Australia's beloved weather website got a makeover - and infuriated users It was an unseasonably warm spring day in Sydney on 22 October, with a forecast of 39C (99F) - a real scorcher. The day before, the state of New South Wales had reported its hottest day in over a century, a high of 44.8C in the outback town of Bourke. But little did the team at the national Bureau of Meteorology foresee that they, in particular, would soon be feeling the heat. Affectionately known by Australians as the Bom, the agency's long-awaited website redesign went live that morning, more than a decade after the last update. Within hours, the Bom was flooded with a deluge of complaints.

A smattering of Google Home users are reporting that their Nest speakers are--when asked the right voice command--chatting with a new voice, a sign that the promised Gemini makeover for Google Assistant is starting to roll out. In a video posted on Reddit, a Google Nest Mini user asked "Hey Google, what's up," and got an unusually loquacious reply in a new voice: "What's happening right now is that we're on a giant rock moving through space at 1,000 miles an hour and orbiting a giant star made up mostly of hydrogen. Also, we're chatting, which I enjoy." When the Nest user asked a more basic follow-up question about the weather, Google Assistant answered in its regular voice with a typical weather report. According to 9to5Google, you can tell if the Gemini-enhanced Assistant has made its way to your Nest speakers by asking, "Hey Google, what's up?"

Last December, Moby-Dick made one of my students gasp. It wasn't the first time this had happened (weird book), but nothing about the text itself produced the response. For the final project in my English class for high-school seniors, where we spend a semester reading Moby-Dick, I assigned a pretty standard eight-to-10-page research paper. One student, interested in finance, saw a connection between the plot and the 2008 financial crisis. He spent weeks thinking about the parallels, trying to find a way to make all of the pieces fit together into a cohesive argument about whaling and the exploitations of global capitalism.

The first image of a black hole captured four years ago revealed a fuzzy, fiery doughnut-shaped object. Now, researchers have used artificial intelligence to give that cosmic beauty shot a touch-up. The updated picture, published Thursday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, keeps the original shape, but with a skinnier ring and a sharper resolution. The image released in 2019 gave a peek at the enormous black hole at the center of the M87 galaxy, 53 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.

Warehouses in India are going through a makeover to add facilities for the needs of tomorrow. The next generation automation, powered by a clutch of smart technologies from machine learning to blockchain, from Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to robotics, is driving this makeover. Though automation has been taking place in the sector for long now to simplify the process and avoid repetitive jobs, we see a highly accelerated momentum now to shape up the sector for Industry 4.0. According to projections, the Indian Warehouse Automation Market is growing at a CAGR of 26.4% between 2020 and 2026. This shows the pace of automation sweeping the sector.

You don't have to wear a Halloween mask to avoid being detected by facial recognition software: a dab of makeup will do the trick, according to a new study. Researchers at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba, Israel, developed an artificial intelligence that shows users where to apply some foundation or rouge to fool face-recognition algorithms into thinking they're looking at a different person. The researchers tested their scheme against ArcFace, a machine-learning model that takes two facial images and determines the likelihood they're the same person. The team used 20 volunteers (10 men and 10 women) in a real-world environment using two cameras and a variety of lighting conditions and shooting angles. Participants wearing'adversarial makeup,' as recommended by the program, tricked the system 98.8 percent of the time.

As a marketer who also dabbles in social media, I am no stranger to the backlash typically associated with AI technology. While it offers incredible potential, many feel AI is out to replace people and take their jobs, but that is far from the truth. AI is here to help us do our jobs better, and let's not forget that it also creates new jobs within the tech sector. Artificial intelligence exists to work with human intelligence to achieve preferred outcomes more efficiently. You don't need me to tell you about how AI has disrupted industries such as ecommerce and customer service -- that's obvious, and there are a couple thousand articles that go into those details.

Cameras powered by 5G and artificial intelligence could be used to enhance worker safety. As workers enter a restricted safe zone--a place where only properly dressed workers can enter--cameras could scan the area to ensure everyone has the proper gear, even preventing doors from opening if a worker isn't wearing a hardhat, Katibeh says. "If you prevent a safety issue, that kind of pays for itself a hundred times over," says Chandra Brown, the CEO of MxD, a nonprofit in partnership with the Department of Defense that equips factories with innovative digital tools. In July, AT&T announced a collaboration with MxD's Chicago Innovation Center, which is dedicated to developing manufacturing innovation, to showcase 5G use cases and applications.

Team-based multiplayer shooter Overwatch is getting a sequel: and interestingly for fans, it'll bring story missions into the game for the first time. According to Blizzard, it will also "redefine what a sequel means". Which is quite a claim for an online shooter. Unveiled with a crowd-pleasing cinematic trailer at annual fan convention BlizzCon last week, Overwatch 2 will introduce PvE missions in an all-new story mode, as well as a new core competitive mode, Push, a six-versus-six PvP team battle, which sees teams compete to have a robot push the map's objective to their opponent. Before now, the original 2016 first person shooter focused on PvP gameplay, with spin-off comic books and animated shorts filling in backstories for the popular crew of ragtag leads.

From the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to Hollywood, humans have attempted to understand their fellow man through labeling and categorization. There was Hippocrates's blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile; the classic dramatic archetypes of hero, ingenue, jester and wise man; and, of course, Carrie, Charlotte, Samantha and Miranda from the famous HBO series More rigorously, psychologists have worked to develop empirical tests that assess core aspects of personality. The "Big Five" traits (extroversion, neuroticism, openness, conscientiousness and agreeableness) emerged in the 1940s through studies of the English language for descriptive terms. Those categories were validated in the 1990s as a scientifically backed way to evaluate a person's character. Through a series of questions, researchers learn whether you are high, low, or in between in each one of those qualities.