Advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration met Thursday to discuss and vote on whether to recommend targeting one of the currently dominant XBB coronavirus variants in updated COVID-19 shots being developed for a fall vaccination campaign. FDA staff reviewers in documents released this week said available evidence suggests this year’s shots should target an XBB variant. XBB and its offshoots, which now account for most U.S. infections, are descendants of the omicron variant that caused COVID cases to surge to record levels early last year. U.S. regulators are looking to bring the next COVID shots more closely in line with the circulating virus. The next-generation shots should select a single XBB-related target, the FDA’s staff reviewers suggested. A so-called monovalent vaccine would be a change from the most recent bivalent COVID boosters that targeted both the original strain of the coronavirus and omicron. Top FDA official Peter Marks said there was concern about another COVID wave over the 2023-24 winter, when population immunity could wane further. The expert panel meeting comes after an advisory group to the World Health Organization last month recommended the next wave of COVID booster shots be updated to target XBB subvariants. Europe’s medicine regulators backed that recommendation. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended booster shots broadly last year. But panel member Dr. Paul Offit questioned whether the shots needed to be recommended for “everybody every season,” noting that the highest risk groups are those most likely to benefit …
Chinese EV Makers Make Progress in Bid to Dominate British Market
Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles are stepping up their push to dominate the European market. As Amy Guttman reports from London, they are making progress in Britain, where car shoppers are eager to buy the lower-cost electric cars that Chinese automakers are offering. …
Bill Gates Visits China for Health, Development Talks
Microsoft Founder Bill Gates was in China on Thursday for what he said were meetings with global health and development partners who have worked with his charitable foundation. “Solving problems like climate change, health inequity and food insecurity requires innovation,” Gates tweeted. “From developing malaria drugs to investing in climate adaptation, China has a lot of experience in that. We need to unlock that kind of progress for more people around the world.” Gates said global crises stifled progress in reducing death and poverty in children and that he will next travel to West Africa because African countries are particularly vulnerable “with high food prices, crushing debt, and increasing rates of TB and malaria.” Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, said Gates would meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Gates is the latest business figure to visit China year, following Apple’s Tim Cook and Tesla’s Elon Musk. Some information for this report came from The Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters. …
Cambodian Facial Recognition Effort Raises Fears of Misuse
Experts are raising concerns that a recent Cambodian government order allocating around $1 million to a local company for a facial recognition technology project could pave the way for the technology to be used against citizens and human rights defenders. The order, signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen and released in March in a recent tranche of government documents, would award the funds to HSC Co. Ltd., a Cambodian company led by tycoon Sok Hong that has previously printed Cambodian passports and installed CCTV cameras in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. The Oct. 17 order appears to be the first direct indication of Cambodia’s interest in pursuing facial recognition, alarming experts who say such initiatives could eventually be used to target dissenters and build a stronger surveillance state similar to China’s. In recent months, the government has blocked the country’s main opposition party from participating in the July national elections, shut down independent media and jailed critics such as labor organizers and opposition politicians. Neither the Interior Ministry nor the company would answer questions about what the project entails. “This is national security and not everyone knows about how it works,” Khieu Sopheak, secretary of state and spokesperson for the Interior Ministry, told VOA by phone. “Even in the U.S., if you ask about the air defense system, they will tell you the same. This is the national security system, which we can’t tell everyone [about].” The order names HSC, a company Sok Hong founded in 2007, as the funds’ recipient. …
NASA Finds Key Building Block for Life in a Saturn Moon
The long hunt for extraterrestrials just got a big boost. Scientists have discovered that phosphorus, a key building block of life, lies in the ocean beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The finding was based on a review of data collected by NASA’s Cassini probe, and it was published Wednesday in the prestigious journal Nature. Cassini started exploring Saturn and its rings and moons in 2004, before burning up in the gas giant’s atmosphere when its mission ended in 2017. “This is a stunning discovery for astrobiology,” said Christopher Glein of the Southwest Research Institute, one of the paper’s co-authors, noting: “We have found abundant phosphorus in plume ice samples spraying out of the subsurface ocean.” Geysers on Enceladus’ south pole spew icy particles through cracks on the surface out into space, feeding Saturn’s E ring — the faint ring outside the brighter main rings. Scientists previously found other minerals and organic compounds in the ejected ice grains, but not phosphorus, which is an essential building block for DNA and RNA. It also is found in the bones and teeth of people, animals, and even ocean plankton. Simply put, life as we know it would not be possible without phosphorus. While geochemical modeling had previously found it was likely phosphorus would also be present, and this prediction was published in an earlier paper, it is one thing to forecast something and another to confirm, said Glein. “It’s the first time this essential element has been discovered in an …
