An international team of scientists from Sweden, India, the US, and the UK has developed a method to search for advanced extraterrestrial megastructures, known as Dyson spheres. A Dyson sphere, a concept proposed by physicist Freeman J. Dyson in 1960, is a hypothetical solar-system-sized structure built to harness the energy of a star, indicating a highly advanced civilization.
The researchers, led by Matías Suazo of Uppsala University in Sweden, have identified seven potential Dyson spheres out of millions of space objects. Their project, named Hephaistos, involved analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia map of stars, the 2MASS infrared astronomical survey, and NASA’s WISE infrared astronomy space telescope.
They aimed to detect technosignatures, particularly excess infrared radiation that partially completed Dyson spheres would emit due to waste heat.
The team filtered around 5 million sources to compile a catalog of potential Dyson spheres. They looked for objects displaying anomalous infrared excess that could not be attributed to known natural sources, such as nebulae or background galaxies. Through this process, they narrowed the list to 368 sources, further reducing it to seven after excluding blends, irregulars, and nebulae.
These seven candidates are M-type (red dwarf) stars with unexplained infrared excess, which the scientists believe might indicate the presence of Dyson spheres. However, they acknowledge other possible explanations, such as warm debris disks, although these are rare around M-dwarfs.
The researchers emphasize that additional analyses, including follow-up optical spectroscopy, are necessary to confirm the true nature of these sources — They conclude that while their findings are intriguing, further investigation is required to determine whether these candidates are indeed evidence of advanced alien civilizations.
Blue Origin is preparing to send a crew of private astronauts to suborbital space, finally resuming its space tourism program on New Shepard after nearly two years of it being grounded.
Slack trains machine-learning models on user messages, files and other content without explicit permission. The training is opt-out, meaning your private data will be leeched by default. Making matters worse, you’ll have to ask your organization’s Slack admin (human resources, IT, etc.) to email the company to ask it to stop. (You can’t do it yourself.) Welcome to the dark side of the new AI training data gold rush.
Corey Quinn, an executive at DuckBill Group, spotted the policy in a blurb in Slack’s Privacy Principles and posted about it on X (viaPCMag). The section reads (emphasis ours), “To develop AI/ML models, our systems analyze Customer Data (e.g. messages, content, and files) submitted to Slack as well as Other Information (including usage information) as defined in our Privacy Policy and in your customer agreement.”
The opt-out process requires you to do all the work to protect your data. According to the privacy notice, “To opt out, please have your Org or Workspace Owners or Primary Owner contact our Customer Experience team at feedback@slack.com with your Workspace/Org URL and the subject line ‘Slack Global model opt-out request.’ We will process your request and respond once the opt out has been completed.”
I’m sorry Slack, you’re doing fucking WHAT with user DMs, messages, files, etc? I’m positive I’m not reading this correctly. pic.twitter.com/6ORZNS2RxC
The company replied to Quinn’s message on X: “To clarify, Slack has platform-level machine-learning models for things like channel and emoji recommendations and search results. And yes, customers can exclude their data from helping train those (non-generative) ML models.”
How long ago the Salesforce-owned company snuck the tidbit into its terms is unclear. It’s misleading, at best, to say customers can opt out when “customers” doesn’t include employees working within an organization. They have to ask whoever handles Slack access at their business to do that — and I hope they will oblige.
Inconsistencies in Slack’s privacy policies add to the confusion. One section states, “When developing Al/ML models or otherwise analyzing Customer Data, Slack can’t access the underlying content. We have various technical measures preventing this from occurring.” However, the machine-learning model training policy seemingly contradicts this statement, leaving plenty of room for confusion.
In addition, Slack’s webpage marketing its premium generative AI tools reads, “Work without worry. Your data is your data. We don’t use it to train Slack AI. Everything runs on Slack’s secure infrastructure, meeting the same compliance standards as Slack itself.”
In this case, the company is speaking of its premium generative AI tools, separate from the machine learning models it’s training on without explicit permission. However, as PCMag notes, implying that all of your data is safe from AI training is, at best, a highly misleading statement when the company apparently gets to pick and choose which AI models that statement covers.
