The current status quo of smartphone design, repair and longevity could finally be upended in favour of users – and the planet. That is the message from campaign groups on the landmark overhaul of rules concerning batteries and eco-sensitive design working their way through the various legislative bodies of the European Union – a market big enough to force manufacturers to change, even if EU rules don't directly apply to other regions. MEPs voted on 14 June to accept new battery regulations, elements of which look to ensure cells in smartphones and gadgets can be replaced with parts available for five years after the device is discontinued. In many cases, the rules say, batteries should be user-replaceable "without requiring the use of specialised tools" and without the heat or solvents typically required to unglue components today. Manufacturers also won't be able to use software to stop batteries installed by third parties from working.

This story was originally published by Slate's Future Tense partnership and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In August 2021, forest range officer Remya Raghavan caught three people carrying wild boar meat in the Wayanad forest of Kerala, a state in southern India. Possessing wild animal meat is a crime under the country's 1972 Wildlife Protection Act, so Raghavan entered all the details of the crime--location, witnesses, names of the accused, items seized, and section of the forest--in a mobile application. Just like that, the case was officially registered in the app-based system, which signaled that it needed to be taken to court. The app Raghavan used is called HAWK, or Hostile Activity Watch Kernel, and it appears to be the first such digital intelligence gathering system for wildlife crime in India.

Fox News anchor Julie Banderas reacts to the vice president's gaffe and CNN calling Dylan Mulvaney a man on'Jesse Watters Primetime.' EXCLUSIVE: Sen. Ted Cruz is criticizing Democrats for what he believes is a rush to regulate the artificial intelligence sector, and says new rules for AI would be a drag on the U.S. in the critical tech race against China. "I am concerned China is investing heavily in AI. I'm also concerned that Democrats want to impose such stringent regulations on the development of AI that it stifles innovation in the United States, and allows China to take the lead," Cruz told Fox News Digital after a classified briefing on AI and national security this week. "That would be a generational mistake," he said of the Democrats' effort.

Vice President Kamala Harris' gaffe-filled week got a little bit worse Friday when she appeared to mistakenly call for lowering population in order to provide cleaner air and drinking water. Vice President Kamala Harris' gaffe-filled week got a little bit worse Friday when she appeared to mistakenly call for lowering population in order to provide cleaner air and drinking water. "When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water," Harris told a crowd at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland in a speech centered on the Inflation Reduction Act. Harris seemingly meant to say "pollution," but her office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment. Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the conclusion of the Investing in America tour at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Maryland, on July 14, 2023.

Testing of function safety and Safety Of The Intended Functionality (SOTIF) is important for autonomous vehicles (AVs). It is hard to test the AV's hazard response in the real world because it would involve hazards to passengers and other road users. This paper studied on virtual testing of AV on the CARLA platform and proposed a Humanoid Scenario Generation (HSG) scheme to investigate the impacts of hazardous behaviors on AV collision rates. The HSG scheme breakthrough the current limitation on the rarity and reproducibility of real scenes. By accurately capturing five prominent human driver behaviors that directly contribute to vehicle collisions in the real world, the methodology significantly enhances the realism and diversity of the simulation, as evidenced by collision rate statistics across various traffic scenarios. Thus, the modular framework allows for customization, and its seamless integration within the CARLA platform ensures compatibility with existing tools. Ultimately, the comparison results demonstrate that all vehicles that exhibited hazardous behaviors followed the predefined random speed distribution and the effectiveness of the HSG was validated by the distinct characteristics displayed by these behaviors.

The task of Argument Mining, that is extracting argumentative sentences for a specific topic from large document sources, is an inherently difficult task for machine learning models and humans alike, as large Argument Mining datasets are rare and recognition of argumentative sentences requires expert knowledge. The task becomes even more difficult if it also involves stance detection of retrieved arguments. Given the cost and complexity of creating suitably large Argument Mining datasets, we ask whether it is necessary for acceptable performance to have datasets growing in size. Our findings show that, when using carefully composed training samples and a model pretrained on related tasks, we can reach 95% of the maximum performance while reducing the training sample size by at least 85%. This gain is consistent across three Argument Mining tasks on three different datasets. We also publish a new dataset for future benchmarking.

Hierarchies are the hidden backbones of complex systems and their analysis allows for a deeper understanding of their structure and how they evolve. We consider languages also to be complex adaptive systems with several intricate networks that capture their structure and function. Hence, we decided to analyze the hierarchical organization of historical syntactic networks to understand how syntax evolves over time. We created these networks from a corpus of German texts from the 11th to 17th centuries, focusing on the hierarchical levels of these networks. diachronically and to map them to specific communicative needs of speakers. We developed a framework to empirically track the emergence of syntactic structures diachronically, enabling us to map the communicative needs of speakers with these structures. We named these syntactic structures "syntactic communicative hierarchies." We showed that the communicative needs of speakers are the organizational force of syntax. Thus, we argue that the emergence of syntactic communicative hierarchies plays a crucial role in shaping syntax over time. This may indicate that languages evolve not only to increase the efficiency of transferring information, but also to increase our capacity, as a species, to communicate our needs with more and more sophisticated abstractions.

Russell Wald, director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, sounds off on'The Story.' A Massachusetts Democrat is calling on the U.S. to pass legislation that would keep artificial intelligence away from nuclear power. On Thursday, Sen. Edward Markey said, "78 years ago this weekend, Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the world's first nuclear weapons explosion. In 2023, we face a new kind of nuclear threat: the militarization of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems." "We must pass legislation to keep AI away from the nuclear button before it's too late," he asserted.

Fox News host Sean Hannity argues the cocaine found at the White House will'forever' be a mystery on'Hannity.' HANNITY – Fox News host argues the cocaine found at the White House will'forever' be a mystery. MISSING THE TRUTH – Here's why FBI Director Wray's grilling failed. GUTFELD – Somebody has to speak up for these victims. AI CROSSROADS – FEC rules the 2024 election won't restrict use of AI, so campaigns are on their own.

Are you watching the new season of the Apple TV series Foundation and thinking, "Wow, space looks cool. I wish it really was like that"? You're in luck--it very well could be. Foundation showrunner David S. Goyer says his adaptation of Isaac Asimov's science fiction series honed its cosmic details with Kevin Hand, a scientist who works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and who's currently hard at work figuring out the logistics of landing a rover on Europa, one of Jupiter's 95 known moons. The show also found inspiration for its spacey visuals in recent images sent down from the James Webb Space Telescope, which Goyer calls "a treasure trove of material."