05 Sci-Tech

Sperm whales may make their own vowel sounds, similar to human language– www.scientificamerican.com

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Sperm whales’ click-based communication system has patterns that echo how human languages use vowels, according to a new study published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“On the surface, [these vocalizations] sound like this alien, ocean intelligence that has nothing to do with us,” says lead author Gašper Beguš, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, who works with Project CETI, a nonprofit that is dedicated to studying sperm whale communication. “But when you actually look at it closely, you realize, ‘Oh, we’re way more similar.’”

Sperm whales flap “phonic lips” (a structure akin to human vocal cords) in their nose to create clicking sounds. They combine these clicks into rhythmic series called codas, which can vary from whale clan to whale clan. In the past, scientists trying to make sense of their communication have tended to focus on the rhythm of these patterns, almost as if deciphering morse code.

Colombia will euthanize Pablo Escobar’s invasive ‘cocaine hippos’– www.scientificamerican.com

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Colombia will euthanize Pablo Escobar’s invasive ‘cocaine hippos’

After attempts at relocation and sterilization have failed, invasive hippos introduced by the infamous drug lord will be culled, the country announced

After two years of failed attempts at relocation and sterilization, Colombia’s government has decided it will euthanize 80 of the at least 169 “cocaine hippos” that were once owned by notorious drug trafficker Pablo Escobar. The decision is triggering divided reactions among scientists and activists.

“Without this action it is impossible to control them,” said Colombia’s environment minister Irene Vélez at a press conference on Monday. Citing estimates that the population could reach at least 500 individuals by 2030, “affecting our ecosystems and native species,” she added that “it is our responsibility to take this action.”

Google DeepMind Releases Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6: Bringing Enhanced Embodied Reasoning and Instrument Reading to Physical AI– www.marktechpost.com

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Google DeepMind research team introduced Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a significant upgrade to its embodied reasoning model designed to serve as the ‘cognitive brain’ of robots operating in real-world environments. The model specializes in reasoning capabilities critical for robotics, including visual and spatial understanding, task planning, and success detection — acting as the high-level reasoning model for a robot, capable of executing tasks by natively calling tools like Google Search, vision-language-action models (VLAs), or any other third-party user-defined functions.

Here is the key architectural idea to understand: Google DeepMind takes a dual-model approach to robotics AI. Gemini Robotics 1.5 is the vision-language-action (VLA) model — it processes visual inputs and user prompts and directly translates them into physical motor commands. Gemini Robotics-ER, on the other hand, is the embodied reasoning model: it specializes in understanding physical spaces, planning, and making logical decisions, but does not directly control robotic limbs. Instead, it provides high-level insights to help the VLA model decide what to do next. Think of it as the difference between a strategist and an executor — Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 is the strategist.

AI Slop Is Making the Internet Fake-Happy– www.wired.com

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To anyone with a pulse and a smartphone, it’s obvious that the internet has an AI slop problem. The issue has grown more severe since ChatGPT launched in 2022, with some social platforms flooded with AI-generated writing. Now, there’s data to back up the anecdotal evidence.

A new preprint study published today from researchers at the Imperial College of London, Stanford University, and the Internet Archive found that approximately 35 percent of all new websites are either AI-generated or AI-assisted. The same study also found that online writing is “increasingly sanitized and artificially cheerful.” In other words, AI is making the internet fake-happy.

The research team tried four different approaches to AI detection before settling on tools from Pangram Labs after it delivered the most consistent results. (Though the team found it performed well on its tests, it is worth noting that all artificial intelligence detection tools are imperfect.) To compile a representative sample of websites, it tapped the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which collects snapshots of webpages. In addition to quantifying how many sites created between 2022 and 2025 lean on AI-generated writing, the study also tested six different theories about the characteristics of slop.

Thomson Reuters Fired Worker For Speaking Out About ICE, Former Employee Says– www.404media.co

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Thomson Reuters, the technology and content conglomerate that owns the Reuters media agency but also owns and operates the investigative CLEAR database, fired a longstanding employee after they spoke out about the company selling data products to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday.

The lawsuit and firing come after more than 200 employees wrote a letter to Thomson Reuters leadership about the company’s contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

“For nearly two decades, I helped Thomson Reuters build the legal resources that lawyers and law enforcement trust. When I saw evidence that our products were being used to harm people and undermine the law, I did what anyone should do—I raised the alarm. Thomson Reuters’ response was to fire me,” Billie Little, who was a senior attorney editor at Thomson Reuters, said in a statement shared with 404 Media by her attorneys.