As Deepfake Fraud Permeates China, Authorities Target Political Challenges Posed By AI
Chinese authorities are cracking down on political and fraud cases driven by deepfakes, created with face- and voice-changing software that tricks targets into believing they are video chatting with a loved one or another trusted person. How good are the deepfakes? Good enough to trick an executive at a Fuzhou tech company in Fujian province who almost lost $600,000 to a person he thought was a friend claiming to need a quick cash infusion. The entire transaction took less than 10 minutes from the first contact via the phone app WeChat to police stopping the online bank transfer when the target called the authorities after learning his real friend had never requested the loan, according to Sina Technology. Despite the public’s outcry about such AI-driven fraud, some experts say Beijing appears more concerned about the political challenges that deepfakes may pose, as shown by newly implemented regulations on “deep synthesis” management that outlaw activities that “endanger national security and interests and damage the national image.” The rapid development of artificial intelligence technology has propelled cutting-edge technology to mass entertainment applications in just a few years. In a 2017 demonstration of the risks, a video created by University of Washington researchers showed then-U.S. President Barack Obama saying things he hadn’t. Two years later, Chinese smartphone apps like Zao let users swap their faces with celebrities so they could appear as if they were in a movie. Zao was removed from app stores in 2019 and Avatarify, another popular Chinese face-swapping app, …
Bill Gates in China to Meet President Xi on Friday – Sources
Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp’s co-founder, is set to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday during his visit to China, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The meeting will mark Xi’s first meeting with a foreign private entrepreneur in recent years. The people said the encounter may be a one-on-one meeting. A third source confirmed they would meet, without providing details. The sources did not say what the two might discuss. Gates tweeted on Wednesday that he had landed in Beijing for the first time since 2019 and that he would meet with partners who had been working on global health and development challenges with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation and China’s State Council Information Office, which handles media queries on behalf of the Chinese government, did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. Gates stepped down from Microsoft’s board in 2020 to focus on philanthropic works related to global health, education and climate change. He quit his full-time executive role at Microsoft in 2008. The last reported meeting between Xi and Gates was in 2015, when they met on the sidelines of the Boao forum in Hainan province. In early 2020, Xi wrote a letter to Gates thanking him, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, for pledging assistance to China including $5 million for its fight against COVID. The meeting would mark the end of a long hiatus by Xi in recent years from meeting foreign private entrepreneurs and business leaders, after …
EU Lawmakers Vote for Tougher AI Rules as Draft Moves to Final Stage
EU lawmakers on Wednesday voted for tougher landmark draft artificial intelligence rules that include a ban on the use of the technology in biometric surveillance and for generative AI systems like ChatGPT to disclose AI-generated content. The lawmakers agreed to the amendments to the draft legislation proposed by the European Commission which is seeking to set a global standard for the technology used in everything from automated factories to bots and self-driving cars. Rapid adoption of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other bots has led top AI scientists and company executives including Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to raise the potential risks posed to society. “While Big Tech companies are sounding the alarm over their own creations, Europe has gone ahead and proposed a concrete response to the risks AI is starting to pose,” said Brando Benifei, co-rapporteur of the draft act. Among other changes, European Union lawmakers want any company using generative tools to disclose copyrighted material used to train its systems and for companies working on “high-risk application” to do a fundamental rights impact assessment and evaluate environmental impact. Microsoft, which has called for AI rules, welcomed the lawmakers’ agreement. “We believe that AI requires legislative guardrails, alignment efforts at an international level, and meaningful voluntary actions by companies that develop and deploy AI,” a Microsoft spokesperson said. However, the Computer and Communications Industry Association said the amendments on high-risk AIs were likely to overburden European AI developers with “excessively prescriptive rules” and slow down innovation. “AI …
Women Want Fistula Treatment, End to Stigma in Tanzania
