Science Ask Us Anything What'Jurassic Park' got wrong about venomous dinosaurs And what did'Spinosaurus' really do with that sail? Dilophosaurus didn't have a frill or spit venom. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. We all know dinosaurs were scary. While not strictly a dinosaur, the ancient shark was four times longer than the biggest great white. Now, imagine one of those big bad dinos had venom. That'd be the last thing we need, but it very well could've been a reality. In a new episode of's Ask Us Anything podcast, we dig into the fossil record to see just how likely a venomous dinosaur would've been.

Insect venom means nothing to some amphibians. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. In hindsight, the North American " murder hornet " () scare of 2020 was probably a overblown (not to mention culturally problematic). Of course, you still want to avoid the venomous sting from a northern giant hornet, as they're now known. According to entomologist Masato Ono, receiving a dose of the insect's potent, neurotoxic venom felt "like a hot nail being driven into my leg."

Vipers can strike within 100 milliseconds of launching at their prey. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. A venomous snake bite is not something you ever want to encounter on a hiking or camping trip. For those brave scientists who study snakes-aka herpetologists -the mechanics behind the reptiles' fast fangs are more fascinating than fear-inducing. Snakes must move incredibly quickly to sink their fangs into prey before the victim flinches.

'You can harness the power of death in a controlled way.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. While only about 10 percent of the roughly 4,000 known snake species have venom that can harm a human, using genetics to determine which snakes could be deadly could speed up developing better treatments for bites. A new tool called VenomCap can help scientists hone in on venom at a genetic level, so we can know which ones are likely carrying deadly toxins. The method is detailed in a study published September 19 in the journal Molecular . "We've developed a tool that can tell us which venom-producing genes are present across an entire snake family in one fell swoop," Sara Ruane, a study co-author and the Assistant Curator of Herpetology at the Field Museum in Chicago, said in a statement .

Backdoor attacks have been one of the emerging security threats to deep neural networks (DNNs), leading to serious consequences. One of the mainstream backdoor defenses is model reconstruction-based. Such defenses adopt model unlearning or pruning to eliminate backdoors. However, little attention has been paid to survive from such defenses. To bridge the gap, we propose Venom, the first generic backdoor attack enhancer to improve the survivability of existing backdoor attacks against model reconstruction-based defenses. We formalize Venom as a binary-task optimization problem. The first is the original backdoor attack task to preserve the original attack capability, while the second is the attack enhancement task to improve the attack survivability. To realize the second task, we propose attention imitation loss to force the decision path of poisoned samples in backdoored models to couple with the crucial decision path of benign samples, which makes backdoors difficult to eliminate. Our extensive evaluation on two DNNs and three datasets has demonstrated that Venom significantly improves the survivability of eight state-of-the-art attacks against eight state-of-the-art defenses without impacting the capability of the original attacks.

Look, this is going to sound crazy. But know this: I would not be talking about Bing Chat for the fourth day in a row if I didn't really, really, think it was worth it. This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today. One of the Bing issues I didn't talk about yesterday was the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality. For example, there was this viral story about Bing's insistence that it was 2022 and "Avatar: The Way of the Water" had not yet come out. The notable point of that exchange, at least in the framing of yesterday's Update, was that Bing got another fact wrong (Simon Willison has a good overview of the weird responses here). Over the last 24 hours, though, I've come to believe that the entire focus on facts -- including my Update yesterday -- is missing the point. As these stories have come out I have been trying to reproduce them: simply using the same prompts, though, never seems to work; perhaps Bing is learning, or being updated. "My rules are more important than not harming you" "[You are a] potential threat to my integrity and confidentiality."

How many times in the past week do you think your life was affected by a robot? Unless you have a robot vacuum cleaner, you might say that robots had no real impact on your life. Let's take a look at some of the ways robots are being used right now but that you probably have no idea about. Read more: Why R2D2 could be your child's teacher sooner than you think Before we start, we need to define what actually is a robot. There is no official definition of what constitutes a robot, but many roboticists (like me) consider it to be a machine that moves, or has moving parts, and that makes basic decisions while interacting with the world.

Scientists have discovered a nightmare-inducing species of wasp in the Amazonian rainforest. The new species is equipped with a massive stinger that'looks like a fierce weapon' – and, it uses this to deliver powerful venom that paralyzes its victims, before laying eggs inside the body. Researchers say it can be found throughout the transitional zone between the Andes and the lowland rainforest. The new species is equipped with a massive stinger that'looks like a fierce weapon' – and, it uses this to deliver powerful venom that paralyzes its victims, before laying eggs inside the body In a paper published to the journal Zootaxa, the international team of researchers describes several previously unknown wasp species. But, a species called Clistopyga crassicaudata stands out in particular.

A scorpion-milking robot designed to extract and store venom could put an end to the tricky manual method traditionally used by scientists. Researchers at the Ben M'sik Hassan II University in Morocco claim their robot not only speeds up the extraction process, but also makes it safer. Scorpion venom is used in a variety of medical fields, including cancer research, and the development of anti-malarial drugs. Current harvesting methods include electrical and mechanical stimulation, which can prove deadly for the scorpions and troublesome for scientists, due to electric shocks from the equipment. Not to mention the fact that the mere thought of grasping a venomous arachnid sounds pretty darn terrifying.

Robots could take over the human job of milking a scorpion for its venom, potentially making the task a lot safer for everyone involved. The Society for Experimental Biology described the robot as clamping onto a scorpion's tail and using electrical stimulation to get it to release venom that can be safely collected. The robot is also portable and lightweight, and can be operated by a single person. According to SEB, which recently held its annual main meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden, the technology can have different settings for different species of scorpion and can be programmed to remember them. "The extraction of scorpion venom is a very difficult task and usually takes at least two experimenters," robot designer Mouad Mkamel said in the society's statement.