Engadget tried to contact Slack via multiple channels but didn’t receive a response at the time of publication. We’ll update this story if we hear back.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/yuck-slack-has-been-scanning-your-messages-to-train-its-ai-models-181918245.html?src=rss
It should be a given any new series needs time to find its footing, even when it’s a revival of an already-running hit. The first three episodes of “new” Doctor Who have been fun, but not without their ownidiosyncrasies that made them hard to love. Now it’s time for Steven Moffat, the series’ greatest 21st century writer, to show what this new season can do. There’s the usual degree of showboating and cleverness, but it’s hard to deny the man’s genius when he pens the first genuine classic of the Disney+ era. Bloody hell.
“Boom” thrusts the Doctor and Ruby into the smallest corner of a war, and lets it play out in microcosm. This is an angry story about how money, power and cruelty make people inhuman, and is the sort of episode Doctor Who excels at. This story makes no bones about the pointlessness of war and why money is the engine that keeps it going. Its framing may be modern — there’s one too many uses of the word “algorithm” here — but its central thesis is timeless.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
In a wasteland battlefield on Kastarian 3, two militarized Anglican clerics are walking back to base. Carson (Majid Mahdizadeh-Valoujerdy) is leading his friend, John Francis Vater (Joe Anderson) who has been blinded in the fighting, an injury that’ll take four weeks to recover from. In the distance, they spot an ambulance but seem afraid of it and look to go the long way around it. Carson loses his footing and slips into a small crater, activating a land mine that instantly obliterates him. The disturbance summons the ambulance, a tank-tracked device with a large screen with an apparently friendly avatar (Susan Twist) which injects its tendrils into Vater, identifying his injury. It decides that four weeks is an unacceptable amount of time for recovery and terminates him instead. His scream is heard by the Doctor, who sprints out of the TARDIS to help but winds up putting one foot on the exact same mine that killed Carson.
Ruby arrives to find the Doctor frozen in place, asking her to describe what he’s standing on: A Villengard mine. It’s an anti-personnel explosive made by a notorious weapons manufacturer that Moffat has referenced several times before. The Doctor asks Ruby to find something heavy for him to hold, so that he can shift his weight and put his foot down without triggering the mine. What she finds is Vater’s compacted remains bolted to an AI canister containing a simulacrum of Vater. The Doctor asks Ruby to throw it to him, but she instead opts to walk within the blast range and hand it over. It affirms the dynamic that as Gatwa’s Doctor has vacated the role of big-chested hero, Ruby has stepped in to fill the void.
The mine is, however, unsure if the Doctor is a viable target, and so remains frozen on the edge of activation. Villengard’s weapons are notoriously vicious and the company has created a warfare algorithm to limit the number of bodies in the battle zone at one time, while also dragging wars on profitably and indefinitely. It gives the company license to slay the wounded rather than spending the cash to cure them.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
Before he died, Vater was speaking to his daughter Splice (Caoilnn Springall), who was brought along to the war as there was no-one else to look after her. While her father was on patrol, she had been left in the care of Mundy (Varada Sethu), a lower-ranking soldier in the army. But she slips her minder to reach the last GPS-tagged location of her father. She arrives, triggering the hologram attached to Vater’s remains that delivers his valediction to his daughter.
Soon after, Mundy tracks down her wayward ward and is able to explain the rest of the plot to the TARDIS crew. The Anglicans have been fighting a war for six months against an enemy that’s never seen or heard. Mundy and the Doctor spar on the nature of religion and how faith — in more than just a higher power — helps create willing material for the meat grinder of war. Mundy’s skeptical about the Doctor and Ruby but is quickly convinced when she scans the Doctor to see he’s not just going to explode on the mine. As a complex space-time event, the mine’s activation won’t just kill him but destroy half of the planet. It gets worse: The mine is going to time out and go off anyway after its stuttering activation.
Having detected the fracas, an ambulance arrives and jams its menacing tendrils into the Doctor. Ruby, again refusing to allow anyone else control the narrative, grabs Mundy’s rifle and tries to create a distraction to no effect. Mundy tells Ruby to shoot her using the rife’s lowest setting which would draw the ambulance without being fatal. But, as Ruby takes aim, Canterbury (Bhav Joshi) arrives just in time to misappraise the scene and shoot Ruby to defend his fellow soldier. Ruby, on the edge of death, generates more snow but is fading fast
The Doctor has worked out the problem, which is that there’s no enemy on the planet at all — it’s barren. Villengard’s algorithm is sending soldiers out to die with the traps they themselves bought and probably placed. The only solution is to surrender but that’s not something Mundy is willing, or empowered, to do, so the Doctor needs to find proof to show to the senior cleric. He uses the AI of Vater, appealing to his duty as a father and whatever humanity is left inside to search through the military database to find evidence there is no enemy at all.
