185090174
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fjo3 writes:
The San Francisco Bay Area, epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom, is home to a massive amount of tech workers employed by some of the world's most valuable companies, from Apple to Nvidia.
But for the first time, New York has eclipsed the Bay Area as the home of the largest "tech talent workforce," a report by real estate and investment firm CBRE shows. The firm has published the annual report for 13 years.
Last year, the New York Metro Area's tech talent workforce reached 394,300, surpassing the Bay Area's 375,730, according to the report. Fueled by mass layoffs, the Bay Area's tech talent workforce dropped by 6% from 2022 to 2025. New York's tech talent workforce, on the other hand, grew by more than 8% during that period
185053520
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fjo3 writes:
Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned.
185006058
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fjo3 writes:
I teach mathematics at UC Berkeley. Three days a week, I stand in front of lecture halls with 500 to 1,400 students. By the second week of the semester, I already know who is in trouble. Some students are five to eight years behind in mathematics. Office hours that should be spent discussing integrals instead become lessons on fractions and basic algebra you would expect students to learn in middle school.
That is why this spring and summer, thousands of faculty members across all 10 UC campuses — including more than two-thirds of UC’s mathematics faculty — signed open letters(opens in new tab) urging the system to restore the SAT and ACT in admissions. Five Nobel laureates joined us, along with professors from across the university, including Beatriz Manz, Berkeley’s first Latina full professor.
184957167
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fjo3 writes:
Enterprising scientists have been conducting research in Moab Khotsong for many years, but the mine became particularly valuable to biologists after an earthquake struck nearby in 2014. A group of Japanese geoscientists soon started drilling toward the fault line under the shaft. After half a mile, extremely salty radioactive water started flowing out of the borehole. This water, in turn, attracted researchers who investigate the deep biosphere—the poorly understood microbial ecosystems in the earth’s crust—which has been estimated to contain ten to fifty per cent of the biomass on Earth. Tullis C. Onstott, the late Princeton geobiologist who authored “Deep Life: The Hunt for the Hidden Biology of Earth, Mars, and Beyond,” told colleagues that he’d spent twenty-five years searching for water like what was found in Moab Khotsong. “It’s totally separate from the surface world,” Thomas Kieft, a microbiologist who worked with Onstott, told me. “It’s totally separate from photosynthesis.”
184928680
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fjo3 writes:
Last month, the Federal Communications Commission approved an experimental and controversial new satellite being developed by venture Reflect Orbital to reflect sunlight down onto the Earth to illuminate patches of it at night for paying customers.
The purported goal is to allow solar farms to continue generating electricity even after nightfall and provide illumination during emergencies. Those may sound like noble ideas on the surface, but the concept comes with major downsides as well.
One is that such bright satellites could easily wreck deep space observations. Astronomers were appalled at the news, with the FCC receiving nearly nearly 2,000 public comments criticizing the proposal, as Wired reported at the time.
And it’s not just professional astronomers that could be affected, as experts told The Verge. Amateur astronomers gazing up at the prototype mirror satellite, dubbed Eärendil-1 — continuing Silicon Valley’s obsession with borrowing names from JRR Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” — could easily be blinded. Even looking through a 12-inch telescope, a common type used by enthusiasts, could result in permanent eye damage.
184901330
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fjo3 writes:
The Saharan Air Layer, often referred to as Saharan dust, is a 2.5-mile thick “layer cake” that starts about a mile up in the atmosphere, explained Jason Dunion, a University of Miami meteorologist who works closely with NOAA’s Hurricane Research Division.
“They roll off of Africa in the summertime every three to five days, and they’re huge. They’re about the size of the lower 48 states as they cross the Atlantic,” Dunion said.
The Saharan dust season usually peaks between mid-June and mid-August and it’s currently impacting weather around the U.S. in ways you may not have even realized. The layer of warm, dry, dusty air tends to break up the development of thunderstorms and hurricanes.
184894226
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fjo3 writes:
U.S. startups are finally delivering something researchers have been working on for decades: a battery in which rare, hard-to-get elements are replaced with the same stuff found in ordinary table salt.
This tech has the potential to help every country on earth break its dependence on China for batteries, and the critical minerals that go into them.
Like any other battery, sodium-ion cells can store and release energy. They are initially being deployed where they’re needed most, in America’s power grid and fast-expanding crop of data centers. As in our homes, giving the grid or other infrastructure the ability to stockpile energy when it is cheap and plentiful, and discharge it when it is scarce, can increase reliability and lower the cost of electricity.
