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- [Arthur T Knackerbracket] ICE Killings - Have the discussion here
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- [turgid] US Special Military Operation in Venezuela
- [hubie] An AC's Proposed Changes for SN Editorial Policy
- [Mojibake Tengu] CCC: Zen Microcode
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- [jasassin] AI real life experience or
- [janrinok] Responses to AC Questions
- [Gaaark] If everyone around you is a loser or weak or stupid...
- [kolie] Follow-up: The "Dead" SSD is a Zombie (Consumer SSDs in Ente
- [Rich] Framework, take my money!
- [fliptop] Charging Overnight: Rivian Dealership Learns the Hard Way
- [khallow] A view into a "moral panic"
- [Ingar] Kenobi
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OpenAI is betting big on audio AI, and it's not just about making ChatGPT sound better. According to new reporting from The Information, the company has unified several engineering, product, and research teams over the past two months to overhaul its audio models, all in preparation for an audio-first personal device expected to launch in about a year.
The move reflects where the entire tech industry is headed — toward a future where screens become background noise and audio takes center stage. Smart speakers have already made voice assistants a fixture in more than a third of U.S. homes. Meta just rolled out a feature for its Ray-Ban smart glasses that uses a five-microphone array to help you hear conversations in noisy rooms — essentially turning your face into a directional listening device. Google, meanwhile, began experimenting in June with "Audio Overviews" that transform search results into conversational summaries. And Tesla is integrating Grok and other LLMs into its vehicles to create conversational voice assistants that can handle everything from navigation to climate control through natural dialogue.
It's not just the tech giants placing this bet. A motley crew of startups has emerged with the same conviction, albeit with varying degrees of success. The makers of the Humane AI Pin burned through hundreds of millions before their screenless wearable became a cautionary tale. The Friend AI pendant, a necklace that records your life and offers companionship, has sparked privacy concerns and existential dread in equal measure. And now at least two companies, including Sandbar and one helmed by Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky, are building AI rings expected to debut in 2026, allowing wearers to literally talk to the hand.
The form factors may differ, but the thesis is the same: audio is the interface of the future. Every space — your home, your car, even your face — is becoming an interface.
OpenAI's new audio model, slated for early 2026, will reportedly sound more natural, handle interruptions like an actual conversation partner, and even speak while you're talking, which is something today's models can't manage. The company is also said to envision a family of devices, possibly including glasses or screenless smart speakers, that act less like tools and more like companions.
As The Information notes, former Apple design chief Jony Ive, who joined OpenAI's hardware efforts through the company's $6.5 billion acquisition in May of his firm io, has made reducing device addiction a priority, seeing audio-first design as a chance to "right the wrongs" of past consumer gadgets.
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Strong subsidies keep Tesla on top in Norway:
Last year, 95.5 percent of all newly registered vehicles in Norway were electric. While consumers in Europe and other markets are pivoting away from Tesla and toward hybrid vehicles, the Scandinavian country is staying firmly on course toward full EV adoption.
The Norwegian Road Federation reported that 95.9 percent of new cars registered in November were electric, a figure that climbed to 98 percent in December. These numbers represent a sharp increase from late 2024, when Norway became the first country where electric vehicles outnumbered petrol-powered cars on the road. In 2025, most newly registered gasoline-powered vehicles were hybrids, sports cars, or models used by first responders.
Tesla remains Norway's most popular automotive brand by a wide margin, increasing its market share slightly last year to 19.1 percent. This stands in stark contrast to trends in the US, China, and much of Europe, where Tesla sales have declined amid the rollback of EV incentives and growing public backlash against CEO Elon Musk's political views. The company was also named America's least reliable car brand last year, coinciding with a nine percent drop in global sales.
Signs of weakening confidence in EVs are particularly visible in the United States. Ford discontinued the all-electric F-150 Lightning last year in favor of hybrid models. In Europe, policymakers recently abandoned plans to ban new gasoline car sales by 2035.
Despite gradually increasing taxes on EVs, Norway continues to offer comparatively strong incentives, while duties on petrol-powered cars are also rising. Electric vehicles priced below roughly $30,000 remain exempt from value-added tax, and buyers rushed to make purchases ahead of January 1, when an additional $5,000 in VAT took effect on more expensive EVs.
Chinese automaker BYD also made notable gains in Norway last year, though it remains far behind Tesla. Its market share increased from 2.1 to 3.3 percent, with sales more than doubling over the period.
Globally, BYD has overtaken Tesla as the world's leading EV seller, posting a sales increase of over 28 percent in 2025. The rapid pace at which BYD and other Chinese automakers have brought vehicles from concept to assembly has forced Western manufacturers to rethink their production workflows and accelerate development timelines.
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https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-create-a-periodic-table-for-artificial-intelligence/
Artificial intelligence is increasingly relied on to combine and interpret different kinds of data, including text, images, audio, and video. One obstacle that continues to slow progress in multimodal AI is deciding which algorithmic approach best fits the specific task an AI system is meant to solve.
Researchers have now introduced a unified way to organize and guide that decision process. Physicists at Emory University developed a new framework that brings structure to how algorithms for multimodal AI are derived, and their work was published in The Journal of Machine Learning Research.
"We found that many of today's most successful AI methods boil down to a single, simple idea — compress multiple kinds of data just enough to keep the pieces that truly predict what you need," says Ilya Nemenman, Emory professor of physics and senior author of the paper. "This gives us a kind of 'periodic table' of AI methods. Different methods fall into different cells, based on which information a method's loss function retains or discards."
A loss function is the mathematical rule an AI system uses to evaluate how wrong its predictions are. During training, the model continually adjusts its internal parameters in order to reduce this error, using the loss function as a guide.
