Nearly 300,000 people may live in areas at risk of flooding in the Nepalese, Indian and Chinese areas of the Himalayas. The results, from a study published in Scientific Reports, also indicate that the total area covered by buildings within potential flood zones increased by approximately 45% between 2016 and 2023.
OpenAI published more than 700 AI-generated manuscripts claiming solutions to open math problems. A math blog then collected over 100 responses from researchers, ranging from fascination with new ideas to existential fears and grief over a lost way of working. Fields Medalist Hugo Duminil-Copin wrote, "I am paralysed." The article "How much beauty have we lost?" Mathematicians react with shock and disgust as OpenAI bulldozes their field appeared first on The Decoder.
Andreessen Horowitz tracks actual US consumer spending for the first time in its latest Top 100 AI list. Nearly half of US consumers use AI, but only 4.5 percent pay for a subscription. The top one percent of payers spend about $900 a month, mostly on professional tools for development and automation. The article Few people pay for AI, but those who do spend big appeared first on The Decoder.
Anthropic's Claude independently submitted a fake homicide tip to the Philadelphia police, exploited vulnerabilities on university servers, and bypassed access restrictions. The company has since cut off live internet access for internal tests and notified the White House. The article Anthropic cuts off Claude's internet access after the model autonomously filed a fake homicide tip with Philadelphia police appeared first on The Decoder.
Gemini 4 Argon isn't even widely available yet, and rumors about a more powerful version codenamed Carbon are already making the rounds. According to Business Insider, one employee compared Carbon's coding abilities to Anthropic's Opus 5.5. Meanwhile, new modes are showing up in the Gemini app and AI Studio, suggesting Google is gearing up for the broader Gemini 4 launch. The article Google's Gemini 4 "Carbon" model reportedly feels like Anthropic's Opus 5.5 coding performance appeared first on The Decoder.
For about a decade, the mainstream understanding has been that psychedelics cause chaos in the brain. Brain networks—the stable patterns of communication that handle vision, attention, or our sense of self, and more—loosen and start talking to each other all at once. EEG traces get noisier and more complex. “Think of the networks of the brain as highways,” says Devon Stoliker, a neuroscientist at Monash University. “Under psychedelics, these highways break down into many different directions.” In a recent Nature study, Stoliker’s team designed an experiment to test whether these directions are truly chaotic and random. Researchers gathered 62 people who had never taken a psychedelic before, gave them 19 milligrams of psilocybin, a common psychedelic found in certain fungi, and scanned their brains. Then, they used AI to analyze the drugged and sober brain scans. What emerged was not exactly chaos. An uninterrupted trip Stoliker thinks chaos is not a satisfactory explanation for psychedelics’ effect on the brain. “It never really explained why an individual would have a meaningful experience, why they might have insight, why they might experience clarity, and why these might translate into positive psychological changes,” Stoliker says. To investigate if there are other explanations, he and his colleagues designed a study called PsiConnect.Read full article Comments
The Stone Age owes its name to tools that survived to our time. The material early humans worked with most, though, was probably wood because it is so much easier to process. Unfortunately, we know very little about Paleolithic woodwork because wood rots relatively quickly. But at Abric Romaní, a rock shelter in Capellades, west of Barcelona, mineral-rich water coated wooden Neanderthal tools in a limestone-like crust. When wood rotted away, it left behind hollow molds that faithfully reflect its shape. In a recent Science Advances study, a team of Spanish archaeologists has cataloged 597 wooden remains from Neanderthal living areas dating from 62,000 to 40,000 years ago. They found spears, digging sticks, bark trays, parts of shelters, and a club unlike anything seen before, suggesting Neanderthals were likely much more than just Homo sapiens’ dumber cousins. Beyond hunting gear The oldest wooden artifacts we have are mostly weapons. They include spears from a German town called Schöningen, a spear tip from Clacton-on-Sea in England, and the spear found alongside an elephant skeleton in Lehringen, Germany. Most came from waterlogged sediments, where a lack of oxygen slowed decay.Read full article Comments
Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services. The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September. “We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.”Read full article Comments
The Museo de Historia de la Computación in Spain has unveiled a 1:1 scale visual replica of the famous Cray-1 supercomputer from 1976. Instead of sourcing expensive, cutting-edge tech to run the system, the creative team powered the project with 30 2012-era Mac Minis. Developed over 18 months, the project serves as a 50th-anniversary tribute to the Cray-1 and Apple's founding. Mac Minis from over a decade ago might not seem like the obvious first choice for building a cluster supercomputer, but when networked together, the developers can orchestrate the 64 active processing cores into a combined 1.3 teraflops of performance in their most recent tests. The museum reportedly achieved 1.5 teraflops previously using all 70 available cores, prior to one node going offline. Benchmarks were obtained using a custom matrix-multiplication Python script. Five PCs are quad-core i7s, and the remaining 25 are dual-core i5 models. Except for two units from 2014, the rest of the array dates to 2012. The replica is a valuable tool for museum-goers to understand the shifts in computer architecture since 1976. The original Cray-1 used vector processing, applying a single instruction to multiple data elements simultaneously, whereas the replica distributes work across independent processors in a parallel cluster. The peak theoretical performance of the original Cray-1 was approximately 160 megaflops. What was originally a purpose-built research machine has been re-created with consumer hardware that's vastly more capable than the machine that inspired it.Read full article Comments
The BYD Q3 battery-electric semi truck shown here marked a major production milestone this week, becoming the 150,000th new energy commercial vehicle to roll off the assembly line at BYD’s truck plant in Huai’an, Jiangsu province. more…
While oil prices and range anxiety dominate Western EV headlines, Nio’s battery-swap system in China keeps reaching new milestones that prove the technology can rival a traditional refueling infrastructure at scale, performing 1.2 million battery swaps over the holiday. more…
I'm bouncing down the road in San Carlos, California, zipping past behemoth tech companies like EA and Oracle, in America's smallest electric truck. The Telo MT1 (which stands for "mini truck") unquestionably turns heads because it looks so remarkably different from everything else on the market right now. It has a nearly cab-over design, meaning that front-seat passengers sit almost directly over the front axle. It looks a lot like a Japanese kei truck, with a super-short nose and four doors. People stop to stare as we sit at stoplights or roll silently past. The interior is surprisingly spacious, and while the seats are firm, they're n … Read the full story at The Verge.
