No, the chatbot did not crash Perseverance. Since 2021, NASA's Perseverance rover has achieved a number of historic milestones, including sending back the first audio recordings from Mars . Now, nearly five years after landing on the Red Planet, it just achieved another feat. This past December, Perseverance successfully completed a route through a section of the Jezero crater plotted by Anthropic's Claude chatbot, marking the first time NASA has used a large language model to pilot the car-sized robot. Between December 8 and 10, Perseverance drove approximately 400 meters (about 437 yards) through a field of rocks on the Martian surface mapped out by Claude.

Earth's largest venomous snakes are hitching a rides to places they don't belong. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. The king cobra () isn't a difficult snake to spot. A fully grown adult easily reaches over 13 feet long, making them the largest venomous snakes in the world. But despite their size and iconic appearance, at least one vulnerable species in India is sneaking aboard trains and accidentally arriving into new and dangerous habitats.

RFK's Overhauled Autism Committee Is Even Worse Than It Looks Kennedy has stacked another HHS panel with his fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world. Get your news from a source that's not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Last April, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. promised that his agency would find the cause of autism "by September." That didn't pan out, but this week he appears to be trying again--by stacking a decades-old committee devoted to "innovations in autism research, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention" with his friends and fellow travelers in the anti-vaccine and pseudoscience world. Much like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, which Kennedy overhauled last fall with a full slate of new appointees after firing all the old members, he filled the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee (IACC), which was first established in 2000 to help set the federal agenda for autism research, with Kennedy's allies in the anti-vaccine movement.

Under Armour data breach investigation reveals 72 million customer email addresses were exposed after researchers found personal information on hacker forums.

Sundance doc'Ghost in the Machine' draws a damning line between AI and eugenics The Sundance documentary boldly declares that the pursuit of artificial intelligence, and Silicon Valley itself, is rooted in eugenics. Director Valerie Veatch makes the case that the rise of techno-fascism from the likes of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel is a feature, not a bug. That may sound hyperbolic, but, which is built around interviews with philosophers, AI researchers, historians and computer scientists, leaves little room for doubt. If you've been following the meteoric rise of AI, or Silicon Valley in general, Veatch's methodical deconstruction of the technology doesn't really unearth anything new. The film begins with the utter failure of Microsoft's Tay chatbot, which wasted no time in becoming a Hitler-loving white supremacist .

An autonomous vehicle in California hit a student near an elementary school, but there were no injuries reported, according to the Santa Monica Police Department.

You'll get the best VPN experience by paying, but prices don't have to be steep. When talking about the best VPNs, I frequently warn about the dangers of trusting free VPNs without verifying them. Although there are a few free VPNs worth recommending, many other free providers are ineffective, malicious or looking to profit off their users (or sometimes all three). Even the best free VPNs work a lot better once you subscribe and access their full service. This can be frustrating if you want to enjoy the benefits of a VPN but don't have the budget for yet another subscription.

New research details how Civitai lets users buy and sell tools to fine-tune deepfakes the company says are banned. Civitai--an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz--is letting users buy custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes. Some of these files were specifically designed to make pornographic images banned by the site, a new analysis has found. The study, from researchers at Stanford and Indiana University, looked at people's requests for content on the site, called "bounties." The researchers found that between mid-2023 and the end of 2024, most bounties asked for animated content--but a significant portion were for deepfakes of real people, and 90% of these deepfake requests targeted women. The debate around deepfakes, as illustrated by the recent backlash to explicit images on the X-owned chatbot Grok, has revolved around what platforms should do to block such content.

This change affects users who haven't upgraded to GPT-5.2, though OpenAI claims most users have already transitioned to the newer model. The retirement streamlines ChatGPT's offerings, leaving users with fewer but more advanced AI models for their interactions. You'll soon have fewer AI models to choose from when conversing with ChatGPT. OpenAI recently announced that it'll soon be discontinuing several of the AI chatbot's older GPT models. In two weeks--on Friday, February 13th--OpenAI will remove the GPT-4o, GPT-4.1,

Despite physical limitations, Romito 1 and Romito 2 likely lived into adulthood about 12,000 years ago. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In 1963, paleoarchaeologists working in southern Italy discovered a unique and puzzling burial scene within an ancient cave known as Grotta del Romito. Inside the cavern, researchers excavated the bodies of two Paleolithic individuals buried in an embrace over 12,000 years ago with no signs of outward trauma. Designated Romito 1 and Romito 2, both subjects had clearly shortened limbs, each with a respective height of around 4.75 and 3.6 feet tall.