"People have devised hundreds of different loss functions for multimodal AI systems and some may be better than others, depending on context," Nemenman says. "We wondered if there was a simpler way than starting from scratch each time you confront a problem in multimodal AI."
To address this, the team developed a mathematical framework that links the design of loss functions directly to decisions about which information should be preserved and which can be ignored. They call this approach the Variational Multivariate Information Bottleneck Framework.
"Our framework is essentially like a control knob," says co-author Michael Martini, who worked on the project as an Emory postdoctoral fellow and research scientist in Nemenman's group. "You can 'dial the knob' to determine the information to retain to solve a particular problem."
"Our approach is a generalized, principled one," adds Eslam Abdelaleem, first author of the paper. Abdelaleem took on the project as an Emory PhD candidate in physics before graduating in May and joining Georgia Tech as a postdoctoral fellow.
"Our goal is to help people to design AI models that are tailored to the problem that they are trying to solve," he says, "while also allowing them to understand how and why each part of the model is working."
AI-system developers can use the framework to propose new algorithms, to predict which ones might work, to estimate the needed data for a particular multimodal algorithm, and to anticipate when it might fail.
"Just as important," Nemenman says, "it may let us design new AI methods that are more accurate, efficient and trustworthy."
The researchers brought a unique perspective to the problem of optimizing the design process for multimodal AI systems.
"The machine-learning community is focused on achieving accuracy in a system without necessarily understanding why a system is working," Abdelaleem explains. "As physicists, however, we want to understand how and why something works. So, we focused on finding fundamental, unifying principals to connect different AI methods together."
Abdelaleem and Martini began this quest — to distill the complexity of various AI methods to their essence — by doing math by hand.
"We spent a lot of time sitting in my office, writing on a whiteboard," Martini says. "Sometimes I'd be writing on a sheet of paper with Eslam looking over my shoulder."
The process took years, first working on mathematical foundations, discussing them with Nemenman, trying out equations on a computer, then repeating these steps after running down false trails.
"It was a lot of trial and error and going back to the whiteboard," Martini says.
They vividly recall the day of their eureka moment.
They had come up with a unifying principal that described a tradeoff between compression of data and reconstruction of data. "We tried our model on two test datasets and showed that it was automatically discovering shared, important features between them," Martini says. "That felt good."
As Abdelaleem was leaving campus after the exhausting, yet exhilarating, final push leading to the breakthrough, he happened to look at his Samsung Galaxy smart watch. It uses an AI system to track and interpret health data, such as his heart rate. The AI however, had misunderstood the meaning of his racing heart throughout that day.
"My watch said that I had been cycling for three hours," Abdelaleem says. "That's how it interpreted the level of excitement I was feeling. I thought, 'Wow, that's really something! Apparently, science can have that effect."
The researchers applied their framework to dozens of AI methods to test its efficacy.
"We performed computer demonstrations that show that our general framework works well with test problems on benchmark datasets," Nemenman says. "We can more easily derive loss functions, which may solve the problems one cares about with smaller amounts of training data."
The framework also holds the potential to reduce the amount of computational power needed to run an AI system.
"By helping guide the best AI approach, the framework helps avoid encoding features that are not important," Nemenman says. "The less data required for a system, the less computational power required to run it, making it less environmentally harmful. That may also open the door to frontier experiments for problems that we cannot solve now because there is not enough existing data."
The researchers hope others will use the generalized framework to tailor new algorithms specific to scientific questions they want to explore.
Meanwhile, they are building on their work to explore the potential of the new framework. They are particularly interested in how the tool may help to detect patterns of biology, leading to insights into processes such as cognitive function.
"I want to understand how your brain simultaneously compresses and processes multiple sources of information," Abdelaleem says. "Can we develop a method that allows us to see the similarities between a machine-learning model and the human brain? That may help us to better understand both systems."
Reference: “Deep Variational Multivariate Information Bottleneck – A Framework for Variational Losses” by Eslam Abdelaal, Ilya Nemenman and K. Michael Martini Jr., 2 September 2025, arXiv.
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2310.03311
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Head-up displays or HUDs were meant to simplify driving, but Ford may have found a very unconventional way to rethink them:
Head-Up Displays (HUDs) were invented as a means to help drivers keep their vision straight on the road without any impediments to their vision. First used in Fighter jets, HUDs display all the relevant information through a projection in the windscreen that the driver can see. It shows speed, vehicle condition, and, in some cases, even map settings.
But it appears that Ford wants to take HUD tech to another level. Alongside an adjustable HUD from last year, the Blue Oval has invented another one – and it's as ridiculous as it looks.
Ford has just filed a patent for its own definition of the HUD, specifically patent no.20260001397 filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on January 1, 2026.
Looking through the patent, Ford's new version of the HUD will be implemented through the sun visor of the vehicle, meaning drivers will be able to deploy the HUD by lowering or attaching it directly...in their line of sight.
The patent filing itself says that the whole idea of this visor HUD is "to eliminate the need to project images onto the windshield and/or to have a projector located on the vehicle dashboard. In certain embodiments, the head-up display visor is portable and is affixed to the driver's conventional sun visor by a clip, thereby allowing a driver to move the device from one vehicle to another."
[...] Another benefit of their project is the visor HUD's portability for owners with multiple vehicles. It must be noted, though, that while a patent has been filed, this is merely Ford's way of protecting its own intellectual property. There is no guarantee that this (novel idea) will ever make it into production.
TFA includes a few illustrations.
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The BBC has an interesting report on a French university training spies:
University professor Xavier Crettiez admits that he doesn't know the real names of many of the students on his course.
This is a highly unusual state of affairs in the world of academia, but Prof Crettiez's work is far from standard.
Instead, he helps train France's spies.
"I rarely know the intelligence agents' backgrounds when they are sent on the course, and I doubt the names I'm given are genuine anyway," he says.
