Amid historically low birth rates and economic pressures from its aging population, China will eliminate a decades-old tax exemption on contraceptives. A visitor looks at condoms during the Beijing International Sex Supplies Exhibition. Amid historically low birth rates and economic pressures from its aging population, China will eliminate a decades-old tax exemption on contraceptives. China aims to impose a unique strategy to address a falling birth rate that threatens its long-term stability. As of January 1, 2026, the government will levy a 13 percent value-added tax (VAT) on various contraceptives, including condoms.

A man has been arrested as a suspect in setting the Pacific Palisades fire in Los Angeles that killed 12 people and destroyed more than 6,000 homes in January. Justice department officials announced at a news conference that 29-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht had been detained. They said evidence collected from his digital devices showed an image he generated on ChatGPT depicting a burning city. The fire was sparked on 7 January near a popular hiking trail overlooking the wealthy coastal neighbourhood. The Eaton Fire, ignited the same day in the Los Angeles area, killed another 19 people and destroyed about 9,400 structures, officials said.

When No Man's Sky was launched in 2016, Hello Games made it available on the platforms available at the time, namely the PC, the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Over time, it was also released for the PS5, the Xbox Series X and S consoles, the Nintendo Switch, the PS VR1 and 2, as well as other virtual reality devices for computers. Now, the developer is rolling out cross-saves and cross-plays to all those platforms so fans can pick up from where they left off even if they switch devices. Hello Games said adding the ability to transfer saves has been especially difficult for its team, since No Man's Sky players can spend thousands of hours exploring worlds and building elaborate bases. It likened cross-saves to moving houses -- the "longer people have lived there the more complicated it is to move them," the developer explained.

Like several million other video game players, I spent many hours last week travelling the galaxy in Starfield, the latest adventure from Bethesda, the creator of Fallout and the Elder Scrolls. But as with a number of my colleagues in the games press, I have spent much of this time wondering what it is about the game that's not quite right, that's lacking somehow. The consensus – summed up neatly in Eurogamer's review and this PCGamesN op-ed – is that the game adheres too closely to the well-worn structure of modern open-world games, where an inescapable main narrative is bulked up with optional side challenges that give the illusion of freedom, without any of the substance or unpredictability, or indeed actual freedom. Starfield represents a highly commodified form of exploration in which player adventures are channeled into endless fetch quests and box-ticking busywork. You're free, but you're unable to create any meaning or narrative of your own.

Has there ever been a game like No Man's Sky? It was dead on arrival when it launched seven years ago, but developer Hello Games has methodically updated the title, adding new features, steadily increasing its popularity and eventually surpassing the lofty expectations for the game's original release. To that end, there's already been three fairly beefy updates this year alone, but get ready for a fourth. The developer just dropped No Man's Sky: Echos to commemorate the seventh anniversary of everyone's favorite space sim. The update brings some nifty new gameplay elements, like a race of sentient robots that promise "rich, new story content" and the ability to create your own robot avatar for battles and resource collection.

The ultimate goal, in Dr. Ferrucci's view, is that A.I. becomes a trusted "thought partner," a skilled collaborator at work and at home, making suggestions and explaining them. Elemental Cognition, founded in 2015, is taking measured steps toward that goal with a promising, though unproven, hybrid approach. Its system combines the latest developments in machine learning with a page from the A.I.'s past, software modeled after human reasoning. Newer machine learning programs are remarkable at pattern recognition and predictions, far more powerful than in the "Jeopardy!" They pore through millions of words and word patterns, and generate the most likely interpretations.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Inmates who were ready to walk out of the largest jail in Los Angeles County over the weekend were held behind bars for days longer because of a computer system crash, a report says. Lorena Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, told the Los Angeles Times that staff at the Men's Central Jail were forced to process inmates' release by hand starting Saturday after its information management system went offline. That system didn't come back online until late last night, the spokesperson added.

The first major No Man's Sky patch of the year has arrived. Among other things, Hello Games says the Sentinel update improves the space exploration sim's AI and introduces a buildable AI mech. You can put an AI pilot in your Exomech and have it follow you and help out in battles. Players can build a drone companion too. As the name suggests, the update brings in changes for the Sentinels, robots that will attack if you try to change an environment or they catch you on a planet that hosts rare items.

