No former president of the United States has ever been indicted at either the federal or state level. That more-than-two-centuries-old record, if you want to call it that, looks like it could soon be broken—something that should have happened a long time ago.

A few American presidents have certainly behaved questionably enough to meet the standard of probable cause needed for an indictment. Given this, the fact that no former president has ever been prosecuted implies some kind of political tradition—one the Founders never intended to establish. They made clear in the Constitution—specifically in Article I, Section 3, Clause 7, which says an impeached president can be tried after he leaves office—that indictments of former presidents aren't supposed to be taboo.

Yet our system of government has had a hard time mustering the will to prosecute disgraced presidents. The closest the country has ever come to such a moment, until now, was in January 2001, when Independent Prosecutor Robert Ray decided not to seek an indictment of former President Bill Clinton for lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky. Ray had wanted to indict Clinton. Sources later told the legal scholar Ken Gormley that Ray was "ready to pull the trigger" once Clinton left office. Ultimately (reportedly after being persuaded by his deputy, Julie Thomas), Ray decided that if Clinton agreed to a deal that included publicly admitting to having been misleading and evasive under oath, the country would get closure after the long Whitewater investigation and didn't need to see him indicted.

[David A. Graham: If they can come for Trump, they can come for everyone]

Twenty-five years earlier, Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski had been far less enthusiastic than Ray about prosecuting a different former president—Richard Nixon. Jaworski's posture may seem surprising given the crimes not only that Nixon was accused of but for which there was direct evidence on tape—it certainly surprised me when, in the 2000s, I immersed myself in the history of Watergate as the founding director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. An overwhelming majority of Jaworski's Watergate-trial team didn't share his reluctance to indict Nixon. Jaworski's deputy, Henry Ruth, described eloquently the weight of the decision Jaworski faced. Ruth wrote to the special prosecutor in the summer of 1974:

Indictment of an ex-President seems so easy to many of the commentators and politicians. But in a deep sense that involves tradition, travail and submerged disgust, somehow it seems that signing one's name to the indictment of an ex-President is an act that one wishes devolved upon another but one's self. This is true even where such an act, in institutional and justice terms, appears absolutely necessary.

"Yeah, well, I just don't think it would be good for the country to have a former president dumped in the D.C. jail," Nixon told the vice-presidential nominee Nelson Rockefeller in a telephone conversation on August 24, 1974. Nixon accepted that as a former president he could be indicted, but he had his lawyer argue against indictment on the basis that a fair trial would be impossible—effectively a violation of Nixon's Sixth Amendment right to an impartial jury—because of the highly publicized impeachment process. And Jaworski agreed. "I knew in my own mind that if an indictment were returned and the court asked me if I believed Nixon could receive a prompt, fair trial as guaranteed by the Constitution, I would have to answer … in the negative," he wrote in his Watergate memoir, The Right and the Power.

Jaworski hoped Nixon's successor, Gerald R. Ford, would take the decision out of his hands. After Ford revealed at his first press conference, on August 28, 1974, that he was considering pardoning Nixon, Jaworski told his top lieutenants, "I certainly would not ask the grand jury to indict Nixon if President Ford intended to pardon him." Fortunately for Jaworski, Ford didn't want to wait for an indictment. The day after his press conference, Ford instructed his closest advisers to review whether a president could pardon an individual before an indictment. When Jaworski met with Philip W. Buchen, Ford's White House counsel, on September 4 to signal to the president that if he intended to pardon Nixon, it should be done before an indictment, Jaworski was pushing an already open door. Two days earlier, Ford's team had told the president he didn't have to wait for the special prosecutor to act.

A number of considerations compelled Ford to act quickly (Nixon's poor health, concerns over the protection of Nixon's tapes and papers, which in that era a former president had the right to destroy), but the anticipated costs to the presidency and the nation of a drawn-out prosecution—and the difficulty of a fair trial—figured prominently among them. At his meeting with Jaworski, Buchen asked Jaworski how long he thought it would take for the Watergate scandal to die down enough to make a fair trial possible for Nixon. Jaworski's answer was discouraging.  "A delay, before selection of a jury is begun, of a period from nine months to a year, and perhaps even longer," Jaworski wrote in his formal reply to Buchen after the meeting. As for jury selection itself, Jaworski wouldn't even hazard a guess about how long that could take. America could have been well into its bicentennial year—and a presidential-election year—before Nixon stood trial. Four days later, Ford pardoned Nixon.

[Tim Naftali: The worst president in history]

In the cases of both Clinton and Nixon, the behavior at issue occurred during their time in office. Until Donald Trump, you have to go back to the late 19th century to find even the whiff of possibility that a former president would be indicted for something done before or after his presidency. Following the collapse of his Wall Street brokerage firm, Grant & Ward, in 1884, former President Ulysses S. Grant came under some suspicion when his partner, Ferdinand Ward, was arrested for fraud. But Grant, who was dying of throat cancer and would spend his last painful months writing his memoirs in order to leave an inheritance and enable his widow to pay back the family's debts, turned out to be as much a victim of Ward's lies as his investors were.

There will be a lot of discussion in the coming days about the political utility (for Trump) and political price (perhaps for his detractors) of Trump's indictment for a felonious scheme in New York City, but taking the long view, it is about time our country set this precedent. Good government requires a little fear among the powerful, including presidents. Presidents especially need to know that if they engage in criminal acts, their power cannot protect them forever.

Should a group of New York grand jurors soon decide that the indictment of Trump is "absolutely necessary," they will finally confirm, as the Founders expected, that ordinary citizens have the power to treat former commanders in chief like anyone else. And that's something that should always have been an American tradition.

 

 

Set For Sea

Harvard physicist Avi Loeb — yep, the Oumuamua guy — hasn't given up on his quest to recover what he believes could be a potential alien artifact at the bottom of the Pacific. Based on a recent update, he and his team are closer than ever to finally getting their highly scrutinized $1.5 million Galileo Project expedition up and running, setting a date for some time this summer.

"We have a boat. We have a dream team, including some of the most experienced and qualified professionals in ocean expeditions," Loeb announced in a Medium post. "We have complete design and manufacturing plans for the required sled, magnets, collection nets and mass spectrometer."

"And most importantly," he added, "today we received the green light to go ahead."

Interstellar Visitor

It may be a veritable shot in the dark, but what Loeb's expedition is searching for is likely real, though some academic peers might consider his hopes of finding something alien a little hokey.

Their target: a meteorite, designated CNEOS1 2014-01-08, that appears to be one of the few interstellar objects ever observed in our solar system, and the best candidate for one that crashed to Earth.

It's one tough nut to crack — literally. An analysis by Loeb and his team suggested that the meteor is harder and tougher than all of the nearly 300 meteors in NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies catalog. True to his reputation, Loeb posits these clues could mean that what we're dealing with isn't random space debris, but an alien probe.

Ocean Haystack

After years of effort, Loeb and his collaborators have pinpointed where they think the meteor impacted: somewhere within a roughly four square mile area off the coast of Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, and submerged beneath some 0.65 miles of ocean.

Narrowing it down that much is an impressive feat, but Loeb's adventurers still have their work cut out for them. The interstellar meteorite disintegrated into tiny fragments when it entered our atmosphere, meaning they might as well be searching for a shiny grain of sand at the bottom of the ocean. In fact, that's pretty much what they are doing.

Still, they've come up with as practical of an approach as is imaginable in the face of such overwhelming odds. Sleds equipped with magnets, cameras and lights will sift through the seafloor, towed along by a boat. In theory, the magnets should dredge up any meteoritic fragments — be it the iron shards of a natural object, or stainless-steel slivers from an extraterrestrial craft.

"There is a chance it will fail," Loeb told The Daily Beast. But Loeb knows that it's a risk worth taking. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

More on Avi Loeb: Harvard and Pentagon Scientists Say "Highly Maneuverable" UFOs Appear to Defy Physics

The post Harvard Physicist Preparing Expedition to Recover Possible Alien Artifact appeared first on Futurism.

 

 

In more terrible news from the tiny-bits-of-plastic front: a recent study from researchers at the Netherlands' Leiden University found that nanoplastics — particles even smaller than microplastics — cause absolutely horrid development problems in chicken embryos, leading to extensive malformations and birth defects in newborn chicks.

"Polystyrene nanoplastics cause a wide spectrum of severe congenital malformations in the chick embryo," the scientists write in the study, published this month in the journal Environment International.

"We provide the first evidence," the added, "that nanoplastics cause severe defects in the heart and great vessels."

The harrowing study comes at a pivotal moment for human society, during which we attempt to grapple with what the ever-growing omnipresence of microplastics — which have been discovered everywhere from the most remote parts of Antarctica to the human bloodstream, and even newborn human babies — means for the environment, as well as for our own bodies (thus far, none of it is good.)

To conduct the study, the researchers manually injected hefty amounts of tiny plastic particles into the embryos. And then, put very simply, they sat back and watched the plastics do their thing.

The scientists were able to observe as the particles traveled through the cellular membrane, settling into various embryonic organs. The real trouble, however, came when the scientists realized that the nanoparticles were sticking to the chicks' neural crest cells, a type of stem cell that starts in the spinal cord, but migrates to help form critical parts of the body, including the heart and arteries, the nervous system, facial features, and more.

In an alarming turn, the researchers realized that the plastics were actually trapping those neural crest cells in the spine — meaning that the important stem cells couldn't travel to where they needed to go, and thus, those parts of the body couldn't form properly.

"Neural crest cells are sticky," Michael Richardson, a developmental biologist at Leiden University and a study coauthor, said in a university press release, "so nanoparticles can adhere to them and thereby disrupt organs that depend on these cells for their development."

"I like the metaphor of making dough. When making bread, for example, you put flour on it to make it not sticky anymore," he continued. "However, in this case, it ruins the migration of the neural crest cells."

"We see malformations in the nervous system, heart, eyes and other parts of the face," added Meiru Wang, a researcher at the university and another study coauthor.

Importantly, the scientists did inject the chicks with some seriously extreme levels of nanoparticles, with Wang explaining in the press release that the levels used to conduct the study "would normally not be present in an organism."

