AI isn't going to make a profit, so they are probably looking for something that will.

Since the scanning technique is to slice off the binding, remove the cover, and then auto-feed the pages through a high-speed scanner, it destroys the books anyway, regardless of the "stupid law".

Another win for Betteridge's law of headlines.

If the question were answered, the headline wouldn't have been in the form of a question.

The information buried way down in the article is that the atmospheric gas detected is helium.

Really not as exciting a discovery as the article makes it seem. Nobody doubts that planets can have helium in their atmosphere. In our solar system this is characteristic of the gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn) and the ice giants (Uranus, Neptune).

I admit that before now I hadn't even heard of this one.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
  Their website: https://zoox.com/
  News article: https://www.usatoday.com/story...

The article is missing key context information.

When Google says it's "shutting down" the project, does that mean that the AlphaFold software will cease to exist? Or does it mean, the project has been completed, and therefore the development team can be reassigned to new projects, but the AI prediction model can still be used to predict protein folding?

Why do you say it wouldn't be expected to have an accretion disk? The fact that we haven't seen it already isn't evidence.

"We don't know whether there are any kangaroos in my house. The fact that we haven't seen any means that they are invisible. How do we know that they are invisible? If they were visible, we would have seen them already."

Not close enough to notice. Stars are very far apart. No, strike that. Very very far apart.

The way to test it is to find Nemesis.

There were multiple searches looking for Nemesis, all of which failed to turn up anything. There's a bit of a discussion in the book "Collisions", by Alec Nevala-Lee
  https://unabridgedbookstore.co...

It should be rejected if it is a false positive correlation.

People have been looking for some periodicity in mass extinctions ever since the "Nemesis" hypothesis some forty-plus years ago. The problem is that each study trying to find periodicity found a different period, depending on the details of what they counted as disasters and what they didn't. (For what it's worth, the recent biography of Luis Alverez, "Collisions", talks about the search for periodicity,)

I worry about this part: they studied "mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions, ocean crises, and other upheavals". These are completely different things. Adding different things together makes false positives much more likely... and also makes the possibility of unconscious "p-hacking" by picking what events, and what kinds of events you choose to analyze to find a set that gives you that false positive.

(the actual paper's abstract lists "aspects of global tectonics in the ocean basins and on continents, fluctuations in sea levels and resulting sedimentation patterns, pulses of active volcanism, variations in ocean/atmospheric composition and climatic changes, biodiversity, and mass-extinction events" as what they included, which doesn't make me worry less.

Given that accidents requiring evacuation on commercial jets are roughly one in a million take-offs, and accidents resulting in loss of life about one in ten million take-offs, it's unlikely that setting up practice centers would save any lives.

Also worth noting that this follows on from the earlier Northrup-Grumman "Mission Extension Vehicle", which in 2019 launched to dock and reposition Intelsat 901, a first for a telerobotically operated spacecraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Some sites:
  https://www.northropgrumman.co...
  https://news.northropgrumman.c...

Coincidentally, Northrup Grumman was also involved in the SWIFT reboost mission, launched the beginning of this month, tp extend the lifetime of the Swift orbital telescope by boosting it into a higher orbit. (In this case, though, they didn't build the spacecraft, just provided the launch service, on a Pegasus)

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/n...

The incident report's actual words were:
  The campaign was run by an autonomous agent framework ... executing many thousands of individual actions across a swarm of short-lived sandboxes,

Ooh! I love syllogisms.

1. LLMs cannot actually do things like that with proper protections in place.
2. A LLM did that.
3. Conclusion?

Conclusion: proper protections were not in place.