Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Country


Job titles of the future: Nature's drug designer

MIT Technology Review

Chemist Tim Cernak is using two decades of experience in Big Pharma to try to save Gila monsters, loggerhead sea turtles, and many more creatures. In 2018, after nearly two decades working in Big Pharma, chemist Tim Cernak was ready to put his skills to a new use. For Merck, he'd developed precision therapies for cancer, HIV, and diabetes that could target disease while minimizing harm to healthy cells. But as a lifelong nature lover, he was increasingly concerned about the health of ecosystems and wondered whether his expertise could transfer. Animals, he learned, are often treated with pharmaceuticals formulated for humans, which affect them like old-school cancer drugs: Though intended to kill abnormal cells, they're indiscriminate in the harm they cause. For instance, the standard of care for frogs infected with a deadly skin infection is itraconazole, an antifungal that is often lethal for the amphibian.


How to Watch the 2026 World Cup

WIRED

The games start June 11 and end with a grand finale in New Jersey on July 19. There are 104 of them. Here's how to watch'em all. The FIFA Men's World Cup is almost here, and this one will be the biggest ever. The tournament is hosted by three countries: Mexico, Canada, and the US.


What's Going On in Donald Trump's Head? We Don't Have Brain Scans. We Do Have This.

Slate

No one can say for sure what's going on in the president's head. His 25 greatest obsessions can get us a little closer. This is the year the first baby boomers--those born in 1946--turn 80, and that cohort includes Donald Trump. We have all recently lived through what it means to have an 80-year-old commander in chief, but at a political moment that's simultaneously more horrific, erratic, and just plain befuddling than anything this country has seen in ages, we wanted to understand the brain of 80-year-old president. Plenty of people are trying to discern whether his recent rants and raves are due to a more serious cognitive decline--we understand the instinct; we've done it too --but we went a different (if related) route. The more we dug into Trump's many fixations, the more we realized that this man still thinks he lives in the 1980s. We also discovered--without too much surprise--that he often seems to fundamentally misunderstand the works he treasures most deeply. These items might not replace a brain map, but they do create a certain holistic view of what animates and splinters Trump's mind. Sometimes, they just help explain his worldview. Other times, they seem to have had real influence on policy and the America that Trump is trying to create. Welcome to Trump Brain, the 25 things that define who the president is--and what he wants. Please enable javascript to fully experience this interactive. When millions of people took to the streets in October to protest Trump's authoritarianism, the president responded by dunking on his critics online. Specifically, he posted an A.I.-generated video of a fighter jet, piloted by himself in a literal crown, dropping human excrement onto the crowds. It was perhaps Trump's most juvenile use of A.I. slop yet--the kind of low-quality, feverish content made possible by artificial intelligence. Trump undoubtedly is the perfect president for the A.I. slop era. In some ways, this is because he's the ideal audience for it: Like many older internet users delighted by the technology, Trump seems to enjoy mindless, cartoonish, childish content. One of the videos he shared depicted him playing soccer with Cristiano Ronaldo in the Oval Office.


Interview with AAAI Fellow Tanya Berger-Wolf: AI for ecology, biodiversity, and conservation

AIHub

Each year the AAAI recognizes a group of individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions to the field of artificial intelligence by appointing them as Fellows. Over the course of the next few months, we'll be talking to some of the 2026 AAAI Fellows. In this interview, we met with Tanya Berger-Wolf, who was elected as a Fellow . We found out about her latest research developing a foundation model for biology, the insights this model can provide, interesting collaborations over the years, and what the future has in store. Could you start with a quick introduction and tell us about the broad area that you're working in? My area of research is in AI for ecology, biodiversity, and conservation.


OpenAI says fake accounts from China tried to turn Americans against data centers

Engadget

The company has published a report about China-linked influence campaigns that used ChatGPT. OpenAI has published a report about ChatGPT users, who it says were likely based in China, that used the chatbot to plan a campaign designed to sway Americans' opinions about AI data centers. It divided the users into two clusters, the first of which it had designated the Data Center Bandwagon group. Accounts categorized in the group allegedly asked ChatGPT to generate English-language talking points and images, such as comic strips, which focus on how AI data centers drive up demand in electricity and how that leads to higher bills for consumers. The company says these users posed as Americans from a variety of backgrounds on social media, where they had posted the text and image output they got from ChatGPT.


