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Rule Breakers Tired of those pesky subscriptions that make it impossible to cancel them? That practice may become illegal and punishable by law, thanks to a new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rule proposal that just dropped. In a press release, the FTC said that its new "click to cancel" rule will require sellers to "make

I Heart New York New Yorkers aren't exactly known for being warm and fuzzy, which was why it was so shocking that only a few were rude to some trash robots deployed in Greenwich Village. The Cornell researchers behind the experiment — which, we should note, featured robotic trash cans that zoomed about Astor Place

Anecdotal accounts were already abound of people losing money to scammers cloning the voices of their relatives. Now, it's apparently become enough of a prevalent — and serious — issue that federal regulators are stepping in. On Monday, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a consumer alert on emerging voice cloning scams, warning people

NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has spotted an absolutely towering tornado roaring on the surface of the sun, raging with swirls of plasma to such astounding heights that even our entire planet would be consumed in its destructive throes. Astronomers at the observatory had been tracking the "solar tornado" since March 14, until it finally spun

In more terrible news from the nanoplastics front: a recent study from researchers at the Netherlands' Leiden University has confirmed that tiny plastics cause absolutely horrid development problems in forming chicken embryos, leading to extensive malformations and birth defects in newborn chicks. "Polystyrene nanoplastics cause a wide spectrum of severe congenital malformations in the chick

Profit, Shmofit With the help of a brand-new $150 million dollar cash infusion from Andreessen Horowitz, a 16-month-old AI chatbot startup called Character.ai just reached a $1 billion market cap — despite having yet to generate any revenue. Founded by two ex-Googlers, the app is pretty much exactly what it says it is. Character.ai's platform

Tea's Hot Like everyone else in his industry, SpaceX, Tesla, and Twitter CEO Elon Musk has had a lot to say about OpenAI in recent weeks — as he probably should, considering that he was one of the firm's original founders, launching the formerly non-profit company back in 2015 alongside figures like Reid Hoffman, Ilya

Humans On Top Jaron Lanier is one of the foremost pioneers of VR technology — but he's also notorious for being one of Silicon Valley's harshest critics. Yet, he balances these bitings critiques with his own brand of laid-back, "dismal optimism,"  and he's recently shared his thoughts on the tech industry's latest obsession: AI. In

Music production is one of the creative tasks that has been democratized by the rise of consumer technology. Tasks like editing and adding effects to multitrack recordings once required a room’s worth of equipment, but can now be done from an airplane seat by someone with a laptop and headphones. Don’t get us wrong, the

Set For Sea Infamous Harvard physicist Avi Loeb hasn't given up on his quest to recover what he believes could be a potential alien artifact at the bottom of the Pacific. In fact, based on a recent update, he and his team are closer than ever to finally getting their highly scrutinized, $1.5 million Galileo

Move Over, Oumuamua Remember Oumuamua, that weird and possibly-alien object that flew past Earth back in 2017, when we were all so young and starry-eyed? Some scientists have a simple and boring explanation for what it was — and reader, it may have nothing to do with aliens. In a new study published in the

Ubisoft, one of the world's largest video game developers known for titles like the Assassin's Creed franchise, has decided to help automate writing dialog by developing an inhouse AI tool called Ghostwriter. "Ghostwriter isn't replacing the video game writer, but instead, alleviating one of the video game writer's most laborious tasks: writing barks," said TK.

Whether you’re surveying the solar system or looking to do some deep-sky stargazing, a dependable telescope is a must-have optical instrument. Using lenses, mirrors, or a combination of both to gather and focus light, optical telescopes increase the apparent size of distant objects—e.g., other planets and stars—so that we can observe them more clearly. Optical

Today’s modems for gaming can handle impressive speeds, reduce latency, and prioritize your devices. With new models coming out every year, it can be confusing to find the right modem that fits your budget and internet package. If you are paying for a high-speed gigabit plan, you need a modem that’s advanced enough to squeeze

TikTok CEO Shou Chew finally took the stand in Congress yesterday to, as many tech CEOs have done before him, defend his company against an hours-long stream of sometimes fair, sometimes flawed, and sometimes just outright ridiculous questions from American representatives. Among the ridiculous was a line of questioning from North Carolina Republican Richard Hudson,

On Wednesday, we reported that Google's finally unveiled Bard AI wasted no time to start spewing ridiculous conspiracy theories and fabricating non-existent sources to back them up. But as it turns out, citing bogus sources is just the beginning of its problems. Tom's Hardware reports that it caught the Bard AI blatantly plagiarizing without citing

Next-Level MetaHuman Animator, the next-gen version of Epic Games' MetaHuman avatar tool, is here — and we gotta say, it's pretty remarkable. Epic's MetaHuman tool, which was first unveiled back in 2021, was already impressively good at generating hyperrealistic avatars from photographs of real people. Before, however, actually animating those characters was still a difficult,

Prayin' As America's upcoming election cycle continues to take shape, one thing is for sure: fans of former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump love themselves some image generators, and they're not afraid to use 'em. And Trump, it seems, isn't afraid to hit the share button on AI-generated fan art, either. Amid the

More For all of their legitimately impressive qualities, AI-powered chatbots, from OpenAI's ChatGPT to Microsoft's Bing AI to, as of this week, Google's Bard, are all bad — or at least very, very unreliable — at one extremely important thing: information. Which, as it stands, is still the internet's greatest, or at the very least,

Sensorius Elon Musk has been promising that Tesla's Full Self-Driving would be coming "next year" for the better part of the past decade — but as it turns out, he may be the reason it hasn't come to fruition. As the Washington Post reports, Musk apparently decided a few years back to do away with