Six percent of all maternal deaths around the world are caused by obstructed labor, according to the World Health Organization. That’s when a baby can’t move through the birth canal. It can also lead to obstetric fistula, a condition that can have a long-term impact on a woman’s health, especially in developing countries. Reporter Idd Uwesu has more from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in this report narrated by Omary Kaseko. Video: …
EU Regulators Order Google To Break up Digital Ad Business Over Competition Concerns
European Union antitrust regulators took aim at Google’s lucrative digital advertising business in an unprecedented decision ordering the tech giant to sell off some of its ad business to address competition concerns. The European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch and top antitrust enforcer, said that its preliminary view after an investigation is that “only the mandatory divestment by Google of part of its services” would satisfy the concerns. The 27-nation EU has led the global movement to crack down on Big Tech companies, but it has previously relied on issuing blockbuster fines, including three antitrust penalties for Google worth billions of dollars. It’s the first time the bloc has ordered a tech giant to split up keys of business. Google can now defend itself by making its case before the commission issues its final decision. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The commission’s decision stems from a formal investigation that it opened in June 2021, looking into whether Google violated the bloc’s competition rules by favoring its own online display advertising technology services at the expense of rival publishers, advertisers and advertising technology services. YouTube was one focus of the commission’s investigation, which looked into whether Google was using the video sharing site’s dominant position to favor its own ad-buying services by imposing restrictions on rivals. Google’s ad tech business is also under investigation by Britain’s antitrust watchdog and faces litigation in the U.S. Brussels has previously hit Google with more than $8.6 billion worth of …
What Peanuts Dancing in Beer Teaches Us About the Earth’s Crust
When peanuts are dropped into a pint of beer, they sink to the bottom before floating up and “dancing” in the glass. Scientists have dug deep to investigate this phenomenon in a study published on Wednesday, saying it has implications for understanding mineral extraction or bubbling magma in the Earth’s crust. Brazilian researcher Luiz Pereira, the study’s lead author, told AFP he first had the idea when passing through Argentina’s capital Buenos Aires to learn Spanish. It was a “bartender thing” in the city to take a few peanuts and pop them into beers, Pereira said. Because the peanuts are denser than the beer, they first sink down to the bottom of the glass. Then each peanut becomes what is called a “nucleation site.” Hundreds of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide form on their surface, acting as buoys to drag them upward. “The bubbles prefer to form on the peanuts rather than on the glass walls,” said Pereira, a researcher at Germany’s Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. When the bubbles reach the surface, they burst. The peanuts sink again before being propelled up anew by freshly formed bubbles, in a dance that continues until the carbon dioxide runs out, or someone interrupts it by drinking the beer. In a series of experiments, the team of researchers in Germany, Britain and France examined how roasted, shelled peanuts fared in a lager-style beer. ‘Beer-gas-peanut system’ The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, describes two key factors in what the …
Big Amazon Cloud Services Recovering After Outage Hits Thousands of Users
Amazon.com said cloud services offered by its unit Amazon Web Services were recovering after a big disruption on Tuesday affected websites of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and The Boston Globe, among others. Several hours after Downdetector.com started showing reports of outages, Amazon said many AWS services were fully recovered and marked resolved. “We are continuing to work to fully recover all services,” AWS’ status page showed. Tuesday’s impact stretching from transportation to financial services businesses underscores adoption of Amazon’s younger Lambda service and the degree to which many of its cloud offerings are crucial to companies in the internet age. According to research in the past year from the cloud company Datadog, more than half of organizations operating in the cloud use Lambda or rival services, known as serverless technology. Nearly 12,000 users had reported issues with accessing the service, according to Downdetector, which tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources, including user-submitted errors on its platform. The disruption appeared smaller in time and breadth than one the company suffered in 2017 of its data-hosting service known as Amazon S3, representing the bread and butter of its cloud business. The outage appeared to extend to AWS’s own webpage describing disruptions in its operations, which at one point failed to load on Tuesday, Reuters witnesses saw. “We quickly narrowed down the root cause to be an issue with a subsystem responsible for capacity management for AWS Lambda, which caused errors directly for customers and indirectly …
Cameroon Officials Campaign Against Taboos to Encourage People to Donate Blood