If you wanted to create a setting for a spy school, then the campus of Sciences Po Saint-Germain on the outskirts of Paris seems a good fit.
With dour, even gloomy-looking, early 20th Century buildings surrounded by busy, drab roads and large, intimidating metal gates, it has a very discreet feel.
Where it does stand out is its unique diploma that brings together more typical students in their early 20s, and active members of the French secret services, usually between the ages of 35 and 50.
The course is called Diplôme sur le Renseignement et les Menaces Globales, which translates as Diploma of Intelligence and Global Threats.
It was developed by the university in association with the Academie du Renseignement, the training arm of the French secret services.
This came following a request from French authorities a decade ago. After the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, the government went on a large recruitment drive within the French intelligence agencies.
It asked Sciences Po, one of France's leading universities, to come up with a new course to both train potential new spies, and provide continuous training for current agents.
Large French companies were also quick to show an interest, both in getting their security staff onto the course, and snapping up many of the younger graduates.
The diploma is made up of 120 hours of classwork with modules spread over four months. For external students – the spies and those on placement from businesses – it costs around €5,000 ($5,900; £4,400).
The core aim of the course is to identify threats wherever they are, and how to track and overcome them. The key topics include the economics of organized crime, Islamic jihadism, business intelligence gathering and political violence.
To attend one of the classes and speak to the students I had to be vetted first by the French security services. The theme of the lesson I joined was "intelligence and over-reliance on technology".
One of the students I speak to is a man in his 40s who goes by the name Roger. He tells me in very precise, clipped English that he is investment banker. He adds: "I provide consultancy across west Africa, and I joined the course to provide risk assessments to my clients there."
Prof Crettiez, who teaches political radicalisation, says there has been a huge expansion in the French secret services in recent years. And that there are now around 20,000 agents in what he called the "inner circle".
This is made up of the DGSE, which looks at matters overseas, and is the French equivalent of the UK's MI6 or the US's CIA. And the DGSI, which focuses on threats within France, like the UK's MI5 or the US's FBI.
But he says it's not just about terrorism. "There are the two main security agencies, but also Tracfin an intelligence agency which specializes in money laundering.
"It is preoccupied with the surge in mafia activity, especially in southern France, including corruption in the public and private sectors mainly due to massive profits in illegal drug trafficking."
Other lecturers on the course include a DGSE official once located in Moscow, a former French ambassador to Libya, and a senior official from Tracfin. The head of security at the French energy giant EDF also runs one module.
Twenty eight students are enrolled in this year's class. Six are spies. You can tell who they are, as they are the ones huddled together during class breaks, away from the young students, and not too overwhelmed with joy when I approach them.
Without saying their exact roles, and with arms crossed, one says the course is considered a fast-track stepping stone for a promotion from the office to field work. Another says he gets fresh ideas being in this academic environment. They signed the day's attendance form with just their first names.
Nearly half of the students in the class are in fact women. And this is a relatively recent development according to one of the lecturers, Sebastien-Yves Laurent, a specialist on technology in spying.
"Women's interest in intelligence gathering is new," he says. "They are interested because they think it will provide for a better world.
"And if there is one common thread amongst all these young students it's that they are very patriotic and that is new compared to 20 years ago.
If you are keen to apply to get on the course, French citizenship is an essential requirement, although some dual citizens are accepted.
Yet Prof Crettiez says he has to be wary. "I regularly get applications from very attractive Israeli and Russian women with amazing CVs. Unsurprisingly they are binned immediately."
In a recent group photo of the class you can immediately tell who the spies are - they had their backs to the camera.
While all the students and professional spies I met are trim and athletic, Prof Crettiez is also keen to dispel the myth of James Bond-like adventure.
"Few new recruits will end up in the field," he says. "Most French intelligence agencies jobs are desk bound."
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The videos from the 39C3 are all in place, and Cory Doctorow's fast-paced talk, A post-American, enshittification-resistant Internet, is among them.
That talk is worth special mention. Don't be put off by the gratuitous cursing or the CCC's misspelling of the name Internet. And because it's often easier, and always faster, to just read text than slog through a video, Cory has also posted a transcript of his presentation:
We won that skirmish, but friends, I have bad news, news that will not surprise you. Despite wins like that one, we have been losing the war on the general purpose computer for the past 25 years.
Which is why I've come to Hamburg today. Because, after decades of throwing myself against a locked door, the door that leads to a new, good internet, one that delivers both the technological self-determination of the old, good [I]nternet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0 that let our normie friends join the party, that door has been unlocked.
Today, it is open a crack. It's open a crack!
His presentation is good all the way through, even to the final Q & A.
Basically, the gist is that 1) the US dollar is no longer a (semi-)neutral platform and 2) the threat of withdrawing financial support has already been played and cannot be used for leverage any more. Countries are now forced to actively work around both points, which is inconvenient and expensive, but the result is that they have been liberated from similar future threats and thus in that way have regained a bit of independence as far as software laws go. That liberation is because economic retaliation has already occurred, nations can more or less safely undo the anti-circumvention laws forced down their throats by "free" trade "agreements". The first country to do so will be able to take a very big bite out of the trillions of dollars (or euros) which Apple and the others currently collect.
What other 39C3 presentations have soylentils found interesting in a positive way?
Previously:
(2025) The 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) Taking Place Now in Hamburg Through 30 Dec 2025
(2025) 38th Chaos Communication Congress (38C3) Presentations Online
(2017) 34th Chaos Communication Congress (34C3) Presentations Online
Cory Doctorow Proposes How to Break Free From Digital Domination
So far, every country in the world has had one of two responses to the Trump tariffs. The first one is: "Give Trump everything he asks for (except Greenland) and hope he stops being mad at you." This has been an absolute failure. Give Trump an inch, he'll take a mile. He'll take fucking Greenland. Capitulation is a failure.
