Singer-songwriter Taylor Swift and NFL tight end Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram after two years of dating. I bet you thought bunnies were nice, normal, cuddly critters -- except for the vorpal bunny of "Monty Python" fame. Turns out, we were all wrong. According to The Associated Press, there's a group of rabbits in Colorado with grotesque horn-like growths that may seem straight out of a low-budget horror film. Hide your kids, hide your wives and dig out your VHS copy of "Night of the Lepus."

It is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager--Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida--has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model's speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I'm losing my mind watching it. Jim Acosta, the former CNN personality who's conducting the interview, appears fully bought-in to the premise, adding to the surreality: He's playing it straight, even though the interactions are so bizarre. Acosta asks simple questions about Oliver's interests and how the teenager died.

Joaquin Oliver was 17 years old when he was shot in the hallway of his high school. An older teenager, expelled some months previously, had opened fire with a high-powered rifle on Valentine's Day in what became America's deadliest high school shooting. Seven years on, Joaquin says he thinks it's important to talk about what happened on that day in Parkland, Florida, "so that we can create a safer future for everyone". But sadly, what happened to Joaquin that day is that he died. The oddly metallic voice speaking to the ex-CNN journalist Jim Acosta in an interview on Substack this week was actually that of a digital ghost: an AI, trained on the teenager's old social media posts at the request of his parents, who are using it to bolster their campaign for tougher gun controls.

Jim Acosta and James Carville speculated whether President Trump will try to rig the 2026 midterms in his favor on "The Jim Acosta Show." Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta was slammed on social media after he posted a clip of his "interview" with an artificially animated avatar of deceased teenager Joaquin Oliver to promote a gun control message on Monday. Working with the gun control group Change the Ref, founded by Oliver's parents, Acosta had a conversation on his Substack with an avatar created by the father of the son, who was killed in the Parkland high school shooting in 2018. Oliver would have turned 25 on Monday. Social media users were shocked by Acosta's "grotesque" interview and slammed the journalist for using the deceased teen's avatar for political content.

Jim Acosta and James Carville speculated whether President Trump will try to rig the 2026 midterms in his favor on "The Jim Acosta Show." Liberal journalist Jim Acosta "interviewed" the artificially animated avatar of deceased teenager Joaquin Oliver to promote a gun control message on Monday. Working with the gun control group Change the Ref, founded by Oliver's parents, Acosta had conversation on his Substack with an avatar created by the father of the son, who was killed in the Parkland high school shooting in 2018. He would have turned 25 on Monday. "I would like to know what your solution would be for gun violence," Acosta asked.

This research endeavors to design the perching maneuver and control in ornithopter robots. By analyzing the dynamic interplay between the robot's flight dynamics, feedback loops, and the environmental constraints, we aim to advance our understanding of the perching maneuver, drawing parallels to biological systems. Inspired by the elegant control strategies observed in avian flight, we develop an optimal maneuver and a corresponding controller to achieve stable perching. The maneuver consists of a deceleration and a rapid pitch-up (vertical turn), which arises from analytically solving the optimization problem of minimal velocity at perch, subject to kinematic and dynamic constraints. The controller for the flapping frequency and tail symmetric deflection is nonlinear and adaptive, ensuring robustly stable perching. Indeed, such adaptive behavior in a sense incorporates homeostatic principles of cybernetics into the control system, enhancing the robot's ability to adapt to unexpected disturbances and maintain a stable posture during the perching maneuver. The resulting autonomous perching maneuvers -- closed-loop descent and turn -- , have been verified and validated, demonstrating excellent agreement with real bird perching trajectories reported in the literature. These findings lay the theoretical groundwork for the development of future prototypes that better imitate the skillful perching maneuvers of birds.

AI Taylor Swift is mad. She is calling up Kim Kardashian to complain about her "lame excuse of a husband," Kanye West. She is threatening to skip Europe on her Eras Tour if her fans don't stop asking her about international dates. She is insulting people who can't afford tickets to her concerts and using an unusual amount of profanity. But she can also be very sweet. She gives a vanilla pep talk: "If you are having a bad day, just know that you are loved.

A Tesla engineer has informed California regulators that the electric vehicle company might not have a fully self-driving vehicle ready for this year. The information comes from documents dated May 6 exchanged between the California Department of Motor Vehicles and several Tesla employees, including CJ Moore, the company's autopilot engineer. The documents were released by the legal transparency group PlainSite, which got them under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In January, Tesla chief Elon Musk said he was "highly confident the car will be able to drive itself with reliability in excess of human this year." "Tesla is at Level 2 currently. The ratio of driver interaction would need to be in the magnitude of 1 or 2 million miles per driver interaction to move into higher levels of automation," California DMV noted in the memo.

The word deepfake combines the terms "deep learning" and "fake," and is a form of artificial intelligence. In simplistic terms, deepfakes are falsified videos made by means of deep learning, said Paul Barrett, adjunct professor of law at New York University. Deep learning is "a subset of AI," and refers to arrangements of algorithms that can learn and make intelligent decisions on their own. More specifically deepfake refers to manipulated videos, or other digital representations produced by sophisticated artificial intelligence, that produce fabricated images and sounds that appear to be real. But the danger of that is "the technology can be used to make people believe something is real when it is not," said Peter Singer, cybersecurity and defense-focused strategist and senior fellow at New America think tank.

The earliest roots of deepfakes were a source of social media fun. Anyone capable of taking a selfie could superimpose their face onto a super model's body and share it for all of their followers to see. Users could also apply any one of the ubiquitous face filters that allow you to add some floppy dog ears or bunny whiskers to your Instagram photos. These types of distorted images were the first incarnations of the deepfake era, and until recently, it was harmless. Today, however, deepfakes are shaking the very foundation of our trust in what we see, hear and believe, to the point that we're not sure what is real and what is fake.