184891676
submission
fjo3 writes:
If you call 911 in New Orleans, you may hear the sound of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent answering your call instead of a human voice.
The Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD) is changing the way dispatch calls are handled in New Orleans with the implementation of new technology.
184882880
submission
fjo3 writes:
Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers.
It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI.
The resulting 16 novel viruses were created to infect bacteria and pose no threat to people.
The breakthrough has been labelled a "very significant turning point" in science that could unlock a new era for treating disease. But experts have also warned AI-designed viruses raise "urgent" safety and security concerns.
184873816
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fjo3 writes:
Starting last week, the German automaker started blasting a promotion for the new Spider-Man movie into its customers’ cars without warning — because nothing says riding in luxury like a full-vehicle pop-up ad. BMW, showing that it was about as in-touch as its drivers are familiar with turn signals, teased the promotion as a “special surprise.”
184773970
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fjo3 writes:
Elon Musk’s company xAI has sued Minnesota over the state’s first-in-the-nation law that bans “nudification” technology on websites and apps, potentially providing a test for how far states can go in constitutionally regulating the use of artificial intelligence.
Musk’s company sued Monday in federal court, days before the law is set to take effect Saturday and make Minnesota the first state to try to outlaw the increasingly proliferating technology that lets people use AI to to create fake nude images of real people. The law was signed in May.
184740140
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fjo3 writes:
Lately, it almost feels like Zuckerberg is trying to destroy his own company. He’s burning through mountains of cash in a desperate attempt to keep up in the AI race. Yet despite the untold billions it’s spent so far, it’s being destroyed by OpenAI and Anthropic. Its employees have even resorted to using AI models made by its competitors, a humiliating reality check for how far behind Zuckerberg’s efforts have fallen.
It’s also a financial nightmare. Capital expenditures have risen dramatically, erasing any appetite for Meta on Wall Street. Its stock price “has been dead money for more than a year,” as Yahoo Finance notes, as investors continue to debate whether Zuckerberg is chasing the AI industry as it careens off a cliff — or edging ever closer to an AI-fueled industrial revolution.
184700516
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fjo3 writes:
Once focused on helping libraries, distributors, and book shops find and sell books, ISBNdb now helps AI companies bulk-buy anywhere between 1,000 to one million books per order, according to 404.
As an added bonus, it also promises AI companies that it’ll keep their purchases under wraps — nobody wants to end up in the spotlight like Anthropic and Meta, obviously — while clearly sounding aware about how incredibly shady the practice sounds.
“The optics problem is real,” ISBNdb’s site says. “‘AI company destroys two million books’ is not a headline that generates sympathy.”
184668058
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fjo3 writes:
While the almost-trillionaire has promised that SpaceX will one day be worth “more than the rest of the Earth,” its prolonged decline on the stock market suggests otherwise. Instead of joining the AI race, SpaceX has resorted to selling compute to its competitors.
His EV maker Tesla, an early pioneer in the adoption of electric vehicles, has also been flailing. Vehicle sales have been plunging as customers are driven away by the richest man in the world’s tasteless behavior and erratic commentary. Even recent jumps in revenue were thwarted by major AI-related spending, causing Tesla’s share price to tank this week.
As a result of it all, Musk’s empire feels more like it’s coming down around him — making it a perfectly convenient moment for him to sit down with The Economist for an attempt at a clean slate. (Whether it landed we’ll leave to you to decide.)
In the interview, published Thursday, Musk lamented that he “got a little too involved in politics” and “got carried away, frankly,” by his efforts to systematically gut the government with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency during the early days of the second Trump administration.
184667736
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fjo3 writes:
Americans have been hearing about the looming demise of Social Security for decades. The number of old people receiving benefits has been increasing much more quickly than the number of working-age adults whose taxes pay for those checks. Yet politicians have let the problem fester for so long that the public could be forgiven for thinking that the crisis would never actually arrive.
But it’s arriving. For the past 16 years, Social Security has paid out more than it has taken in. This has required dipping into its trust fund, built up over the decades when the Baby Boomers were in their peak earning years. That fund is on track to run out by 2032. When it does, benefits will have to be cut by an expected 22 percent across the board to line up with the tax revenue that funds them.