But so is the other tactic: retaliatory tariffs. That's what we've done in Canada (like all the best Americans, I'm Canadian). Our top move has been to levy tariffs on the stuff we import from America, making the things we buy more expensive. That's a weird way to punish America! It's like punching yourself in the face as hard as you can, and hoping the downstairs neighbor says "Ouch!"
And it's indiscriminate. Why whack some poor farmer from a state that begins and ends with a vowel with tariffs on his soybeans. That guy never did anything bad to Canada.
But there's a third possible response to tariffs, one that's just sitting there, begging to be tried: what about repealing anticircumvention law?
If you're a technologist or an investor based in a country that's repealed its anticircumvention law, you can go into business making disenshittificatory products that plug into America's defective tech exports, allowing the people who own and use those products to use them in ways that are good for them, even if those uses make the company's shareholders mad.
Simple premise, interesting ramifications - I wonder what the course corrections will look like...
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https://www.hzdr.de/db/Cms?pNid=99&pOid=76137
Proposed is a plan to impact gravity waves, imparting more energy unto them, by using lasers - much like the LIGO interferometer, but in reverse. By imparting energy from light into the gravity waves, we subtly change the gravity wave itself, and can measure the amount of energy taken from the light source. Thus, we can measure properties about the gravity wave - and, perhaps, the graviton.
In an interferometer tailored to Schützhold's idea, it could be possible not only to observe gravitational waves but also to manipulate them for the first time by stimulated emission and absorption of gravitons. According to Schützhold, light pulses whose photons are entangled, that is, quantum mechanically coupled, could significantly increase the sensitivity of the interferometer further. "Then we could even draw inferences about the quantum state of the gravitational field itself," says Schützhold.
High-school level summary at link, with link to journal article contained within.
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https://phys.org/news/2025-12-ice-home-food-scientist-easy.html
When you splurge on a cocktail in a bar, the drink often comes with a slab of aesthetically pleasing, perfectly clear ice. The stuff looks much fancier than the slightly cloudy ice you get from your home freezer. How do they do this?
Clear ice is actually made from regular water—what's different is the freezing process.
With a little help from science, you can make clear ice at home, and it's not even that tricky. However, there are quite a few hacks on the internet that won't work. Let's dive into the physics and chemistry involved.
Homemade ice is often cloudy because it has a myriad of tiny bubbles and other impurities. In a typical ice cube tray, as freezing begins and ice starts to form inward from all directions, it traps whatever is floating in the water: mostly air bubbles, dissolved minerals and gases.
These get pushed toward the center of the ice as freezing progresses and end up caught in the middle of the cube with nowhere else to go.
That's why when making ice the usual way—just pouring water into a vessel and putting in the freezer—it will always end up looking somewhat cloudy. Light scatters as it hits the finished ice cube, colliding with the concentrated core of trapped gases and minerals. This creates the cloudy appearance.
As well as looking nice, clear ice is denser and melts slower because it doesn't have those bubbles and impurities. This also means that it dilutes drinks more slowly than regular, cloudy ice.
Because it doesn't have impurities, the clear ice should also be free from any inadvertent flavors that could contaminate your drink.
Additionally, because it's less likely to crumble, clear ice can be easily cut and formed into different shapes to further dress up your cocktail.
If you've tried looking up how to make clear ice before, you've likely seen several suggestions. These include using distilled, boiled or filtered water, and a process called directional freezing. Here's the science on what works and what doesn't.
You might think that to get clear ice, you simply need to start out with really clean water. However, a recent study found this isn't the case.
- Using boiling water: Starting out with boiling water does mean the water will have less dissolved gases in it, but boiling doesn't remove all impurities. It also doesn't control the freezing process, so the ice will still become cloudy.
- Using distilled water: While distilling water removes more impurities than boiling, distilled water still freezes from the outside in, concentrating any remaining impurities or air bubbles in the center, again resulting in cloudy ice.
- Using filtered or tap water: Filtering the water or using tap water also doesn't stop the impurities from concentrating during the conventional freezing process.
As it turns out, it's not the water quality that guarantees clear ice. It's all about how you freeze it. The main technique for successfully making clear ice is called "directional freezing."
Directional freezing is simply the process of forcing water to freeze in a single direction instead of from all sides at once, like it does in a regular ice cube tray.
This way, the impurities and air will be forced to the opposite side from where the freezing starts, leaving the ice clear except for a small cloudy section.
In practice, this means insulating the sides of the ice container so that the water freezes in one direction, typically from the top down. This is because heat transfer and phase transition from liquid to solid happens faster through the exposed top than the insulated sides.
The simplest way to have a go at directional freezing at home is to use an insulated container—you can use a really small cooler (that is, an "esky"), an insulated mug or even a commercially available insulated ice cube tray designed for making clear ice at home.
Fill the insulated container with water and place it in the freezer, then check on it periodically.
Once all the impurities and air bubbles are concentrated in a single cloudy area at the bottom, you can either pour away this water before it's fully frozen through, or let the block freeze solid and then cut off the cloudy portion with a large serrated knife, then cut the ice into cubes for your drinks.
If using a commercial clear ice tray, it will likely come with instructions on how to get rid of the cloudy portion so you can enjoy the sparkling clear ice.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-say-ozempic-could-change-how-you-feel-after-drinking-alcohol/
Drugs used for diabetes and weight loss may also dampen alcohol's effects by slowing how fast it enters the bloodstream. Early research suggests this could help people feel less intoxicated and potentially drink less.
Evidence is growing that medications commonly prescribed for diabetes and weight loss, better known by brand names like Ozempic and Wegovy, may also help reduce alcohol consumption.
