Marc Berman is out to start a revolution. I am already a convert to his cause – and you may be too, having read in New Scientist about the extraordinary benefits of a nature walk, the healing power of plants and the magic of urban green spaces. If so, perhaps you will think there is nothing to be gained from a book about Berman's research. Nature and the Mind is for everyone from the adept to the uninitiated – it isn't simply written to educate and entertain, it is a call to action. This is the story of how an anxious boy, warned off studying medicine by his mother, a nurse, and law by his father, a lawyer, enrolled as an undergraduate in engineering and then went on to establish the revolutionary field of environmental neuroscience.

We introduce the Discrete Inverse Continuity Equation (DICE) method, a generative modeling approach that learns the evolution of a stochastic process from given sample populations at a finite number of time points. Models learned with DICE capture the typically smooth and well-behaved population dynamics, rather than the dynamics of individual sample trajectories that can exhibit complex or even chaotic behavior. The DICE loss function is developed specifically to be invariant, even in discrete time, to spatially constant but time-varying spurious constants that can emerge during training; this invariance increases training stability and robustness. Generating a trajectory of sample populations with DICE is fast because samples evolve directly in the time interval over which the stochastic process is formulated, in contrast to approaches that condition on time and then require multiple sampling steps per time step. DICE is stable to train, in situations where other methods for learning population dynamics fail, and DICE generates representative samples with orders of magnitude lower costs than methods that have to condition on time. Numerical experiments on a wide range of problems from random waves, Vlasov-Poisson instabilities and high-dimensional chaos are included to justify these assertions.

Days after Vice President Kamala Harris launched her presidential bid, a video -- created with the help of artificial intelligence -- went viral. "I ... am your Democrat candidate for president because Joe Biden finally exposed his senility at the debate," a voice that sounded like Harris' said in the fake audio track used to alter one of her campaign ads. "I was selected because I am the ultimate diversity hire." Billionaire Elon Musk -- who has endorsed Harris' Republican opponent, former President Trump-- shared the video on X, then clarified two days later that it was actually meant as a parody. His initial tweet had 136 million views.

After several reports of artificial intelligence-generated child pornography surfaced in California, Ventura County Dist. Erik Nasarenko advocated for a change to state law to protect children who are increasingly vulnerable to this misuse of technology. Last December, Nasarenko received his first tip regarding a person who had artificially created photos depicting an underaged girl performing sex acts with an adult man. "When it came to my attention, I said let's file [charges]," Nasarenko told The Times. But, because of current loopholes in California law, he learned that he couldn't press charges in cases where the photos of children are AI-generated.

The United States is on the brink of its most consequential transformation since the New Deal. Read more about what it takes to decarbonize the economy, and what stands in the way, here. This story was originally published by Hakai Magazine and is reproduced here as part of our Climate Desk collaboration. Imagination is a powerful thing. Mary Shelley predicted organ transplantation in her novel Frankenstein, published in 1818.

This paper presents an interdisciplinary project which aims at cross-fertilizing dance with artificial intelligence. It utilizes AI as an approach to explore and unveil new territories of possible dance movements. Statistical analyzes of recorded human dance movements provide the foundation for a system that learns poses from human dancers, extends them with novel variations and creates new movement sequences. The system provides dancers with a tool for exploring possible movements and finding inspiration from motion sequences generated automatically in real time in the form of an improvising avatar. Experiences of bringing the avatar to the studio as a virtual dance partner indicate the usefulness of the software as a tool for kinetic exploration. In addition to these artistic results, the experiments also raise questions about how AI generally relates to artistic agency and creativity. Is the improvising avatar truly creative, or is it merely some kind of extension of the dancer or the AI researcher? By analyzing the developed platform as a framework for exploration of conceptual movement spaces, and by considering the interaction between dancer, researcher and software, some possible interpretations of this particular kind of creative process can be offered.

Imagine you just woke up. Worried about being late for your big meeting, you decide it's best for you to muster up the strength to unravel your sheets and get ready. You don't have enough motivation to get up so you scream "HEY ALEXA, WHAT TIME IS MY MEETING?" in hopes of having a few more minutes of sleep. She responds, "Your meeting starts in 10 minutes!". All of a sudden, you feel a dose of adrenaline and jump right out of your bed and into the shower. There are countless ways in which Artificial Intelligence is improving our daily lives.

Waverly Labs' Ambassador, an over-the-ear translation device, can support up to 20 languages and 42 dialects. The greatest obstacle to international understanding is the barrier of language," wrote British scholar and author Christopher Dawson in November 1957, believing that relying on live, human translators to accurately capture and reflect a speaker's meaning, inflection, and emotion was too great of a challenge to overcome. More than 60 years later, Dawson's theory may finally be proven outdated, thanks to the development of powerful, portable real-time translation devices. The convergence of natural language processing technology, machine learning algorithms, and powerful portable chipsets has led to the development of new devices and applications that allow real-time, two-way translation of speech and text. Language translation devices are capable of listening to an audio source in one language, translating what is being said into another language, and then translating a ...

Deepfakes have been known to make politicians appear to do and say unusual things. While some deepfakes are silly and fun, others are misleading and even abusive. Two new California laws aim to put a stop to these more nefarious video forgeries. California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday signed AB 730, which makes it illegal to distribute manipulated videos that aim to discredit a political candidate and deceive voters within 60 days of an election. He also signed AB 602, which gives Californians the right to sue someone who creates deepfakes that place them in pornographic material without consent.

Innovation Endeavors, the fund backed by Google's Eric Schmidt, has for years now been taking a novel approach to working on difficult and still-evolving problems, like cybersecurity and food shortages: it sets up incubators that bring together different stakeholders to identify, develop and fund ways of tackling these issues. Today, Innovation unveiled the latest of these: a new project called Deep Life, which aims to identify tricky problems in the world of life sciences, and figure out how to use computer science -- specifically innovations in areas like machine learning -- to help fix them. Target areas will include therapeutics, diagnostics and industrial life sciences in biology, chemistry and other fields; and Deep Life will provide startups with "investment capital across all stages of growth; access to experts, including scientists and decision-makers; proprietary data sets; early feedback on product; identification of market needs; initial customers and potential partners. In exchange for their startup support, Deep Life member organizations gain access to emerging technologies and hard-to-find talent," according to a blog post introducing the new project penned by Innovation Endeavors' co-founder Dror Berman. Deep Life will unveil the first fruits of its efforts during a pitch day on May 30, and it's accepting applications for places as of right now.