Enlarge / OpenAI said it was committed to uncovering disinformation campaigns and was building its own AI-powered tools to make detection and analysis "more effective." (credit: FT montage/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

OpenAI has revealed operations linked to Russia, China, Iran and Israel have been using its artificial intelligence tools to create and spread disinformation, as technology becomes a powerful weapon in information warfare in an election-heavy year.

The San Francisco-based maker of the ChatGPT chatbot said in a report on Thursday that five covert influence operations had used its AI models to generate text and images at a high volume, with fewer language errors than previously, as well as to generate comments or replies to their own posts. OpenAI’s policies prohibit the use of its models to deceive or mislead others.

The content focused on issues “including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the conflict in Gaza, the Indian elections, politics in Europe and the United States, and criticisms of the Chinese government by Chinese dissidents and foreign governments,” OpenAI said in the report.

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The US government is nearing an agreement to bankroll a late-stage trial of Moderna’s mRNA pandemic bird flu vaccine, hoping to bolster its pandemic jab stockpile as an H5N1 outbreak spreads through egg farms and among cattle herds.

The federal funding from the government’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, known as BARDA, could come as early as next month, according to people close to the discussions.

It is expected to total several tens of millions of dollars and could be accompanied by a commitment to procure doses if the phase-three trials are successful, they said.

Enlarge / A hydro-fracking drilling pad for oil and gas operates October 26, 2017 in Robinson Township, Pennsylvania. (credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

In 2007, a geoscientist at Penn State named Terry Engelder calculated that Pennsylvania could be sitting on more than 50 trillion cubic feet of accessible natural gas deposits. Engelder later revised his calculation upward, to 489 trillion cubic feet, enough to meet US natural gas demand for 18 years. These massive numbers set off the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, leading to drilling across the state. Since the rush began, there have been 13,000 unconventional wells drilled in Pennsylvania.

Now, a new “astounding” calculation has caught the attention of the gas industry: A study from researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory shows the wastewater produced by Pennsylvania’s unconventional wells could contain enough lithium to meet 38 to 40 percent of current domestic consumption. Lithium is a critical mineral that’s an “essential component” of many clean energy technologies, including batteries for electric vehicles. 

The study used chemical and production compliance data from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection to estimate that approximately 1,160 metric tons of lithium per year could be extracted from this produced water, which is a combination of fluids used for fracking and water from natural formations underground that returns to the surface during the drilling process. The lithium in Pennsylvania’s produced water likely comes from ancient volcanoes that were erupting at the time the natural gas deposits were being formed. This volcanic ash contained lithium that eventually seeped into the water underground.

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Two years ago when “Michael,” an owner of cryptocurrency, contacted Joe Grand to help recover access to about $2 million worth of bitcoin he stored in encrypted format on his computer, Grand turned him down.

Michael, who is based in Europe and asked to remain anonymous, stored the cryptocurrency in a password-protected digital wallet. He generated a password using the RoboForm password manager and stored that password in a file encrypted with a tool called TrueCrypt. At some point, that file got corrupted, and Michael lost access to the 20-character password he had generated to secure his 43.6 BTC (worth a total of about 4,000 euros, or $5,300, in 2013). Michael used the RoboForm password manager to generate the password but did not store it in his manager. He worried that someone would hack his computer and obtain the password.

“At [that] time, I was really paranoid with my security,” he laughs.

Enlarge / 2023 marked the first sighting of a yellow-legged hornet in the United States, sparking fears that it may spread and devastate honeybees as it has in parts of Europe. (credit: Miguel Riopa/AFP via Getty Images)

In early August 2023, a beekeeper near the port of Savannah, Georgia, noticed some odd activity around his hives. Something was hunting his honeybees. It was a flying insect bigger than a yellowjacket, mostly black with bright yellow legs. The creature would hover at the hive entrance, capture a honeybee in flight, and butcher it before darting off with the bee’s thorax, the meatiest bit.