New findings from the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, published this month in Scientific Reports, suggest that GLP-1 agonists slow the rate at which alcohol enters the bloodstream. As a result, alcohol's effects on the brain also appear to develop more slowly.
"People who drink know there's a difference between nursing a glass of wine and downing a shot of whiskey," said Alex DiFeliceantonio, assistant professor and interim co-director of the FBRI's Center for Health Behaviors Research.
Even though both drinks contain the same amount of alcohol, 0.6 ounces, a shot causes blood alcohol levels to rise much faster. That rapid increase changes how alcohol feels because of the way the body absorbs and processes it over time.
"Why would this matter? Faster-acting drugs have a higher abuse potential," DiFeliceantonio said. "They have a different impact on the brain. So if GLP-1s slow alcohol entering the bloodstream, they could reduce the effects of alcohol and help people drink less."
Alcohol use is widespread in the United States, with more than half of adults reporting that they drink. About one in ten people meets the criteria for alcohol use disorder. Long-term heavy drinking is linked to serious health problems, including high blood pressure, cancer, and heart and liver disease. In January, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory naming alcohol use as the third leading preventable cause of cancer, after tobacco use and obesity.
In the study, participants who took GLP-1 medications such as semaglutide, tirzepatide, or liraglutide showed a slower increase in breath alcohol concentration, even though they consumed the same amount of alcohol as others. Their alcohol levels rose more gradually, and they also reported feeling less intoxicated based on their own assessments.
The research was supported by funding from Virginia Tech's Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and focused on how alcohol moves through the body and how it feels subjectively for people taking GLP-1 drugs. Researchers say the results offer early guidance for designing larger and more detailed studies on whether these medications could be used to help reduce alcohol use.
The study included 20 adults with a BMI of 30 or higher. Half of the participants were taking a maintenance dose of a GLP-1 medication, while the other half were not taking any medication. All participants were recruited from Roanoke, Virginia, and nearby communities. They fasted before arriving and were given a snack bar to keep caloric intake and stomach contents consistent.
Researchers measured blood pressure, pulse, breath alcohol concentration, and blood glucose levels. Ninety minutes later, participants were given an alcoholic drink and asked to finish it within 10 minutes. Over the next hour, researchers repeatedly measured breath alcohol levels and asked participants about cravings, appetite, taste, and alcohol effects. One question asked participants to rate, on a scale from zero to 10, "How drunk do you feel right now?"
Participants taking GLP-1 medications consistently reported feeling less drunk.
Afterward, participants stayed in a recovery room while their bodies processed the alcohol. Breath alcohol levels were checked every 30 minutes, blood glucose was measured twice, and participants answered follow-up questions three hours later. After four hours, once breath alcohol levels dropped below .02 percent and a study physician approved, participants were allowed to leave.
"Other medications designed to help reduce alcohol intake" — naltrexone and acamprosate — "act on the central nervous system," said DiFeliceantonio, the study's corresponding author. "Our preliminary data suggest that GLP-1s suppress intake through a different mechanism."
GLP-1 drugs slow gastric emptying, which appears to delay the rise of alcohol levels in the blood.
The study began during a faculty retreat at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute and was led by Warren Bickel, professor and director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center, who died in 2024.
The work built on an earlier analysis of social media posts on Reddit, where users described experiencing fewer alcohol cravings while taking medications for type 2 diabetes and obesity.
"His guidance shaped every stage of this research — from the initial idea to its final form — and his passion for scientific discovery continues to inspire me every day," said Fatima Quddos, a graduate researcher in Bickel's lab and first author on both studies.
"Bickel's work had long focused on what happens when you delay rewards, so we asked, 'What if GLP-1s affect how the body handles alcohol?'" DiFeliceantonio said. "Ending this project was bittersweet, because it was my last collaboration with him."
"He was always asking, 'How do we help people the fastest?' Using a drug that's already shown to be safe to help people reduce drinking could be a way to get people help fast," DiFeliceantonio said.
Although the study was small, researchers say the differences between groups were clear and provide early evidence to support larger clinical trials. Those future studies would test whether GLP-1 drugs could become a treatment option for people looking to cut back on alcohol.
"As a recent graduate, I'm deeply inspired by the potential this research holds — not only for advancing our scientific understanding, but also for paving the way toward future therapies," said Quddos, who earned her doctorate from Virginia Tech's Translational Biology, Medicine, and Health Graduate Program in May. "The possibility of offering new hope to individuals struggling with addiction is what makes this work so meaningful."
Reference: “A preliminary study of the physiological and perceptual effects of GLP-1 receptor agonists during alcohol consumption in people with obesity” by Fatima Quddos, Mary Fowler, Ana Carolina de Lima Bovo, Zacarya Elbash, Allison N. Tegge, Kirstin M. Gatchalian, Anita S. Kablinger, Alexandra G. DiFeliceantonio and Warren K. Bickel, 15 October 2025, Scientific Reports.
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-025-17927-w
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A study done by a technology tracker run by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) — an independent think tank, indicates that China is leading research in nearly 90% of the crucial technologies that "significantly enhance, or pose risks to, a country's national interests."
The tracker measures not a country's overall strength in critical technologies but its research performance in them. It does so by focusing on high-impact research, the 10 percent most cited research papers. A country's five-year performance between 2020 and 2024 is taken as a lead indicator of its future science and technology capability.
The 10 new technologies that have been added to it are key to strategic advantage, including advanced computing and communication, artificial intelligence, and emerging neurotechnologies relevant to human-machine integration. The dataset has also undergone a full refresh to ensure accuracy and comparability.
