05 Sci-Tech

How political discourse impacts on trust in science– cosmosmagazine.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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A new study has shown that community trust in Australian and New Zealand scientists is the highest in the developed world, and the authors say – surprisingly – it might be because local politics doesn’t get in the way.

Not everyone agrees.

The survey results were posted yesterday. The study of 70,000 respondents compares public trust in climate scientists and scientists in general across 68 countries.

It reveals that on average, participants reported moderately high levels of trust in climate scientists, with trust levels being slightly lower than in scientists in general.

“Overall, this trust gap was larger among participants who identified as politically conservative or right-leaning, but there was considerable variation across countries,” the report concludes.

Judge allows lawsuit alleging AI chatbot pushed Florida teen to kill himself to proceed– www.cbc.ca

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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A U.S. federal judge on Wednesday rejected arguments made by an artificial intelligence company that its chatbots are protected by the First Amendment — at least for now.

The developers behind Character.AI are seeking to dismiss a lawsuit alleging the company’s chatbots pushed a teenage boy to kill himself. The judge’s order will allow the wrongful death lawsuit to proceed, in what legal experts say is among the latest constitutional tests of artificial intelligence.

The suit was filed by a mother from Florida, Megan Garcia, who alleges that her 14-year-old son Sewell Setzer III fell victim to a Character.AI chatbot that pulled him into what she described as an emotionally and sexually abusive relationship that led to his suicide.

Meetali Jain of the Tech Justice Law Project, one of the attorneys for Garcia, said the judge’s order sends a message that Silicon Valley “needs to stop and think and impose guardrails before it launches products to market.”

A new technology for extending the shelf life of produce– www.sciencedaily.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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We’ve all felt the sting of guilt when fruit and vegetables go bad before we could eat them. Now, researchers from MIT and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) have shown they can extend the shelf life of harvested plants by injecting them with melatonin using biodegradable microneedles.

That’s a big deal because the problem of food waste goes way beyond our salads. More than 30 percent of the world’s food is lost after it’s harvested — enough to feed more than 1 billion people. Refrigeration is the most common way to preserve foods, but it requires energy and infrastructure that many regions of the world can’t afford or lack access to.

The researchers believe their system could offer an alternative or complement to refrigeration. Central to their approach are patches of silk microneedles. The microneedles can get through the tough, waxy skin of plants without causing a stress response, and deliver precise amounts of melatonin into plants’ inner tissues.

AI could make grading faster for teachers– www.futurity.org

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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A new study suggests that AI could speed up the grading process for teachers, but it may sacrifice some accuracy in the process.

Many states have adopted the Next Generation Science Standards, which emphasize the importance of argumentation, investigation, and data analysis. But teachers following the curriculum face challenges when it’s time to grade students’ work.

“Asking kids to draw a model, to write an explanation, to argue with each other are very complex tasks,” says Xiaoming Zhai, corresponding author of the study and an associate professor and director of AI4STEM Education Center in University of Georgia’s Mary Frances Early College of Education.

“Teachers often don’t have enough time to score all the students’ responses, which means students will not be able to receive timely feedback.”

The study explored how Large Language Models grade students’ work compared to humans. LLMs are a type of AI that are trained using a large amount of information, usually from the internet. They use that data to “understand” and generate human language.

 

AI doesn’t know ‘no’ – and that’s a huge problem for medical bots– www.newscientist.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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Toddlers may swiftly master the meaning of the word “no”, but many artificial intelligence models struggle to do so. They show a high fail rate when it comes to understanding commands that contain negation words such as “no” and “not”.

That could mean medical AI models failing to realise that there is a big difference between an X-ray image labelled as showing “signs of pneumonia” and one labelled as showing “no signs of pneumonia” – with potentially catastrophic consequences if physicians rely on AI…

Trump announces ‘Golden Dome’ missile defence system plan– www.euronews.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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US President Donald Trump has unveiled a scheme to build a $175 billion (€154bn) missile defence system called the “Golden Dome”, claiming it could be “fully operational” by the end of his presidential term.

The announcement on Tuesday came roughly four months after Trump signed an executive order, instructing the Pentagon to draw up plans to defend the US against “catastrophic” aerial attacks.

Although the exact scope of the Golden Dome project remains unclear, Trump said the system would involve “next-generation” technologies, including space-based sensors and interceptors.

“Once fully constructed, the Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world, and even if they are launched from space,” Trump claimed.

Foxconn builds AI factory in partnership with Taiwan and Nvidia– venturebeat.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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Nvidia and Foxconn Hon Hai Technology Group today announced they are deepening their longstanding partnership and are working with the Taiwan government to build an AI factory supercomputer that will deliver state-of-the-art Nvidia Blackwell infrastructure to researchers, startups and industries.

Foxconn will provide the AI infrastructure through its subsidiary Big Innovation Company as an Nvidia Cloud Partner. Featuring 10,000 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, the AI factory will significantly expand AI computing availability and fuel innovation for Taiwan researchers and enterprises.

The Taiwan National Science and Technology Council will use the Big Innovation Company supercomputer to provide AI cloud computing resources to the Taiwan technology ecosystem, accelerating AI development and adoption across sectors.

TSMC researchers plan to leverage the system to advance its research and development with orders-of-magnitude faster performance, compared with previous-generation systems.

“AI has ignited a new industrial revolution — science and industry will be transformed,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia in a keynote talk at Computex 2025 in Taiwan. “We are delighted to partner with Foxconn and Taiwan to help build Taiwan’s AI infrastructure, and to support TSMC and other leading companies to advance innovation in the age of AI and robotics.”