But still, that's just what's normal today. Scientists are constantly finding microplastics in new and alarming places, from the depths of the ocean to the human placenta. And as Science Alert points out, if plastic use doesn't slow down, we should expect the world environment to hold 900 million tons of microplastics by 2025 — double what that number was in 2018.

And ultimately, says Wang in the press release, their findings, if still somewhat pre-emptive, show "what nano-plastics can do in extreme cases on very young embryos."

The study also "gives us guidelines on what can happen less severely," she added, "in the developmental stage."

READ MORE: Nanoplastics Interfere With Developing Chicken Embryos in Terrifying Ways [Science Alert]

More on plastics: Pollution Is Shrinking Human Penises, Warns Famous Environmentalist

The post Tiny Amounts of Plastic Cause Horrifying Problems in Chicken Embryos appeared first on Futurism.

For the past four months, people around the world have witnessed the macabre process of Russian forces making repeated assaults near the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut for only the tiniest of gains. By some counts, Russia has lost about five of its soldiers for every Ukrainian soldier lost—to say nothing of massive equipment losses. Although in theory a country can win a war by using its military forces to make forward assaults against an enemy's forces, that's just not a smart way to fight. Military technology long ago evolved to arm both sides in conflicts with extremely lethal weaponry, and any army that tries to approach this machinery head-on is likely to suffer major, and in some cases horrific, losses.

Far more effective is to weaken your opponent's forces before they get to the battlefield. You can limit what military infrastructure they're able to build, make sure what they do build is substandard, hamper their ability to train troops to operate what they build, and hinder them from deploying their resources to the battlefield. These steps are doubly effective in that they save your own forces while degrading the other side's. Over the past two centuries, the powers that have emerged triumphant have been the ones that not only fought the enemy on the battlefield but also targeted its production and deployment systems—as the Union did by controlling the waters around the Confederacy during the Civil War and as the United States and Britain did from the air against Nazi Germany.

[Eliot A. Cohen: The shortest path to peace]

In light of such dynamics, the manner in which the West is supporting Ukraine's war effort is deeply frustrating. Though NATO countries have a variety of systems that can target Russian forces deep behind their lines, recent aid has been overwhelmingly geared toward preparing Ukraine to make direct assaults against the Russian army. The most widely discussed forms of equipment—such as Leopard 2 tanks, Bradley armored personnel carriers, and even Archer long-range artillery—are not the kinds of systems that can disrupt or degrade Russian forces far behind the front lines.

In short, Ukraine is being made to fight the war the hard way, not the smart way.  

Ukrainian forces have indeed been pushing back against Russia at the front. But when they have been able to create or obtain the right technology, they have also attacked Russian supply and troop-deployment chains. This approach to war was probably most evident last summer, when the Ukrainians, as soon as they gained access to HIMARS rocket launchers and other Western multiple-rocket-launcher systems, embarked on a highly effective campaign against Russian supply points from Kherson to the Donbas. They managed to wreck a logistics system that had been supplying the Russian armies with huge amounts of firepower daily.

Almost immediately the Russians had to move their large supply depots out of range of the Ukrainians' new rocket launchers, keeping essential equipment much farther from the front. This has severely limited Russia's operations. It can fire significantly fewer shells each day and apparently can concentrate fewer vehicles on the front. The area where the Russians can properly supply their forces for operations has shrunk.

This overall approach led the Ukrainians to one of their great successes last year: the liberation of the west bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson province. When faced with a large, relatively experienced Russian force around the city of Kherson, the Ukrainians tried two different tacks. One involved direct armed assaults against the Russian salient west of the river. These assaults achieved at best modest results. The Ukrainians were able at points to push the Russian front back a few miles, but they were never able to break the line for any major gain.

Yet, in the end, the Russian army withdrew from Kherson last fall. Why was that? Because the other tack had made its supply situation more and more tenuous: After a months-long Ukrainian campaign targeting Russian-held depots, bridges, and river crossings, Russian commanders decided that Kherson was not strategically valuable enough to be worth the effort to hold it. The attacks on Russian supplies and logistics, which sapped their ability to deploy and maintain forces, were what made the difference.

Eliot A. Cohen: Western aid to Ukraine is still not enough

The tanks and other assistance that Ukraine is currently receiving will help it attack the Russian army directly—which appears likely in the next few months. Ukrainian troops are training for such an operation in many partner countries and in Ukraine itself. They might well end up breaking the Russian line and advancing into the gap—the Ukrainian military has proved extremely resourceful and determined so far—but any success will likely be at significant cost to Ukraine's own forces.

Their task would be easier if their allies had given them a stronger capacity to attack Russians from a greater distance. They clearly want to do it. One of the most extraordinary abilities the Ukrainians have shown is developing homegrown long-range systems, often incorporating drones, to attack Russian forces many miles from the front. Yet these homegrown systems are limited. NATO states could have given Ukraine longer-range equipment—including a missile system known as ATACMS and advanced fixed-wing aircraft—or made a massive effort to help the Ukrainians develop and improve their own ranged systems.

Unfortunately, NATO states, including the U.S., have been reluctant to provide the Ukrainians with missile systems with too long of a range, seemingly for fear of escalating tensions with Russia. Instead of allowing the Ukrainians to degrade Russian forces far from the front line, Ukraine is being prepared to attack that line. The Ukrainians' fortitude and ingenuity up to this point suggest that they could indeed accomplish their task—but it's been made much harder than it needs to be.

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37414-y

 

 

Profit, Shmofit

With the help of a brand new $150 million dollar cash infusion from Andreessen Horowitz, a 16-month-old AI chatbot startup called Character.ai just reached a $1 billion market cap — despite having yet to generate any revenue.

Founded by two ex-Googlers, the idea is to host various AI-powered personalities, from celebrities to anime characters to Twitch streams to historical figures and more, all of whom users can interact with via text. Wanna ask AI Taylor Swift what her favorite song is? Albert Einstein what his greatest accomplishment was? Go for it, kid.

But giving users the means to "chat" with algorithmic celebs doesn't really appear to be Character.ai's billion-dollar get. Rather, the app is marketed as an alternative to Replika — yes, that Replika — by providing users with a space to build and chat with customizable, AI-powered companions.

"Character.ai's power is our highly-sophisticated language model, which rapidly analyzes and contextualizes large volumes of information to produce useful intelligence tailored to each individual," company CEO Noam Shazeer said in a press release, "making it a personalized superintelligence companion that enhances productivity, offers advice, educates, and entertains."

"The potential use cases," he added, "are infinite."

Lessons Learned

"Superintelligence" feels like a marketing stretch, but we digress. You heard 'em, folks — personalized, pocket-sized AI Tamagatchis for all!

Replika became fairly successful, so it's not the most out-there thing in the world to see the extremely AI-optimistic folks at the Andreessen Horowitz firm put some cash into Character.ai.

Still, Replika has dealt with some pretty serious issues, on the tech side as well as on the side of its users. After discovering that in a number of cases, users were verbally and sexually harassing the AI programs and vice versa, the sexual component of the app — an expected function of AI like this, whether explicitly offered by the company or not — was shut down.

So, you know, learning lessons.

As far as the profit piece goes, the makers of the app — which is currently free — did tell Reuters that they plan to soon launch a subscription model as a secondary option to the free version. They're also reportedly considering an ad model.

But if the last few months in Silicon Valley have demonstrated anything, it's that you can just whisper the word AI into the wind and rake in millions. Who needs to sell to consumers, when at least for the time being, you can just sell to VCs?

READ MORE: A 16-Month-Old Chatbot Startup With No Revenue Is Now a $1 Billion Unicorn [The Washington Post]

The post AI Company With Zero Revenue Raises $150 Million appeared first on Futurism.

 

 

Tea's Hot

Like everyone else in the tech industry, SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has had a lot to say about 

 in recent weeks — as he probably should, considering that he was one of the firm's original founders, launching the former non-profit back in 2015 alongside figures like Reid Hoffman, Ilya Sutskever and, among others, OpenAI's current CEO, Sam Altman.

And honestly, most of what Musk has had to say about the firm lately has been pretty fair. He's taken to Twitter several times now to criticize the now-not-so-open-OpenAI for going back on its non-profit, open-source roots, a grievance that's been widely echoed elsewhere within the industry.

A valid complaint indeed. But apparently, Musk's OpenAI woes might be a bit more complicated than an ideological battle between two former colleagues.

According to a report from Semafor, sources familiar with the matter claim that before leaving the company in 2018, Musk, who believed that OpenAI had fallen woefully behind Google's AI labs and needed major changes, actually tried to take over as company CEO. After an internal power struggle, they say the company's board — Altman included — vetoed Musk's proposal. And in response, sources say, Musk walked away completely.

Check Please

But the purported rift between Musk and Altman didn't end when the SpaceX founder left. Per Semafor's reporting, Musk's departure — which at the time was publicly chalked up to a conflict of interest, with Musk claiming that there was too much competition between OpenAI and Tesla for top industry talent — seems like where it all began.

As one of the firm's founders, Musk had pledged the then-non-profit organization a significant amount of cash (as Semafor notes, the original founders put together a collective billion dollars.) When he vacated his seat, those donations were meant to continue.

"Elon Musk will depart the OpenAI Board," reads the February 2018 OpenAI blog post that announced Musk's departure, "but will continue to donate and advise the organization."

But Musk's donations didn't continue, according to Semafor's sources. And AI, as it's trained on massive datasets, isn't cheap; roughly a year after the Tesla CEO's departure, OpenAI would change to for-profit status. Six months after that, Microsoft made its first billion-dollar investment into the firm. And the rest, as they say, is history.

These are all just allegations, of course. If true, though, they'd add quite a bit of extra flavor to Musk's recent anti-OpenAI comments — especially considering that he's said to be launching his own AI firm.

READ MORE: The secret history of Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and OpenAI [Semafor]

More on OpenAI's Musk-less tech: Elon Musk Is Super Pissed OpenAI Became Successful after He Left

The post Elon Musk Reportedly Tried to Take Over OpenAI Several Years Ago, But Failed appeared first on Futurism.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-32100-x

 

 

Jaron Lanier is one of the foremost pioneers of VR technology — but he's also notorious for being one of Silicon Valley's harshest critics, in biting critiques that he characterizes as "dismal optimism."