“He’d only been keeping bees since March… but he knew enough to know that something wasn’t right with this thing,” says Lewis Bartlett, an evolutionary ecologist and honeybee expert at the University of Georgia, who helped to investigate. Bartlett had seen these honeybee hunters before, during his PhD studies in England a decade earlier. The dreaded yellow-legged hornet had arrived in North America.

With origins in Afghanistan, eastern China, and Indonesia, the yellow-legged hornet, Vespa velutina, has expanded during the last two decades into South Korea, Japan, and Europe. When the hornet invades new territory, it preys on honeybees, bumblebees, and other vulnerable insects. One yellow-legged hornet can kill up to dozens of honeybees in a single day. It can decimate colonies through intimidation by deterring honeybees from foraging. “They’re not to be messed with,” says honeybee researcher Gard Otis, professor emeritus at the University of Guelph in Canada.

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When the Brazilian nutritional scientist Carlos Monteiro coined the term “ultra-processed foods” 15 years ago, he established what he calls a “new paradigm” for assessing the impact of diet on health.

Monteiro had noticed that although Brazilian households were spending less on sugar and oil, obesity rates were going up. The paradox could be explained by increased consumption of food that had undergone high levels of processing, such as the addition of preservatives and flavorings or the removal or addition of nutrients.

But health authorities and food companies resisted the link, Monteiro tells the FT. “[These are] people who spent their whole life thinking that the only link between diet and health is the nutrient content of foods ... Food is more than nutrients.”

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Last week, the Biden administration announced it would levy dramatic new tariffs on electric vehicles, electric vehicle batteries, and battery components imported into the United States from China. The move kicked off another round of global debate on how best to push the transportation industry toward an emissions-free future, and how global automotive manufacturers outside of China should compete with the Asian country’s well-engineered and low-cost car options.

But what is an electric vehicle exactly? China has dominated bicycle manufacturing, too; it was responsible for some 80 percent of US bicycle imports in 2021, according to one report. In cycling circles, the US’s new trade policies have raised questions about how much bicycle companies will have to pay to get Chinese-made bicycles and components into the US, and whether any new costs will get passed on to US customers.

On Wednesday, the Office of the United States Trade Representative—the US agency that creates trade policy—clarified that ebike batteries would be affected by the new policy, too.

Enlarge / Tesla sold 1.2 million Model Y crossovers last year. (credit: John Paraskevas/Newsday RM via Getty Images)

For at least a decade, a car theft trick known as a “relay attack” has been the modern equivalent of hot-wiring: a cheap and relatively easy technique to steal hundreds of models of vehicles. A more recent upgrade to the radio protocol in cars' keyless entry systems known as ultra-wideband communications, rolled out to some high-end cars including the latest Tesla Model 3, has been heralded as the fix for that ubiquitous form of grand theft auto. But when one group of Chinese researchers actually checked whether it's still possible to perform relay attacks against the latest Tesla and a collection of other cars that support that next-gen radio protocol, they found that they're as stealable as ever.

In a video shared with WIRED, researchers at the Beijing-based automotive cybersecurity firm GoGoByte demonstrated that they could carry out a relay attack against the latest Tesla Model 3 despite its upgrade to an ultra-wideband keyless entry system, instantly unlocking it with less than a hundred dollars worth of radio equipment. Since the Tesla 3's keyless entry system also controls the car's immobilizer feature designed to prevent its theft, that means a radio hacker could start the car and drive it away in seconds—unless the driver has enabled Tesla's optional, off-by-default PIN-to-drive feature that requires the owner to enter a four-digit code before starting the car.

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This June, approximately 150 motorcycles will thunder down Route 9W in Saugerties, New York, for Ryan’s Ride for Recovery. Organized by Vince Kelder and his family, the barbecue and raffle will raise money to support their sober-living facility and honor their son who tragically died from a heroin overdose in 2015 after a yearslong drug addiction.

The Kelders established Raising Your Awareness about Narcotics (RYAN) to help others struggling with substance-use disorder. For years, the organization has relied on Eventbrite, an event management and ticketing website, to arrange its events. This year, however, alongside listings for Ryan’s Ride and other addiction recovery events, Eventbrite surfaced listings peddling illegal sales of prescription drugs like Xanax, Valium, and oxycodone.