Blue State Vermont Dumping Unworkable Electric Vehicle Mandates– lidblog.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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The deep blue state of Vermont has run into the inevitable brick wall that electric vehicle mandates always leads to and they have come to their senses by dumping the dreamy green mandates they had envisioned.

Vermont’s Democrat Governor Phil Scott issued an executive order this month halting enforcement of the state’s EV mandates, which demanded that 35 percent of all vehicles be electric by 2026.

Per Reuters:

Vermont is one of 11 states including New York, Maryland and Massachusetts that have adopted California’s zero-emission vehicle rules, which seek to end the sale of gasoline-only vehicles by 2035. California’s rules require 35% of light-duty vehicles in the 2026 model year to be zero-emission models.

Scott cited warnings from automakers that they could limit supply of gas-powered vehicles to dealers in the state because of the EV rules.

“It’s clear we don’t have anywhere near enough charging infrastructure and insufficient technological advances in heavy-duty vehicles to meet current goals,” said Scott.

140,000-year-old Homo erectus bones discovered on ‘drowned land’ in Indonesia– www.livescience.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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Bones from an extinct human ancestor have been recovered from the seafloor, revealing a previously unknown Homo erectus population in Southeast Asia that may have interacted with more modern humans, new studies find.

The H. erectus bones were among a cache of more than 6,000 animal fossils hoovered up as part of a construction project off the island of Java in Indonesia. This is the first time scientists have seen fossils from the submerged parts of the Indonesian archipelago, which connected islands like Java to the Asian mainland during the last ice age, when sea levels were lower.

These lost lands, called drowned Sundaland, were once vast open plains interspersed with rivers around 140,000 years ago. The newly discovered fossils revealed the rivers were teeming with fish, turtles, river sharks, hippos and other marine life, while terrestrial giants such as elephants, the elephant-like Stegodon and water buffalo populated the plains, according to the studies.

AI can do a better job of persuading people than we do– www.technologyreview.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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Their findings are the latest in a growing body of research demonstrating LLMs’ powers of persuasion. The authors warn they show how AI tools can craft sophisticated, persuasive arguments if they have even minimal information about the humans they’re interacting with. The research has been published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

“Policymakers and online platforms should seriously consider the threat of coordinated AI-based disinformation campaigns, as we have clearly reached the technological level where it is possible to create a network of LLM-based automated accounts able to strategically nudge public opinion in one direction,” says Riccardo Gallotti, an interdisciplinary physicist at Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Italy, who worked on the project.

“These bots could be used to disseminate disinformation, and this kind of diffused influence would be very hard to debunk in real time,” he says.

The researchers recruited 900 people based in the US and got them to provide personal information like their gender, age, ethnicity, education level, employment status, and political affiliation.

Trump signs anti-deepfake revenge porn bill into law– mashable.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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The Take It Down Act, a controversial bipartisan bill recently hailed by First Lady Melania Trump as a tool to build a safer internet, is officially law, as President Donald Trump took to the White House Rose Garden today to put ink to legislative paper. It’s the first high-profile tech legislation to pass under the new administration.

“With the rise of AI image generation, countless women have been harassed with deepfakes and other explicit images distributed against their will. This is wrong, so horribly wrong, and it’s a very abusive situation,” said Trump at the time of signing. “This will be the first ever federal law to combat the distribution of explicit, imaginary, posted without subject’s consent… We’ve all heard about deepfakes. I have them all the time, but nobody does anything. I ask Pam [Bondi], ‘Can you help me Pam?’ She says, ‘No I’m too busy doing other things. Don’t worry you’ll survive.’ But a lot of people don’t survive, that’s true and so horrible… Today, we’re making it totally illegal.”

Elon Musk endorses conspiracy theory around Biden’s cancer diagnosis – MSN

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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President Donald Trump’s ally, Elon Musk, endorsed a conspiracy theory about former-President Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis in a post on X.

On Sunday night, right-wing podcast host Clint Russell took to X to accuse the Democrats of forging an “evil” plan to get Biden elected into office and strategically drop out because of his diagnosis, to pave the way for Kamala Harris to take the reins.

The former President was diagnosed with an “aggressive” prostate cancer on Friday, according to a spokesperson on his behalf.

“So the plan was to run Biden, lie about his cancer and dementia, get him back in the WH, and then have him immediately step aside so Kamala’s reign of terror could begin.

“All while trying to jail or kill DJT. Just making sure we’re all on the same page, here. These people are evil,” the Liberty Lockdown podcaster scorned on X.

New theory suggests dark matter formed from massless particles– www.techexplorist.com

pgnewser May 22, 2025 0

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The ΛCDM model is a widely accepted cosmology theory that explains the universe’s structure and evolution. Observational and experimental data strongly support it. However, the two key components—cold dark matter (making up about 25% of the universe) and dark energy (about 70%)—are still mysterious, and scientists are working to understand their true nature.

A Dartmouth professor and a physics-mathematics student propose a new theory on the origin of dark matter—the invisible substance shaping the universe. Their research suggests dark matter may have formed in the early universe from high-energy massless particles colliding and gaining mass instantly after pairing up.

Though still hypothetical, dark matter is believed to exist due to unexplained gravitational effects and is estimated to make up 85% of the universe’s total mass. Unlike previous theories, this new idea can be tested using existing data. If correct, these extremely low-energy particles would leave a unique mark on the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), the lingering radiation from the Big Bang.