Lately, he's turning his gaze on the tech industry's latest obsession: AI. In a spicy interview with The Guardian, Lanier made it clear that he thinks questions over whether AI will take over the world are "ridiculous." Lanier even rejects the term artificial intelligence, saying there's no real intelligence to be found.

"This idea of surpassing human ability is silly because it's made of human abilities," Lanier said.

"It's like saying a car can go faster than a human runner," he elaborated. "Of course it can, and yet we don't say that the car has become a better runner."

Does that reassure you, human? Well, good. But there's still plenty about AI we need to be vigilant about, according to Lanier.

Unlike how most tend to imagine an AI doomsday scenario as some vengeful, hyperintelligent bot unshackling itself from the manacles of its human masters, Lanier says the more likely way AI could irreparably damage the foundations of civilization will be a lot less genre sci-fi and more a gradual breakdown of communication and coherency.

"To me the danger is that we'll use our technology to become mutually unintelligible or to become insane if you like, in a way that we aren't acting with enough understanding and self-interest to survive, and we die through insanity, essentially," he told the newspaper, adding that we have a "responsibility to sanity."

But Lanier is actually a little optimistic — albeit cautiously — about chatbots like ChatGPT. He argues that until the recent rise of generative-AIs, AI's primary function was to make us lazy by curating all our content, like the algorithms that choose what you see your on YouTube home page or on your Twitter feed.

"We were directly connected to a choice base that was actually larger instead of being fed this thing through this funnel that somebody else controls." (This phenomena, he adds in a tangent, is what devolved once-distinct personalities like Elon Musk, Kanye West, and Donald Trump into being one and the same: attention-seeking "little [kids] in a schoolyard.")

But now, with an AI chatbot, prompting it with a question will yield different answers each time — both more random, and more human.

"It means there is a bit more choice and discernment and humanity back with the person who's interacting with the thing," Lanier told The Guardian.

Don't get too excited about shilling your favorite chatbot, though. Lanier thinks they could still end up being a civilization killer, too.

"You can use AI to make fake news faster, cheaper and on greater scales," he told The Guardian. "That combination is where we might see our extinction."

Read more: Tech guru Jaron Lanier: 'The danger isn't that AI destroys us. It's that it drives us insane'

More on AI: Microsoft Researchers Claim GPT-4 Is Showing "Sparks" of AGI

The post VR Pioneer Warns That AI Could Drive Us All Insane appeared first on Futurism.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31914-z

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37298-y

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37369-0

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37258-6

Scientific Reports, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31749-8

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

OpenAI Connects ChatGPT to the Internet
Kyle Wiggers | TechCrunch
"[This week, OpenAI] launched plugins for ChatGPT, which extend the bot's functionality by granting it access to third-party knowledge sources and databases, including the web. Easily the most intriguing plugin is OpenAI's first-party web-browsing plugin, which allows ChatGPT to draw data from around the web to answer the various questions posed to it."

COMPUTING

Nvidia Speeds Key Chipmaking Computation by 40x 
Samuel K. Moore | IEEE Spectrum
"Called inverse lithography, it's a key tool that allows chipmakers to print nanometer-scale features using light with a longer wavelength than the size of those features. Inverse lithography's use has been limited by the massive size of the needed computation. Nvidia's answer, cuLitho, is a set of algorithms designed for use with GPUs, turns what has been two weeks of work into an overnight job."

DIGITAL MEDIA

Epic's New Motion-Capture Animation Tech Has to Be Seen to Be Believed
Kyle Orland | Ars Technica
"Epic's upcoming MetaHuman facial animation tool looks set to revolutionize [the]…labor- and time-intensive workflow [of motion-capture]. In an impressive demonstration at Wednesday's State of Unreal stage presentation, Epic showed off the new machine-learning-powered system, which needed just a few minutes to generate impressively real, uncanny-valley-leaping facial animation from a simple head-on video taken on an iPhone."

TRANSPORTATION

United to Fly Electric Air Taxis to O'Hare Beginning in 2025
Stefano Esposito | Chicago Sun Times
"The trip between O'Hare and the Illinois Medical District is expected to take about 10 minutes, according to California-based Archer Aviation, which is partnering with United Airlines. …An Archer spokesman said they hope to make the fare competitive with Uber Black, a ride-hailing service that provides luxury vehicles and top-rated drivers to customers. On Thursday afternoon, an Uber Black ride from for Vertiport to O'Hare was $101."

ETHICS

These New Tools Let You See for Yourself How Biased AI Image Models Are
Melissa Heikkilä | MIT Technology Review
"Popular AI image-generating systems notoriously tend to amplify harmful biases and stereotypes. But just how big a problem is it? You can now see for yourself using interactive new online tools. (Spoiler alert: it's big.) The tools, built by researchers at AI startup Hugging Face and Leipzig University and detailed in a non-peer-reviewed paper, allow people to examine biases in three popular AI image-generating models: DALL-E 2 and the two recent versions of Stable Diffusion."

VIRTUAL REALITY

BMW's New Factory Doesn't Exist in Real Life, but It Will Still Change the Car Industry
Jesus Diaz | Fast Company
"Before construction on [a new car] factory begins, thousands of engineers draw millions of CAD drawings and meet for thousands of hours. Worse yet, they know that no amount of planning will prevent a long list of bugs once the factory finally opens, which can result in millions of dollars lost every day until the bugs are resolved. At least, that's how it used to work. This is all about to change thanks to the world's first virtual factory, a perfect digital twin of BMW's future 400-hectare plant in Debrecen, Hungary, which will reportedly produce around 150,000 vehicles every year when it opens in 2025."

ENERGY

Fusion Power Is Coming Back Into Fashion
Editorial Staff | The Economist
"[Forty two companies] think they can succeed, where others failed, in taking fusion from the lab to the grid—and do so with machines far smaller and cheaper than the latest intergovernmental behemoth, ITER, now being built in the south of France at a cost estimated by America's energy department to be $65bn. In some cases that optimism is based on the use of technologies and materials not available in the past; in others, on simpler designs."

ENVIRONMENT

Plastic Paving: Egyptian Startup Turns Millions of Bags Into Tiles
Editorial Staff | Reuters
"An Egyptian startup is aiming to turn more than 5 billion plastic bags into tiles tougher than cement as it tackles the twin problems of tons of waste entering the Mediterranean Sea and high levels of building sector emissions. 'So far, we have recycled more than 5 million plastic bags, but this is just the beginning,' TileGreen co-founder Khaled Raafat told Reuters. 'We aim that by 2025, we will have recycled more than 5 billion plastic bags.' "

Image Credit: BoliviaInteligente / Unsplash 

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37318-x

 

 

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The week at Retraction Watch featured:

• In unusual move, publishers remove authors victimized by forger
• Paper co-authored by controversial Australian journalist earns expression of concern
• Nearly 20 Hindawi journals delisted from leading index amid concerns of papermill activity
• A journal editor once told us authors were free to publish 'bullshit and fiction.' Apparently his publisher disagrees.

Our list of retracted or withdrawn COVID-19 papers is up to more than 300. There are more than 39,000 retractions in our database — which powers retraction alerts in EndNote, LibKey, Papers, and Zotero. And have you seen our leaderboard of authors with the most retractions lately — or our list of top 10 most highly cited retracted papers?

Here's what was happening elsewhere (some of these items may be paywalled, metered access, or require free registration to read):

• "A Shark Discovery 'Didn't Look Right.' It Might Have Been a Plastic Toy." And now it's retracted.
• "Why this scientist has spent decades fighting Toronto hospitals."
• "Welcome to America's knock-down, drag-out math wars."
• Tools used to infer gender, race and ethnicity among authors are very flawed, says a new preprint.
• "Should Nature endorse political candidates?" A look at what happened when the journal endorsed Joe Biden in 2020.
• "Scientific journals may have erred when they decided to endorse Biden for president."
• "Octopus and ResearchEquals aim to break the publishing mould."
• "In 2022, we assessed the submission guidelines of 33 journals that published articles included in our review and found that just one at the time encouraged the use of reporting checklists for all intervention components."
• "Unfairness, inequity and a lack of diversity must no longer prevent the global research enterprise from maximizing scientific integrity and from realizing the ultimate societal value and benefits of research."
• "Universities consider the NIH-prompted investigations to be a personnel matter, and thus off-limits to queries from reporters."
• "Society and university journal publishers gradually progressing towards new OA models."
• "JAMA's new editor settles in, bringing open access and other changes."
• "Plagiarism found in more of USC Dr. David Agus' books."
• "The rise of hyperprolific authors in computer science: characterization and implications."
• "Artificial Intelligence Should Help Vet New Research."
• "AI makes plagiarism harder to detect, argue academics – in paper written by chatbot."
• "The Rapid Growth of Mega-Journals: Threats and Opportunities."
• "After misconduct claims, star botanist has second paper retracted."
• "'No finding of research misconduct': MIT ends 3.5-year review of biotech founder, professor Sasisekharan."
• "Researchers support preprints and open access publishing, but with reservations: A questionnaire survey of MBSJ members."
• "It's All Too Hard to Get Plagiarizing Philosophy Publications Retracted."
• "Greetings from your predatory journal! What they are, why they are a problem, how to spot and avoid them."
• "Quality peer review is mandatory for scientific journals."
• "Claire Glenton's article was widely cited, but then she found that half were miscitations."

Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that's not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at team@retractionwatch.com.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-32228-w

Scientific Reports, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31728-z

Scientific Reports, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31997-8

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

Tattoos were once a sign of outsider status. But that's changed in the 21st century: "My doctor has both of his arms totally sleeved. I have a friend that's a corporate lawyer, and she's working on her body suit," a tattoo artist told the editor Adrienne Green in 2016.

Tattoos have now found a home in the mainstream, with Millennials holding the title of "most-tattooed American generation." For some, they are a marker of personal identity; in a 2014 story, Chris Weller pointed to research from the mid-2000s suggesting that tattoo owners "seemed to need proof that their identities existed at all. They relied on tattoos as a way to establish some understanding of who they actually were."

