Google's Smart Glasses Will Have the Best Software. But They'll Have to Win on Style Too When Google releases its smart glasses in the coming months, the strength of its AI-powered software will be its biggest leg up on its rivals. But will people want to be seen wearing them? When Google ships its newly refreshed smart glasses this year--as the rumor mill is predicting, and as the hands-on demos posted just last week have all but confirmed it will--the company's tech will be joining a crowded field. But whether this rebirth of Glass will pop or fizzle comes down to whether Google can best its main competitor: Meta .

This article presents the full, original record of the 2024 Joint Statistical Meetings (JSM) town hall, "Statistics in the Age of AI," which convened leading statisticians to discuss how the field is evolving in response to advances in artificial intelligence, foundation models, large-scale empirical modeling, and data-intensive infrastructures. The town hall was structured around open panel discussion and extensive audience Q&A, with the aim of eliciting candid, experience-driven perspectives rather than formal presentations or prepared statements. This document preserves the extended exchanges among panelists and audience members, with minimal editorial intervention, and organizes the conversation around five recurring questions concerning disciplinary culture and practices, data curation and "data work," engagement with modern empirical modeling, training for large-scale AI applications, and partnerships with key AI stakeholders. By providing an archival record of this discussion, the preprint aims to support transparency, community reflection, and ongoing dialogue about the evolving role of statistics in the data- and AI-centric future.

No one can truly have it. The world is too interconnected for nations to go it alone. Governments plan to pour $1.3 trillion into AI infrastructure by 2030 to invest in "sovereign AI," with the premise being that countries should be in control of their own AI capabilities. The funds include financing for domestic data centers, locally trained models, independent supply chains, and national talent pipelines. This is a response to real shocks: covid-era supply chain breakdowns, rising geopolitical tensions, and the war in Ukraine. But the pursuit of absolute autonomy is running into reality.

Should You Buy a Smart Plug? Smart plugs can add controls to any outlet, but they aren't perfect for everything. Here's our guide to using one and which ones to buy. A smart plug is a pretty handy gadget, but for a while they were touted as a device you could add to anything to turn it smart. That's true to a certain degree; you can use a smart plug to add instant power control to any outlet, letting you turn the outlet on and off at your command from anywhere in your home (or even if you aren't there).

With great biological havoc comes great opportunity. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. About 445 million years ago, our planet completely changed. Massive glaciers formed over the supercontinent Gondwana, sucking up sea water like an icy sponge. Now called the Late Ordovician mass extinction (LOME), Earth's first major mass extinction wiped out about 85 percent of all marine species as the ocean chemistry radically changed and Earth's climate turned bitter cold. However, with great biological havoc also comes opportunity.

Clear, reliable audio is no longer optional, say Genevieve Juillard, CEO of IDC, and Chris Schyvinck, president and CEO at Shure. When business leaders talk about digital transformation, their focus often jumps straight to cloud platforms, AI tools, or collaboration software. Yet, one of the most fundamental enablers of how organizations now work, and how employees experience that work, is often overlooked: audio. As Genevieve Juillard, CEO of IDC, notes, the shift to hybrid collaboration made every space, from corporate boardrooms to kitchen tables, meeting-ready almost overnight. In the scramble, audio quality often lagged, creating what research now shows is more than a nuisance. Poor sound can alter how speakers are perceived, making them seem less credible or even less trustworthy. Audio is the gatekeeper of meaning," stresses Julliard. "If people can't hear clearly, they can't understand you. And if they can't understand you, they can't trust you, and they can't act on what you said. And no amount of sharp video can fix that. For Shure, which has spent a century advancing sound technology, the implications extend far beyond convenience.

Today’s global coral bleaching events are the worst kind of climate warning.

We introduce BioTrove, the largest publicly accessible dataset designed to advance AI applications in biodiversity. Curated from the iNaturalist platform and vetted to include only research-grade data, BioTrove contains 161.9 million images, offering unprecedented scale and diversity from three primary kingdoms: Animalia (animals), Fungi (fungi), and Plantae (plants), spanning approximately 366.6K species. Each image is annotated with scientific names, taxonomic hierarchies, and common names, providing rich metadata to support accurate AI model development across diverse species and ecosystems.We demonstrate the value of BioTrove by releasing a suite of CLIP models trained using a subset of 40 million captioned images, known as BioTrove-Train. This subset focuses on seven categories within the dataset that are underrepresented in standard image recognition models, selected for their critical role in biodiversity and agriculture: Aves (birds), Arachnida} (spiders/ticks/mites), Insecta (insects), Plantae (plants), Fungi (fungi), Mollusca (snails), and Reptilia (snakes/lizards). To support rigorous assessment, we introduce several new benchmarks and report model accuracy for zero-shot learning across life stages, rare species, confounding species, and multiple taxonomic levels.We anticipate that BioTrove will spur the development of AI models capable of supporting digital tools for pest control, crop monitoring, biodiversity assessment, and environmental conservation. These advancements are crucial for ensuring food security, preserving ecosystems, and mitigating the impacts of climate change. BioTrove is publicly available, easily accessible, and ready for immediate use.

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. There are plenty of annual recap lists circulating around this time of year, but few of them involve the amount of work put in by California's Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI). Over the past year, researchers guided remotely operated vehicles more than 3,000 feet down to survey the vast biodiversity within some of the oceans' deepest and darkest regions. The data and footage collected during these trips will help experts fill in the gaps towards understanding the planet's hardest-to-reach ecosystems. To celebrate the past 12 months of discoveries, MBARI released a video highlighting some of 2025's most stunning, strange, and mysterious creature sightings.

Google's Chromebook Successor Is Coming. Here's Everything We Know So Far Google has officially acknowledged the upcoming merger of Android and Chromebooks, and it may be coming in 2026. It's never fun to be in last place. Google has been coasting along with its Android tablets and Chromebooks for years, playing second fiddle to the bigger players in the game. But the company has a new card up its sleeve: the upcoming merger of its two platforms into something entirely new.