Blood banks in Cameroon are usually close to empty due to widely held taboos against blood donation. Officials in the central African country are trying to convince people to move past those beliefs amid an increased demand for blood and blood products in hospitals and on the front lines where soldiers are fighting separatists and Islamist militants. The effort comes ahead of World Blood Donor Day, observed on June 14. Illustrating the shortages is the story of a woman who told nurses at the Yaounde military hospital that she has not found anyone to donate blood to save the life of her two-year-old son. Hospital workers said the 34-year-old fruit seller’s blood was infected and that it could not be transfused to her son. Medical staff members have requested blood from government hospitals to save the child’s life, the hospital said, adding that the blood bank at the military hospital is empty. Celestin Ayangma, head of the laboratory that is in charge of the hospital’s blood bank, said that since January of this year, the Yaounde military hospital had been able to provide only six of the 20 units of blood it needs every day. Ayangma added that patients eventually die if they do not have relatives, friends or other donors to give the blood that the patients need. By midday on Tuesday, the baby was still waiting for blood. Cameroon’s public health ministry reported that in 2022, hospitals in the country were able to collect a little more than …
McCartney: ‘Final Beatles Record’ Out This Year Aided by AI
A “final Beatles record”, created with the help of artificial intelligence, will be released later this year, Paul McCartney told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Tuesday. “It was a demo that John (Lennon) had, and that we worked on, and we just finished it up,” said McCartney, who turns 81 next week. The Beatles — Lennon, McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — split in 1970, with each going on to have solo careers, but they never reunited. Lennon was shot dead in New York in 1980 aged 40 while Harrison died of lung cancer in 2001, aged 58. McCartney did not name the song that has been recorded but according to the BBC it is likely to be a 1978 Lennon composition called “Now And Then”. The track — one of several on a cassette that Lennon had recorded for McCartney a year before his death — was given to him by Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono in 1994. Two of the songs, “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love”, were cleaned up by the producer Jeff Lynne, and released in 1995 and 1996. An attempt was made to do the same with “Now And Then” but the project was abandoned because of background noise on the demo. McCartney, who has previously talked about wanting to finish the song, said AI had given him a new chance to do so. ‘Now and Then’ Working with Peter Jackson, the film director behind the 2021 documentary series “The Beatles: Get …
India Denies Dorsey’s Claims It Threatened to Shut Down Twitter
India threatened to shut Twitter down unless it complied with orders to restrict accounts critical of the government’s handling of farmer protests, co-founder Jack Dorsey said, an accusation Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government called an “outright lie.” Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, said on Monday that India also threatened the company with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down certain posts. “It manifested in ways such as: ‘We will shut Twitter down in India’, which is a very large market for us; ‘we will raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; And this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey said in an interview with YouTube news show Breaking Points. Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a top ranking official in Modi’s government, lashed out against Dorsey in response, calling his assertions an “outright lie.” “No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” he said in a post on Twitter. Dorsey’s comments again put the spotlight on the struggles faced by foreign technology giants operating under Modi’s rule. His government has often criticized Google, Facebook and Twitter for not doing enough to tackle fake or “anti-India” content on their platforms, or for not complying with rules. The former Twitter CEO’s comments drew widespread attention as it is unusual for global companies operating in India to publicly criticize the government. Last year, Xiaomi in a …
Are Abortion Laws in Idaho Hurting Maternal Health Care?
In the United States, women’s access to legal abortion depends on where they live. The Western U.S. state of Idaho has some of the toughest laws against abortion, and that may be having an impact on women who are trying to have babies. Deborah Bloom has our story. …
Startup Firm Leads Kenya Into World of High-Tech Manufacturing
A three-year-old startup company is leading Kenya into the world of high-tech manufacturing, building a workforce capable of making semiconductors and nanotechnology products that operate modern devices from mobile phones to refrigerators. Anthony Githinji is the founder of Semiconductors Technologies Limited, or STL, located in Nyeri, about a three hours’ drive from Nairobi. He brought his know-how to Kenya from the United States, where he started work in 1997 on semiconductors — materials that conduct electricity and are used in thousands of products. He said the biggest barrier to entry in any high-tech business is finding a workforce with the right skills. In deciding to start a business in Kenya, his country of origin, Githinji said a meeting with the vice-chancellor of Dedan Kimathi University of Science and Technology, also known as DEKUT, was a game changer. “DEKUT and STL formed a partnership that allowed for us to engage STEM-related education and develop it, tool it and orient it toward our specific industry, which is the semiconductor and microchip space and so we started attaching students and having internships through STL, and it became very clear and very quickly that the level and caliber of the education system and the product of DEKUT, I believe most institutions of higher learning in Kenya are very high level,” Githinji said. Female engineers STL employs about 100 engineers, 70 percent of them women. Irene Ngetich, a process engineer with a background in telecommunications and electrical engineering, graduated from DEKUT in 2019. She said …