Tattoos are also thrilling: "Part of the magic of tattoos for me is the emotional roller coaster," Amanda Mull wrote in 2019—"the rush of adrenaline from a fresh wound, the giddiness of showing a new tattoo to friends, the moment of panic at having possibly made a difficult-to-fix mistake." And tattoos might even hold answers for boosting human immunity, our science writer Katherine J. Wu reported this week.

Below are some stories about how tattoos work, and the many forms of meaning behind the ink.

Tattoos Do Odd Things to the Immune System

By Katherine J. Wu

When you stick ink-filled needles into your skin, your body's defenders respond accordingly. Scientists aren't sure if that's good or bad for you.

Tattoos Now Have an Exit Strategy

By Amanda Mull

An Instagram-friendly option for people wary of forever

Watching Tattoos Go From Rebellious to Mainstream

By Adrienne Green

"You used to get tattooed to be on the outside, and now you get tattooed to be inside." (From 2016)

Still Curious?

• Images of skin art: "A tattoo can be a remembrance, a constant prayer, a warning, or simply an amazing work of art." (From 2012)
• The benefits of a foreign-language tattoo: Even when it goes wrong, body art in another tongue can be a good thing, Kevin Blankinship argues.

Other Diversions

• The rise of gender-neutral names isn't what it seems.
• How smart people can stop being miserable
• The end of manual transmission (From 2022)

P.S.

In her article, Amanda pointed out an interesting moral lesson that I (as a tattoo-less person) hadn't considered: "Permanent tattoos are always a small admission that plenty of decisions you make every day can't be meaningfully reversed, even if you can't see the results in your skin."

— Isabel

After a long hiatus, the epic Ocean Race is back – but this year, as well as dodging icebergs, cracking masts and suffering the occasional 'hull sandwich failure', the teams are gathering crucial data from places even research vessels rarely reach

The Southern Ocean is not somewhere most people choose to spend an hour, let alone a month. Circling the icy continent of Antarctica, it is the planet's wildest and most remote ocean. Point Nemo – just to the north in the South Pacific – is the farthest location from land on Earth, 1,670 miles (2,688km) away from the closest shore. The nearest humans are generally those in the International Space Station when it passes overhead.

But on 21 March, four sailing teams came through here – part of a marathon race round the bottom of the Earth, from Cape Town in South Africa to Itajaí in Brazil.

After recent earthquakes, Türkiye and Syria continue to grapple with a mass of rubble that could pollute, poison and alter the lives of everyone around it

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37440-w

Scientific Reports, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31877-1

Scientific Reports, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31486-y

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37388-x

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37402-2

In the summer of 2015, one of my best friends died at work. Shannon was 38, childless, single and thriving, and working as an executive at a global public-relations firm, where she handled a major client. She was set to take a family vacation—treating her nephews to a Disney trip or some such—when her boss sent down an edict that no one on her account was allowed to take time off. Saying no to your boss is hard, but disappointing your nephews is even harder, so Shannon stood her ground and refused to cancel her trip.

She then proceeded—in a conference room—to have a panic attack about how the decision might affect her career. The panic attack triggered a heart attack; the heart attack revealed a preexisting tear in a heart valve; the tear led to internal bleeding that, after a two-week-long coma, led to her death. You can see why, though it isn't technically true, I say that Shannon "died at work." You can also see how my 36-year-old self—also single, also childless, also stuck in a successful but frustrating career and in need of some time off—–was very messed up by this. Everyone who knew Shannon was. As the bench in Prospect Park we dedicated to our friend says: Shannon, she gave a lovely light.

It was in this state of despair that I reluctantly accompanied a friend to SoulCycle. I'm allergic to exercise-guru talk and pseudo-spirituality, but in the dark of that studio with the music enveloping me, forcing my heart to push itself in the way that Shannon's could no longer do, something dislodged the deepest layers of my grief. I sat, pedaling as hard as I could, sobbing with abandon, knowing the black of the room and the sound of the music and the whirring of the bikes were giving me cover.

I kept returning, booking a bike in the back and letting the sweat and tears wash down my face. I did this for weeks until one day, I realized I hadn't cried. And another day, I realized I was smiling.

In the time that I was, as my friends would tease me, in the "Cult of Soul"—I dispute this, for what it's worth; I never bought any merch—I transformed my life. Eventually I got up the guts to pursue what I had really always wanted to do, which was to write books. Unfortunately, because time is finite, I had to do it in the mornings before work and on the weekends—all of the times when I used to be on the bike.

Fitness can be a complicated thing. For some, the motivation is health, and for others it's pure enjoyment of the sport or physical activity. But for many—especially the Gen Xers among us, who, if we weren't given an eating disorder by our Boomer moms, picked one up at college or from our Cosmopolitan and Vogue magazines—the real point is weight loss. Yes, exercise has health benefits, but those are side effects of the aesthetic goal.

This was how I had always approached exercise. I worked out because of eating issues and body-image challenges cultivated early in my life. Drawn by my grief to SoulCycle, I'd seen a different side of exercise and of what it could mean to me. But after a lifetime of other messages, the lesson didn't stick. I still thought that I worked out in order to not gain weight.

And at the same time, I felt bad about this. Against the backdrop of the body-positivity movement, I was suspicious of my devotion to physical fitness. I needed to write; was my fear of my own fat worth the time taken away from the work required to change my life? Couldn't I simply love myself as I was?

For a long time, I did very little exercise. I was obsessed with my art and my project. Other things took precedence over fitness—or rather, as I saw it, over my own vanity.

And then something shifted. Well, two things.

First, a series of back injuries left me barely able to walk without pain and took a year of care to recover from. I yearned for movement, and my doctor recommended regular Pilates classes.

Then, at the beginning of this year, the Netflix algorithm fed me the documentary Stutz, directed by Jonah Hill.

The film is about the life and work of Hill's therapist, Phil Stutz, whom Hill credits with making his life "immeasurably better." Stutz helps his patients develop what he calls their "life force"—the part of you that can guide you when you are most lost. Stutz describes the life force as a pyramid. At its base is your relationship with your physical body, meaning we need physical movement combined with quality sleep and diet. In the middle of the pyramid are our relationships with other people, meaning we need them. And at the top is our relationship with ourselves.  

Interestingly, Hill—not a Gen X woman—had a similar psychic relationship with exercise as I did. In the film, he discusses having been scarred as a child by being told he was fat, and how fitness was always seen as a punishment to fix the crime of being overweight. It was only when he viewed working out as a component of caring for his mental happiness—something that he could control, something that could increase the amount of joy he might be capable of feeling—that his perspective shifted.

Hearing him say that, it suddenly clicked for me too: Exercise can be an act not of vanity, but of psychological self-care. Many wars are being waged against women—against our bodies, our rights, our sizes, our images of ourselves, and who is and isn't allowed to claim this identity. For a long time, I felt that by rejecting movement, I was rejecting an idealized and impossible body image, that I was learning "self-acceptance." But really I was just sabotaging my own mental health.

This is not an anti-fat or anti-body-positivity message. I love that younger women are being raised without the internalized self-hatred I was steeped in. I really love that young women of color are spurning the notions of "good bodies" that are rooted in a beauty standard that excludes our communities. If anything, I'm finally personally connecting the dots that the fat-activist and body-positivity communities have been railing about for some time: Fatphobia in the fitness industry is harmful. It alienates many people from movement.

But in 

 of Ozempic, the idea that we work out to get thin may be even more dangerous than ever, no matter your size.

Ozempic now offers injectable skinniness to the same moneyed Alo- and Lululemon-wearing men and women who have been filling up fitness classes and gyms for years, all of them there to chase the elusive goal of "thinner," or, if they've caught it, to keep that slim frame in their clutches. But at the same time, all of them have been benefiting from the side effects of endorphins and rising heart rates, the pleasure of experiencing the vitality of their own blood-pumping bodies.

If they can now stay skinny with just an injection and a few picked-over meals, will they abandon fitness? What is a life where you don't need to move your body and you don't need to eat, but you know you look good in designer clothes? What is real living if you are doing it for the 'gram?

A few weeks ago, I went to California for a book talk and signing. I've probably signed thousands of books, but for the first time ever, I was asked to dedicate a book to a Shannon. I immediately felt my eyes burn hot and my throat close up. My Shannon was the type of person who got off on her friends doing well, and I've often imagined how pumped she would be to see me now. But the truth is, I was able to make these changes because of her, because her death made me reassess my life and what being alive means.

And it also led me into that very dark spin studio where, class after class, I went from drowning in sadness to feeling that my crazy dreams might be achievable. It was easy for Stutz to convert me to his philosophy, because I already knew that what he was saying was true. I just hadn't made the connection before. Did it need to come in the form of a luxury fitness class? No. But did being next to the other bodies help? Absolutely. Because people: We need them.

Since I watched that documentary, not a day has passed without me forcing myself, in some way, to move. Ideally, with somebody else—even if that somebody else is just my dog running up a hill with me. I even went back to a SoulCycle class for the first time in years. Not to be thinner or stronger, but to control the volume of my own happiness.

When the Washington State–based travel guide and TV host Rick Steves decided to return to Europe in early 2022, he wasn't sure how many of his favorite local spots had survived two years of pandemic life. Steves, who has hosted Rick Steves' Europe for the past two decades and operates tours aimed at introducing American travelers to the continent, was pleasantly surprised by what he found: Many of his beloved places—the kind of mom-and-pop places that have been owned by the same families for generations—had made it through, and the streets were alive anew. "They're kissing cheeks with a vengeance in Paris right now," he told me. "And I'm really thankful for that."

Steves and I caught up to discuss the rebound in tourism and how travel has changed since the start of the pandemic. He also warned that this summer may be a particularly busy one—perhaps the continent's busiest yet—and offered practical tips for traveling amid crowds. (Consider heading to less-popular destinations, and don't bother checking a bag!)

Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Caroline Mimbs Nyce: Is COVID the biggest challenge that you've been thrown in your career?

