Just don't try to pop it in that old Walkman. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It seemed like this once-groundbreaking piece of technology may have gone the way of the dodo. However, the cassette tape could offer a new way to store our ever increasing amount of digital data-with a biological twist. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is nature's ultimate hard drive because it is dense, compact, and durable.

The suspect in the late night doorbell ringing is pretty slippery. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It was a scene straight out of a horror movie . About 30 minutes after midnight, someone rang an apartment doorbell in Bavaria, Germany. The home's occupants Lisa and Domink had already gone to bed, and Lisa told German news outlet BILD that she had no intention of answering it, since she simply does not answer the door after 10 pm.

How do AI models generate videos? With powerful video generation tools now in the hands of more people than ever, let's take a look at how they work. It's been a big year for video generation. In the last nine months OpenAI made Sora public, Google DeepMind launched Veo 3, the video startup Runway launched Gen-4. All can produce video clips that are (almost) impossible to distinguish from actual filmed footage or CGI animation. This year also saw Netflix debut an AI visual effect in its show, the first time video generation has been used to make mass-market TV.

Powerful moment Charlie Kirk's widow Erika holds hands with Usha Vance on his final journey on Air Force Two REVEALED: The truth about the'vanishing plane' five miles from Charlie Kirk's assassination... as private jet owner is unmasked Charlie Kirk's incredible welcome to young gay man who wants to join his conservative movement And the armed militia mystery. FBI terror hunter blows the lid on search for Charlie Kirk's assassin... and the vital clue cops are desperate for Kristin Chenoweth fans surprised over her grieving comment on Charlie Kirk's final video about abortion Charlotte Tilbury reveals the secrets behind the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders' flawless look Go inside the killing that has rocked America - on Daily Mail's podcast The Assassination of Charlie Kirk Charlie Kirk's gesture to my son tells you everything about the man: JILLIAN MICHAELS on her unlikely camaraderie with the conservative giant Joe Rogan is speechless as he learns of Charlie Kirk's assassination on his podcast McDonald's fans disgusted by what customer thinks is'parasite' found in Filet-O-Fish READ MORE: Scientists finally discover what is inside mysterious'halo barrels' The failure of a vital ocean upwelling has sparked concerns of catastrophic effects for life, according to scientists. Every year, between December and April, northerly winds create a rising current in the deep waters of the Gulf of Panama. This upwelling brings cold, nutrient-rich waters to the surface, protecting vulnerable coral reefs and triggering an explosion of ocean life. However, researchers now say the Panama Pacific upwelling has failed for the first time in over 40 years of records - and it could be a permanent change.

Powerful moment Charlie Kirk's widow Erika holds hands with Usha Vance on his final journey on Air Force Two REVEALED: The truth about the'vanishing plane' five miles from Charlie Kirk's assassination... as private jet owner is unmasked Charlie Kirk's incredible welcome to young gay man who wants to join his conservative movement And the armed militia mystery. FBI terror hunter blows the lid on search for Charlie Kirk's assassin... and the vital clue cops are desperate for Kristin Chenoweth fans surprised over her grieving comment on Charlie Kirk's final video about abortion Charlotte Tilbury reveals the secrets behind the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders' flawless look Go inside the killing that has rocked America - on Daily Mail's podcast The Assassination of Charlie Kirk Charlie Kirk's gesture to my son tells you everything about the man: JILLIAN MICHAELS on her unlikely camaraderie with the conservative giant Joe Rogan is speechless as he learns of Charlie Kirk's assassination on his podcast McDonald's fans disgusted by what customer thinks is'parasite' found in Filet-O-Fish Walkers and hikers have an exciting opportunity to find meteorite fragments that scattered over Scotland this summer, scientists say. The bright meteor was witnessed by some Scots as it streaked across the sky in the early hours of Thursday July 3. It is believed to have exploded over northern Scotland, with the'fall zone' straddling Loch Treig in Lochaber, Highland. The aerial event was captured on some cameras and shared on social media, showing a big yellow spark soaring through the dark sky.

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba (center) speaks at the first meeting of the government's headquarters for promoting the use of artificial intelligence and strengthening related risk management, on Friday. The government held the first meeting of its headquarters for promoting the use of artificial intelligence and strengthening related risk management, at the Prime Minister's Office on Friday. Discussions centered on a draft outline of the government's proposed basic plan on AI, which aims to transform Japan into the country with the world's best environment for the use and development of AI. The government hopes to finalize the basic plan by the end of this year. The headquarters, led by Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and composed of all Cabinet ministers, was set up on Sept. 1 based on a new AI law enacted in May.

