Asia
11 wild photos show the Amazon River in its glory
New photography book takes readers on a journey down the world's longest river. Magnificent frigate birds (Fregata magnificens) make long foraging trips far over the Atlantic Ocean. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The vital Amazon River is a lifeline for flora and fauna alike. The mighty river is celebrated in a new book, .
Anthropic-Pentagon battle shows how big tech has reversed course on AI and war
Less than a decade ago, Google employees scuttled any military use of its AI. The standoff between Anthropic and the Pentagon has forced the tech industry to once again grapple with the question of how its products are used for war - and what lines it will not cross. Amid Silicon Valley's rightward shift under Donald Trump and the signing of lucrative defense contracts, big tech's answer is looking very different than it did even less than a decade ago. Anthropic's feud with the Trump administration escalated three days ago as the AI firm sued the Department of Defense, claiming that the government's decision to blacklist it from government work violated its first amendment rights. The company and the Pentagon have been locked in a months-long standoff, with Anthropic attempting to prohibit its AI model from being used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons.
Future AI chips could be built on glass
A specialized glass layer could make tomorrow's computers faster and more energy efficient. An early version of the glass substrate developed by Absolics. Human-made glass is thousands of years old. But it's now poised to find its way into the AI chips used in the world's newest and largest data centers. This year, a South Korean company called Absolics is planning to start commercial production of special glass panels designed to make next-generation computing hardware more powerful and energy efficient. Other companies, including Intel, are also pushing forward in this area.
The race to solve the biggest problem in quantum computing
The errors that quantum computers make are holding the technology back. Quantum computers won't be truly useful until they can correct their mistakes Quantum computers are already here, but they make far too many errors. This is arguably the biggest obstacle to the technology really becoming useful, but recent breakthroughs suggest a solution may be on the horizon. Errors creep into traditional computers too, but there are well-established techniques for correcting them. They rely on redundancy, where extra bits are used to detect when 0s incorrectly swap to 1s or vice versa.
Learning Conditional Deformable Templates with Convolutional Networks
Adrian Dalca, Marianne Rakic, John Guttag, Mert Sabuncu
In these frameworks, templates are constructed using an iterative process of template estimation and alignment, which is often computationally very expensive. Due in part to this shortcoming, most methods compute asingle template for the entire population of images, or a few templates for specific sub-groups of the data.
MacNet: Transferring Knowledge from Machine Comprehension to Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Boyuan Pan, Yazheng Yang, Hao Li, Zhou Zhao, Yueting Zhuang, Deng Cai, Xiaofei He
Machine comprehension (MC) has gained significant popularity over the past few years and it is a coveted goal in the field of natural language understanding. Its task is to teach the machine to understand thecontent ofagivenpassage andthenanswer arelated question, which requires deep comprehension and accurate information extraction towards the text.
Japan considers mass drone use for coastal defense
Amid an increasingly severe security environment, the Defense Ministry plans to establish a coastal defense system using thousands of drones, though there are still many issues to overcome. The SHIELD defense system will involve more than 10 types of drones, including those for attacking enemy ships, collecting information and protecting radar sites, to thwart enemy advances in a multilayered manner. The government's fiscal 2026 budget bill allocates around ¥100 billion ($628.7 million) for the drone defense system, which the ministry aims to implement in fiscal 2027. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.