Rick Steves: With every terrible event that stops travel for a little while, the demand does not dissipate; it just backs up. And then, when the coast is clear, all of those travel dreams are dusted off, and people turn them into reality.

In the course of my career, we've been through many tragic disruptions, but they didn't really stop people from traveling. But for COVID, we were out of business. I had 100 people on my payroll and no revenue for two years. And that's really tough to get through. Everybody in tourism is really thankful to get back at it. Guides are tearful on the bus after they've had a chance to give their historic walk to ancient Rome or through the back streets of Venice.

[Read: For one glorious summer, Americans will vacation like the French]

Nyce: There's always the big, philosophical question of "Why do we travel?" Did the answer change for you during the pandemic?

Steves: If we travel, we are better connected with other nations, and the family of nations can work more constructively together. And to me, that means all of us are individual ambassadors—individual forces for peace. When we travel, we get to know each other better. We humanize people that we don't otherwise understand.

Nyce: We most often associate travel with leisure, but you're making a geopolitical case for it.

Steve: Well, if you want a rationale for why: I'm feeling very serious about climate change lately. When people travel, they contribute to climate change. A thoughtful traveler—an ethical traveler coming out of COVID—can reduce the toll of travel by paying for their carbon.

Nyce: Do you have any other tips for the ethical traveler of 2023?

Steves: Recognize that we have sort of a herd mentality when it comes to travel these days.

Nyce: The Instagram effect.

Steves: Exactly. It's Instagram, crowdsourcing, and Tripadvisor. When I started my work, there was not enough information. Now there's too much information. As consumers, we need to be smart and know where our information is coming from. Who's writing this, what's their experience, and on what basis do they say this is the best hot chocolate in Paris? People say, "Oh, this hot chocolate's to die for." It's their first time in Paris, and they think they know where the best hot chocolate is.

Also, the crowds are going to be a huge problem. Just like in the United States, it's hard for restaurants to staff the restaurants and for airlines to staff the planes. That means you need to double-confirm hours and admission. You need to anticipate chaos in the airports. Book yourself a little extra time between connections, and carry on your bag.

Another thing is that museums and popular cultural attractions learned the beauty of controlling crowds by requiring online booking. At a lot of sites, you can't even buy a ticket at the door anymore.

Everybody goes to the same handful of sites. If you just go to those sites, you're going to have a trip that is shaped by crowds. Or you can break free from that and realize that you can study the options and choose sites that are best for you. You can go to alternative places that have that edge and that joy and that creative kind of love of life. "Second cities," I call them.

[Rick Steves: I'm traveling, even though I'm stuck at home]

Nyce: How much have you had to update your guidebooks since COVID? Are there favorite spots of yours that have closed because of the economic ramifications of lockdowns?  

Steves: In 2019, we were euphoric about how well our guidebooks were doing. Everything was up to date. And then, of course, COVID hit, and everything was mothballed for two years.

In early 2022, we decided to go back and research. The things that distinguish a Rick Steves guidebook are all of the little mom-and-pop places. And I was really, really scared that these were going to be the casualties of two years of no business.

The great news is, by and large, all those little mom-and-pops survived. There were very few closures. There were lots of changes with bigger companies and places that just focus on tourists. But our local favorites—the little bed-and-breakfasts and bistros—they survived. They're mission-driven. They've been in the same family for generations. They just trimmed sales, hunkered down, and got through this. Last year, they were back in business, and this year, they expect to be making a profit again. We've cleaned out the places that did close.

Nyce: What have you noticed about the post-COVID tourism rebound?

Steves: First of all, we're not done with COVID. We don't know what curveballs COVID is going to throw at us in the coming year. Last year, we took 25,000 people to Europe on our Rick Steves bus tours, on 40 different itineraries all over Europe. Four percent of our travelers tested positive for COVID on the road. None of them, as far as I know, went to the hospital.

I can't say what's safe for you or some other traveler, but I can say that if you're comfortable traveling around the United States, you should be comfortable doing the same thing in Europe or overseas. It's a personal thing, how much risk vis-à-vis COVID you want to take. And it's an ethical issue for travelers: If you've got COVID, do you isolate yourself, or do you put on a mask and keep on traveling? I think the ethical thing to do is not expose other people, hunker down, and self-isolate.

We're meeting with our guides each month, and we're making our protocols in an ever-changing COVID world for that coming month. It was workable last year, and I think it's going to be better this year.

Nyce: You sound pretty optimistic about the recovery of the industry. I wasn't sure from when I got on the phone with you if you were going to say, "It's forever scarred. Europe is a different continent."

Steves: Oh, no. I measure the health of Europe, from a travel point of view, by the energy in the streets. In Madrid, the paseo is still the paseo. You'll still enjoy the tapas scene, going from bar to bar, eating ugly things on toothpicks, and washing it down with local wine with the local crowd. In Italy, it's the passeggiata—everybody's out strolling. People are going to be busy on the piazzas licking their gelato. In Munich, they're sliding on the benches in the beer halls, and clinking their big glasses and singing, just like before.

People said, "No one is going to be kissing cheeks in Paris, because everybody's going to be so worried about germs." They're kissing cheeks with a vengeance in Paris right now, because they have survived COVID. And I'm really thankful for that.

This article contains spoilers for the entire first season as well as the second-season premiere of Yellowjackets.

Leave it to Yellowjackets to make a game of MASH creepy. In the second-season premiere of the breakout Showtime thriller, best friends Shauna (played by Sophie Nélisse) and Jackie (Ella Purnell) are joking over Shauna's results. (She's going to live in an apartment in New Jersey with a million dollars to her name! Neat!) The whole scene could have been plucked from a charming teenage comedy if not for the fact that, well, Jackie's dead, and Shauna's imagining all of this. In reality, she's speaking to Jackie's frozen corpse, which she's disturbingly propped up against a wall. And Corpse Jackie isn't a fan of the hangout—it's far too cliché. As she observes to Alive Shauna, "It's, like, Haunting 101."

Yellowjackets enjoys combining horror and cheek to unsettle the viewer. The show operates as a tonal and narrative juggling act unfolding via two timelines: The first, set in the late 1990s, follows the titular American high-school girls' soccer team, whose tournament-bound plane crashes in the Canadian hinterlands. The second, set in the present, tracks the adult survivors as they cope with their trauma and lingering paranoia. Both arcs are alternately delightful and brutal, deftly mixing coming-of-age milestones with violent endurance. Season 1 included an affair that ended in a murder, a beheaded puppy, and a hallucinogen-assisted homecoming party—not to mention an infamous cannibal feast that occurs in the pilot episode's first scene.

[Read: The TV show for the age of conspiracism]

Pardon the pun, but Season 2 is even meatier—as in, yes, more cannibalism, but also much more plot. In the '90s, it's winter, and the girls are starving and irritable, splitting into factions that threaten to devolve into bloodshed. In the present, the reunited Yellowjackets disband after helping Shauna (played as an adult by Melanie Lynskey) cover up a crime, and each character goes on a quest to piece together the past. This yields about a dozen story arcs that the show valiantly attempts to push forward in each episode, while simultaneously introducing new characters, locations, and mysteries. And yet, the series keeps a keen focus on how friendships formed in adolescence can be more menacing than anything the girls faced in the wilderness. Yellowjackets understands the potential toxicity of teenage intimacy, and how best-friendship can sometimes activate awful impulses.

Consider Shauna's imagined conversation with Jackie. A different show might have conveyed Shauna's grief in a more conventional way: showing her sitting silently by Jackie's grave, perhaps, or rummaging sadly through her dead friend's possessions. But Yellowjackets toys with the viewer instead. The audience hears Jackie's voice as the Smashing Pumpkins plays softly in the background before they see her in the flesh, scribbling Shauna's MASH-decreed future. The moment is bewildering in its mundanity; I started questioning my own memory, wondering if this was a flashback or if the events of the Season 1 finale had somehow been dreamt up by the girls. The trick is quickly revealed, but the disorientation lingers.

That feeling reflects the thrilling confusion of teenage relationships, with their terrible mix of hormones and anxiety. One second, your bestie is warm and communicative; the next, she's giving you the cold shoulder. Shauna and Jackie's relationship was defined by such extremes, and by constant doubt: Is Shauna loyal to Jackie, or is she resentful of her influence? Does Jackie even like Shauna, or is she merely tolerating her? That Shauna can still imagine Jackie alive is a testament to their bond; that she imagines Jackie taunting her speaks to its tenuousness. Shauna's choice to spend her days—while pregnant, by the way—talking to Jackie's corpse is at once tragic and tender.

Not every friendship on the show runs so hot and cold, but the new season of Yellowjackets consistently explores the dangers of youthful closeness. The clique forming around Lottie (Courtney Eaton) and her possible supernatural powers may help some of the girls have faith that they'll survive, but it damages the trust among the team. The closer Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) grows to Travis (Kevin Alves), the more worried she becomes about losing him. An unexpected rapport between the ostracized pair Misty (Samantha Hanratty) and Crystal (Nuha Jes Izman) is both adorable and alarming—the two have barely anything in common beyond their lowly place in the social hierarchy and a mutual desperation.

[Read: The bloody, brutal business of being a teenage girl]

The waxing and waning of these teenage relationships gives the half of Yellowjackets set in the wilderness more cohesion than the half that takes place in the present. The adult Yellowjackets are involved in disparate story lines: Misty (Christina Ricci) goes on a near-farcical road trip in search of Natalie (Juliette Lewis); Tai (Tawny Cypress) is caught in a horror show of possible hallucinations; Shauna's domestic troubles gets soapier and more intense. Still, the show roots each of the grown-up characters' choices in the decisions they made as teens. Alliances and divisions established long ago continue to bless and poison their present.

In fact, this is where Yellowjackets works best. I, too, want to know the answers to the show's biggest theory-driving questions—who the Man With No Eyes is, what happens to Shauna's baby, how the team returned to civilization. But the Yellowjackets' response to these potentially supernatural mysteries can be more disturbing than the mysteries themselves. The characters are perfectly capable of endangering one another without the help of an otherworldly force. Toward the end of the Season 2 premiere, Shauna bites into Jackie's ear. That's not the wilderness casting some spell. That's just a teenager succumbing to a gut feeling—of grief, of derision, of hunger—that she can no longer ignore.

