Fast, stealthy, and cheap--autonomous, semisubmersible drone boats carrying tons of cocaine could be international law enforcement's nightmare scenario. A big one just came ashore. Colombian military officials intercepted this 40-foot-long uncrewed fiberglass "narco sub" in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. On a bright morning last April, a surveillance plane operated by the Colombian military spotted a 40-foot-long shark-like silhouette idling in the ocean just off Tayrona National Park. It was, unmistakably, a "narco sub," a stealthy fiberglass vessel that sails with its hull almost entirely underwater, used by drug cartels to move cocaine north. The plane's crew radioed it in, and eventually nearby coast guard boats got the order, routine but urgent: Intercept. In Cartagena, about 150 miles from the action, Captain Jaime González Zamudio, commander of the regional coast guard group, sat down at his desk to watch what happened next.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Any pet parent knows that our furry friends can get into accidents. While some like rolling around in the mud are mainly a nuisance, ingesting something that they shouldn't can be very dangerous. In a study published August 18 in the journal Frontiers in Veterinary Science, Doctor Jake Johnson, a cardiology resident at North Carolina State University's College of Veterinary Medicine, presents a case study of a chihuahua that accidentally ingested cocaine. Ahead of the study's publication, the team at Frontiers conducted this Q&A with Dr. Johnson.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In a world first, scientists at the University of Utah have engineered fruit flies susceptible to cocaine addiction. But as strange as it sounds, there are potentially life-saving reasons for genetically altering the insects to crave the drug. The novel biological model could help addiction treatment therapies development and expedite research timelines. The findings are detailed in the Journal of Neuroscience.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones seized on a May 9 video of a train car meeting among three European leaders to claim they had used drugs and were trying to hide it. The video showed French President Emmanuel Macron sitting at a table with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer. On the table before them were two blue folders, two drinking glasses and a small white object. The three men smiled for photographers who had gathered. Just as the shutter clicks started, Macron removed the crumpled white object from the tabletop and held it in his fist.

After months at sea, the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Waesche returned to San Diego on Thursday, with over 37,000 pounds of confiscated cocaine and one less crew member, lost at sea, officials said. The offloading of their massive narcotics haul -- which weighs about as much as a full grown humpback whale and is estimated to be worth 275 million -- comes days after search efforts were ended for 23-year-old Seaman Bryan Lee, according to the Coast Guard. Lee, who hails from Rancho Cordova, was discovered missing at 6:45 a.m. last Tuesday while the Waesche was conducting a routine counter-drug patrol around 300 nautical miles south of Mexico. Search crews dedicated over 190 hours to scouring 19,000 nautical miles for Lee using drones, aircraft and vessels, before suspending the search on Monday. The confiscated cocaine was netted through 11 drug interdiction missions off the coasts of Mexico and Central and South America from December through mid February.

A "cocaine addicted" police officer who was found to be stealing drugs from an evidence store after he accidentally dropped a bag of white powder at his daughter's school has been jailed. Andrew Talbot, at the time a Greater Manchester Police detective, had taken just under 4kg (9lb) of cocaine worth almost 400,000 from police property rooms between 2018 and 2020. He also used the force's computer systems to find a drug dealer to help him sell the drugs on the streets of Manchester. The 54-year-old was found guilty of supplying the drug and misconduct in public office and sentenced to 19 years in jail at Liverpool Crown Court.GMPThe detective stole drugs from Greater Manchester's Police evidence rooms Sentencing him on Friday, Judge Neil Flewitt KC said Talbot had deceived colleagues to put a "significant" quantity of cocaine back into circulation as a result of his "addiction and greed". The investigation into Talbot by GMP's anti-corruption unit began in February 2020 after he dropped a small bag of cocaine outside his daughter's primary school.

As AI advances in text generation, human trust in AI generated content remains constrained by biases that go beyond concerns of accuracy. This study explores how bias shapes the perception of AI versus human generated content. Through three experiments involving text rephrasing, news article summarization, and persuasive writing, we investigated how human raters respond to labeled and unlabeled content. While the raters could not differentiate the two types of texts in the blind test, they overwhelmingly favored content labeled as "Human Generated," over those labeled "AI Generated," by a preference score of over 30%. We observed the same pattern even when the labels were deliberately swapped. This human bias against AI has broader societal and cognitive implications, as it undervalues AI performance. This study highlights the limitations of human judgment in interacting with AI and offers a foundation for improving human-AI collaboration, especially in creative fields.

PubTator 3.0 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/research/pubtator3/) is a biomedical literature resource using state-of-the-art AI techniques to offer semantic and relation searches for key concepts like proteins, genetic variants, diseases, and chemicals. It currently provides over one billion entity and relation annotations across approximately 36 million PubMed abstracts and 6 million full-text articles from the PMC open access subset, updated weekly. PubTator 3.0's online interface and API utilize these precomputed entity relations and synonyms to provide advanced search capabilities and enable large-scale analyses, streamlining many complex information needs. We showcase the retrieval quality of PubTator 3.0 using a series of entity pair queries, demonstrating that PubTator 3.0 retrieves a greater number of articles than either PubMed or Google Scholar, with higher precision in the top 20 results. We further show that integrating ChatGPT (GPT-4) with PubTator APIs dramatically improves the factuality and verifiability of its responses. In summary, PubTator 3.0 offers a comprehensive set of features and tools that allow researchers to navigate the ever-expanding wealth of biomedical literature, expediting research and unlocking valuable insights for scientific discovery.

Elon Musk has unveiled Grok, an artificial intelligence chatbot with a "rebellious streak" inspired by The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The Tesla CEO, who warned last week that AI was "one of the biggest threats to humanity", said the competitor to ChatGPT would be made available to premium subscribers on his X platform after testing. Musk also revealed that Grok had access to user posts on X, which he owns, and has a penchant for sarcastic responses. Grok has real-time access to info via the? It's also based & loves sarcasm. I have no idea who could have guided it this way pic.twitter.com/e5OwuGvZ3Z

Fox News host Sean Hannity argues the cocaine found at the White House will'forever' be a mystery on'Hannity.' HANNITY – Fox News host argues the cocaine found at the White House will'forever' be a mystery. MISSING THE TRUTH – Here's why FBI Director Wray's grilling failed. GUTFELD – Somebody has to speak up for these victims. AI CROSSROADS – FEC rules the 2024 election won't restrict use of AI, so campaigns are on their own.