More ambulances arrive in an attempt to overwhelm the people in the crater, looming down on them all. As Mundy and Canterbury speak, the latter is suddenly minced for reasons that boil down to… we’re in the final few minutes of the episode. In the chaos, it looks as if all is lost, but as the Villengard AI projects a hologram, it’s quickly taken over by Vater, whose love for his daughter has hopefully triggered some sort of feedback loop, ending the war and disabling the mine. As the war is ended, Ruby is resurrected by the ambulance and the four survivors are able to enjoy the beautiful view in the skies over Kastarian 3.
There’s even time for the Doctor to mention a “grumpy old man” who told him once that “what will survive of us is love.” That’s a reference to notoriously acerbic poet Philip Larkin’s work An Arundel Tomb, referencing a long-decayed sculpture of two people lying in state. The Doctor mentions Splice may have a bright future ahead of her, and gets ready to head off to their next adventure.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
There’s no good place to address this later, so I’ll add that Varada Sethu has also been cast as a new companion for Doctor Who’s second season. Initial rumors suggested she was replacing Millie Gibson but the BBC said last month the trio would travel together. It’s not uncommon for an actor to play a minor role in one episode and then return as a member of the core cast. Peter Capaldi, Karen Gillan, Freema Agyeman and Colin Baker all played one-off roles before joining as a Doctor or as a companion. I have no idea if Mundy will return, or if Sethu will play a new character, but I’m not sure Mundy was a compelling enough character to warrant a revisit.
Bad Wolf / BBC Studios
“Boom” is a masterclass in perpetually-building tension in a way that Doctor Who has rarely attempted. I wouldn’t want to experience this level of stress every single week, but it’s a wonderful change from the status quo. The one thing that doesn’t quite work with the episode is the uneven pacing. For all the effort put into building the tension, the ending just seems to happen.
I feel like Moffat was straining against the running time, since the last few minutes are just dashed off without as much attention as I’d have liked. Interestingly, the other times Moffat has written stories that are this bleak, like “The Empty Child / The Doctor Dances” and “World Enough and Time / The Doctor Falls,” they were both two-parters. I’m not sure “Boom” needed 90 minutes, but an extra 10 or so might have helped things breathe.
Despite being rooted to one spot for most of the story, Gatwa’s Doctor still commands every frame he occupies. There’s enough chemistry between him and Millie Gibson that the pair’s interactions are entirely believable. The rest of the cast, however, don’t really get as much time to shine, given the limited focus and the stock roles they play in the narrative.
It’s entirely in keeping with Moffat’s style that he’d come back to a show, now equipped with a Disney-sized budget, only to make an episode set in one location. As a writer, he’s always enjoyed tying one hand behind his back and then allowing those restrictions to force him to be better. It was his Swiss watch plotting, smart storylines and snappy dialog that has always ensured his episodes are events. History has also silenced his critics: Last year, Doctor Who Magazine polled readers to rank every episode of the show made. Staggeringly, of the top 10, Moffat was credited with five, knocking Robert Holmes, the show’s greatest writer, off his perch.
And, as I said at the top, “Boom” stands proud as the first bona fide classic of the Disney+ era.
Susan Twist Corner
This week, Susan Twist played the avatar of the sinister Villengard ambulances that roamed the battlefield. Several times, the Doctor appealed to Vater’s AI homunculus on the fact that they are, or were, both fathers. If it isn’t clear, I think the show really wants the audience to know that the Doctor is a father with a child, whereabouts unknown. The hacky premise would be that it’s Susan who has taken the mantle of “The One Who Waits,” or that she’s somehow Ruby. Yeugh.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/doctor-who-boom-review-all-hail-the-conquering-hero-000001420.html?src=rss
An international team of scientists from Sweden, India, the US, and the UK has developed a method to search for advanced extraterrestrial megastructures, known as Dyson spheres. A Dyson sphere, a concept proposed by physicist Freeman J. Dyson in 1960, is a hypothetical solar-system-sized structure built to harness the energy of a star, indicating a highly advanced civilization.