Diffusion models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation, enabling the creation of highly realistic images conditioned on textual prompts and seeds. Given the considerable intellectual and economic value embedded in such prompts, prompt theft poses a critical security and privacy concern. In this paper, we investigate prompt-stealing attacks targeting diffusion models. We reveal that numerical optimization-based prompt recovery methods are fundamentally limited as they do not account for the initial random noise used during image generation. We identify and exploit a noise-generation vulnerability (CWE-339), prevalent in major image-generation frameworks, originating from PyTorch's restriction of seed values to a range of $2^{32}$ when generating the initial random noise on CPUs. Through a large-scale empirical analysis conducted on images shared via the popular platform CivitAI, we demonstrate that approximately 95% of these images' seed values can be effectively brute-forced in 140 minutes per seed using our seed-recovery tool, SeedSnitch. Leveraging the recovered seed, we propose PromptPirate, a genetic algorithm-based optimization method explicitly designed for prompt stealing. PromptPirate surpasses state-of-the-art methods, i.e., PromptStealer, P2HP, and CLIP-Interrogator, achieving an 8-11% improvement in LPIPS similarity. Furthermore, we introduce straightforward and effective countermeasures that render seed stealing, and thus optimization-based prompt stealing, ineffective. We have disclosed our findings responsibly and initiated coordinated mitigation efforts with the developers to address this critical vulnerability.

High-profile speech videos are prime targets for falsification, owing to their accessibility and influence. This work proposes VeriLight, a low-overhead and unobtrusive system for protecting speech videos from visual manipulations of speaker identity and lip and facial motion. Unlike the predominant purely digital falsification detection methods, VeriLight creates dynamic physical signatures at the event site and embeds them into all video recordings via imperceptible modulated light. These physical signatures encode semantically-meaningful features unique to the speech event, including the speaker's identity and facial motion, and are cryptographically-secured to prevent spoofing. The signatures can be extracted from any video downstream and validated against the portrayed speech content to check its integrity. Key elements of VeriLight include (1) a framework for generating extremely compact (i.e., 150-bit), pose-invariant speech video features, based on locality-sensitive hashing; and (2) an optical modulation scheme that embeds $>$200 bps into video while remaining imperceptible both in video and live. Experiments on extensive video datasets show VeriLight achieves AUCs $\geq$ 0.99 and a true positive rate of 100% in detecting falsified videos. Further, VeriLight is highly robust across recording conditions, video post-processing techniques, and white-box adversarial attacks on its feature extraction methods. A demonstration of VeriLight is available at https://mobilex.cs.columbia.edu/verilight.

Full-duplex dialog models aim to listen and speak simultaneously, delivering rapid responses to dynamic user input. Among different solutions to full duplexity, a native solution merges multiple channels in each time step, achieving the lowest latency. However, prevailing designs break down the textual monologue sentences for word-level alignment with audio streams, which degrades language modeling abilities. To help address this issue, we introduce natural monologues, which are composed by continuous sentences and waiting intervals, mimicking humanoid cognitive behavior in dialogs. We find a proper training paradigm to be critical for semantically aligning natural monologues with audio. To this end, we develop a dual training paradigm that alternates the position of the monologues, either leading or trailing the audio, across different training stages. A combination of our natural monologue and dual training strategy is applied in developing FLM-Audio, our 7B spoken dialog chatbot with native full-duplexity. As confirmed by experimental results, FLM-Audio achieves superior response qualities and chatting experiences while requiring significantly less training data.

West Lafayette, Indiana, USA Abstract--Zero-shot V oice Cloning (VC) and T ext-to-Speech (TTS) methods have advanced rapidly, enabling the generation of highly realistic synthetic speech and raising serious concerns about their misuse. While numerous detectors have been developed for English and Chinese, Spanish--spoken by over 600 million people worldwide--remains underrepresented in speech forensics. T o address this gap, we introduce HISPASpoof, the first large-scale Spanish dataset designed for synthetic speech detection and attribution. It includes real speech from public corpora across six accents and synthetic speech generated with six zero-shot TTS systems. We evaluate five representative methods, showing that detectors trained on English fail to generalize to Spanish, while training on HISPASpoof substantially improves detection. We also evaluate synthetic speech attribution performance on HISPASpoof, i.e., identifying the generation method of synthetic speech. HISPASpoof thus provides a critical benchmark for advancing reliable and inclusive speech forensics in Spanish. The rapid advancement of speech synthesis techniques has significantly transformed the area of audio generation and speech forensics. Recent Text-to-Speech (TTS) and V oice Cloning (VC) methods [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] are now capable of producing highly realistic synthetic voices that closely mimic the spectral, prosodic, and linguistic traits of real human speech [7], [8], [9], [10].