While there's a sprawling patchwork of ideas and philosophies powering these visions, three features play a central role, says Adam Becker, a science writer and astrophysicist: an unshakable certainty that technology can solve any problem, a belief in the necessity of perpetual growth, and a quasi-religious obsession with transcending our physical and biological limits. In his timely new book, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, Becker calls this triumvirate of beliefs the "ideology of technological salvation" and warns that tech titans are using it to steer humanity in a dangerous direction. "In most of these isms you'll find the idea of escape and transcendence, as well as the promise of an amazing future, full of unimaginable wonders--so long as we don't get in the way of technological progress." "The credence that tech billionaires give to these specific science-fictional futures validates their pursuit of more--to portray the growth of their businesses as a moral imperative, to reduce the complex problems of the world to simple questions of technology, [and] to justify nearly any action they might want to take," he writes. Becker argues that the only way to break free of these visions is to see them for what they are: a convenient excuse to continue destroying the environment, skirt regulations, amass more power and control, and dismiss the very real problems of today to focus on the imagined ones of tomorrow.

Cutaway view of a fictional space colony concept painted by artist Rick Guidice as part of a NASA art program in the 1970s. This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Elon Musk once joked: "I would like to die on Mars. Musk is, in fact, deadly serious about colonizing the Red Planet. Part of his motivation is the idea of having a "back-up" planet in case some future catastrophe renders the Earth uninhabitable. Musk has suggested that a million people may be calling Mars home by 2050 -- and he's hardly alone in his enthusiasm. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen believes the world can easily support 50 billion people, and more than that once we settle other planets. And Jeff Bezos has spoken of exploiting the resources of the moon and the asteroids to build giant space stations. "I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system," he has said. Not so fast, cautions science journalist Adam Becker.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. That euphoric feeling when a great idea strikes or a challenging puzzle piece fits into place is electric–and also helps our brains. Now, a team of researchers from the United States and Germany have taken a peek inside the brain to see what those so-called aha, lightbulb, or eureka moments look like. The new brain imaging shows that these flashes of insights reshape how the brain represents information and helps burn it into our memory. According to Maxi Becker, a study co-author and cognitive neuroscientist at Humboldt University in Berlin, if you have one of these aha moments when solving a problem, "you're actually more likely to remember the solution.'" The findings are detailed in a study published May 9 in the journal Nature Communications.

LLM chatbot interfaces allow students to get instant, interactive assistance with homework, but doing so carelessly may not advance educational objectives. In this study, an interactive homework help system based on DeepSeek R1 is developed and first implemented for students enrolled in a large computer science beginning programming course. In addition to an assist button in a well-known code editor, our assistant also has a feedback option in our command-line automatic evaluator. It wraps student work in a personalized prompt that advances our educational objectives without offering answers straight away. We have discovered that our assistant can recognize students' conceptual difficulties and provide ideas, plans, and template code in pedagogically appropriate ways. However, among other mistakes, it occasionally incorrectly labels the correct student code as incorrect or encourages students to use correct-but-lesson-inappropriate approaches, which can lead to long and frustrating journeys for the students. After discussing many development and deployment issues, we provide our conclusions and future actions.

In (Beckers, 2025) I introduced nondeterministic causal models as a generalization of Pearl's standard deterministic causal models. I here take advantage of the increased expressivity offered by these models to offer a novel definition of actual causation (that also applies to deterministic models). Instead of motivating the definition by way of (often subjective) intuitions about examples, I proceed by developing it based entirely on the unique function that it can fulfil in communicating and learning a causal model. First I generalize the more basic notion of counterfactual dependence, second I show how this notion has a vital role to play in the logic of causal discovery, third I introduce the notion of a structural simplification of a causal model, and lastly I bring both notions together in my definition of actual causation. Although novel, the resulting definition arrives at verdicts that are almost identical to those of my previous definition (Beckers, 2021, 2022).

