Environment Animals Wildlife Hermit crab poop spreads a parasitic plant's seeds The crustaceans are both external and internal seed dispersers. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Hikers exploring the coastal forest on a tropical island near Okinawa, Japan, would be forgiven for thinking that is a simple mushroom .

A member of Japanese Self-Defense Force pilots a SOTEN drone during a joint live-fire drill with U.S. Marines as part of the annual Resolute Dragon exercises in Yufu, Oita Prefecture on June 28. The Japanese government is considering incorporating domestically developed artificial intelligence into the Self-Defense Forces' command and control system, informed sources have said. The government hopes the move will speed up and improve the accuracy of decision-making by SDF commanders while maintaining AI sovereignty, at a time when countries around the world are rushing to adapt to new ways of warfare. It is expected to include the policy in the planned update by year-end of its three key national security-related documents. AI would be incorporated into the SDF's command and control system for the first time.

She is Russia's richest woman. Her business empire is going up in flames. Tatyana Kim, the head and co-founder of Wildberries, speaks about Ukrainian drone attacks on the company's warehouses in the course of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, at an unidentified location, in this still image from a handout video released on July 31. She built Russia's answer to Amazon. And she outmaneuvered her ex-husband -- the father of her seven children -- in a rancorous business feud that involved a deadly shooting near Red Square. But Tatyana Kim, billionaire co-founder of the online marketplace Wildberries and the richest woman in Russia, is now facing a far greater challenge.

Neighborhood safety, street noise and greenery may affect sleep quality and insomnia symptoms, according to a study analyzing urban environments with AI and Google Street View images.

From branding irons to iris scans, the ancient business of proving who you are has never been stranger--or more lucrative. There are now more bots online than people. The challenge used to be telling who was a person from who was a bot; today, the challenge is telling good bots and bad bots apart--with humanity in the lurch. Three summers ago, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, posted on X a fifteen-second video of dozens of people--mostly young, veiled in face masks, and wearing super-hip, white-soled sneakers--waiting in a long, snaky line in the traffic-light-lit but otherwise dusky dark of an unnamed city that appears to have been Nagoya, Japan. "Crazy lines around the world," Altman wrote. "One person getting verified every 8 seconds now." In the video, the camera pans to the front of the line, where a woman is kneeling on the sidewalk as if in prayer, staring into a gleaming silver orb about the size of a volleyball that has been propped up on a stand about the height of an end table. It looks like the eyeball of a giant robot Cyclops. She is bowing before an artificially intelligent machine, seeking a certification that she is human. That eyeball, which is known as the Orb, was developed by Tools for Humanity, a San Francisco-and Munich-based tech company that Altman founded in 2019 with a twenty-five-year-old German physicist named Alex Blania, who is now its C.E.O.

Seoul - A North Korean hacking group built large language model tools and collected software that could help automate cyberattacks, analyze stolen material and produce more convincing phishing campaigns, a South Korean cybersecurity firm said on Monday. The cybersecurity firm, Genians, said it found evidence that the North Korean-linked group Kimsuky had set up tools for running and managing AI models locally, including Ollama, GPT4All and Msty, alongside document search technology known as retrieval augmented generation. According to the company, the tools could allow operators to process documents without sending sensitive information to outside AI services. Genians also found AI agent development frameworks, speech-to-text software and Cursor, an AI-assisted coding tool, on infrastructure it linked to the campaign. The findings suggest Kimsuky is moving beyond using generative AI to create phishing lures and is building capacity to integrate existing AI models into malware development, data analysis and attack automation, Genians said in a report. Genians also said it found finance and cryptocurrency-themed decoy documents that appeared to have been generated with AI.

Sony Semiconductor Solutions and TSMC are partnering on next-generation image sensors for robots and cars, a person familiar with the plans says. Sony Group and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. are in talks to spend a combined ¥1 trillion ($6.4 billion) on their planned joint factory in Japan, according to a person familiar with the plans. The Japanese company's chip arm Sony Semiconductor Solutions and TSMC are partnering on next-generation image sensors for robots and cars. The factory will begin production in 2029, the person said, asking not to be named because the talks are private. No time frame was given for the investment under discussion, they said. Representatives of Sony and TSMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sony Semiconductor Solutions and TSMC are partnering on next-generation image sensors for robots and cars, a person familiar with the plans says. Sony Group and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. are in talks to spend a combined ¥1 trillion ($6.4 billion) on their planned joint factory in Japan, according to a person familiar with the plans. The Japanese company's chip arm Sony Semiconductor Solutions and TSMC are partnering on next-generation image sensors for robots and cars. The factory will begin production in 2029, the person said, asking not to be named because the talks are private. Representatives of Sony and TSMC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The investment under discussion, which was earlier reported by the Nikkei, is the latest in Sony's transition toward a more asset-light approach with its image sensor operations.

Nippon Yusen and other companies aim to complete the world's first ammonia-fueled medium gas carrier for international shipping in November. Japan's public and private sectors are stepping up joint efforts to revive the nation's struggling shipbuilding industry. Last year, the transport ministry drew up a road map for revitalizing Japan's shipbuilding sector, setting a target of doubling shipbuilding volume by 2035 from the 2024 level. The plan calls for ¥1 trillion in combined public-and private-sector investment. In addition to capital spending, the road map aims to strengthen the industry as a whole by improving productivity through the use of robots and artificial intelligence technology, while also developing human resources. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever.

Japan's strongest media export makes a solid case for your attention span. Despite its ferocious popularity, people still tend to swear off anime entirely. These are usually the people whose reference of the medium pertains to a certain stereotype or to the few seconds of anime they once saw on a computer somewhere in the early 2000s. But Japan has been producing some of the most emotionally resonant and visually audacious storytelling in contemporary media for half a century, and a great deal of it looks nothing at all like the stereotype it holds. Start with self-contained films you can knock out in a single evening before graduating to series worth committing wholly to.