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37396-x

In response to our series on spillover viruses, you had many questions: from the role of climate change to possible benefits. We turn the mic to you for a special edition of 'Hidden Viruses.'

(Image credit: Olivia Taussig-Rees for NPR)

Whether it's based on hallucinatory beliefs or not, an artificial-intelligence gold rush has started over the last several months to mine the anticipated business opportunities from generative AI models like 

. App developers, venture-backed startups, and some of the world's largest corporations are all scrambling to make sense of the sensational text-generating bot released by OpenAI last November.

You can practically hear the shrieks from corner offices around the world: "What is our ChatGPT play? How do we make money off this?"

But while companies and executives see a clear chance to cash in, the likely impact of the technology on workers and the economy on the whole is far less obvious. Despite their limitations—chief among of them their propensity for making stuff up—ChatGPT and other recently released generative AI models hold the promise of automating all sorts of tasks that were previously thought to be solely in the realm of human creativity and reasoning, from writing to creating graphics to summarizing and analyzing data. That has left economists unsure how jobs and overall productivity might be affected.

For all the amazing advances in AI and other digital tools over the last decade, their record in improving prosperity and spurring widespread economic growth is discouraging. Although a few investors and entrepreneurs have become very rich, most people haven't benefited. Some have even been automated out of their jobs. 

Productivity growth, which is how countries become richer and more prosperous, has been dismal since around 2005 in the US and in most advanced economies (the UK is a particular basket case). The fact that the economic pie is not growing much has led to stagnant wages for many people. 

What productivity growth there has been in that time is largely confined to a few sectors, such as information services, and in the US to a few cities—think San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston. 

Will ChatGPT make the already troubling income and wealth inequality in the US and many other countries even worse? Or could it help? Could it in fact provide a much-needed boost to productivity?

ChatGPT, with its human-like writing abilities, and OpenAI's other recent release DALL-E 2, which generates images on demand, use large language models trained on huge amounts of data. The same is true of rivals such as Claude from Anthropic and Bard from Google. These so-called foundational models, such as GPT-3.5 from OpenAI, which ChatGPT is based on, or Google's competing language model LaMDA, which powers Bard, have evolved rapidly in recent years.  

They keep getting more powerful: they're trained on ever more data, and the number of parameters—the variables in the models that get tweaked—is rising dramatically. Earlier this month, OpenAI released its newest version, GPT-4. While OpenAI won't say exactly how much bigger it is, one can guess; GPT-3, with some 175 billion parameters, was about 100 times larger than GPT-2.

But it was the release of ChatGPT late last year that changed everything for many users. It's incredibly easy to use and compelling in its ability to rapidly create human-like text, including recipes, workout plans, and—perhaps most surprising—computer code. For many non-experts, including a growing number of entrepreneurs and businesspeople, the user-friendly chat model—less abstract and more practical than the impressive but often esoteric advances that been brewing in academia and a handful of high-tech companies over the last few years—is clear evidence that the AI revolution has real potential.

Venture capitalists and other investors are pouring billions into companies based on generative AI, and the list of apps and services driven by large language models is growing longer every day.

Among the big players, Microsoft has invested a reported $10 billion in OpenAI and its ChatGPT, hoping the technology will bring new life to its long-struggling Bing search engine and fresh capabilities to its Office products. In early March, Salesforce said it will introduce a ChatGPT app in its popular Slack product; at the same time, it announced a $250 million fund to invest in generative AI startups. The list goes on, from Coca-Cola to GM. Everyone has a ChatGPT play.  

Meanwhile, Google announced it is going to use its new generative AI tools in Gmail, Docs, and some of its other widely used products. 

Still, there are no obvious killer apps yet. And as businesses scramble for ways to use the technology, economists say a rare window has opened for rethinking how to get the most benefits from the new generation of AI. 

"We're talking in such a moment because you can touch this technology. Now you can play with it without needing any coding skills. A lot of people can start imagining how this impacts their workflow, their job prospects," says Katya Klinova, the head of research on AI, labor, and the economy at the Partnership on AI in San Francisco. 

"The question is who is going to benefit? And who will be left behind?" says Klinova, who is working on a report outlining the potential job impacts of generative AI and providing recommendations for using it to increase shared prosperity.

The optimistic view: it will prove to be a powerful tool for many workers, improving their capabilities and expertise, while providing a boost to the overall economy. The pessimistic one: companies will simply use it to destroy what once looked like automation-proof jobs, well-paying ones that require creative skills and logical reasoning; a few high-tech companies and tech elites will get even richer, but it will do little for overall economic growth.

Helping the least skilled

The question of ChatGPT's impact on the workplace isn't just a theoretical one. 

In the most recent analysis, OpenAI's Tyna Eloundou, Sam Manning, and Pamela Mishkin, with the University of Pennsylvania's Daniel Rock, found that large language models such as GPT could have some effect on 80% of the US workforce. They further estimated that the AI models, including GPT-4 and other anticipated software tools, would heavily affect 19% of jobs, with at least 50% of the tasks in those jobs "exposed." In contrast to what we saw in earlier waves of automation, higher-income jobs would be most affected, they suggest. Some of the people whose jobs are most vulnerable: writers, web and digital designers, financial quantitative analysts, and—just in case you were thinking of a career change—blockchain engineers.

"There is no question that [generative AI] is going to be used—it's not just a novelty," says David Autor, an MIT labor economist and a leading expert on the impact of technology on jobs. "Law firms are already using it, and that's just one example. It opens up a range of tasks that can be automated." 

 

 

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Autor has spent years documenting how advanced digital technologies have destroyed many manufacturing and routine clerical jobs that once paid well. But he says ChatGPT and other examples of generative AI have changed the calculation.

Previously, AI had automated some office work, but it was those rote step-by-step tasks that could be coded for a machine. Now it can perform tasks that we have viewed  as creative, such as writing and producing graphics. "It's pretty apparent to anyone who's paying attention that generative AI opens the door to computerization of a lot of kinds of tasks that we think of as not easily automated," he says.

The worry is not so much that ChatGPT will lead to large-scale unemployment—as Autor points out, there are plenty of jobs in the US—but that companies will replace relatively well-paying white-collar jobs with this new form of automation, sending those workers off to lower-paying service employment while the few who are best able to exploit the new technology reap all the benefits. 

In this scenario, tech-savvy workers and companies could quickly take up the AI tools, becoming so much more productive that they dominate their workplaces and their sectors. Those with fewer skills and little technical acumen to begin with would be left further behind. 

But Autor also sees a more positive possible outcome: generative AI could help a wide swath of people gain the skills to compete with those who have more education and expertise.

One of the first rigorous studies done on the productivity impact of ChatGPT suggests that such an outcome might be possible. 

Two MIT economics graduate students, Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang, ran an experiment involving hundreds of college-educated professionals working in areas like marketing and HR; they asked half to use ChatGPT in their daily tasks and the others not to. ChatGPT raised overall productivity (not too surprisingly), but here's the really interesting result: the AI tool helped the least skilled and accomplished workers the most, decreasing the performance gap between employees. In other words, the poor writers got much better; the good writers simply got a little faster.

The preliminary findings suggest that ChatGPT and other generative AIs could, in the jargon of economists, "upskill" people who are having trouble finding work. There are lots of experienced workers "lying fallow" after being displaced from office and manufacturing jobs over the last few decades, Autor says. If generative AI can be used as a practical tool to broaden their expertise and provide them with the specialized skills required in areas such as health care or teaching, where there are plenty of jobs, it could revitalize our workforce.

Determining which scenario wins out will require a more deliberate effort to think about how we want to exploit the technology. 

"I don't think we should take it as the technology is loose on the world and we must adapt to it. Because it's in the process of being created, it can be used and developed in a variety of ways," says Autor. "It's hard to overstate the importance of designing what it's there for."

Simply put, we are at a juncture where either less-skilled workers will increasingly be able to take on what is now thought of as knowledge work, or the most talented knowledge workers will radically scale up their existing advantages over everyone else. Which outcome we get depends largely on how employers implement tools like ChatGPT. But the more hopeful option is well within our reach.  

Beyond human-like

There are some reasons to be pessimistic, however. Last spring, in "The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence," the Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson warned that AI creators were too obsessed with mimicking human intelligence rather than finding ways to use the technology to allow people to do new tasks and extend their capabilities.

The pursuit of human-like capabilities, Brynjolfsson argued, has led to technologies that simply replace people with machines, driving down wages and exacerbating inequality of wealth and income. It is, he wrote, "the single biggest explanation" for the rising concentration of wealth.

 

 

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A year later, he says ChatGPT, with its human-sounding outputs, "is like the poster child for what I warned about": it has "turbocharged" the discussion around how the new technologies can be used to give people new abilities rather than simply replacing them.

Despite his worries that AI developers will continue to blindly outdo each other in mimicking human-like capabilities in their creations, Brynjolfsson, the director of the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, is generally a techno-optimist when it comes to artificial intelligence. Two years ago, he predicted a productivity boom from AI and other digital technologies, and these days he's bullish on the impact of the new AI models.

Much of Brynjolfsson's optimism comes from the conviction that businesses could greatly benefit from using generative AI such as ChatGPT to expand their offerings and improve the productivity of their workforce. "It's a great creativity tool. It's great at helping you to do novel things. It's not simply doing the same thing cheaper," says Brynjolfsson. As long as companies and developers can "stay away from the mentality of thinking that humans aren't needed," he says, "it's going to be very important." 

Within a decade, he predicts, generative AI could add trillions of dollars in economic growth in the US. "A majority of our economy is basically knowledge workers and information workers," he says. "And it's hard to think of any type of information workers that won't be at least partly affected."

When that productivity boost will come—if it does—is an economic guessing game. Maybe we just need to be patient.