Scientists discover why bread can cause weight gain without extra calories– www.sciencedaily.com

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Bread has long been a dietary cornerstone, sustaining societies for generations. It is deeply woven into everyday life. But with obesity rates continuing to climb, researchers are beginning to question whether this reliance on staple carbohydrates still makes sense in modern diets.

Obesity increases the risk of many lifestyle-related diseases, making prevention a major public health priority. Traditionally, research has focused on high fat consumption as the main driver of weight gain. This is why many animal studies rely on high fat diets.

However, carbohydrates such as bread, rice, and noodles are consumed daily around the world, yet their role in obesity and metabolism has not been explored as thoroughly. While many people believe that “bread makes you gain weight” or that “carbohydrates should be limited,” it has been unclear whether the issue lies in the foods themselves or in how people choose and consume them.

Scientists just recreated a rare cosmic reaction never seen before– www.sciencedaily.com

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Scientists have reported a major experimental advance in understanding how some of the rarest elements in the universe are formed. These unusual atoms, known as p-nuclei, are proton-rich isotopes heavier than iron that have long puzzled researchers.

The new study, led by Artemis Tsantiri, who conducted the work as a graduate student at the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) and is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Regina in Canada, achieved a milestone. For the first time, researchers directly measured how arsenic-73 captures a proton to form selenium-74 using a rare isotope beam. This result places new limits on how the lightest p-nucleus is created and destroyed in space.

The findings were published in Physical Review Letters (“Constraining the Synthesis of the Lightest Nucleus 74Se”) and involved more than 45 scientists from 20 institutions across the United States, Canada, and Europe.

After the Attack on Sam Altman’s Home, Will AI CEOs Go On the Offensive? – Mother Jones– www.motherjones.com

pgnewser April 14, 2026 1

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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, takes his seat before a meeting of the White House Task Force on Artificial Intelligence Education in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington.Alex Brandon/AP

Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily.

Sam Altman suggested that an investigative story describing him as someone “unconstrained by truth” with a “sociopathic lack of concern” for consequences caused an early Friday attack on his San Francisco home.

Physicists just witnessed pinpricks of darkness moving faster than the speed of light ‪—‬ without breaking the laws of relativity– www.livescience.com

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For the first time, researchers have detected empty voids moving faster than the speed of light — and they blazed past that cosmic speed limit without breaking the laws of relativity.

A recent study shows the voids’ acceleration. Researchers used recent advances in ultrafast electron microscopy to measure voids in phonon-polariton waves zooming around inside a thin flake of boron nitride. Phonon-polaritons are quasiparticles formed from photons (quantized light) coupled with tiny vibrations, and they act like light and sound waves combined.

An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story– www.tobru.ch

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And so it happened, my first real-world AI vibe coding horror story, one that affected me personally. –> Deutsche version

I went to a medical appointment and was greeted by a friendly person. Shortly after the warm welcome, they mentioned watching a video explaining how easy it is for anyone to build software with AI these days. That sparked an idea: why use an industry-proven solution when you could just build your own patient management system?

So they did exactly that. They fired up a coding agent, built a custom patient management application, imported all their existing patient data into it, and published it to the internet. They even added a feature to record conversations during appointments and send the audio to not one, but two AI services for automatic summaries. No more manual note-taking.

Google hosts AI for the Economy Forum in Washington D.C.– blog.google

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Today we’re bringing people together in Washington D.C. to discuss how AI will impact the economy and jobs. At our inaugural AI for the Economy Forum, co-hosted with MIT FutureTech, we’re starting with a simple premise: neither the benefits nor the risks are automatic or guaranteed. How AI impacts our lives, jobs and economy is something we as a society can shape – and fully realizing AI’s economic potential will require a new era of partnership between companies, workers, governments, researchers and more. At the forum, economists, industry leaders, policymakers and experts will gather to share information, identify gaps in current understanding, and lay the foundation for ongoing collaboration.

Google has a long-standing commitment to helping positively shape this transition. Today, we’re building on that commitment in two critical ways. First, we are making new investments in research to ensure governments, companies, researchers, and civil society have the information required to make smart decisions. Second, we are providing training opportunities to equip people with the skills needed to navigate a changing economy.

You Can Soon Buy a $4,370 Humanoid Robot on AliExpress– www.wired.com

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Listing consumer electronics on the internet’s large ecommerce marketplaces is a key step in “democratizing” the products, allowing them to be purchased by anyone with just a click. It has happened to cars (in the United States, you can buy a Hyundai on Amazon), and now it’s happening to humanoid robots.

