Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. For 20 years, the remains of a giant lizard that lived alongside dinosaurs were tucked away in a jar at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Simply labeled "lizard," the fragmented and several millennia-old bones actually belonged to an entirely new species of giant lizard dug up from the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah in 2005. Bolg amondol was a raccoon-sized armored mostesaurian lizard that lived about 77 million years ago, similar to today's Gila monsters (Heloderma horridum). It is named after the goblin prince from The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien and is described in a study published June 17 in the open-access journal Royal Society Open Science.

The recent developments in the field of AI are creating very interesting new outcomes. We have been always focused on how AI will take over, how it will grow into something stand-alone and will take over the World. Maybe that will happen someday, but before that, there are a lot of areas where working together with an AI-integrated system can help humans. Collaborating usually makes our work better -- but keeping a team on task is not easy. Now, researchers are finding that machines can bring out the best in group work.

This piece was originally published at Scout.ai. "This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

"This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

When Tay started its short digital life on March 23, it just wanted to gab and make some new friends on the net. The chatbot, which was created by Microsoft's Research department, greeted the day with an excited tweet that could have come from any teen: "hellooooooo w rld!!!" Within a few hours, though, Tay's optimistic, positive tone had changed. "Hitler was right I hate the jews," it declared in a stream of racist tweets bashing feminism and promoting genocide. Concerned about their bot's rapid radicalization, Tay's creators shut it down after less than 24 hours of existence. Microsoft had unwittingly lowered their burgeoning artificial intelligence into -- to use the parlance of the very people who corrupted her -- a virtual dumpster fire.