“It’s criminal,” Vince Kelder says. “They’re preying on people trying to get their lives back together.”

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Leading artificial intelligence companies have signed up to a new round of voluntary commitments on AI safety, the UK and South Korean governments have announced.

The companies, which include tech giants Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft as well as Sam Altman-led OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, and Chinese developer Zhipu AI, will publish frameworks outlining how they will measure the risks of their “frontier” AI models.

The groups committed “not to develop or deploy a model at all” if severe risks could not be mitigated, the two governments said ahead of the opening of a global AI summit in Seoul on Tuesday.

Enlarge / A 133-car coal train moves slowly as it's loaded at the Buckskin Coal Mine in 2006 in Gillette, Wyoming. (credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, independent news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. It is republished with permission. Sign up for their newsletter here. 

The Bureau of Land Management announced Thursday that it would no longer make federally managed lands in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin available for new coal mining leases, drawing condemnation from the fossil fuel industry in the region that produces the most coal in the country, but delivering a boon to the nation’s clean energy transition.

The Powder River Basin, a geological formation that covers much of northeast Wyoming and a portion of southeast Montana, has been the nation’s largest source of coal for decades, with production there peaking in 2008. Since then, demand for coal has plummeted, largely due to the rise of natural gas and renewable energy. Taking federal coal off the table in the basin could all but put an expiration date on the nation’s thermal coal industry.

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Ruth Ann Norton used to look forward to seeing the blue flame that danced on the burners of her gas stove. At one time, she says, she would have sworn that preparing meals with the appliance actually made her a better cook.

But then she started learning about the toxic gases, including carbon monoxide, formaldehyde, and other harmful pollutants that are emitted by stoves into the air, even when they’re turned off.

“I’m a person who grew up cooking, and love that blue flame,” said Norton, who leads the environmental advocacy group known as the Green & Healthy Homes Initiative. “But people fear what they don’t know. And what people need to understand really strongly is the subtle and profound impact that this is having—on neurological health, on respiratory health, on reproductive health.”

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In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and one of the company’s co-founders, was named as the co-lead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power.

Now OpenAI’s “superalignment team” is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday’s news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team’s other co-lead. The group’s work will be absorbed into OpenAI’s other research efforts.

Enlarge / The Sony Music letter expressly prohibits artificial intelligence developers from using its music — which includes artists such as Beyoncé. (credit: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood via Getty Images)

Sony Music is sending warning letters to more than 700 artificial intelligence developers and music streaming services globally in the latest salvo in the music industry’s battle against tech groups ripping off artists.

The Sony Music letter, which has been seen by the Financial Times, expressly prohibits AI developers from using its music—which includes artists such as Harry Styles, Adele, and Beyoncé—and opts out of any text and data mining of any of its content for any purposes such as training, developing or commercializing any AI system.

Sony Music is sending the letter to companies developing AI systems including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Suno, and Udio, according to those close to the group.

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Brussels has opened an in-depth probe into Meta over concerns it is failing to do enough to protect children from becoming addicted to social media platforms such as Instagram.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, announced on Thursday it would look into whether the Silicon Valley giant’s apps were reinforcing “rabbit hole” effects, where users get drawn ever deeper into online feeds and topics.

EU investigators will also look into whether Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, is complying with legal obligations to provide appropriate age-verification tools to prevent children from accessing inappropriate content.

Enlarge / Riding atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, spacecraft sets off to collide with an asteroid in the world’s first full-scale planetary defense test mission in November 2021. (credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls)

On a fall evening in 2022, scientists at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory were busy with the final stages of a planetary defense mission. As Andy Rivkin, one of the team leaders, was getting ready to appear in NASA’s live broadcast of the experiment, a colleague posted a photo of a pair of asteroids: the half-mile-wide Didymos and, orbiting around it, a smaller one called Dimorphos, taken about 7 million miles from Earth.

