A handful of wealthy, politically connected Silicon Valley investors are reportedly eyeing Greenland's icy shores as the site for a techno-utopian "freedom city." That's according to a report from Reuters, which details a proposed effort to establish a new, libertarian-minded municipality characterized by minimal corporate regulation and a focus on accelerating emerging technologies like AI and mini nuclear reactors. Supporters of increased economic development in Greenland argue its frigid climate could naturally cool massive, energy intensive AI data centers. Large deposits of critical and rare earth minerals buried beneath the island's ice sheets could also potentially be used to manufacture consumer electronics. The so-called "start-up city"--which bears similarities to another ongoing venture in California's Solano County--reportedly already has the backing of PayPal founder Peter Thiel and Ken Howery, President Donald Trump's pick for Denmark ambassador.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Some things are sadly inevitable: death, taxes, another Coldplay album. One such inevitability, long since proved beyond any reasonable doubt, is that if you try to suppress an embarrassing story, you will only draw more attention to it. This phenomenon is called the Streisand Effect, after an incident in 2003 when Barbra Streisand sued to have an aerial photograph taken off the internet.

Rami Sinno is crouched beside a filing cabinet, wrestling a beach-ball sized disc out of a box, when a dull thump echoes around his laboratory. "I just dropped tens of thousands of dollars' worth of material," he says with a laugh. Straightening up, Sinno reveals the goods: a golden silicon wafer, which glitters in the fluorescent light of the lab. This circular platter is divided into some 100 rectangular tiles, each of which contains billions of microscopic electrical switches. These are the brains of Amazon's most advanced chip yet: the Trainium 2, announced in December.

Want to see a picture of Jesus Christ laughing at a meme on his phone, Donald Trump as the Nevermind baby, or Karl Marx being slimed at the Nikelodeon Kid's Choice awards? If you've been on Twitter or Instagram in the past couple of weeks, it's been hard to miss odd-looking formulations of these kinds of scenarios in the form of AI art. DALL-E (and DALL-E mini), the creator of these artworks, is a neural network that can take a text phrase and transform it an image. It was trained by looking at millions of images on the internet along with accompanying text and it learned to create pictures of things you'd never expect to be combined, such as an avocado armchair. Text to image technology is proceeding at a rapid pace, and the full DALL-E model is able to produce scarily clear images based on the input you provide, while the mini version is still clunky enough to capture the weird internet style that makes them instantly meme-able.

Since April of 2020, Brown has been writing full time on college sports financing and licensing for his newsletter and podcast. An entire section of his website is dedicated to public records he's obtained in his reporting, including the financial reports and coaching contracts at certain schools. Some schools and institutions charge processing fees for digging up records requests, and Brown estimates that he's spent somewhere in the "low three-figures" procuring records from institutions. To Brown, EA Sports' game -- and whether players will appear in it -- is a clear, practical example of how players may financially benefit from the shift in long-standing NCAA policies.

A disparate pair of publications is questioning if facial recognition can be used reliably when it comes to LGBTQ subjects. One point of view is a podcast from the conservative-libertarian Cato Institute think tank and the other is a blog posted on the site of digital ID verification provider Mitek. In the podcast, Caleb Brown, director of Cato's multimedia operations, says of facial recognition "is, for the most part, not ready for prime time." Brown is talking with a Cato colleague, Matthew Feeney, director of the Project on Emerging Technologies. Feeney says studies indicate that facial-analysis business tools may be better at determining sexual orientations than people. That has convinced some outfits to find related problems to solve with AI code.

It's the latest lawsuit filed by Thaler, who has sought to secure AI intellectual property rights around the world, so far with limited success. On Monday, he will argue before the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that inventors on patents do not need to be human. "My interest is the definition of what a person is," Thaler said in an interview with Bloomberg Law. "What I'm building, what many will argue, is sentient machine intelligence. So maybe expansion to the term sentient organism would be in order."

If you own a Tesla, or a loved one does, or you're thinking about buying one, or you share public roads with Tesla cars, you might want to watch the new documentary "Elon Musk's Crash Course." Premiering Friday on FX and Hulu, the 75-minute fright show spotlights the persistent dangers of Tesla's automated driving technologies, the company's lax safety culture, Musk's P.T. Barnum-style marketing hype and the weak-kneed safety regulators who seem not to care. Get Screen Gab for weekly recommendations, analysis, interviews and irreverent discussion of the TV and streaming movies everyone's talking about. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. The central through line is the story of Joshua Brown, a rabid Tesla fan and derring-do techno-geek beheaded when his Autopilot-engaged Tesla drove itself at full speed on a Florida highway underneath the trailer of a semi-truck in 2016.

You could be forgiven for believing that we've already achieved the era of autonomous vehicles. Tesla, the electric car manufacturer run by Elon Musk, refers to a version of its Autopilot software as "Full Self Driving". The company released a (misleadingly edited) video of an autonomous vehicle navigating city streets, its drivers' hands on their lap – a style replicated by enthusiasts. Musk has repeatedly assured in speeches and interviews that autonomous vehicles were one to two years away – or, as he put it in 2015, a "solved problem" because "we know what to do and we'll be there in a few years." But the existing Autopilot technology has not yet realized those promises and, as a new New York Times documentary illustrates, the gap in expectation and reality has led to several deadly crashes.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 - 28. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. Unstructured data is by its very nature difficult to wrangle. It is one of the hardest sources of data to manage, said Amy Brown, founder and CEO of B2B software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup Authenticx. "AI allows organization of this really messy data source," Brown said. Still, she said, "it takes a commitment and a desire to use that data source."