Academic disciplines

A livestreamer sells products at a JD outsourcing livestream company in Beijing, China on November 9, 2021.Photo: Jade Gao / AFP (Getty Images)The Chinese government issued a long list of new guidelines for internet livestreamers and so-called influencers this week, according to a new report from the South China Morning Post and rules posted online. The new rules prohibit influencers from talking about topics like law, medicine, and finance, unless thoseinternet personalities have some kind of qualifications. What…

The only real limits to DALL-E Mini are the creativity of your own prompts and its uncanny brushwork. The accessible-to-all AI internet image generator can conjure up blurry, twisted, melting approximations of whatever scenario you can think up. Seinfeld nightmares? You got it. Court room sketches of animals, vehicles, and notable people in varying combinations? Easy peasy. Never before seen horror monsters from the mind of the mindless. Sure, whatever.But give DALL-E Mini literally nothing, and it quickly reveals the…

Photo: AFP (Getty Images)The Pentagon’s marching forward with AI weapons of war… responsibly.This week, the Department of Defense released a lengthy 47-page document outlining the military’s plan to implement its responsible artificial intelligence principles, which basically seeks to integrate AI in the military without turning the world into a Terminator-esque hellscape. Though the DoD first outlined its ethical AI goals in 2020, this week’s Responsible Pathway to AI Development and Acceleration document details…

Photo: John MacDougall (Getty Images)Microsoft’s turning its back on its scientifically suspect and ethically dubious emotion recognition technology. For now, at least.In a major win for privacy advocates sounding the alarm on under-tested and invasive biometric technology, Microsoft announced it’s planning to retire its so-called “emotion recognition” detection systems from its Azure Face facial recognition services. The company will also phase out capabilities that attempt to use AI to infer identity attributes like…

The proposed space bubbles could deflect some of the Sun’s rays. Image: MIT Senseable CityA team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believe that we can mitigate the worst of climate change with… space bubbles. They’ve outlined a strategy in which a huge raft of bubbles, carefully positioned between Earth and the Sun, would deflect sunlight (and thus heat) to stop further global warming.01:57Rainn Wilson’s First Fandoms: Star Trek And D&DYesterday 4:32PM“Geoengineering might be our final and…

The Voicemod app now includes voices for rough approximations of Morgan Freeman, HAL-9000, and more.Screenshot: VoicemodI wanted to see how alike I could be to HAL-9000 in my own, ragged rendition of the song Daisy Bell. It turns out, I actually sound better as the vague approximation of the demented artificial intelligence from 2001: A Space Odyssey than either HAL’s actor Douglas Rain or my normal, human voice.The Spain-based company Voicemod revealed its new beta AI Voices product Wednesday that promotes it uses AI to…

Illustration: ESA/Gaia/DPAC/CU6It wasn’t all stars for Gaia’s third dataset. The space observatory also mapped the orbit of more than 150,000 asteroids, from the inner parts of the solar system all the way out to the Trojan asteroids that trail behind, and lead in front of, Jupiter. The different types of asteroids are indicated by different colors.The yellow dot at the center of the illustration is the Sun, while the blue represents the inner part of the solar system,with its rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth, and…

Image: TorDotComIf you are in the global north and want to migrate to a fictional dystopia, then you have lost your grip on reality but also, more worryingly, may have expat colonial/oligarch aspirations: your only possible reason for wanting to move could be to reinforce that dystopia’s ruling elite. This advisory is not for you.If you’re in the global south and being forced to migrate by your regional totalitarian/oligarch combination, war, invasion, climate catastrophe, or by economic/social devastation caused by that…

Illustration: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)People might be more hotheaded than we thought. In new research this week, scientists say they were able to create the first maps of healthy people’s brain temperatures. Their findings indicate that brain temperature varies widely depending on many factors, like the time of day and region of the brain, but that it’s typically warmer than the rest of our body.The study was conducted primarily by researchers at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory for Molecular Biology in…

Saudis want to live longer, healthier lives.Photo: Amr Nabil (AP)The obnoxiously affluent Saudi Arabia is trying to prove that maybe money can buy everything after all, pouring $1 billion a year into researching ways to slow down the effects of aging. The gulf state’s royal family started a non-profit organization that would grant funds to scientists to understand the underlying causes of aging, and how to mitigate them using drugs, according to the MIT Technology Review.The Hevolution Foundation will look into biotech…