If you were on social media over the holiday weekend--and really, what better use of a holiday weekend is there--you might have noticed a controversy brewing around the use of artificial intelligence in The Brutalist, Brady Corbet's sprawling saga about a Jewish architect who escapes the Holocaust and immigrates to the U.S. to ply his trade. If you didn't happen to catch the initial backlash, good news: By Monday, Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and Deadline had all picked up the story, and by this morning the internet was awash in aggregations and explainers, all blossoming two days before the Oscar nominations are announced. The flap traced back to an article published by RedShark News on Jan. 11--an eternity ago in internet time--that actually praised the film's "subtle and sensitive" use of artificial intelligence. Editor Dávid Jancsó detailed how the production used a tool called Respeecher to enhance "certain sounds" in Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones' Hungarian dialogue. Jancsó, a native speaker, explained that Hungarian is "one of the most difficult languages to learn to pronounce," and even after working with a dialogue coach, there were still lingering inaccuracies.

The sudden emergence of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has had a disruptive impact throughout the computing education community. LLMs have been shown to excel at producing correct code to CS1 and CS2 problems, and can even act as friendly assistants to students learning how to code. Recent work shows that LLMs demonstrate unequivocally superior results in being able to explain and resolve compiler error messages -- for decades, one of the most frustrating parts of learning how to code. However, LLM-generated error message explanations have only been assessed by expert programmers in artificial conditions. This work sought to understand how novice programmers resolve programming error messages (PEMs) in a more realistic scenario. We ran a within-subjects study with $n$ = 106 participants in which students were tasked to fix six buggy C programs. For each program, participants were randomly assigned to fix the problem using either a stock compiler error message, an expert-handwritten error message, or an error message explanation generated by GPT-4. Despite promising evidence on synthetic benchmarks, we found that GPT-4 generated error messages outperformed conventional compiler error messages in only 1 of the 6 tasks, measured by students' time-to-fix each problem. Handwritten explanations still outperform LLM and conventional error messages, both on objective and subjective measures.

Dr. Sheila Nazarian, the star of Netflix's "Skin Decision: Before and After," said celebrities who want to speak out on the Israel-Hamas war should educate themselves first. A woman in Arizona has sued her plastic surgeon, accusing him of botching her procedure while operating under the influence of alcohol, leaving her in distress, according to local reports. Dr. Bradley Becker is a "Double Board Certified-Plastic Reconstructive surgeon who has been practicing in AZ for 21 years. "It's hard to feel like you can go out when you feel like Frankenstein," his former patient, Wendy Ellsworth, said in an interview Friday with Phoenix New Times. Ellsworth said she got a tummy tuck and breast reduction with Dr. Becker. Ellsworth sued Becker in Maricopa County Superior Court in September, accusing the Glendale plastic and reconstructive surgeon of "medical negligence," "battery" and "intentional infliction of emotional distress," the report said. Woman said she felt like Frankenstein after plastic surgery allegedly went wrong. Ellsworth said she thought she smelled alcohol when Dr. Becker came to see her before the operation began. "I had put my money down.

Microelectronic morphogenesis is the creation and maintenance of complex functional structures by microelectronic information within shape-changing materials. Only recently has in-built information technology begun to be used to reshape materials and their functions in three dimensions to form smart microdevices and microrobots. Electronic information that controls morphology is inheritable like its biological counterpart, genetic information, and is set to open new vistas of technology leading to artificial organisms when coupled with modular design and self-assembly that can make reversible microscopic electrical connections. Three core capabilities of cells in organisms, self-maintenance (homeostatic metabolism utilizing free energy), self-containment (distinguishing self from non-self), and self-reproduction (cell division with inherited properties), once well out of reach for technology, are now within the grasp of information-directed materials. Construction-aware electronics can be used to proof-read and initiate game-changing error correction in microelectronic self-assembly. Furthermore, non-contact communication and electronically supported learning enable one to implement guided self-assembly and enhance functionality. This article reviews the fundamental breakthroughs that have opened the pathway to this prospective path, analyzes the extent and way in which the core properties of life can be addressed and discusses the potential and indeed necessity of such technology for sustainable high technology in society.

Scientists have discovered a hidden layer of Earth, which sits 100 miles below the surface and covers at least 44 percent of the planet. This previously unknown region of molten rock is part of the asthenosphere, located under tectonic plates in the upper mantle, which forms a soft boundary that allows the solid rock slabs to move. While the discovery is significant, it shatters long-held theories that molten rocks influence the asthenosphere's viscosity. Junlin Hua, with the University of Texas, Austin, said in a statement: 'When we think about something melting, we intuitively think that the melt must play a big role in the material's viscosity. 'But what we found is that even where the melt fraction is quite high, its effect on mantle flow is very minor.'