The Chinese manufacturer Unitree Robotics, among the most active robot-makers in the field, is preparing to bring its most affordable model, the Unitree R1, to international markets through Alibaba Group’s marketplace. According to reports in The South China Morning Post, the rollout will initially cover North America, Japan, Singapore, and Europe. There’s no exact on-sale date for the robots yet, but the Post report says it will show up as soon as this week.

This is not the first time Unitree has used AliExpress as a global storefront. The company’s G1 model, the more powerful and more expensive predecessor to the R1, is already listed at just under $19,000.

U.S. defense contractors are getting a huge share of taxpayer dollars– www.yahoo.com

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Except for Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the national debt, defense contractors are getting the biggest share of Ohioans’ federal tax dollars, according to a new analysis.

Medicare and Medicaid provide health care to more than 144 million Americans, and paying interest on the $39 trillion national debt isn’t really optional. However, policymakers choose to spend nearly $900 billion a year on defense, and allow the Pentagon to ship 54% of that off to wealthy defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin — sometimes for weapons systems of questionable military value.

If you look at the federal tax bill of the average American, that person is giving those contractors more than he or she is paying for food and agriculture, school lunches, housing and urban development, disaster relief and national parks and the environment combined, according to the Institute for Policy Studies’ 2026 Tax Day report.

Man accused of attacking Sam Altman’s home charged with 2 counts of attempted murder– www.cbc.ca

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The man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s home has been charged with attempting to kill Altman and a security guard at the residence, San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins said Monday.

Authorities allege Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, threw the incendiary device about 4 a.m. local time Friday, setting an exterior gate at Altman’s home alight before fleeing on foot, police said. Less than an hour later, Moreno-Gama allegedly went to OpenAI’s headquarters a few kilometres away and reportedly threatened to burn down the building.

Moreno-Gama is opposed to artificial intelligence, writing about AI’s purported risk to humanity and “our impending extinction,” according to court documents.

“This was not spontaneous. This was planned, targeted and extremely serious,” said Matt Cobo, FBI San Francisco acting special agent in charge, during a news conference.

Universe is expanding faster than expected: Scientists struggle to explain cosmic acceleration |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com

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Universe is expanding faster than expected: Scientists struggle to explain cosmic acceleration |– timesofindia.indiatimes.com
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Not only is the Universe expanding, but its expansion is actually happening at a speed higher than was thought possible until recently. For many years now, physicists have been trying to establish the speed of galaxy movement through the Hubble constant. But the different measurement results have posed a dilemma for modern physics, and it seems like there is an inconsistency somewhere within our universe. The problem that lies before physicists is commonly known as the “Hubble tension” problem, and, despite recent discoveries and more detailed observations, it still lacks explanation.

Agentic coding at enterprise scale demands spec-driven development– venturebeat.com

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Agentic coding at enterprise scale demands spec-driven development– venturebeat.com
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Autonomous agents are compressing software delivery timelines from weeks to days. The enterprises that scale agents safely will be the ones that build using spec-driven development.

There’s a moment in every technology shift where the early adopters stop being outliers and start being the baseline. We’re at that moment in software development, and most teams don’t realize it yet.

A year ago, vibe coding went viral. Non-developers and junior developers discovered they could build beyond their abilities with AI. It lowered the floor. It made prototyping much quicker, but it also introduced a surplus of slop. What the industry then needed was something that raised the ceiling — something that improved code quality and worked the way the most expert developers work. Spec-driven development did that. It laid the foundation for trustworthy autonomous coding agents.

A Deep Neural Network Approach for Random Networks with Sparse Nodal Attributes and Complex Nodal Heterogeneity– arxiv.org

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A Deep Neural Network Approach for Random Networks with Sparse Nodal Attributes and Complex Nodal Heterogeneity– arxiv.org
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arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.

Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.

Why opinion on AI is so divided– www.technologyreview.com

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Why opinion on AI is so divided– www.technologyreview.com
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In an industry that doesn’t stand still, Stanford’s AI Index, an annual roundup of key results and trends, is a chance to take a breath. (It’s a marathon, not a sprint, after all.)

This year’s report, which dropped today, is full of striking stats. A lot of the value comes from having numbers to back up gut feelings you might already have, such as the sense that the US is gunning harder for AI than everyone else: It hosts 5,427 data centers (and counting). That’s more than 10 times as many as any other country.

There’s also a reminder that the hardware supply chain the AI industry relies on has some major choke points. Here’s perhaps the most remarkable fact: “A single company, TSMC, fabricates almost every leading AI chip, making the global AI hardware supply chain dependent on one foundry in Taiwan.” One foundry! That’s just wild.