Just don't try to pop it in that old Walkman. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. It seemed like this once-groundbreaking piece of technology may have gone the way of the dodo. However, the cassette tape could offer a new way to store our ever increasing amount of digital data-with a biological twist. DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is nature's ultimate hard drive because it is dense, compact, and durable.

A Google developer recently decided that one of the company's chatbots, a large language model (LLM) called LaMBDA, had become sentient. According to a report in the Washington Post, the developer identifies as a Christian and he believes that the machine has something akin to a soul -- that it's become sentient. As is always the case, the "is it alive?" We don't want to dunk on anyone here at Neural, but it's flat out dangerous to put these kinds of ideas in people's heads. The more we, as a society, pretend that we're "thiiiis close" to creating sentient machines, the easier it'll be for bad actors, big tech, and snake oil startups to manipulate us with false claims about machine learning systems.

After 15 years of diligently exploring the surface of Mars, the Opportunity rover finally succumbed to the elements and went offline Feb. 13. As obituaries and tributes to "Oppy" surfaced, fans caught a glimpse into the robot's final moments: the last picture it sent, its last words, the last-ditch attempts to revive it. Scientists wept as they said their final farewells. As employees swayed and embraced, mission control sent one final transmission to Oppy: Billie Holiday's 1944 recording of "I'll Be Seeing You." The muted, intimate timbre of Holiday's voice helped millions say goodbye to "the little robot who could": I'll find you in the morning sun, I'll be looking at the moon, But I'll be seeing you.