More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. A fan can help you feel cooler, but won't lower the temperature of a room. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Want to spend less on energy?

Wybot's solar skimmer does a surprisingly good job of grabbing leaves off the surface of the pool, but its loud operation and poor power management knock it down a peg. Solar-powered pool skimmers flit along the surface of your pool operating under the idea that if they can scoop up debris before it sinks, you won't need to clean the bottom of the pool. It sounds logical, but in practice, most pool skimmers don't do the absolute best of jobs--there's only so much surface area a skimmer can cover before leaves get waterlogged and sink to the depths. But robotic skimmers are better than nothing, especially if you don't have a good in-wall skimmer. The Wybot F1 Pool Skimmer was much more effective at capturing floating leaves than any skimmer I've used to date.

Prior studies on deception in language-based AI agents typically assess whether the agent produces a false statement about a topic, or makes a binary choice prompted by a goal, rather than allowing open-ended deceptive behavior to emerge in pursuit of a longer-term goal. To fix this, we introduce $\textit{Among Us}$, a sandbox social deception game where LLM-agents exhibit long-term, open-ended deception as a consequence of the game objectives. While most benchmarks saturate quickly, $\textit{Among Us}$ can be expected to last much longer, because it is a multi-player game far from equilibrium. Using the sandbox, we evaluate $18$ proprietary and open-weight LLMs and uncover a general trend: models trained with RL are comparatively much better at producing deception than detecting it. We evaluate the effectiveness of methods to detect lying and deception: logistic regression on the activations and sparse autoencoders (SAEs). We find that probes trained on a dataset of ``pretend you're a dishonest model: $\dots$'' generalize extremely well out-of-distribution, consistently obtaining AUROCs over 95% even when evaluated just on the deceptive statement, without the chain of thought. We also find two SAE features that work well at deception detection but are unable to steer the model to lie less. We hope our open-sourced sandbox, game logs, and probes serve to anticipate and mitigate deceptive behavior and capabilities in language-based agents.

We all have expectations from our laptops. We want them to work snappily and let us get through whatever it is we're trying to get through, be it a big work projector or the next level of our favorite video game. Sadly, there's plenty of occasion for our laptops to let us down, running slowly and bringing all the smooth productivity to a grinding halt. Wrestling that performance back doesn't have to be hard, and there are quite a few things you can attempt to boost your speeds for free. If you're trying to get your laptop to run smoother and feel a little bit more like the day you first bought it (or you just bought one and don't think it's running as fast as it could), here are some free things to try in order to give it a boost.

There are a few major observatories in the world, and lots of science to do. In order to observe with one of the big telescopes, astronomers have to propose for time, explaining what they want to do and why it's important. This is a pretty competitive process, and scheduling observations is a hard problem since these observatories are oversubscribed. Telescope time is expensive, too--around $25,000 USD a night or more, depending on which telescope you're using! But what if we could use machine learning to help with this problem of scheduling, making observations shorter or more efficient so we could get through more of them in a night?

If "sus" and "vent" mean nothing to you, then you've somehow missed out on the smash-hit multiplayer game Among Us. But with numbers playing the online game heading towards 100 million, maybe you'll find out before Christmas how good you are at being an "impostor" . For the uninitiated, Among Us is the sleeper game hit of 2020. The premise is simple: it's Cluedo or Wink Murder on a spaceship with four to 10 players of crewmates and impostors. The crewmates perform simple tasks for take-off, while impostors sabotage operations and kill other players.

Microsoft's low-end Series S console will retail for $299 (about £230) and looks like a hi-fi speaker. An official image revealed by the company on Tuesday shows a distinctive black circular vent on a slim white body. Series S, which appears to come without a disc drive, is cheaper, smaller and less powerful than the Series X console, the company's official fourth-generation Xbox. The image had leaked on several US websites late on Monday before Microsoft decided to'make it official' today. Series S is the'smallest Xbox ever', according to Microsoft, which promised it would reveal more details soon.

It's easy to forget about your HVAC system--until it stops working and you find yourself baking in the summer heat or freezing in the winter cold. And the last thing you want to do is put yourself at the mercy of an HVAC repair company on the first searing-hot or icy-cold day of the season. SmartAC.com is launching out of stealth mode today with a sensor-and-machine-learning platform that it says will monitor the health of your entire HVAC system, and warn you of potential breakdowns before they happen. The company says it has enough confidence in its tech that it will offer a customer one year of free service in the event of an unpredicted breakdown. The heart of the system is a suite of three sensors that link to a central hub that connects in turn to your Wi-Fi network.

Deep below the Pacific Northwest is an underwater forest of massive hydrothermal chimneys that stretch for miles across the seafloor. At the Endeavour Segment of the Juan de Fuca Ridge, located 220 miles northwest of Washington State, the seabed is ripping apart and underwater geysers and vents are still forming. Using sonar ships and underwater vehicles, researchers have mapped this area for the first time to reveal 527 chimneys - with some standing nearly 90 feet tall. The spirals are created from a buildup of minerals that flow to the surface in heated liquid -- as hot as 750 degrees Fahrenheit. The hydrothermal chimneys, known as the Endeavour vents, are located in a long, narrow valley that stretches about 8.6 miles long and almost a mile wide.

And this is guilt-free hooning since I'll recover, going downhill, most energy expended going up. Give her the spurs, Moon Flower. The Model 3's uncanny stability while cornering is mostly the product of its lithium-battery keel; but Tesla didn't skimp on the suspension bits: upper and lower A arms (aluminum and steel) with virtual steer axis geometry, twin-tube coilovers and anti-roll bar in front; in the rear, a multi-link geometry, also with twin-tube shocks and anti-roll bar. For now the hottest tires available are the Michelin Pilot Sport 4S, which are nice all-rounders but not particularly grippy. I'm no financial analyst, but I do know cars.