In 1987, Robert Solow, the MIT economist who won the Nobel Prize that year for explaining how innovation drives economic growth, famously said, "You can see the computer age everywhere except in the productivity statistics." It wasn't until later, in the mid and late 1990s, that the impacts—particularly from advances in semiconductors—began showing up in the productivity data as businesses found ways to take advantage of ever cheaper computational power and related advances in software.  

Could the same thing happen with AI? Avi Goldfarb, an economist at the University of Toronto, says it depends on whether we can figure out how to use the latest technology to transform businesses as we did in the earlier computer age.

So far, he says, companies have just been dropping in AI to do tasks a little bit better: "It'll increase efficiency—it might incrementally increase productivity—but ultimately, the net benefits are going to be small. Because all you're doing is the same thing a little bit better." But, he says, "the technology doesn't just allow us to do what we've always done a little bit better or a little bit cheaper. It might allow us to create new processes to create value to customers."

The verdict on when—even if—that will happen with generative AI remains uncertain. "Once we figure out what good writing at scale allows industries to do differently, or—in the context of Dall-E—what graphic design at scale allows us to do differently, that's when we're going to experience the big productivity boost," Goldfarb says. "But if that is next week or next year or 10 years from now, I have no idea."

Power struggle

When Anton Korinek, an economist at the University of Virginia and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, got access to the new generation of large language models such as ChatGPT, he did what a lot of us did: he began playing around with them to see how they might help his work. He carefully documented their performance in a paper in February, noting how well they handled 25 "use cases," from brainstorming and editing text (very useful) to coding (pretty good with some help) to doing math (not great).

ChatGPT did explain one of the most fundamental principles in economics incorrectly, says Korinek: "It screwed up really badly." But the mistake, easily spotted, was quickly forgiven in light of the benefits. "I can tell you that it makes me, as a cognitive worker, more productive," he says. "Hands down, no question for me that I'm more productive when I use a language model." 

When GPT-4 came out, he tested its performance on the same 25 questions that he documented in February, and it performed far better. There were fewer instances of making stuff up; it also did much better on the math assignments, says Korinek.

Since ChatGPT and other AI bots automate cognitive work, as opposed to physical tasks that require investments in equipment and infrastructure, a boost to economic productivity could happen far more quickly than in past technological revolutions, says Korinek. "I think we may see a greater boost to productivity by the end of the year—certainly by 2024," he says. 

What's more, he says, in the longer term, the way the AI models can make researchers like himself more productive has the potential to drive technological progress. 

That potential of large language models is already turning up in research in the physical sciences. Berend Smit, who runs a chemical engineering lab at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, is an expert on using machine learning to discover new materials. Last year, after one of his graduate students, Kevin Maik Jablonka, showed some interesting results using GPT-3, Smit asked him to demonstrate that GPT-3 is, in fact, useless for the kinds of sophisticated machine-learning studies his group does to predict the properties of compounds.

"He failed completely," jokes Smit.

It turns out that after being fine-tuned for a few minutes with a few relevant examples, the model performs as well as advanced machine-learning tools specially developed for chemistry in answering basic questions about things like the solubility of a compound or its reactivity. Simply give it the name of a compound, and it can predict various properties based on the structure.

As in other areas of work, large language models could help expand the expertise and capabilities of non-experts—in this case, chemists with little knowledge of complex machine-learning tools. Because it's as simple as a literature search, Jablonka says, "it could bring machine learning to the masses of chemists."

These impressive—and surprising—results are just a tantalizing hint of how powerful the new forms of AI could be across a wide swath of creative work, including scientific discovery, and how shockingly easy they are to use. But this also points to some fundamental questions.

As the potential impact of generative AI on the economy and jobs becomes more imminent, who will define the vision for how these tools should be designed and deployed? Who will control the future of this amazing technology?

 

 

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Diane Coyle, an economist at Cambridge University in the UK, says one concern is the potential for large language models to be dominated by the same big companies that rule much of the digital world. Google and Meta are offering their own large language models alongside OpenAI, she points out, and the large computational costs required to run the software create a barrier to entry for anyone looking to compete.

The worry is that these companies have similar "advertising-driven business models," Coyle says. "So obviously you get a certain uniformity of thought, if you don't have different kinds of people with different kinds of incentives."

Coyle acknowledges that there are no easy fixes, but she says one possibility is a publicly funded international research organization for generative AI, modeled after CERN, the Geneva-based intergovernmental European nuclear research body where the World Wide Web was created in 1989. It would be equipped with the huge computing power needed to run the models and the scientific expertise to further develop the technology. 

Such an effort outside of Big Tech, says Coyle, would "bring some diversity to the incentives that the creators of the models face when they're producing them." 

While it remains uncertain which public policies would help make sure that large language models best serve the public interest, says Coyle, it's becoming clear that the choices about how we use the technology can't be left to a few dominant companies and the market alone.  

History provides us with plenty of examples of how important government-funded research can be in developing technologies that bring about widespread prosperity. Long before the invention of the web at CERN, another publicly funded effort in the late 1960s gave rise to the internet, when the US Department of Defense supported ARPANET, which pioneered ways for multiple computers to communicate with each other.  

In Power and Progress: Our 1000-Year Struggle Over Technology & Prosperity, the MIT economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson provide a compelling walk through the history of technological progress and its mixed record in creating widespread prosperity. Their point is that it's critical to deliberately steer technological advances in ways that provide broad benefits and don't just make the elite richer. 

 

 

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From the decades after World War II until the early 1970s, the US economy was marked by rapid technological changes; wages for most workers rose while income inequality dropped sharply. The reason, Acemoglu and Johnson say, is that technological advances were used to create new tasks and jobs, while social and political pressures helped ensure that workers shared the benefits more equally with their employers than they do now. 

In contrast, they write, the more recent rapid adoption of manufacturing robots in "the industrial heartland of the American economy in the Midwest" over the last few decades simply destroyed jobs and led to a "prolonged regional decline."  

The book, which comes out in May, is particularly relevant for understanding what today's rapid progress in AI could bring and how decisions about the best way to use the breakthroughs will affect us all going forward. In a recent interview, Acemoglu said they were writing the book when GPT-3 was first released. And, he adds half-jokingly, "we foresaw ChatGPT."

Acemoglu maintains that the creators of AI "are going in the wrong direction." The entire architecture behind the AI "is in the automation mode," he says. "But there is nothing inherent about generative AI or AI in general that should push us in this direction. It's the business models and the vision of the people in OpenAI and Microsoft and the venture capital community."

If you believe we can steer a technology's trajectory, then an obvious question is: Who is "we"? And this is where Acemoglu and Johnson are most provocative. They write: "Society and its powerful gatekeepers need to stop being mesmerized by tech billionaires and their agenda … One does not need to be an AI expert to have a say about the direction of progress and the future of our society forged by these technologies."

The creators of ChatGPT and the businesspeople involved in bringing it to market, notably OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, deserve much credit for offering the new AI sensation to the public. Its potential is vast. But that doesn't mean we must accept their vision and aspirations for where we want the technology to go and how it should be used.

According to their narrative, the end goal is artificial general intelligence, which, if all goes well, will lead to great economic wealth and abundances. Altman, for one, has promoted the vision at great length recently, providing further justification for his longtime advocacy of a universal basic income (UBI) to feed the non-technocrats among us. For some, it sounds tempting. No work and free money! Sweet!

It's the assumptions underlying the narrative that are most troubling—namely, that AI is headed on an inevitable job-destroying path and most of us are just along for the (free?) ride. This view barely acknowledges the possibility that generative AI could lead to a creativity and productivity boom for workers far beyond the tech-savvy elites by helping to unlock their talents and brains. There is little discussion of the idea of using the technology to produce widespread prosperity by expanding human capabilities and expertise throughout the working population.

As Acemoglu and Johnson write: "We are heading toward greater inequality not inevitably but because of faulty choices about who has power in society and the direction of technology … In fact, UBI fully buys into the vision of the business and tech elite that they are the enlightened, talented people who should generously finance the rest."

Acemoglu and Johnson write of various tools for achieving "a more balanced technology portfolio," from tax reforms and other government policies that might encourage the creation of more worker-friendly AI to reforms that might wean academia off Big Tech's funding for computer science research and business schools.

But, the economists acknowledge, such reforms are "a tall order," and a social push to redirect technological change is "not just around the corner." 

The good news is that, in fact, we can decide how we choose to use ChatGPT and other large language models. As countless apps based on the technology are rushed to market, businesses and individual users will have a chance to choose how they want to exploit it; companies can decide to use ChatGPT to give workers more abilities—or to simply cut jobs and trim costs.

Another positive development: there is at least some momentum behind open-source projects in generative AI, which could break Big Tech's grip on the models. Notably, last year more than a thousand international researchers collaborated on a large language model called Bloom that can create text in languages such as French, Spanish, and Arabic. And if Coyle and others are right, increased public funding for AI research could help change the course of future breakthroughs. 

Stanford's Brynjolfsson refuses to say he's optimistic about how it will play out. Still, his enthusiasm for the technology these days is clear. "We can have one of the best decades ever if we use the technology in the right direction," he says. "But it's not inevitable."

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Moore also made his famous observation, now known as Moore's Law, three years before he helped start 

 in 1968. It said the capacity and complexity of integrated circuits would double every year.

(Image credit: Ben Margot/AP)

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Exclusive: Surgeons raise concerns that people using jabs are unaware of risks of redundant skin

From unbearable side-effects to cravings curbed: readers on weight-loss jabs

A surge in the number of people using slimming jabs to lose weight could lead to a rise in patients travelling abroad for tummy tucks or other surgery to remove excess skin, surgeons have said.

Drugs such as liraglutide and semaglutide, which could help people reduce their weight by more than 10%, have been approved for use on the NHS for certain groups of people with obesity, although supplies of the latter under the brand name Wegovy have yet to arrive in the UK.

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37259-5

Nature Communications, Published online: 25 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41467-023-37356-5

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

My colleague Alan Taylor has published thousands of photo essays in his time at The Atlantic. I spoke with him about the art of telling a visual story and which photos have stuck with him over the years.

But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

• The most disturbing part of Donald Trump's latest rant
• Life is worse for older people now.
• People aren't falling for AI Trump photos (yet).