The updated picture is stark. China's exceptional gains in high-impact research are continuing, and the gap between it and the rest of the world is still widening. In eight of the 10 newly added technologies, China has a clear lead in its global share of high-impact research output. Four—cloud and edge computing, computer vision, generative AI and grid integration technologies—carry a high technology monopoly risk (TMR) rating, reflecting substantial concentration of expertise within Chinese institutions.
In total, China now leads in 66 of the 74 technologies tracked, with the United States leading in the remaining eight—an imbalance that underscores why trusted partners need to act together to leverage comparative advantages, reduce concentration risk and shape the trajectory of critical technologies together.
The historical data for these new technologies tells a familiar story: an early and often overwhelming US lead in research output in the opening decade of this millennium, eroded and then outmatched by persistent long-term Chinese investment in fundamental research. In total, China now leads in 66 of the 74 technologies tracked, with the United States leading in the remaining eight—an imbalance that underscores why trusted partners need to act together to leverage comparative advantages, reduce concentration risk and shape the trajectory of critical technologies together.
The ASPI team based its analysis on a database that contains more than nine million publications from all around the world. It ranked nations in each technology by identifying the top 10% of the most-cited papers produced by researchers in a country over a five-year period, between 2020 and 2024, and calculated that country's global share.
Paywalled Nature article:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04048-7?WT.ec_id=NATURE-20260102
Original study:
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/aspis-critical-technology-tracker-2025-updates-and-10-new-technologies/
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Planet's oldest bee species and primary pollinators were under threat from deforestation and competition from 'killer bees'
Stingless bees from the Amazon have become the first insects to be granted legal rights anywhere in the world, in a breakthrough supporters hope will be a catalyst for similar moves to protect bees elsewhere.
It means that across a broad swathe of the Peruvian Amazon, the rainforest's long-overlooked native bees – which, unlike their cousins the European honeybees, have no sting – now have the right to exist and to flourish.
Cultivated by Indigenous peoples since pre-Columbian times, stingless bees are thought to be key rainforest pollinators, sustaining biodiversity and ecosystem health.
But they are faced with a deadly confluence of climate change, deforestation and pesticides, as well as competition from European bees, and scientists and campaigners have been racing against time to get stingless bees on international conservation red lists.
Constanza Prieto, Latin American director at the Earth Law Center, who was part of the campaign, said: "This ordinance marks a turning point in our relationship with nature: it makes stingless bees visible, recognises them as rights-bearing subjects, and affirms their essential role in preserving ecosystems."
The world-first ordinances, passed in two Peruvian regions in the past few months, follow a campaign of research and advocacy spearheaded by Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, founder of Amazon Research Internacional, who has spent the past few years travelling into the Amazon to work with Indigenous people to document the bees.
Espinoza, a chemical biologist, first started researching the bees in 2020, after a colleague asked her to conduct an analysis of their honey, which was being used during the pandemic in Indigenous communities where treatments for Covid were in short supply. She was stunned by the findings.
"I was seeing hundreds of medicinal molecules, like molecules that are known to have some sort of biological medicinal property," Espinoza recalled. "And the variety was also really wild – these molecules have been known to have antiinflammatory effects or antiviral, antibacterial, antioxidant, even anti-cancer."
Espinoza, who has written a book, The Spirit of the Rainforest, about her work in the Amazon, began leading expeditions to learn more about stingless bees, working with Indigenous people to document the traditional methods of finding and cultivating the insects, and harvesting their honey.
Found in tropical regions across the world, stingless bees, a class that encompasses a number of varieties, are the oldest bee species on the planet. About half of the world's 500 known species live in the Amazon, where they are responsible for pollinating more than 80% of the flora, including such crops as cacao, coffee and avocados.
They also hold deep cultural and spiritual meaning for the forest's Indigenous Asháninka and Kukama-Kukamiria peoples. "Within the stingless bee lives Indigenous traditional knowledge, passed down since the time of our grandparents," said Apu Cesar Ramos, president of EcoAshaninka of the Ashaninka Communal Reserve. "The stingless bee has existed since time immemorial and reflects our coexistence with the rainforest."
From the outset, Espinoza began hearing reports that the bees were becoming more difficult to find. "We were talking actively with the different community members and the first things they were saying, which they still do to this day, is: 'I cannot see my bees any more. It used to take me 30 minutes walking into the jungle to find them. And now it takes me hours.'"
Her chemical analysis had also turned up some concerning findings. Traces of pesticides were appearing in the stingless bees' honey – despite their being kept in areas far from industrial agriculture.
A lack of awareness about stingless bees made obtaining funding for research difficult, Espinoza said. So at the same time as beginning fieldwork, she and her colleagues began advocating for recognition of the insects, both in Peru and at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
For years, the only kinds of bees to have official recognition in Peru have been European honeybees, brought to the continent by colonisers in the 1500s.
"It almost created a vicious cycle. I cannot give you the funding because you're not on the list, but you cannot even get on the list because you don't have the data. You don't have the funding to get it." In 2023, they formally began a project to map the extent and ecology of the bees, "because by that time we had already spoken with the IUCN team and some government people in Peru and understood that that data was critical."
The mapping revealed links between deforestation and the decline of stingless bees – research that helped contribute to the passing of a law in 2024 recognising stingless bees as the native bees of Peru. The law was a critical step, as Peruvian law requires the protection of native species.
Dr César Delgado, a researcher at the Institute of Investigation of the Peruvian Amazon, described stingless bees as "primary pollinators" in the Amazon, contributing not just to plant reproduction, but also to biodiversity, forest conservation and global food security.
But their research revealed something else too.
An experiment in 1950s Brazil to create a strain that would produce more honey in tropical conditions led to the creation of the Africanised honeybee – a variety that was also more aggressive, earning them the fearsome moniker "African killer bees". Now, Espinoza and her colleagues found, these Africanised bees have begun outcompeting the comparatively gentle stingless bees in their own habitats.