The researchers, led by Matías Suazo of Uppsala University in Sweden, have identified seven potential Dyson spheres out of millions of space objects. Their project, named Hephaistos, involved analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia map of stars, the 2MASS infrared astronomical survey, and NASA’s WISE infrared astronomy space telescope.
They aimed to detect technosignatures, particularly excess infrared radiation that partially completed Dyson spheres would emit due to waste heat.
The team filtered around 5 million sources to compile a catalog of potential Dyson spheres. They looked for objects displaying anomalous infrared excess that could not be attributed to known natural sources, such as nebulae or background galaxies. Through this process, they narrowed the list to 368 sources, further reducing it to seven after excluding blends, irregulars, and nebulae.
These seven candidates are M-type (red dwarf) stars with unexplained infrared excess, which the scientists believe might indicate the presence of Dyson spheres. However, they acknowledge other possible explanations, such as warm debris disks, although these are rare around M-dwarfs.
The researchers emphasize that additional analyses, including follow-up optical spectroscopy, are necessary to confirm the true nature of these sources — They conclude that while their findings are intriguing, further investigation is required to determine whether these candidates are indeed evidence of advanced alien civilizations.
If you’re looking for booze with an extra bit of buzz, you’re in luck. Microbiologists in the U.K. have just created beer using yeast sourced from the guts of Africanized honey bees, a.k.a. killer bees.
Springtime means it’s keynote season in the tech world, and in 2024, that means “time to show off your AI bona fides.” Google and OpenAI have already revealed big new upgrades to Gemini and ChatGPT this month, and now it’s time for Microsoft Build. The tech giant’s annual developer conference kicks off with a keynote slated for Tuesday, May 21 at 12 PM ET/9 AM PT, and you can watch the entire event live on YouTube (which is also embedded below) and at Microsoft’s site (registration required). What about that Microsoft Surface event you may have heard about? Well, that’s actually happening a day earlier: Monday, May 20. Confused? Don’t worry, here’s the tl;dr version of what to expect, summarized from our more in-depth What to expect from Microsoft Build 2024: The Surface event, Windows 11 and AI.
New Microsoft Surface products expected: Monday, May 20
One day before the official Build keynote, Microsoft is hosting a more intimate event for journalists at which it plans to reveal its “AI vision across hardware and software.” That event won’t be livestreamed, but Engadget will have full coverage as it unfolds.
The rumor mill strongly suggests that we’ll see new consumer-targeted Surface PCs. And unlike the enterprise-centric models like the Surface Pro 10 and Surface Laptop 6 introduced back in March, these new models may be powered by updated Qualcomm Snapdragon chips – Arm chips that run cooler and offer far better battery life than their Intel and AMD equivalents, but often at the expense of reduced app compatibility and processing speeds.
Microsoft Build keynote: Tuesday, May 21
The thought is that Microsoft is following the template that its fellow tech giants have demonstrated this season: get the hardware announcements out of the way first, clearing the runway for an all-AI showcase at the developer conference. That’s what happened with Apple and Google in recent weeks, as they respectively revealed new iPads weeks before the WWDC event in June, and a new Pixel 8a phone in the days leading up to Google I/O.
What’s that mean for Tuesday? Last year’s Build announcements give you the general flavor: Microsoft’s Copilot AI (possibly with more impressive OpenAI-powered smarts) integrated into even more of Microsoft’s DNA, likely both at the device level (Windows) all the way up to the company’s massive cloud infrastructure.
While much of Tuesday’s news will be through the prism of Microsoft’s developer community, we’re looking forward to giving you the big picture on what it all means for end users – and how it dovetails with the hardware announcements we expect to hit on Monday. Stay tuned.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/how-to-watch-the-microsoft-build-2024-keynote-live-on-may-21-003204596.html?src=rss
If you’re looking for booze with an extra bit of buzz, you’re in luck. Microbiologists in the U.K. have just created beer using yeast sourced from the guts of Africanized honey bees, a.k.a. killer bees.
If you’re looking for booze with an extra bit of buzz, you’re in luck. Microbiologists in the U.K. have just created beer using yeast sourced from the guts of Africanized honey bees, a.k.a. killer bees.
If you’re looking for booze with an extra bit of buzz, you’re in luck. Microbiologists in the U.K. have just created beer using yeast sourced from the guts of Africanized honey bees, a.k.a. killer bees.
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