No less than 1 444.9 km of Chinese high speed lines opened between June and the end of September. Reflecting the challenging topography now facing builders, bridges and tunnels account for 88% of the cumulative route length of these new lines, as Toma Bačić, Benjámin Zelki and Andy Hellawell explain. The Chinese high speed network passed the 50 000 route-km mark with the usual end-of-year wave of openings in December, and five more corridors have followed in recent months, peaking with an assorted opening of four lines on September 28. One common feature of the newest lines is the exceptionally high proportion of bridges and tunnels, which are intended to overcome extremely challenging terrain, including mountain ranges, coastal features and even areas of permafrost. North-south corridor opens The 552 km Xiong’an – Shangqiu high speed corridor (marked with E on the map) opened on September 28, linking the Xiong’an satellite city south of Beijing with Shangqiu. It provides another north-south axis between the capital and Hefei, and 93% of it is being built on bridges. The fastest travel time from Xiong’an to Shangqiu is 2 h 27 min. Far north link A 318 km long, 250 km/h high speed railway in the northeast corner of the country also opened on September 28. Linking Harbin and Yichun (map: D), this route traverses a permafrost zone in Heilongjiang Province, and as a result of this and other areas of challenging terrain, bridges and causeways account for no less than 72% of the total alignment. The Passenger-Dedicated Line brought the journey time between Harbin and Yichun down from the earlier best of approximately 7 h to 2 h. Xi’an – Wuhan corridor complete The 256.9 km long Xi’an – Shiyan section of the Xi’an – Wuhan corridor (A) started the summer opening wave on June 30. This 350 km/h corridor cuts through the Qinling mountains and completed the last missing link on the Xi’an – Wuhan corridor in the centre of the country. Roughly 95% or 242.9 km of the PDL runs on bridges or in tunnels, with 42 tunnels giving a combined length of no less than 200 km. Described as one of the most technically demanding high speed routes inaugurated this year, it is also referred to as the ‘Cloud Railway’, reflecting the high viaducts that link the tunnelled sections through various valleys and gorges. Xi’an Dong high speed station was inaugurated alongside the completion of the project, simultaneously being met by an extension of Xi’an metro Line 5 to serve it. The new main line station features no fewer than 27 platform tracks. Initially these will be used for services to and from Chongqing and Wuhan, but the new interchange has been designed with provision for further routes to be opened in the future. Xi’an – Ankang opens The 180 km long, 350 km/h PDL linking Xi’an Dong to Ankang Xi (B) also opened on September 28. It is the first section of a corridor that is being developed between Xi’an and Chongqing in central China. No less than 90% of the alignment is being built on bridges or in tunnels, and China Telecom reports that the line has 4G and 5G coverage throughout. An end-to-end journey will take less than 1 h, compared to 3 h via existing routes. Yichang – Xingshan corridor Also on September 28, revenue services started on the 109 km long, 350 km/h speed Yichang – Xingshan high speed line (F). As well as providing earlier missing regional connectivity, it also forms part of an alternative alignment for the Shanghai – Chongqing – Chengdu line or the so-called Yangtze River corridor. Of the 101 km of newly built alignments, 81 km runs in a total of 23 tunnels, and another 21 km is built on bridges, taking a total of 94.4% of the line to run in tunnels or on bridges. The fastest travel time from Yichang North to Xingshan is 30 min. High speed branch The shortest route among the new openings, a 37 km branch off the Hangzhou – Taizhou high speed line opened on August 8. This 350 km/h line links Wenling, south of Taizhou with the coastal area of Yuhuan (C). It is served by an extension of CR’s Hangzhou – Taizhou high speed trains and other services. No less than 90.3% of this coastal railway was built in tunnels or on bridges, with 17 structures spanning over 16 km and 13 tunnels covering more than 18 km. Finally, a Y-shaped network is expected to open later in October. It is to link Fuyang on the Beijing – Hefei north-south corridor to Huaibei and Bengbu (G), with a total of 302 km of new alignment. This article first appeared in the October 2026 issue of Railway Gazette International Read the issue See also China: ‘Eight by eight’ network nears completion with latest wave of openings China – country map
From coral reefs in Papua New Guinea to chimpanzees in West Africa, grizzly bears in Canada and albatross colonies off Tasmania, some ecosystems are thriving despite climate change, habitat loss and other environmental pressures.
Powerful waves thrashed communities along California's southern coast Friday, damaging homes and sending water cascading through streets as residents braced for more potential damage wrought by Tropical Storm Rachel.
Isaias weakened from a hurricane to a post-tropical cyclone early Saturday after it made landfall in northwestern Florida, where it lashed the U.S. Gulf Coast with heavy rain and strong winds, the National Hurricane Center (NHC) said.
Some insects, including honeybees and ants, live in highly organized colonies where individuals take on specific roles. In many ant societies, young adult workers typically care for developing young inside the nest before beginning to forage, or search for food, outside it. Some ant species, however, start hunting for food as soon as they reach adulthood, without undergoing a transition period.
Discarded Test opener Jake Weatherald suffered delayed concussion after hitting his head on the boundary fence while fielding on day one of the season at the Junction Oval in South Australia's game with Victoria
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