Zanskar uses AI to identify hidden geothermal systems--and claims it has found one that could fuel a power plant, the first such discovery by industry in decades. A geothermal startup said Thursday that it has hit gold in Nevada--metaphorically speaking. Zanskar, which uses AI to find hidden geothermal resources deep underground, says that it has identified a new commercially viable site for a potential power plant. The discovery, the company claims, is the first of its kind made by the industry in decades. The find is the culmination of years of research on how to find these resources--and points to the growing promise of geothermal energy .

Virginia grandmother Carrie Edwards used ChatGPT to pick Powerball numbers, won $150,000, and donated the entire prize to three charities.

The system uses an AI model that would trigger a Kevlar bubble cocoon in the event of a crash. 'REBIRTH is more than engineering--it's a response to grief,' the researchers wrote. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. An Air India flight from Ahmedabad bound for London spent just 30 seconds in the air before disaster struck earlier this year . Preliminary reports indicate that the aircraft's fuel control switches were inexplicably turned off shortly after takeoff, cutting fuel to the engines and causing total power loss.

Generative AI can be used in multi-actor environments with purposes ranging from social science modeling to interactive narrative and AI evaluation. Supporting this diversity of use cases -- which we classify as Simulationist, Dramatist, and Evaluationist -- demands a flexible scenario definition framework. We argue here that a good approach is to take inspiration from tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs), where a Game Master (GM) is responsible for the environment and generates all parts of the story not directly determined by the voluntary actions of player characters. We argue that the Entity-Component architectural pattern is useful here. In such a system, the GM is not a hardcoded computer game but is itself a configurable entity, composed of components just like any other actor. By design, the approach allows for a separation between the underlying implementation details handled by an engineer, the creation of reusable components, and their composition and configuration managed by a designer who constructs entities from the components. This separation of concerns is instrumental for achieving rapid iteration, maintaining modularity, and ultimately to ensure scalability. We describe the ongoing evolution of the Concordia library in terms of this philosophy, demonstrating how it allows users to effectively configure scenarios that align with their specific goals.

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Bryan Kohberger is accused of committing an unspeakably evil act, stabbing to death four University of Idaho students in their off-campus home in November 2022. The killings were brutal, and as soon as Kohberger was arrested, some members of the victims' families demanded that he should be executed if he is convicted. Kohberger is due to stand trial in August. In the run-up to that trial, his defense lawyers have filed a flurry of motions challenging various aspects of the prosecution's case. Filing such motions is standard in death cases, though in Kohberger's case, the defense and prosecution have done much of that work in secret.

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 Feedback is as fond of true crime as the next morbidly curious ghoul, so we have occasionally dipped our toes into the never-ending well of speculation about the Whitechapel murders of 1888-91 and the near-mythical Jack the Ripper. Although frankly, we didn't get much further than Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, which (spoiler!) ties the killings to the British establishment and the Freemasons, who supposedly arranged the murders to create an evil psychic force that would perpetuate the patriarchy. But the field of "Ripperology" extends far beyond one eccentric graphic novel.

Some of the world's most popular apps are likely being co-opted by rogue members of the advertising industry to harvest sensitive location data on a massive scale, with that data ending up with a location data company whose subsidiary has previously sold global location data to US law enforcement. The thousands of apps, included in hacked files from location data company Gravy Analytics, include everything from games like Candy Crush and dating apps like Tinder to pregnancy tracking and religious prayer apps across both Android and iOS. Because much of the collection is occurring through the advertising ecosystem--not code developed by the app creators themselves--this data collection is likely happening without users' or even app developers' knowledge. This article was created in partnership with 404 Media, a journalist-owned publication covering how technology impacts humans. "For the first time publicly, we seem to have proof that one of the largest data brokers selling to both commercial and government clients appears to be acquiring their data from the online advertising'bid stream,'" rather than code embedded into the apps themselves, Zach Edwards, senior threat analyst at cybersecurity firm Silent Push and who has followed the location data industry closely, tells 404 Media after reviewing some of the data.

The grinding trial-and-error process that precedes world-changing scientific discoveries doesn't really lend itself to dramatization. Instead of our heroes chasing bad guys down dark alleys, the exciting story action involves them standing in front of a blackboard or gazing into a microscope. So dramatic tension is injected by financial or political forces threatening to derail a project of urgent importance (Oppenheimer); the scientists fighting for credibility in the face of belonging to a marginalized group (Hidden Figures, The Imitation Game, any biopic of a female scientist); or the old reliable of the main scientist being a difficult, maverick genius (Oppenheimer again). Joy: The Birth of IVF, Ben Taylor's new film out now on Netflix, about the arduous path to develop a viable technique for fertilizing human eggs outside the body and implanting them in the womb, aka in vitro fertilization, hits many of these notes. There's the irascible pioneer, here played by Bill Nighy at his most crotchety but sympathetic as gynecologist Patrick Steptoe, who introduced laparoscopy to the U.K. He's teamed with the driven visionary--physiologist Robert Edwards, played by James Norton, who, like Jude Law, is always required to conceal his innate gorgeousness under an unbecoming wig or glasses to convince as an ordinary guy.

Large language models can do jaw-dropping things. But nobody knows exactly why. Two years ago, Yuri Burda and Harri Edwards, researchers at OpenAI, were trying to find out what it would take to get a large language model to do basic arithmetic. The models memorized the sums they saw but failed to solve new ones. By accident, Burda and Edwards left some of their experiments running for days rather than hours.

Two years ago, Yuri Burda and Harri Edwards, researchers at OpenAI, were trying to find out what it would take to get a large language model to do basic arithmetic. The models memorized the sums they saw but failed to solve new ones. By accident, Burda and Edwards left some of their experiments running for days rather than hours. The models were shown the example sums over and over again, and eventually they learned to add two numbers--it had just taken a lot more time than anybody thought it should. In certain cases, models could seemingly fail to learn a task and then all of a sudden just get it, as if a lightbulb had switched on, a behavior the researchers called grokking.