Lab-Grown Meat Industry Makes Progress but Faces Supply, Public Acceptance Hurdles
Singapore was the first country in the world to greenlight the sale of lab-grown meat, but even after nearly 2½ years, the fledgling industry is still struggling with supply issues and hurdles such as public acceptance, experts say. Lab-grown or cultivated meat is meat grown in a lab by extracting cells from animals and growing the muscles to eventually have the texture, nutrition and taste of meat from real-life animals. The product has long been touted as a potential solution to multiple issues, including burgeoning food insecurity brought by human-caused climate change, degrading soil and biodiversity, and a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from livestock. Southeast Asia is at the forefront of the impact of climate change impacts, with recent heatwaves sweeping across the region and food security has become a priority in the region’s agenda. In land-scarce Singapore, the issue is even more acute where its citizens import 90% of the food they consume. Turning to more sustainable meat is one of the city-state’s food strategies. Its so-called “30 by 30” goal aims to produce 30% of Singapore’s nutritional needs locally by 2030, and COVID-19’s impacts on food exports was another wake-up call for the country. Chicken rice is Singapore’s de-facto national dish, but its neighbor, Malaysia, banned its exports of chicken to Singapore last year due to a global feed shortage. “We [Singapore] had to scramble to try and find chicken supplies from other countries,” Andre Huber, executive director of Huber’s Butchery and Bistro, the only restaurant …
UN Chief Considering Watchdog Agency for AI
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Monday that he will appoint a scientific advisory body in the coming days that will include outside experts on artificial intelligence, and said he is open to the idea of creating a new U.N. agency that would focus on AI. “I would be favorable to the idea that we could have an artificial intelligence agency, I would say, inspired by what the International Atomic Energy Agency is today,” Guterres said of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency. He said he does not have the authority to create an IAEA-like agency — that is up to the organization’s 193-member states. But he said it has been discussed and he would see it as a positive development. “What is the advantage of the IAEA — it is a very solid, knowledge-based institution,” Guterres told reporters. “And at the same time, even if limited, it has some regulatory functions. So, I believe this is a model that could be very interesting.” The Vienna-based IAEA is the focal point for international nuclear cooperation. It has developed international nuclear safety standards and is both watchdog and advisor on the peaceful use of nuclear energy. There are growing concerns about the power of artificial intelligence and how it can be abused for negative and even deadly purposes, including from Geoffrey Hinton, who is the scientist known as “the godfather of AI.” Top U.S. cybersecurity officials have also warned of the growing dangers of AI. “I think ultimately there will have to be …
UK Hobbyist Stuns Math World With ‘Amazing’ New Shapes
David Smith, a retired print technician from the north of England, was pursuing his hobby of looking for interesting shapes when he stumbled onto one unlike any other in November. When Smith shared his shape with the world in March, excited fans printed it onto T-shirts, sewed it into quilts, crafted cookie cutters or used it to replace the hexagons on a soccer ball — some even made plans for tattoos. The 13-sided polygon, which 64-year-old Smith called “the hat,” is the first single shape ever found that can completely cover an infinitely large flat surface without ever repeating the same pattern. That makes it the first “einstein” — named after the German for “one stone” (ein stein), not the famed physicist — and solves a problem posed 60 years ago that some mathematicians had thought impossible. After stunning the mathematics world, Smith — a hobbyist with no training who told AFP that he wasn’t great at math in school — then did it again. While all agreed “the hat” was the first einstein, its mirror image was required one in seven times to ensure that a pattern never repeated. But in a preprint study published online late last month, Smith and the three mathematicians who helped him confirm the discovery revealed a new shape — “the specter.” It requires no mirror image, making it an even purer einstein. ‘It can be that easy’ Craig Kaplan, a computer scientist at Canada’s Waterloo University, told AFP that it was …
Dutch Minister Discusses Health Care in an Age of Longevity