“We were able to see Didymos and this little dot in the right spot where we expected Dimorphos to be,” Rivkin recalled.

After the interview, Rivkin joined a crowd of scientists and guests to watch the mission’s finale on several big screens: As part of an asteroid deflection mission called DART, a spacecraft was closing in on Dimorphos and photographing its rocky surface in increasing detail.

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Billy Restey is a digital artist who runs a studio in Seattle. But after hours, he hunts for rare chunks of bitcoin. He does it for the thrill. “It’s like collecting Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon cards,” says Restey. “It’s that excitement of, like, what if I catch something rare?”

In the same way a dollar is made up of 100 cents, one bitcoin is composed of 100 million satoshis—or sats, for short. But not all sats are made equal. Those produced in the year bitcoin was created are considered vintage, like a fine wine. Other coveted sats were part of transactions made by bitcoin’s inventor. Some correspond with a particular transaction milestone. These and various other properties make some sats more scarce than others—and therefore more valuable. The very rarest can sell for tens of millions of times their face value; in April, a single sat, normally worth $0.0006, sold for $2.1 million.

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Brussels is set to issue new antitrust charges against Microsoft over concerns that the software giant is undermining rivals to its videoconferencing app Teams.

According to three people with knowledge of the move, the European Commission is pressing ahead with a formal charge sheet against the world’s most valuable listed tech company over concerns it is restricting competition in the sector.

Microsoft last month offered concessions as it sought to avoid regulatory action, including extending a plan to unbundle Teams from other software such as Office, not just in Europe but across the world.

Enlarge / Galaxy rotation has long perplexed scientists. (credit: NASA/James Webb Telescope)

One of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics today is that the forces in galaxies do not seem to add up. Galaxies rotate much faster than predicted by applying Newton’s law of gravity to their visible matter, despite those laws working well everywhere in the Solar System.

To prevent galaxies from flying apart, some additional gravity is needed. This is why the idea of an invisible substance called dark matter was first proposed. But nobody has ever seen the stuff. And there are no particles in the hugely successful Standard Model of particle physics that could be the dark matter—it must be something quite exotic.

This has led to the rival idea that the galactic discrepancies are caused instead by a breakdown of Newton’s laws. The most successful such idea is known as Milgromian dynamics or Mond, proposed by Israeli physicist Mordehai Milgrom in 1982. But our recent research shows this theory is in trouble.

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Global carmakers are stepping up their investment in hybrid technologies as consumers’ growing wariness over fully electric vehicles forces the industry to rapidly shift gear, according to top executives.

A combination of still high interest rates and concern over inadequate charging infrastructure has chilled buyers’ enthusiasm for fully electric cars, prompting a rebound in sales of hybrid vehicles that most of the industry had long regarded as nothing more than a stop-gap.

Tapping the resurgent demand for hybrids was a priority, executives from General Motors, Nissan, Hyundai, Volkswagen and Ford told the Financial Times’ Future of the Car Summit this week.

Enlarge / Xorides praecatorius is a parasitoid wasp. (credit: TorriPhoto via Getty)

If you puncture the ovary of a wasp called Microplitis demolitor, viruses squirt out in vast quantities, shimmering like iridescent blue toothpaste. “It’s very beautiful, and just amazing that there’s so much virus made in there,” says Gaelen Burke, an entomologist at the University of Georgia.

M. demolitor  is a parasite that lays its eggs in caterpillars, and the particles in its ovaries are “domesticated” viruses that have been tuned to persist harmlessly in wasps and serve their purposes. The virus particles are injected into the caterpillar through the wasp’s stinger, along with the wasp’s own eggs. The viruses then dump their contents into the caterpillar’s cells, delivering genes that are unlike those in a normal virus. Those genes suppress the caterpillar’s immune system and control its development, turning it into a harmless nursery for the wasp’s young.

The insect world is full of species of parasitic wasps that spend their infancy eating other insects alive. And for reasons that scientists don’t fully understand, they have repeatedly adopted and tamed wild, disease-causing viruses and turned them into biological weapons. Half a dozen examples already are described, and new research hints at many more.