Apple Fellow Phil Schiller has been selected for an observer role on the OpenAI board. He will be able to observe board meetings but will not have any voting power. This will allow Apple to gain insights into how decisions are made at OpenAI. The arrangement will take effect later this year - details of the situation could still change.
The upcoming Google Pixel 9 series will introduce new machine learning abilities under the branding of Google AI. Google AI includes features such as Add Me, Studio, and Pixel Screenshots. Add Me appears to be an upgraded version of Best Take and Studio is likely a previously seen Creative Assistant app. Pixel Screenshots is a feature that closely resembles Microsoft's controversial Recall feature except that it uses screenshots users take themselves instead of recording everything users do on their devices.
Several agencies are now preparing impact statements for SpaceX's Starship launch plans. SpaceX plans to launch its Starship mega-rocket up to 44 times per year from NASA's Kennedy Space Center and up to 76 times per year from the Space Launch Complex at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Elon Musk aims to eventually launch Starship multiple times per day, with each launch delivering hundreds of tons of cargo to low Earth orbit or beyond. Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance have expressed concerns that SpaceX's high flight rate will have effects on other launch providers with infrastructure at Kennedy and Cape Canaveral.
University of Michigan researchers have created mice with supercharged hearing abilities by dialing up the expression of a nerve growth gene called neurotrophin-3 (Ntf3). Previous research has shown that increasing Ntf3 expression can improve hearing in middle-aged mice and help recover some hearing in mice with damaged inner ears. The treatment works by increasing the number of connections between hair cells in the ear's cochlea and the brain. The researchers believe the treatment could potentially work in humans.
SmoothMQ is a drop-in replacement for SQS. It has a much smoother developer experience, a functional UI, observability, tracing, message scheduling, and rate-limiting. SmoothMQ allows users to run private SQS instances on any cloud. It is deployed as a single Go binary and can be used by any existing SQS client.
Mako is a production-grade web bundler. It is used by companies like Ant Group and projects like Umi and Father to make web apps and websites and for bundling. Mako is extremely fast and built in Rust.
This article looks into the history of the research into subterranean life and how it has changed the way scientists see life and the planet. Earth's crust is teeming with subterranean life that scientists are just starting to begin to understand. These microbes may closely resemble some of the earliest single-celled organisms that ever existed. They make up an estimated 10 to 20 percent of the biomass on Earth.
Japan seems immune to many of the layoffs and trends seen abroad. Employee protections play a major factor in ensuring this stability for employees. Layoffs are incredibly difficult to implement under Japanese employment law. Companies need to be under severe financial difficulty and at risk of insolvency and they have to have exhausted all other cost-saving measures. There are also cultural factors - reducing their workforce can reflect poorly on a company's reputation with the public and prospective future employees.
Planning programming involves providing an initial state, a set of actions, and a target, then using a tool to find the shortest sequence of actions that reaches the target.