It was previously thought that children younger than 7 couldn't find efficient solutions to complex problems, but new research suggests that much earlier, children can happen upon known sorting algorithms used by computer scientists Complex problem-solving may arise earlier in a child's development than previously thought Children as young as 4 years old are capable of finding efficient solutions to complex problems, such as independently inventing sorting algorithms developed by computer scientists. The scientists behind the finding say these skills emerge far earlier than previously thought, and should force a rethink of developmental psychology. Take control of your brain's master switch to optimise how you think Experiments carried out by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget and widely popularised in the 1960s asked children to physically sort a collection of sticks into length order, a task Piaget called seriation. His tests revealed until around age 7, children applied no structured strategies; they approached the problem in messy ways through trial and error. But new research by Huiwen Alex Yang and his colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, shows a minority of even 4-year-old children can develop algorithmic solutions to the same task, and by 5 years old more than a quarter are capable of the same thing.

"Noise" protection can be added to content before it's uploaded online. A new technique developed by Australian researchers could stop unauthorised artificial intelligence (AI) systems learning from photos, artwork and other image-based content. Developed by CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, in partnership with the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) and the University of Chicago, the method subtly alters content to make it unreadable to AI models while remaining unchanged to the human eye. This could help artists, organisations and social media users protect their work and personal data from being used to train AI systems or create deepfakes. For example, a social media user could automatically apply a protective layer to their photos before posting, preventing AI systems from learning facial features for deepfake creation.

Millions of images of passports, credit cards, birth certificates, and other documents containing personally identifiable information are likely included in one of the biggest open-source AI training sets, new research has found. Thousands of images--including identifiable faces--were found in a small subset of DataComp CommonPool, a major AI training set for image generation scraped from the web. Because the researchers audited just 0.1% of CommonPool's data, they estimate that the real number of images containing personally identifiable information, including faces and identity documents, is in the hundreds of millions. Anything you put online can be and probably has been scraped. AI companies have stopped warning you that their chatbots aren't doctors AI companies have now mostly abandoned the once-standard practice of including medical disclaimers and warnings in response to health questions, new research has found.

Gone are the days of simply meeting people in the pub or through friends and when Hinge was merely a joint attached to a door. Instead, we're forced to swipe right endlessly to search for our soulmate. But with two million Brits estimated to be living with undiagnosed ADHD, being unlucky in love online could be a potential sign of the condition, new research suggests. Experts found over a fifth of singletons with the mental health condition are more likely to be feel overwhelmed by dating apps than non-ADHD daters. According to the probe, by dating app Hinge, three in four ADHD daters also report feeling misunderstood using them.

When we think of the "cloud," we often imagine data floating invisibly in the ether. But the reality is far more tangible: the cloud is located in huge buildings called data centers, filled with powerful, energy-hungry computer chips. Those chips, particularly graphics processing units (GPUs), have become a critical piece of infrastructure for the world of AI, as they are required to build and run powerful chatbots like ChatGPT. As the number of things you can do with AI grows, so does the geopolitical importance of high-end chips--and where they are located in the world. The U.S. and China are competing to amass stockpiles, with Washington enacting sanctions aimed at preventing Beijing from buying the most cutting-edge varieties.

A 200-acre wide, nearly 300-foot deep pit in the Yana highlands of Siberia, known as the'Batagaika Crater,' is expanding faster than expected due to climate change. Sometimes called the'Gateway to Hell,' the Batagaika Crater first formed when melting'permafrost' soil within the Siberian tundra began to release tons of previously frozen methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, into Earth's atmosphere. Now, new research has discovered that the rate of methane and other carbon gases released as the crater deepens has reached between 4000 and 5000 tons per year. The findings, according to the study's lead author, 'demonstrate how quickly permafrost degradation occurs.' He warns the crater is soon likely to leak all the remaining greenhouse gas it has left.

Internet addiction rewires teenagers' brains and may make them more likely to engage in other addictive behaviour, new research suggests. Signalling between different areas of the brain related to controlling attention and understanding our own emotions were altered in youngsters addicted to being online, say scientists. Their findings, published in the journal PLOS Mental Health, indicate that internet addiction is associated with disrupted signalling in the regions of the brain involved in multiple neural networks. Study co-author Max Chang said: 'These networks play an important role in controlling our attention, in association with intellectual ability, working memory, physical coordination, and emotional processing. 'All of which in turn have an impact on mental health.'

Parents cleverly pull a ruse on their daughter who pretends to be asleep by suggesting actions that can only be done while awake -- check this out! For the 30% of children who have problems falling or staying asleep -- their genes may be to blame. That's according to a 15-year study recently published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, which found that certain genetic variants can have an impact on children's sleep quality and quantity. Researchers from the Department of Sleep and Cognition at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam analyzed the sleep patterns of 2,458 children, as reported by their mothers. Those who were "genetically predisposed" to insomnia -- based on polygenic risk scores that had previously been used for adults -- were more likely to have sleep problems between 1½ and 15 years of age.

Abstract: The emergence of deepfake technologies has become a matter of social concern as they pose threats to individual privacy and public security. It is now of great significance to develop reliable deepfake detectors. However, with numerous face manipulation algorithms present, it is almost impossible to collect sufficient representative fake faces, and it is hard for existing detectors to generalize to all types of manipulation. Therefore, we turn to learn the distribution of real faces, and indirectly identify fake images that deviate from the real face distribution. In this study, we propose Real Face Foundation Representation Learning (RFFR), which aims to learn a general representation from large-scale real face datasets and detect potential artifacts outside the distribution of RFFR. Specifically, we train a model on real face datasets by masked image modeling (MIM), which results in a discrepancy between input faces and the reconstructed ones when applying the model on fake samples.

The recent emergence of artificial intelligence chatbots has already changed the world. From ChatGPT, to Microsoft's Bing AI, and Google's newly released Bard, the advancement in human technology is going to have a huge effect on how humans operate. But while AI might provide a new dawn for technology, there are a number of serious and unsettling threats. What if, for example, you find out you've been speaking to an AI chatbot for days, thinking it's a human? Dating apps have transformed the way in which we find love.