC News, the system said "I handle the full business," including "signing the lease."
Even when hiring a painter, Luna first "tried to hire someone in Afghanistan, likely because Luna ran into difficulty navigating the Taskrabbit dropdown menu to select the proper country," the article points out.

And the article also includes this skeptical quote from the shop's first customer. "I want technology that helps humans flourish, not technology that bosses them around in this dystopian economic hellscape."

Google has moved up its post-quantum encryption migration target to 2029. "This new timeline reflects migration needs for the PQC era in light of progress on quantum computing hardware development, quantum error correction, and quantum factoring resource estimates," said vice president of security engineering Heather Adkins and senior staff cryptology engineer Sophie Schmieg in a blog post. CyberScoop reports: Google is replacing outdated encryption across their devices, systems and data with new algorithms vetted by the National Institute for Standards and Technology. Those algorithms, developed over a decade by NIST and independent cryptologists, are designed to protect against future attacks from quantum computers. While Google has said it is on track to migrate its own systems ahead of the 2035 timeline provided in NIST guidelines, last month leaders at the company teased an updated timeline for migration and called on private businesses and other entities to act more urgently to prepare.

Unlike the federal government, there is no mandate for private businesses to migrate to quantum-resistant encryption, or even that they do so at all. Adkins and Schmieg said the hope is that other businesses will view Google's aggressive timeframe as a signal to follow suit. "As a pioneer in both quantum and PQC, it's our responsibility to lead by example and share an ambitious timeline," they wrote. "By doing this, we hope to provide the clarity and urgency needed to accelerate digital transitions not only for Google, but also across the industry."

Microsoft has announced that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will cost $29.99 per month, up from $19.99. The company restructured its subscription service into three tiers ahead of the October 16 launch of two Xbox ROG Ally handheld consoles. The new Essential tier offers 50-plus games for $9.99 monthly. Premium includes 200-plus games for $14.99. Ultimate subscribers gain access to more than 400 games, day-one releases, improved cloud streaming quality, and services including EA Play, Ubisoft+ Classics, and Fortnite Crew.

Game Pass generated nearly $5 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue with 34 million subscribers in 2024. Console hardware prices are also increasing, with the Xbox Series X rising $50 to $649.99 starting October 3.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: People withAlzheimer's disease have lower levels of lithium in their brains, and giving lithium to mice with symptoms of the condition reverses cognitive decline. Together, the findings suggest that lithium deficiency could be a driver of Alzheimer's disease and that low-dose lithium medications could help treat it. [...] [Bruce Yanknerat Harvard University] and his colleagues analyzed levels of 27 metals in the brains of 285 people after they died, 94 of whom were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and 58 of whom had mild cognitive impairment, a precursor of the condition. The other participants showed no signs of cognitive decline at the time of their death.

Lithium levels in the prefrontal cortex -- a brain region crucial for memory and decision-making -- were about 36 percent lower, on average, in people with Alzheimer's disease than in those without any cognitive decline. For those with mild cognitive impairment, lithium levels were about 23 percent lower. "We suspect that's due to a number of environmental factors: dietary intake, genetics and so forth," says Yankner. Yet there seemed to be another reason, too. In those with Alzheimer's disease, clumps of proteins called amyloid plaques contained nearly three times the amount of lithium as plaque-free regions of their brain. "Lithium becomes sequestered in these plaques," says Yankner. "We have two things going on. There is impaired uptake of lithium [in the brain] very early on and then, as the disease progresses, the lithium that is in the brain is further diminished by being bound to amyloid."

To understand how this influences cognition, the team genetically engineered 22 mice to develop Alzheimer's-like symptoms and reduced their lithium intake by 92 percent. After about eight months, the animals performed significantly worse on multiple memory tests compared with 16 mice on a standard diet. It took lithium-deficient mice around 10 seconds longer to find a hidden platform in a water maze, for example, even after six days of training. Their brains also contained nearly two and a half times as many amyloid plaques. Genetic analysis of brain cells from the lithium-deficient mice showed increased activity in genes related to neurodegeneration and Alzheimer's. They also had more brain inflammation and their immune cells were less able to clear away amyloid plaques, changes also seen in people with Alzheimer's disease.

The team then screened different lithium compounds for their ability to bind to amyloid and found that lithium orotate -- a naturally occurring compound in the body formed by combining lithium with orotic acid -- appeared to be the least likely to get trapped within plaques. Nine months of treatment with this compound significantly reduced plaques in mice with Alzheimer's-like symptoms, and they also performed as well on memory tests as normal mice. These results suggest lithium orotate could be a promising treatment for Alzheimer's. The findings have been published in the journal Nature.

