A new drug usually starts with a tragedy. Born in what is now Zimbabwe, the child of a mechanic and a radiology technician, Ray fled with his family to South Africa during the Zimbabwean War of Liberation. He remembers the journey there in 1980 in a convoy of armored cars. As the sun blazed down, a soldier taught 8-year-old Ray how to fire a machine gun. But his mother kept having to stop.

Grok 4 by xAI was released on July 9, and it's surged ahead of competitors like DeepSeek and Claude at LMArena, a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models. New AI models are commonly judged on a variety of metrics, including their ability to solve math problems, answer text questions, and write code. The big AI companies use a variety of standardized assessments to measure the effectiveness of their models, such as Humanity's Last Exam, a 2,500-question test designed for AI benchmarking. Typically, when a company like Anthropic or OpenAI releases a new model, it shows improvements on these tests. Unsurprisingly, Grok 4 scores higher than Grok 3 on some key metrics, but it also has to battle in the court of public opinion.

For the past few weeks, the AI-powered ElliQ companion robot has perched on the end of my desk. Designed by Intuition Robotics for seniors living alone, this proactive animatronic chats to me throughout the day, checking how I'm feeling, suggesting "fun" activities, and prodding me to be more active and sociable. While it can be annoying, I've grown attached to ElliQ despite myself, and I can see the positive potential. According to the US Census Bureau, around 16 million elders (over 65) live alone in the country, and up to a third report feelings of loneliness. Multiple studies have shown that social isolation harms mental and physical health, increasing blood pressure, depression, weight gain, alcohol and drug use, and decreasing physical activity, cognition, heart health, and sleep.

Finding potential partners on dating apps who want the same things as you can be a grueling task -- especially if you're out for a relationship. It can feel deeply disappointing when someone you've spent hours talking to keeps making excuses for not meeting up. Why do they bother crafting sparkling text conversation over a series of weeks if they won't actually take you on a date? A new study published in Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace may have the answer. Researchers from Miguel Hernández University of Elche in Spain studied the motives of Tinder users and how this lined up with the'dark tetrad' set of personality traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism.

When David Fajgenbaum was a twenty-five-year-old medical student, at the University of Pennsylvania, he started to feel so tired that he could barely stand. Fajgenbaum, a former college quarterback, could still bench-press three hundred and seventy-five pounds; he was known for doing pullups on a tree near his workplace. But now he was desperately ill. The lymph nodes in his groin and neck swelled. Small red dots--blood moles--emerged on his chest, and he woke up soaked in sweat. One day, at the hospital where he was doing his rotation, he stumbled down the hall into the emergency room, and doctors told him that his liver, bone marrow, and kidneys were failing. Fluid had leaked out of his blood vessels, into his abdomen and around his heart; bleeding in his retina temporarily blinded him in his left eye.

Although it is easy to be enthusiastic about the sea's ability to regulate climate and to produce both oxygen and delicious marine life that goes well with melted butter, it is also easy to recognize that the sea is an uncompromising bringer of death, a hotheaded bully who is perpetually ready to rumble. The other day in the Rockaways, on the shore at Beach Eighty-seventh Street, the ocean was exhibiting its pugilistic side: four-foot waves, strong undertow--perfect conditions for test-driving one of the city's new beach-patrol initiatives. For the past three years, New York City beaches have relied on drones to detect sharks and riptides, and now the gizmos are being used to drop flotation devices on swimmers in trouble. This summer, a stretch of the Rockaways will be patrolled by two all-terrain vehicles, each bearing a drone pilot as well as a rescue swimmer, who can assist lifeguards as needed. A correspondent who had volunteered to pose as a swimmer in distress cast a wary eye at the surf.

These days, everyone seems to have an opinion about A.I. companions. Last year, I found myself joining the debate, publishing a paper--co-written with two fellow psychology professors and a philosopher--called "In Praise of Empathic A.I." Our argument was that, in certain ways, the latest crop of A.I.s might make for better company than many real people do, and that, rather than recoiling in horror, we ought to consider what A.I. companions could offer to those who are lonely. This, perhaps unsurprisingly, did not go over especially well in my corner of academia. In the social sciences and the humanities, A.I. tends to be greeted less as a technological advance than as a harbinger of decline. There are the familiar worries about jobs--ours and our students'--and about the ease with which A.I. can be used for cheating.

Users of a naturally occurring psychedelic drug are convinced they've encountered real alien beings, including'machine elves,' which inhabit a realm beyond our Earth. These machine elves, described as chattering, mischievous entities, consistently appear in the visions of those who take DMT, which one neuroscientist suggested could mean users are actually entering a shared alien reality. DMT (or N,N-Dimethyltryptamine) is present in thousands of plants, including ayahuasca, which is used in religious ceremonies, but is also present in small amounts within the human body. Dr Andrew Gallimore, who has a PhD was in biological chemistry and has studied computational neuroscience, said he encountered these beings firsthand after being transported to a hyper-dimensional world teeming with intelligent lifeforms. Unlike earthly creatures, these beings - ranging from insectoids to God-like figures -seem to exist in a space that defies our three-dimensional understanding.

Philosophy professor Dr. Susan Schneider joins'Fox & Friends First' to discuss the impact of artificial intelligence on students' performance in the classroom. Staying awake to watch "just one more episode" is a classic excuse for delaying bedtime. And with popular shows like Peacock's "Love Island" airing almost every night as the drama unfolds live, there's more pressure to finish the latest episode and to engage in conversation with others the next day. In addition to making us sleepier in the morning, staying awake to watch TV is not good for the brain, according to Daniel Amen, a psychiatrist, brain imaging doctor and founder of Amen Clinics in California. "'I just have to watch the last episode' of whatever show you're watching, and you end up cutting out half an hour or an hour of sleep," he said in an interview with Fox News Digital.

If you've heard of Chuck Tingle, it's likely due to the wild titles of his extremely niche, parodic, self-published gay erotica, many of which have gone viral since Tingle became involved in the culture wars within the science-fiction community in the 2010s. And if that's so, you may be surprised to learn that Tingle has, over the past few years, evolved into one of the better horror/technothriller authors around. The mainstream publishing success of the author of This Handsome Sentient Baseball Hits a Home Run Into My Butt is one of the most unlikely, inspiring, and downright sweet underdog stories in book publishing, an industry not known for its abundance of sweet underdogs. Tingle's first taste of mass-culture fame came in 2016, when one of his short stories was nominated for a Hugo Award. The Hugos, presented every year at the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), are among the genre's most prestigious prizes.