Long hidden from public view on factory floors, robots today are increasingly located in spaces where they exist alongside humans. This development has generated considerable hand-wringing. Will robots eventually take our jobs? Will they replace human romantic partners? In The New Breed , Kate Darling argues that equating robots with humans deprives us of our ability to determine the fate of humanity in a robot-filled world. She argues that our relationships with animals present an analogy more suitable for predicting how society will evolve as robots become part of it. Darling begins by illustrating how animals have long held roles that only seem to elicit concern when robots enter the conversation. We have domesticated donkeys to plow fields, brought dogs into battle, and directed birds to deliver messages. Robots, she argues, like animals before them, will augment human abilities, not replace humans altogether. Whether humans become obsolete is a choice, not an inevitability, and this decision must be placed in the context of the institutions that structure our lives. Crucially, Darling identifies capitalism as the culprit responsible for encouraging “short-term corporate profits rather than long-term investments in humans.” Our “moral panic” about the robot invasion is misplaced, she argues. Instead, we should devote our energy to “holding our governments and corporations accountable and demanding that our economic and political systems do better for people.” The book's second section deals with companionship between humans and robots. Here Darling's own research shines brightly. In opposition to those who contend that humans should treat robots like tools or that roboticists should not design intelligent machines to look like humans, Darling demonstrates that we are hardwired to perceive nonhumans capable of movement and other abilities as possessing vitality. “Our desire to anthropomorphize… isn't going away,” she notes. This is an important point too often missed by critics of humanoid robotics who mistakenly believe that we can circumvent questions about moral status by ignoring the innate human tendency to project ourselves onto other beings. Darling's chapter on animal companions is an enjoyable one that even those who have no interest in robots would likely relish. Here, she reminds us that humans have a long history of establishing meaningful relationships with animals. Therefore, in principle, there is no reason why we could not also forge important ties with robots. The next chapter adds that, following our trajectory with animals, robots “will become a new type of relationship altogether” and, despite our anthropomorphic urges, “we're unlikely to confuse them with the alternative.” Darling believes we should be less worried about forming relationships with robots and more worried about how these relationships could be exploited. If we fail to take an “intentional” approach to robot design, she insists, we leave ourselves vulnerable to corporate coercion, reinforcing biases, and invasions of privacy. Strong regulations and enforcement mechanisms will be needed to avoid these potential pitfalls. The book's final section addresses how humans should treat robots. Here the literature on animal rights makes a late but essential entrance. While our treatment of animals is “rife with inconsistencies,” empathy, she maintains, might be the key to understanding our obligations toward robots. Perhaps to the disappointment of some, Darling suggests that our emotions, not our reason, might best guide the design of legal protections for intelligent machines. The New Breed offers readers an energetic and witty overview of how our relations with animals can deliver useful insights into how robots might be incorporated into human society, but a couple of weaknesses might catch the attention of specialists. Darling's emphasis on human needs and empathy, for example, reinforces the kind of anthropocentric thinking that has produced animal suffering and ecological devastation. In addition, her exclusive focus on Western philosophy and law gives short shrift to important ideas about the relational personhood of nonhuman entities and the fundamental interconnectedness of all life forms that are articulated in Eastern and Indigenous worldviews. Despite these shortcomings, this book succeeds in arresting the alarmism that has pervaded recent popular writing on robots. Darling ultimately makes a strong case that while our future will indeed include robots, it remains up to us to decide how to adjust our systems to accommodate our new companions. By examining the past and present of our relationships with animals, she shows how we might learn lessons that will help us shape our technological future for the better.

It was the summer of 2010, and Ian Burkhart was sizing up the waves as he swam in the ocean off the coast of North Carolina. He had traveled there on a vacation with a group of friends to unwind after wrapping up his freshman year studying video production at Ohio University. He prepared to dive into an oncoming wave and tumbled into the water. Burkhart was a capable swimmer, but the ocean is unpredictable. The wave slammed him into a sandbar--and that's when he realized he couldn't feel his body.