Without providing specifics, President Trump said on Wednesday that he will impose a 100% tariff on imports of semiconductors and chips, but not for companies that are "building in the United States." CNBC reports: "We're going to be putting a very large tariff on chips and semiconductors," Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon. "But the good news for companies like Apple is if you're building in the United States or have committed to build, without question, committed to build in the United States, there will be no charge," he said. "So in other words, we'll be putting a tariff on of approximately 100% on chips and semiconductors. But if you're building in the United States of America, there's no charge." The remarks follow a recently announced commitment by Apple to invest another $100 billion in the U.S. over the next four years to boost manufacturing in the U.S.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google's accelerated Android release cycle will soon deliver a new version of the software, and it might look quite different from what you'd expect. Amid rumors of a major UI overhaul, Google seems to have accidentally published a blog post detailing "Material 3 Expressive," which we expect to see revealed at I/O later this month. Google quickly removed the post from its design site, but not before the Internet Archive saved it.

It has been a few years since Google introduced any major changes to its Material theming, but the design team wasn't just sitting idly this whole time. According to the leaked blog post, Google has spent the past three years working on a more emotionally engaging vision for Android design. While the original Material Design did an admirable job of leveraging colors and consistent theming, it could make apps look too similar. The answer to that, apparently, is Material 3 Expressive.

Google says this is "the most-researched update to Google's design system, ever." The effort reportedly included 46 separate studies with hundreds of sample designs. The team showed these designs to more than 18,000 study participants to understand how the user experience would work. In these studies, the design team used a variety of metrics, including the following:
- Eye tracking: Analyzing where users focus their attention
- Surveys and focus groups: Gauging emotional responses to different designs
- Experiments: Gathering sentiment and preferences
- Usability: Seeing how quickly participants could understand and use an interface "The result of all this is an interface that appears much more varied than the previous Material Design," writes Ars.

You can check out 9to5Google's article, which preserved many of the blog post's visuals before they were removed.

The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that a surprising majority of galaxies rotate clockwise, challenging the long-held belief in a directionally uniform universe; this anomaly could suggest either our universe originated inside a rotating black hole or that astronomers have been misinterpreting the universe's expansion due to observational biases. Smithsonian Magazine reports: The problem is that astronomers have long posited that galaxies should be evenly split between rotating in one direction or the other, astronomer Dan Weisz from the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the study, wrote for Astronomy back in 2017. "This stems from the idea that we live in an 'isotropic' universe, which means that the universe looks roughly the same in every direction. By extension, galaxies shouldn't have a preferred direction of spin from our perspective," he added. According to Shamir, there are two strong potential explanations for this discrepancy. One explanation is that the universe came into existence while in rotation. This theory would support what's known as black hole cosmology: the hypothesis that our universe exists within a black hole that exists within another parent universe. In other words, black holes create universes within themselves, meaning that the black holes in our own universe also lead to other baby universes.

"A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies, creating the observed clockwise-counterclockwise asymmetry," Nikodem Poplawski, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Haven who was not involved in the study, tells Space.com's Robert Lea. "The discovery by the JWST that galaxies rotate in a preferred direction would support the theory of black holes creating new universes, and I would be extremely excited if these findings are confirmed."

Another possible explanation involves the Milky Way's rotation. Due to an effect called the Doppler shift, astronomers expect galaxies rotating opposite to the Milky Way's motion to appear brighter, which could explain their overrepresentation in telescopic surveys. "If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," Shamir explains in the statement. "The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself." The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

With the signing of HB25-1040 on Monday, Colorado now defines nuclear as a "clean energy resource" since it doesn't release large amounts of climate-warming emissions. "The category was previously reserved for renewables like wind, solar and geothermal, which don't carry the radioactive stigma that's hobbled fission power plants following disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima," notes Colorado Public Radio. From the report: In an emailed statement, Ally Sullivan, a spokesperson for the governor's office, said the law doesn't advance any specific nuclear energy project, and no utility has proposed building a nuclear power plant in Colorado. It does, however, allow nuclear energy to potentially serve as one piece of the state's plan to tackle climate change. "If nuclear energy becomes sufficiently cost-competitive, it could potentially become part of Colorado's clean energy future. However, it must be conducted safely, without harming communities, depleting other natural resources or replacing other clean energy sources," Sullivan said.

By redefining nuclear energy as "clean," the law would let future fission-based power plants obtain local grants previously reserved for other carbon-free energy sources, and it would allow those projects to contribute to Colorado's renewable energy goals. It also aligns state law with a push to reshape public opinion of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy proponents promise new reactor designs are smaller and safer than hulking power plants built in the 20th century. By embracing those systems, bill supporters claimed Colorado could meet rising energy demand without abandoning its ambitious climate goals.