Huge strides in life expectancy worldwide are bringing new challenges that come with increased longevity, the Dutch health minister told VOA this week. “If you look at it from a global perspective, we’ve seen that over the past 25 years, on average we added more than five years of global life expectancy,” Ernst Kuipers, Dutch minister of health, welfare and sport, noted during a stop in Washington. Looking at it another way, the former internist continued, “It actually means that for more than 20 years in a row, every week we added more than a day to the life expectancy of our world population. That is huge!” Kuipers and a Dutch delegation co-led by the country’s minister of economy are in the U.S. to take part in a trade fair focused on international health and life sciences in Boston. The Dutch are known to be the tallest people in the world and rank high in the world longevity list. Kuipers looked at the global picture when discussing the worldwide jump in life expectancy in the past quarter century. While clean water supply, improved hygiene, sanitation conditions, access to vaccines, medicines and medical treatments have contributed to rising life expectancy in low-income countries, breakthroughs in many areas of life sciences have helped prolong life in higher-income countries, he pointed out. “For example, new drugs in cancer treatment, newly developed interventions to treat cardiovascular diseases, and also improvement in public health.” The good news about longevity aside, the former doctor pointed out …
AI Chatbots Offer Comfort to the Bereaved
Staying in touch with a loved one after their death is the promise of several start-ups using the powers of artificial intelligence, though not without raising ethical questions. Ryu Sun-yun sits in front of a microphone and a giant screen, where her husband, who died a few months earlier, appears. “Sweetheart, it’s me,” the man on the screen tells her in a video demo. In tears, she answers him, and a semblance of conversation begins. When Lee Byeong-hwal learned he had terminal cancer, the 76-year-old South Korean asked startup DeepBrain AI to create a digital replica using several hours of video. “We don’t create new content” such as sentences that the deceased would have never uttered or at least written and validated during their lifetime, said Joseph Murphy, head of development at DeepBrain AI, about the “Rememory” program. “I’ll call it a niche part of our business. It’s not a growth area for us,” he cautioned. The idea is the same for StoryFile, a company that uses 92-year-old “Star Trek” actor William Shatner to market its site. “Our approach is to capture the wonder of an individual, then use the AI tools,” said Stephen Smith, boss of StoryFile, which claims several thousand users of its Life service. Entrepreneur Pratik Desai caused a stir a few months ago when he suggested people save audio or video of “your parents, elders and loved ones,” estimating that by “the end of this year” it would be possible to create an autonomous avatar of …
Apple, Defying the Times, Stays Quiet on AI
Resisting the hype, Apple defied most predictions this week and made no mention of artificial intelligence when it unveiled its latest slate of new products, including its Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Generative AI has become the tech world’s biggest buzzword since Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, revealing the capabilities of the emerging technology. ChatGPT opened the world’s eyes to the idea that computers can churn out complex, human-level content using simple prompts, giving amateurs the talents of tech geeks, artists or speechwriters. Apple has laid low as Microsoft and Google raced out announcements on how generative AI will revolutionize its products, from online search to word processing and retouching images. During the recent earnings season, tech CEOs peppered mentions of AI into their every phrase, eager to reassure investors that they wouldn’t miss Silicon Valley’s next big chapter. Apple has chosen to be much more discreet and, in its closely watched keynote address to the World Developers conference in California, never once mentioned AI specifically. “Apple ghosts the generative AI revolution,” said a headline in Wired Magazine after the event. ‘Not necessarily AI?’ Arguments vary on why Apple has chosen a more subtle approach. For one, Apple follows other critics who have long been wary of the catchall “AI” term believing that it is too vague and unhelpfully evokes dystopian nightmares of killer robots and human subjugation to machines. For this reason, some companies – including TikTok or Facebook’s Meta – roll out AI innovations, but without …
El Nino Climate Pattern Now Underway, NOAA Reports
El Nino has officially returned and is likely to yield extreme weather later this year, from tropical cyclones spinning toward vulnerable Pacific islands to heavy rainfall in South America to drought in Australia. After three years of the La Nina climate pattern, which often lowers global temperatures slightly, the hotter El Nino is back in action, according to an advisory issued on Thursday by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center. El Nino is born out of unusually warm waters in the Eastern Pacific, near the coast of South America, and often accompanied by a slowing down or reversal of the easterly trade winds. “In May, weak El Nino conditions emerged as above-average sea surface temperatures strengthened across the equatorial Pacific Ocean,” the advisory said. The last time an El Nino was in place, in 2016, the world saw its hottest year on record. Coupled with warming from climate change, 2023 or 2024 could reach new highs. Declaring El Nino Most experts look to two agencies for confirmation that El Nino has kicked off — NOAA and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). The two agencies use different metrics for declaring El Nino, with the Australian definition slightly stricter. NOAA calls an El Nino when ocean temperatures in the eastern and central equatorial Pacific have been 0.5 Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit) higher than normal for the preceding month, and has lasted or is expected to continue for another five consecutive, overlapping three-month periods. The agency also looks at a …