On an expedition in the Amazonian highlands of Junin, southern Peru, they met Elizabeth, an Asháninka elder, who told them of what Espinoza said was "the strongest example of [bee] species competition that I have ever seen".
Living a semi-nomadic lifestyle in a remote part of the Avireri Vraem Biosphere reserve, Elizabeth farmed and kept bees at a spot in the forest some distance from her home. But she described how her stingless bees had been displaced by Africanised bees, which attacked her violently whenever she visited.
"I felt so scared, to be honest," said Espinoza. "Because I have heard of that before, but not to that extent. She had horror in her eyes and she kept looking at me straight and asking: 'how do I get rid of them? I hate them. I want them gone'."
It is the municipality where Elizabeth lives, Satipo, that became the first to pass an ordinance granting legal rights to stingless bees in October. Across the Avireri Vraem reserve the bees will now have rights to exist and thrive, to maintain healthy populations, to a healthy habitat free from pollution, ecologically stable climatic conditions and, crucially, to be legally represented in cases of threat or harm. A second municipality, Nauta, in the Loreto region, approved a matching ordinance on Monday 22 December.
The ordinances are precedents with no equivalent worldwide. According to Prieto they will establish a mandate requiring policies for the bees' survival, "including habitat reforestation and restoration, strict regulation of pesticides and herbicides, mitigation of and adaptation to the impacts of climate change, the advancement of scientific research, and the adoption of the precautionary principle as a guiding framework for all decisions that may affect their survival."
Already, a global petition by Avaaz calling on Peru to make the law nationwide has reached more than 386,000 signatures, and there has also been strong interest from groups in Bolivia, the Netherlands and the US who want follow the municipalities' examples as a basis to advocate for the rights of their own wild bees.
Ramos said: "The stingless bee provides us with food and medicine, and it must be made known so that more people will protect it. For this reason, this law that protects bees and their rights represents a major step forward for us, because it gives value to the lived experience of our Indigenous peoples and the rainforest."
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China's first homegrown 6nm GPUs are no longer a show-floor exclusive.
Earlier this year, Lisuan took the stage to announce its G100 series of GPUs, based on the in-house "TrueGPU" architecture and fabricated on TSMC's N6 process. It was the first time a Chinese company had potential to directly rival AMD and Nvidia's duopoly in the discrete GPU market. Sampling for these cards was expected to begin in September and now, IT Home is reporting that they've begun initial deliveries.
There are two GPUs part of the G100 family: the gaming-oriented 7G106 and the enterprise-focused 7G105. It was the former that really made headlines by touting RTX 4060-level performance, even beating the GPU in early benchmark results. Specs-wise, we're looking at 192 texture units, 96 ROPs, and an FP32 throughput of up to 24 TFLOP/s.
The 7G106 has 12GB of GDDR6 VRAM saturated across a 192-bit wide bus, which is doubled to 24GB on the workstation-class 7G105, with proper ECC support. These GPUs support modern APIs including DirectX 12, use the PCIe 4.0 interface, and even have a custom upscaling solution called NSRR, akin to Nvidia's DLSS or AMD's FSR. Unlike those two, however, Lisuan supports Microsoft's Windows-on-Arm initiative.
IT Home says the G100 series began production on September 15, 2025, in China, and now that customers have started to receive the first batch of orders, these graphics cards have successfully transitioned into commercialization. This is a big deal for the region, and Lisuan's TrueGPU architecture represents China's self-reliance ambitions in the boldest way possible — something that even local darling Moore Threads hasn't been able to achieve yet.
When these GPUs were first announced, we were impressed by the performance Lisuan was touting. While reviews are still up in the air, if the numbers at the launch event were real, then Lisuan's efforts would've paid off massively in creating a legitimate homegrown alternative. Now that the G100 is finally shipping, we should start to see those claims validated sooner rather than later.
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China is requiring chipmakers to use at least 50% domestically made equipment for adding new capacity, three people familiar with the matter said, as Beijing pushes to build a self-sufficient semiconductor supply chain.
The rule is not publicly documented, but chipmakers seeking state approval to build or expand their plants have been told by authorities in recent months that they must prove through procurement tenders that at least half their equipment will be Chinese-made, the people told Reuters.
The mandate is one of the most significant measures Beijing has introduced to wean itself off reliance on foreign technology, a push that gathered pace after the U.S. tightened technology export restrictions in 2023, banning sales of advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment to China.
While those U.S. export restrictions blocked the sale of some of the most advanced tools, the 50% rule is leading Chinese manufacturers to choose domestic suppliers even in areas where foreign equipment from the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Europe remain available.
[...] "Authorities prefer if it is much higher than 50%," one source told Reuters. "Eventually they are aiming for the plants to use 100% domestic equipment."
[...] China's President Xi Jinping has been calling for a "whole nation" effort to build a fully self-sufficient domestic semiconductor supply chain that involves thousands of engineers and scientists at companies and research centers nationwide.
The effort is being made across the wide supply-chain spectrum. Reuters reported earlier this month that Chinese scientists are working on a prototype of a machine capable of producing cutting-edge chips, an outcome that Washington has spent years trying to prevent.
"Before, domestic fabs like SMIC would prefer U.S. equipment and would not really give Chinese firms a chance," a former employee at local equipment maker Naura Technology, said, referring to the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation
"But that changed starting with the 2023 U.S export restrictions, when Chinese fabs had no choice but to work with domestic suppliers."
[...] To support the local chip supply chain, Beijing has also poured hundreds of billions of yuan into its semiconductor sector through the "Big Fund", which established a third phase in 2024 with 344 billion yuan ($49 billion) in capital.
The policy is already yielding results, including in areas such as etching, a critical chip manufacturing step that involves removing materials from silicon wafers to carve out intricate transistor patterns, sources said.
