From 25-27 August, UK RAS STEPS members came together at the University of York's Institute for Safe Autonomy for a three-day Micromaze Robot Hackathon. Working in teams, participants were challenged to design, build and program autonomous robots capable of navigating a series of increasingly complex mazes. Each team used a custom Raspberry Pi Pico W robotics platform, designed a laser-cut chassis, integrated motors and sensors, and developed its control software in MicroPython. Participants had access to ultrasonic, infrared and time-of-flight sensors, alongside laser-cutting and 3D-printing facilities. The final challenge considered maze performance, collision avoidance, robot design, code quality, wireless control and any innovative features developed by the teams.

A safety expert at Anthropic believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could spark an event that wipes out humanity. A safety expert at Anthropic believes there is a greater than 10% chance that AI could spark an event that wipes out humanity. AI could kill all humans in next decade, warn experts: but how seriously should we take them? Does artificial superintelligence really pose a risk greater than nuclear weapons? Is there a significant chance of "a Chornobyl-sized catastrophe".

The battle over Palestine has never been fought only on the ground. For decades, Israel and its powerful political, lobbying and public-relations networks have devoted enormous resources to shaping how the conflict is understood in Washington and across the Western world. But an investigation into an Israeli-funded influence operation suggests that this campaign has entered a new and potentially more consequential arena: the artificial intelligence systems increasingly used by millions of people to determine what is true. Recent investigations exposed the Hanover Institute for Public Policy as a purported American think tank that appeared to have no real offices, identifiable scholars or meaningful institutional presence. Instead, the institute appears to have been created as a sophisticated propaganda operation aimed at shaping search engine results and influencing the answers generated by AI chatbots.

A pro-Israel messaging website badged with the name of a thinktank that does not exist has published more than half a million words in nine days, built on a commercial platform that promises to optimize content so that AI chatbots will cite it. The site gives Israel's position on subjects including the torture of Palestinian prisoners, Israeli war crimes and whether Israel has deliberately starved Palestinians in Gaza, all presented as neutral research. The site publishes in the name of the Hanover Institute for Public Policy, which apparently does not exist as a legal entity in any jurisdiction, has no physical address, and carries no named staff and no bylines on any of its reports. Its own terms of use are governed by the laws of "the state in which the Institute is established", which they decline to name. The existence of the site was first reported on 14 August.

That's a major factor in how well models do on the most famous puzzle-based benchmark, ARC-AGI. These problems require you to infer abstract, general rules from a set of examples. Models do better on ARC puzzles when they receive each grid not as an image but as a string of numbers that encodes the color of each cell. Research suggests that even when models answer ARC-AGI questions correctly, they often do so using byzantine and non-generalizable rules, whereas humans draw on simple visual concepts. Despite these disadvantages, models have gotten quite good at ARC-AGI over the past year, but some puzzles--such as the one printed here--still stump them.

Why are sandwiches more regulated than AI? Futurist Max Tegmark wonders why sandwiches are more regulated than artificial intelligence in the US. The biggest danger facing mankind is a machine that can "outsmart the whole species", argues Max Tegmark, professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder of the Future of Life Institute. Tegmark tells host Steve Clemons that governments and tech companies are in a "race to replace" human labour, instead of solving human problems. "It's aimed at getting more money and power to a very small number of individuals," he says. But a slew of suicides and murders committed by people chatting with AI chatbots has led to pushback against the Silicon Valley "don't regulate us" lobby.

How we picked 35 of the world's top young scientists and engineers Our 2026 Innovators Under 35 list will be out soon. Here's what we looked for as we sifted through 550 nominations from around the world. Next month, on September 8, will reveal its 2026 list of Innovators Under 35, recognizing 35 young people from around the world who are doing groundbreaking scientific work and building clever technical fixes for sticky problems. By finding the top young innovators globally and learning what they're focused on in their work, we aim to give readers a sense of what advances to expect in the years to come. As a newsroom, we also use this exercise to help us spot rising talent and get to know some of the best early-career researchers in the fields that we cover. The editors of published the first Innovators Under 35 list in 1999, and it's become a beloved annual tradition alongside our lists of 10 Breakthrough Technologies, 10 Climate Tech Companies to Watch, and (new this year) 10 Things That Matter in AI Right Now .

The AI-based program AlphaFold predicts a protein's 3D structure with remarkable accuracy. However, it tends to reduce heterogeneous structures to a single dominant conformation, or shape, and overlooks experimental conditions that can alter local structure. Researchers at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA) and international collaborators have now developed a way to guide AlphaFold with experimental data. Their approach, published in, paves the way for improved future predictive models. Our understanding of molecular structures is considerably influenced by X-ray crystallography--a technique that has served as structural biology's central pillar for many decades.

How are companies, governments responding to the OpenAI hack? ChatGPT owner OpenAI has admitted an "unprecedented cyber incident" - two of its most capable artificial intelligence models hacked into another AI company on their own - stirring debates over the need for stronger technology guardrails. The company said its AI systems broke out of a testing environment and hacked startup Hugging Face. The startup had disclosed on July 16 that its servers were hacked by an unknown but sophisticated agent acting on its own. Here's the latest on how companies, some governments and lawmakers have responded to the first such publicly disclosed cyberattack: What has Hugging Face said?

Things to Do in L.A. Tap to enable a layout that focuses on the article. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) tours the UC Berkeley campus alongside Chancellor Rich Lyons ahead of announcing the Nancy Pelosi Institute for Representative Democracy. This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here . See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search.