Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen is a leader of THORChain, a blockchain that is not supposed to have any leaders--and is reeling from a series of expensive controversies. We can do whatever we want," Jean-Paul Thorbjornsen tells me from the pilot's seat of his Aston Martin helicopter. As we fly over suburbs outside Melbourne, Australia, it's becoming clear that doing whatever he wants is Thorbjornsen's MO. Upper-middle-class homes give way to vineyards, and Thorbjornsen points out our landing spot outside a winery. "They're going to ask for a shot now," he says, used to the attention drawn by his luxury helicopter, emblazoned with the tail letters "BTC" for bitcoin (the price tag of $5 million in Australian dollars--$3.5 million in US dollars today--was perhaps reasonable for someone who claims a previous crypto project made more than AU$400 million, although he also says those funds were tied up in the company). Thorbjornsen is a founder of THORChain, a blockchain through which users can swap ...

Environment Animals Wildlife World's smallest possum may be hiding in South Australia The tiny mammal weighs less than one pound. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Weighing less than one pound, the little pygmy possum () is one of the smallest mammals in Australia. These miniscule mammals feed on nectar, pollen, and insects, and differ from opossums . Opossums live in the United States and parts of Canada and have a bare tail instead of a furry tail.

These sentence pairs will serve as a means to evaluate machines' commonsense reasoning abilities under different extra-linguistic contexts.

Recently, commonsense reasoning in text generation has attracted much attention. Generative commonsense reasoning is the task that requires machines, given a group of keywords, to compose a single coherent sentence with commonsense plausibility. While existing datasets targeting generative commonsense reasoning focus on everyday scenarios, it is unclear how well machines reason under specific geographical and temporal contexts.

UK's Starmer announces crackdown on AI chatbots in child safety push United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a crackdown on artificial intelligence chatbots that endanger children and pledged to seek broader powers to regulate internet access for minors. Starmer's office said on Monday that the government would target "vile and illegal content created by AI" and push for legal powers to act quickly on the findings of a public consultation that will consider a social media ban for children below 16 years of age. "Technology is moving really fast, and the law has got to keep up," Starmer said in a statement. "We are acting to protect children's wellbeing and help parents to navigate the minefield of social media," he said. The measures will require all AI chatbot providers to abide by digital safety laws, including a ban on creating sexualised images without a subject's consent.

The discovery likely dates back to the continent's gold rushes. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A metal detector hobbyist discovered a centuries' old coin while scouring an abandoned sports field--and the coin is especially rare for the area. In the southern Australian province of Victoria, treasure hunting enthusiast Angus James recently spotted a well-preserved 100 Mon Tenpō Tsūhō, a 19th century Japanese coin likely deposited during Australia's decades' long gold rush. "You never know what you'll find next," James posted to social media on January 25th, along with photos of his recent haul.

Australia's AI boom may revive productivity, CBA says Cabinets housing servers inside a data hall at a NextDC data center in Sydney. The company partnered with OpenAI last December to build a large-scale computing cluster in Sydney. Australia has become the world's third-largest artificial intelligence investment destination behind the U.S. and China, a result that's set to spur productivity in an economy currently struggling with a low potential growth rate and high inflation, Commonwealth Bank of Australia says. CBA's updated estimates suggest that Australia's data center pipeline is closer to 6 gigawatt, or 150 billion Australian dollars ($105 billion), implying installed capacity could more than triple over the period to 2030, according to a research note released Monday by economists led by Luke Yeaman. Shares in Australian data centers jumped following the report, with Goodman Group rising as much as 6.9%, the most since Dec. 23.

Australia's eSafety commissioner has welcomed the global regulatory focus on Elon Musk's X after this week's raid in France. Australia's eSafety commissioner has welcomed the global regulatory focus on Elon Musk's X after this week's raid in France. The eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, says global regulatory focus on Elon Musk's X has reached a "tipping point" after a raid of the company's offices in France this week. The raid on Tuesday was part of an investigation that included alleged offences of complicity in the possession and organised distribution of child abuse images, violation of image rights through sexualised deepfakes, and denial of crimes against humanity. A number of other countries - including the UK and Australia - and the EU have launched investigations in the past few weeks into X after its AI chatbot, Grok, was used to mass-produce sexualised images of women and children in response to user requests.

Science Dinosaurs Teen discovers Australia's oldest dinosaur fossil--almost 70 years ago An early sauropodomorph likely made the 230-million-year-old footprint. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. In 1958, an Australian teenager named Bruce Runnegar uncovered a mysterious dinosaur footprint during a visit to a quarry with school friends. He kept the fossil for years, eventually becoming a paleontologist himself. Over six decades later, the prehistoric print is now ready for its close-up.

Science Archaeology World's oldest-known rock art found in Indonesian cave The claw-like drawing of a human hand is roughly 67,800-years-old. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A drawing of a claw-like hand on the wall of a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia is now the oldest known rock art in the world. The roughly 67,800-year-old art exceeds the previous record holder in the same region of Southeast Asia by 15,000 years or more. The drawing is detailed in a study published today in the journal, and helps fill in the archaeological timeline of how and when Australia was first settled.