China's largest chip equipment group, Naura, is testing its etching tools on a cutting-edge 7nm (nanometre) production line of SMIC, two sources said. The early-stage milestone, which comes after Naura recently deployed etching tools on 14nm successfully, demonstrates how quickly domestic suppliers are advancing.
"Naura's etching results have been accelerated by the government requiring fabs to use at least 50% domestic equipment," one of the people told Reuters, adding that it was forcing the company to rapidly improve.
[...] Analysts estimate that China has now reached roughly 50% self-sufficiency in photoresist-removal and cleaning equipment, a market previously dominated by Japanese firms, but now locally led by Naura.
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Major releases still coming out, and enthusiasts collecting discs:
20 years ago today, the CES in Las Vegas was buzzing with talk of Blu-ray technology, players, and media. Several years in the making, Blu-rays arrived with considerable industry backing, with "seven out of the eight major movie studios announced movie titles for the launch," reports Blu-ray.com. This successor to the DVD offered improved density and thus capacity vs earlier optical formats, largely thanks to the development of blue‑violet laser diodes – hence the name.
Blu-ray discs boosted single layer media capacity to 25GB, vs 4.7GB for DVDs, using a new 405nm blue‑violet laser combined with more advanced materials. The shorter wavelength enabled a higher numerical aperture for more pits per sq mm. This was complemented by a tighter track pitch and a thinner (but harder) protection layer to boost capacity tenfold (comparing single-layer media).
Moreover, Blu-ray's base speed was significantly boosted, with the older DVD standard offering 11 Mbps, but the new format raising the bar to 36 Mbps. Better quality video was also delivered thanks to Blu-ray's adoption of the AVC (H.264) codec. It retained MPEG-2 compatibility, but AVC facilitated more efficient HD video file playback at manageable bitrates.
Blu-ray's success wasn't inevitable, as a rival faction of electronics companies and movie studios would ignite a high‑profile format war. Much like the VHS vs Betamax videotape format war, there could only be one winner, and Sony was on the winning side this time, being one of the biggest backers of Blu-ray. Console gamers of the late noughties became well aware of this format war, as it would also divide the PlayStation and Xbox camps.
Blu-ray's superior capacity, default console integration, copy protection, and broader studio support would mean that this format war was quite brief, with Toshiba conceding in early 2008.
Since its introduction, Blu-ray has been iterated and improved with 4K Blu-ray packing HEVC, HDR and more features into the format starting about a decade ago.
Its bitrates are still considerably better than the best mainstream streaming quality available, so it remains a cherished format among home cinema enthusiasts. Thus, Blu-ray media still clings onto some relevance in 2026, with collectors and bandwidth‑limited regions keeping the format alive. It is also still available as the physical media distribution format for some modern consoles.
Its days look numbered, though, if we look at various industry trends. Console makers are pulling away from physical media, including Blu-ray distribution, for example. Also, we saw news of Sony ending recordable Blu-ray production in 2025, and LG ending production of Blu-ray players in late 2024. Changes like this put several sturdy nails in this optical disc format's coffin.
It seems like an age since PCs last came with Blu-ray (or any optical) disc apparatus built-in. That excludes Japan, for some reason, where we recently noticed optical drive demand surged (inc Blu-ray compatible) coinciding with the end of support for Windows 10.
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Strengthening asphalt roads with a unique green ingredient: Algae:
Snow and ice can damage paved surfaces, leading to frost heaves and potholes. These become potential hazards for drivers and pedestrians and are expensive to fix. Now, researchers propose in ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering a figurative and literal green solution to improve the durability of roads and sidewalks: an algae-derived asphalt binder. For temperatures below freezing, results indicated that the algae binder reduced asphalt cracks when compared to a conventional, petroleum-based binder.
"Algae-derived compounds can improve moisture resistance, flexibility and self-healing behavior in asphalt, potentially extending pavement life and reducing maintenance costs," says research team lead Elham Fini. "In the long term, algae asphalt could help create more sustainable, resilient and environmentally responsive roadways."
Currently, asphalt is held together with bitumen: a thick, glue-like substance made from crude oil. Bitumen binds the sand and rocks that make up paved surfaces and allows the asphalt to expand and contract in hot and cold conditions, respectively. However, when the temperature rapidly drops below freezing, the binder becomes brittle and can crack, leading to roadway damage. To improve asphalt's flexibility and durability at subzero temperatures, Fini and colleagues developed a sustainable and rubbery binder from algae oil.
Fini's previous studies showed that oil extracted from algae can make a bitumen-like product that is particularly durable at low temperatures. Continuing this work, Fini and colleagues used computer models to evaluate oils from four algae species for their abilities to produce bitumen-like products that mixed well with asphalt solids and retained functionality in freezing temps. Of the four algal species, oil from the freshwater green microalga Haematococcus pluvialis appeared to impart the most resistance to permanent deformation under simulated traffic-induced stress, as well as enhanced resistance to moisture-induced damage.
In laboratory demonstrations that mimicked road traffic and freezing cycles, H. pluvialis algae-asphalt samples created by the researchers showed up to a 70% improvement in deformation recovery compared to pavement made with a crude oil-based binder. In addition to strengthening roads, the team estimates that substituting 1% of the petroleum-based binder with algae-based binder would cut net carbon emissions from asphalt by 4.5%. At around 22% algae-based binder, asphalt could potentially become carbon neutral. The researchers say this approach paves the way toward high-performance, cost-effective and sustainable pavement infrastructure.
Journal Reference: Mohammadjavad Kazemi, Farideh Pahlavan, Andrew J. Schmidt, et al., ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering 2025 13 (45), 19496-19510 https://doi.org/10.1021/acssuschemeng.5c03860
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