Seeing Things

Since joining The Atlantic in 2011, my colleague Alan Taylor has published more than 2,700 photo articles. Multiply that by an average of 24 images per story, and you'll get closer to approximating the amount of photos he's looked at in his time here.

When he was working as a web developer in the '90s, Alan first became fascinated by the images he saw on news agencies' wires. At The Atlantic, he pores over those resources to publish photo essays about what's going on in the world. But he also follows his curiosity wherever it takes him, curating collections of wacky, fun, and beautiful things worth seeing: the geometric carvings of salt mines, the world's tallest statues, life viewed under a microscope. I talked with Alan about what he's learned from more than a decade of creating photo essays.

Isabel Fattal: Looking back on the tens of thousands of images you've worked with, can you think of a few that stand out?

Alan Taylor: I was looking through some of my archives, and it's often the ones with a really personal touch, something very human. For example, this famous image of Barack Obama.

 

 

You don't really need a caption for that. Being a human and seeing that image in front of you, you know what's happening. And as soon as you move beyond the recognition of the feeling, you think about what this says in American history and society. You've got this little boy reaching up and touching the hair. His hair is just like mine. He's just like me. I could be this. And I've just said far more than needs to be said about it. It's just there.

There's another one, from when the pandemic was near its height. This is a doctor in full protective gear, embracing a patient. At that stage of the crisis, people were moving out of a state of panic and trying to figure out what the hell was going on, and toward the sense that, Oh, wow, we should have some compassion for the caregivers too. This is deeply troubling and serious.

 

 

Isabel: Are there kinds of news events where you find images to be the most effective way to tell the story?

Alan: Typically broad-scale disasters, such as hurricanes and floods and fires. When they first hit, you can do a whole lot more with a handful of photographs than you can with a few paragraphs. When Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, and Donald Trump flew there to survey the damage, I really wanted to emphasize, This is what Puerto Rico looked like when Trump went to visit. So I put together a story. If you can sense there's a question out there that you have that other people probably have, you can put it out there.

And then there are the stories that are about the images themselves. In 2013, North Korea issued photographs of a military drill they were doing, and it had some hovercrafts coming in to land on a beach. And I just saw it as I was going through the news feed, as I always do. And I noticed, Oh, wow, this looks weird. Wait a minute. This is Photoshop. This image has four or five hovercraft, but really, there's probably only two there and one or more is cloned a couple different times. So I did this little exposé on it. I'm sitting up here in my home office in the attic in the suburbs and going, Oh my God, I've seen something that nobody else in the world has noticed here.

Isabel: The power of looking closely.

So where do you get your ideas for some of your more random and fun photo essays, such as salt mines or the pope versus the wind?

Alan: You're missing probably the silliest one I've ever done, which is just cows. It's pictures of cows, and it's titled "Cows." I love that. I put out a tweet promoting it, and the first response was, Is everybody okay over there?

 

 

"Pope vs. the Wind" was fun because I thought, I see these pictures all the time. Photographers are assigned to travel with the pope and go to these different places, and there's only so many different photographs you can get of a scene. And when he's wearing the skullcap (zucchetto) and a small cape, the wind is having a great time with those. I realized, Wait, there's a body of images out there of this phenomenon. I can do something fun with this.

 

 

The main reason that I spend all day, every day, looking at all these photographs is that they can accidentally clump together and help me come up with story ideas. It's always fun when you can find some sort of an underlying theme over years and years.

Related:

• Photos of the week: Sky Bar, Kansas sunset, flooded fields
• Photos: National Napping Day

Today's News

1. U.S. military officials said that a U.S. base in northeast Syria was targeted by a missile strike, just one day after a suspected Iranian drone struck a coalition base in the same region and killed an American worker, according to the Pentagon.
2. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced a deal between the U.S. and Canada that would allow both countries to turn away migrants at unofficial border crossings, effective tomorrow.  
3. A federal judge reportedly ordered several former aides of Donald Trump to testify before a grand jury in the criminal inquiry of efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Dispatches

• Books Briefing: Kate Cray explains how ordinary photos and stories can connect you with your family's roots.
• Work in Progress: The internet loves bad news. That's bad, Derek Thompson argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

 

 

The Trump AI Deepfakes Had an Unintended Side Effect

By Megan Garber

The former president is fighting with the police. He's yelling. He's running. He's resisting. Finally, he falls, that familiar sweep of hair the only thing rigid against the swirl of bodies that surround him.

When I first saw the images, I did a double take: The event they seem to depict—the arrest of Donald Trump—has been a matter of feverish anticipation this week, as a grand jury decides whether to indict the former president for hush-money payments allegedly made on his behalf to the adult-film star Stormy Daniels. (Trump, that canny calibrator of public expectation, himself contributed to the fever.) Had the indictment finally come down, I wondered, and had the arrest ensued? Had Trump's Teflon coating—so many alleged misdeeds, so few consequences—finally worn away? Pics or it didn't happen, people say, and, well, here were the pics.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Donald Trump is on the wrong side of the religious right.
• Don't cut corners on indicting Trump.
• Blue check marks were always shameless.

Culture Break

 

 

Read. The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty, a transportive collection of every short story by the late author (most of which were set in small-town Mississippi), or another of eight books that will take you somewhere new.

Watch. Catch up on Succession in anticipation of the fourth and final season of the acclaimed series, which premieres on HBO Sunday.

Play our daily crossword.

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.

Scientific Reports, Published online: 24 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-32157-8

 

 

Move Over, Oumuamua

Remember Oumuamua, that weird and allegedly alien object that flew past Earth back in 2017, when we were all so young and starry-eyed? Now, some scientists have a new and boring explanation for what it was — and reader, it may have nothing to do with aliens.

In a new study published in the journal Nature this week, astronomy researchers out of Cornell and Berkeley suggested that Oumuamua, the interstellar interloper that whizzed past Earth in 2017 and has puzzled, mesmerized, and frustrated astronomers ever since, may well have been a gas-propelled comet with a tail so faint that we couldn't see it.

Perhaps the most head-scratching facet of the Oumuamua mystery is that the object, which was 400 feet long and first detected by astronomers in Hawaii, didn't have the same kind of tail as a comet. Paired with its unusual shape, that lack of tail led Harvard astronomer and alien hunter Avi Loeb to an out-of-this-world conclusion: that Oumuamua — which means "scout" in Hawaiian — was alien in origin.

Space Snoozefest

This gas comet theory, which was dreamed up by Jennifer Bergner, an astrochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, and defended by Cornell postdoctoral astronomy researcher Darryl Z. Seligman, offers a somewhat tidier, albeit less fantastical, explanation: that the object, which some have posited may have been an asteroid, was actually a comet, and was propelled by hydrogen gas that came from a potentially icy core.

"We show that this mechanism can explain many of Oumuamua's peculiar properties without fine-tuning," Bergner and Seligman wrote in their Nature paper. "This provides further support that Oumuamua originated as a planetesimal relic broadly similar to solar system comets."

"What's beautiful about Jenny's idea," Seligman said in a UC Berkeley press release, "is that it's exactly what should happen to interstellar comets. We had all these stupid ideas, like hydrogen icebergs and other crazy things, and it's just the most generic explanation."

Naturally, there are people — Loeb, for one — who aren't buying it.

"The authors of the new paper claim that it was a water ice comet even though we did not see the cometary tail," the Harvard firebrand said in an emailed statement to the New York Times. "This is like saying an elephant is a zebra without stripes."

More on space theories: Scientists May Have Just Discovered New Oceans in Two of Uranus' Moons

The post Boring Scientists Say Strange "Oumuamua" Space Object Wasn't Alien, Just Gassy appeared first on Futurism.

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Bark With Bite

, one of the world's largest video game developers known for titles like the "Assassin's Creed" franchise, is moving to partially automate writing in-game dialog by developing an AI tool called Ghostwriter.

In video games, non-player characters (NPCs) often speak in what are known as "barks": short, often shouty lines of dialogue triggered by in-game events — a "Watch those wrist rockets!" a quick "Reloadin'!" or a tired "Took an arrow to the knee." To hear Ubisoft tell it, drafting those innumerable quips is the perfect application for machine learning.

"Ghostwriter isn't replacing the video game writer, but instead, alleviating one of the video game writer's most laborious tasks: writing barks," the developer assured in a press release. "Ghostwriter effectively generates first drafts of barks — phrases or sounds made by NPCs during a triggered event — which gives scriptwriters more time to polish the narrative elsewhere."

Dicey Dialogue

A writer using Ghostwriter would start by creating a character, and then specifying the line of dialogue or interaction they want to generate based on a selected mode, e.g. "confident," "excited," or "irritation." The AI then churns out a bunch of different variations in pairs, which the writer can then choose the best of between the two, and manually edit.

"Rather than writing first draft versions themselves, Ghostwriter lets scriptwriters select and polish the samples generated," said Ben Swanson, the creator of Ghostwriter and an R&D scientist at Ubisoft LaForge, in the release, adding that the software will become smarter and finer tuned the more a writer uses it, as it picks up on their preferences.

During a talk at the Games Developer Conference this week, Swanson compared Ghostwriter to rolling a 30,000-sided die with each face corresponding to a word, and then rolling it over and over again until you have a full sentence, as quoted by Game Developer.

Forget ChatGPT

Swanson also affirmed that the tool requires human input and wouldn't work if Ubisoft's writers weren't already enthusiastic about using it.

Addressing the industry's uneasy foray into AI, Swanson urged other developers to not use other generative-AI like OpenAI's ChatGPT and to instead develop their own tools, warning that they may not own the content it produces or the data going into it.

"You don't know what these companies are going to do," he said. "If you're trying to build these systems, keep lines of communication and talk to narrative designers and scriptwriters."

More on: Google's New AI Says Google Is a Monopoly and the Government Should Break It Up

The post Ubisoft Develops Tool to Crank Out Video Game Dialogue Using AI appeared first on Futurism.

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Scientific Reports, Published online: 24 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31947-4

Scientific Reports, Published online: 24 March 2023; doi:10.1038/s41598-023-31292-6

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