Benchmarking Egocentric Multimodal Goal Inference for Assistive Wearable Agents

Neural Information Processing Systems

There has recently been a surge of interest in Wearable Assistant Agents: agents embodied in a wearable form factor such as smart glasses, who can take actions toward a user's stated goal -- a high-level language-expressed command such as "where did I leave my keys?", "Text Alice I will be late", or "What's the weather in Cancun?". In this work, we consider the complementary problem of eliminating the effort required to interact with such an agent by proactively inferring the user's goal from multimodal contextual observations. As vision-language models (VLMs) hold strong potential to ultimately solve this problem, our work focuses on creating a strong benchmark to measure progress toward this end. Given the limited prior work in this area, establishing the benchmark required collecting a novel multimodal goal-inference dataset; our dataset comprises ~30 hours of data from 363 participants across 3,482 recordings, featuring ground-truth reference goals alongside accompanying visual, audio, digital, and longitudinal contextual observations. We ran a human predictability study, where we found that humans set a strong baseline that comprises a de facto upper bound on model performance: they show multiple choice question (MCQ) accuracy of 93%, with the best VLM achieving about 84% accuracy.


In aging South Korea, AI dolls are caring for the elderly

The Japan Times

Bang Chun-ja, a 78-year-old South Korean woman living alone, holding Hyodol, an artificial intelligence-powered healthcare doll designed for the elderly, during an interview at her home in Yongin in April. Yongin, South Korea - In her tiny apartment in South Korea where she lives alone, 78-year-old Bang Chun-ja spends her days with a childlike artificial intelligence-powered doll she says she prefers to people. The doll greets Bang when she returns home, sings to her when she feels bored, reminds her not to skip meals or medication -- helping her maintain a routine -- and tells her it loves her. Bang has limited contact with her grown-up daughter, and fell into severe depression after major back surgery, spending hours alone staring at the ceiling in pain. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.


OpenAI says China-based actors stoking opposition to AI data centres

Al Jazeera

China-based actors are likely behind the use of ChatGPT for "covert influence operations" aimed at stoking opposition to data centres in the United States, OpenAI has said. In a research report released on Wednesday, the company behind the world's most popular AI chatbot said it had banned a cluster of accounts likely based in China for attempting to "manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI". Among other content, the accounts generated a comic strip showing a cigar-chomping businessman holding bags marked with dollar signs as a family reacted in shock to their electricity bill, according to the San Francisco-based company. OpenAI said a second cluster of accounts had generated content casting US tariffs as an effort to "dominate technological competition" with China, and specified that the material should not mention Chinese leader Xi Jinping. While the campaign sought to "exploit and amplify existing public concerns" about energy prices, OpenAI found no evidence that it had a "meaningful" influence, the company said.


Teenagers in Tokyo allegedly used ChatGPT to decide extortion amount in assault case

The Japan Times

A group of high school students arrested over allegedly trying to extort money from a boy in western Tokyo may have used ChatGPT to decide how much to demand, police said. A group of high school students in Tokyo arrested over allegedly assaulting a boy and trying to extort money from him may have used ChatGPT to decide how much to demand, media reports have recently revealed. Five teenagers, including a 17-year-old girl and four boys ranging in age from 16 to 17, were arrested in January over the alleged assault and attempted extortion of a 17-year-old high school student in the city of Hachioji in western Tokyo, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. Police said the suspects assaulted the boy in a plaza in Hachioji's Shiroyamate district, breaking his nose and causing other injuries, before allegedly trying to extort ¥150,000 ($935) from him. The girl, who was the victim's ex-girlfriend, allegedly first confronted him, accusing him of touching her younger sister's leg. She then challenged him, saying, "Give me the money or fight me one-on-one," according to reports by Fuji TV.


Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have 'Sabotaged' AI Researchers Using Claude

WIRED

Anthropic Walks Back Policy That Could Have'Sabotaged' AI Researchers Using Claude The company changed course after researchers spoke out against the policy, which would have covertly limited Claude's ability to develop competing AI models. Anthropic is backtracking on a policy that would have covertly limited competitors from using its new AI model, Claude Fable 5, to develop other AI models. The company changed course after the move received significant backlash from the AI research community . "We're changing Fable 5's safeguards for frontier LLM development to make them visible," Anthropic said in a statement to WIRED. "We made the wrong tradeoff and we apologize for not getting the balance right."