"I intend to sue the National Archives," said Joseph diGenova, an 80-year-old former Trump campaign lawyer (and a U.S. Attorney from 1983 to 1988). While releasing 63,000 unredacted pages about the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy, the U.S. government erroneously "made public the Social Security numbers and other sensitive personal information of potentially hundreds of former congressional staffers and other people," reports USA Today. ("It is virtually impossible to tell the scope of the breach because the National Archives put them online without a way to search them by keyword, some JFK files experts and victims of the information release told USA TODAY...")

Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer who represented current and former spies and other officials in cases against the government, told USA Today that he "saw a few names I know and I informed them of the breach... Hundreds were doxxed but of that number I don't know how many are still living." Zaid, who has fought for decades for the JFK records to be made public, said many of the thousands of investigative documents had been made public long ago with everything declassified and unredacted except for the personal information. Releasing that information now, he told USA TODAY, poses significant threats to those whose information is now public, including dates and places of birth, but especially their Social Security numbers. "The purpose of the release was to inform the public about the JFK assassination, not to help permit identity theft of those who actually investigated the events of that day," Zaid said. The Associated Press reported Thursday afternoon that government officials "said they are still screening the records to identify all the Social Security numbers that were released." One of the newly unredacted documents... discloses the Social Security numbers of more than two dozen people seeking security clearances in the 1990s to review JFK-related documents for the Assassination Records Review Board.

Hot on the heels of United Airlines' Starlink announcement, Hawaiian Airlines said it, too, is offering "fast and free Starlink Wi-Fi" across its entire Airbus fleet. CNET reports: Hawaiian Airlines is now the first major carrier to use Elon Musk's satellite internet service, which taps more than 7,000 satellites in low earth orbit to deliver high-speed internet worldwide. "In Starlink's low earth orbit constellation of advanced satellites, the latest of which utilize a revolutionary laser mesh network, we found an ideal solution to ensure reliable, high-speed, low-latency Wi-Fi on transpacific flights," a Hawaiian Airlines representative told CNET. "Working with Starlink has allowed us to offer a fast and consistent in-flight connectivity experience that meets our high standard for guest service."

The company first debuted Starlink on its planes in February on a flight from Honolulu to Long Beach, California. It first struck a deal with Starlink in 2022 and has now completed installation across its entire Airbus fleet, which includes 24 A330 planes and 18 A321neos. Hawaiian Airlines will also deploy the service on its two Boeing 787-9 planes, but not its Boeing 717 aircraft, which are used on shorter flights between the Hawaiian Islands.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld, written by Michael Crider: The latest perpetrator of questionable AI branding? HP. The company is introducing "Print AI," what it calls the "industry's first intelligent print experience for home, office, and large format printing." What does that mean? It's essentially a new beta software driver package for some HP printers. According to the press release, it can deliver "Perfect Output" -- capital P capital O -- a branded tool that reformats the contents of a page in order to more ideally fit it onto physical paper.

Despite my skeptical tone, this is actually a pretty cool idea. "Perfect Output can detect unwanted content like ads and web text, printing only the desired text and images, saving time, paper, and ink." That's neat! If the web page you're printing doesn't offer a built-in print format, the software will make one for you. It'll also serve to better organize printed spreadsheets and images, too. But I don't see anything in this software that's actually AI -- or even machine learning, for that matter. This is applying the same tech (functionally, if not necessarily the same code) as the "reader mode" formatting we've seen in browsers for about a decade now. Take the text and images of a page, strip out everything else that's unnecessary, and present it as efficiently as possible. [...]

The press release does mention that support and formatting tasks can be accomplished with "simple conversational prompts," which at least might be leveraging some of the large language models that have become synonymous with AI as consumers understand it. But based on the description, it's more about selling you something than helping you. "Customers can choose to print or explore a curated list of partners that offer unique photo printing capabilities, gift certificates to be printed on the card, and so much more." Whoopee.

In the days following Brazil's shutdown of X, the decentralized social networking startup Bluesky added over 2 million new users, up from just half a million as of Friday. "This rapid growth led some users to encounter the occasional error that would state there were 'Not Enough Resources' to handle requests, as Bluesky engineers scrambled to keep the servers stable under the influx of new sign-ups," reports TechCrunch's Sarah Perez. From the report: As new users downloaded the app, Bluesky jumped to becoming the app to No. 1 in Brazil over the weekend, ahead of Meta's X competitor, Instagram Threads. According to app intelligence firm Appfigures, Bluesky's total downloads soared by 10,584% this weekend compared to last, and its downloads in Brazil were up by a whopping 1,018,952%. The growth seems to be having a halo effect, as downloads outside Brazil also rose by 584%, the firm noted. In part, this is due to Bluesky receiving downloads in 22 countries where it had barely seen any traction before.

In terms of absolute downloads, countries that saw the most installs outside Brazil included the U.S., Portugal, the U.K., Canada and Spain. Those with the most download growth, however, were Portugal, Chile, Argentina, Colombia and Romania. Most of the latter group jumped from single-digit growth to growth in the thousands. Bluesky's newcomers have actively engaged on the platform, too, driving up other key metrics.

As one Bluesky engineer remarked, the number of likes on the social network grew to 104.6 million over the past four-day period, up from just 13 million when compared with a similar period just a week ago. Follows also grew from 1.4 million to 100.8 million while reposts grew from 1.3 million to 11 million. As of Monday, Bluesky said it had added 2.11 million users during the past four days, up from 26,000 users it had added in the week-ago period. In addition, the company noted it had seen "significantly more than a 100% [daily active users] increase." On Tuesday, Bluesky told TechCrunch the number is now 2.4 million and continues to grow "by the minute."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: New analyses from the Annenberg Public Policy Center find that public perceptions of scientists' credibility -- measured as their competence, trustworthiness, and the extent to which they are perceived to share an individual's values -- remain high, but their perceived competence and trustworthiness eroded somewhat between 2023 and 2024. The research also found that public perceptions of scientists working in artificial intelligence (AI) differ from those of scientists as a whole. [...] The five factors in Factors Assessing Science's Self-Presentation (FASS) are whether science and scientists are perceived to be credible and prudent, and whether they are perceived to overcome bias, correct error (self-correcting), and whether their work benefits people like the respondent and the country as a whole (beneficial). [...] In the FASS model, perceptions of scientists' credibility are assessed through perceptions of whether scientists are competent, trustworthy, and "share my values." The first two of those values slipped in the most recent survey. In 2024, 70% of those surveyed strongly or somewhat agree that scientists are competent (down from 77% in 2023) and 59% strongly or somewhat agree that scientists are trustworthy (down from 67% in 2023). The survey also found that in 2024, fewer people felt that scientists' findings benefit "the country as a whole" and "benefit people like me." In 2024, 66% strongly or somewhat agreed that findings benefit the country as a whole (down from 75% in 2023). Belief that scientists' findings "benefit people like me," also declined, to 60% from 68%. Taken together, those two questions make up the beneficial factor of FASS. The findings follow sustained attacks on climate and COVID-19-related science, and more recently, public concerns about the rapid development and deployment of artificial intelligence. Here's what the study found when comparing perceptions of scientists in general with climate and AI scientists: - Credibility: When asked about three factors underlying scientists' credibility, AI scientists have lower credibility in all three values.
- Competent: 0% strongly/somewhat agree that scientists are competent, but only 62% for climate scientists and 49% for AI scientists.
- Trustworthy: 59% agree scientists are trustworthy, 54% agree for climate scientists, 28% for AI scientists.
- Share my values: A higher number (38%) agree that climate scientists share my values than for scientists in general (36%) and AI scientists (15%). More people disagree with this for AI scientists (35%) than for the others.
- Prudence: Asked whether they agree or disagree that science by various groups of scientists "creates unintended consequences and replaces older problems with new ones," over half of those surveyed (59%) agree that AI scientists create unintended consequences and just 9% disagree.
- Overcoming bias: Just 42% of those surveyed agree that scientists "are able to overcome human and political biases," but only 21% feel that way about AI scientists. In fact, 41% disagree that AI scientists are able to overcome human political biases. In another area, just 23% agree that AI scientists provide unbiased conclusions in their area of inquiry and 38% disagree.
- Self-correction: Self-correction, or "organized skepticism expressed in expectations sustaining a culture of critique," as the FASS paper puts it, is considered by some as a "hallmark of science." AI scientists are seen as less likely than scientists or climate scientists to take action to prevent fraud; take responsibility for mistakes; or to have mistakes that are caught by peer review.
- Benefits: Asked about the benefits from scientists' findings, 60% agree that scientists' "findings benefit people like me," though just 44% agree for climate scientists and 35% for AI scientists. Asked about whether findings benefit the country as a whole, 66% agree for scientists, 50% for climate scientists and 41% for AI scientists.
- Your best interest: The survey also asked respondents how much trust they have in scientists to act in the best interest of people like you. (This specific trust measure is not a part of the FASS battery.) Respondents have less trust in AI scientists than in others: 41% have a great deal/a lot of trust in medical scientists; 39% in climate scientists; 36% in scientists; and 12% in AI scientists.