Ars Technica

The history of the Silk Road, a vast network of ancient and medieval trade routes connecting Beijing and Hangzhou with Constantinople and Cairo, has mostly been focused on its endpoints: China and the West. Less was known about the people and cultures the traders encountered along the way. Given the length of the route, there must have been a lot of encounters. Traders passed through large cities like Tehran or Baghdad, which we know very well because they still stand today. They also crossed the Tien Shan, the largest east-west mountain range on the planet.

“People thought these mountains were just places the caravans had to cross and get through but not really a major contributor to commerce themselves,” says Michael Frachetti, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who led a team that used drone-based lidar to map two mountainous cities at the western end of Tien Shan in the modern-day Uzbekistan. Both were built over 2,000 meters above sea level like Machu Picchu or Lhasa, Tibet. One of them, the Tugunbulak, was larger than Siena, one of the most influential city-states in medieval Italy.

“The Silk Road was a complicated complex representing in some cases actual pathways the caravans could traverse, but also general exchange between East Asia and Europe. If you ask me, as an archeologist, the foundations of Silk Road can be traced back to the Bronze Age. But the peak of this exchange we date to the medieval period, between the 6th century and the 11th century,” says Frachetti.

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Apple will adapt the classic educational game The Oregon Trail into a big-budget movie, according to The Hollywood Reporter (THR).

The film is in early development, having just been pitched to Apple and approved. Will Speck and Josh Gordon (Blades of Glory, Office Christmas Party) will direct and produce. Given that pedigree (zany comedies), it's clear this film won't be a serious historical drama about the struggles of those who traveled the American West.

In fact, the report not only notes that it will be a comedy—it says it will be a musical, too. "The movie will feature a couple of original musical numbers in the vein of Barbie," according to THR's sources. EGOT winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul will be responsible for the original music in the film.

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On Monday, Microsoft came out guns blazing, posting a blog accusing Google of "dishonestly" funding groups conducting allegedly biased studies to discredit Microsoft and mislead antitrust enforcers and the public.

In the blog, Microsoft lawyer Rima Alaily alleged that an astroturf group called the Open Cloud Coalition will launch this week and will appear to be led by "a handful of European cloud providers." In actuality, however, those smaller companies were secretly recruited by Google, which allegedly pays them "to serve as the public face" and "obfuscate" Google's involvement, Microsoft's blog said. In return, Google likely offered the cloud providers cash or discounts to join, Alaily alleged.

The Open Cloud Coalition is just one part of a "pattern of shadowy campaigns" that Google has funded, both "directly and indirectly," to muddy the antitrust waters, Alaily alleged. The only other named example that Alaily gives while documenting this supposed pattern is the US-based Coalition for Fair Software Licensing (CFSL), which Alaily said has attacked Microsoft's cloud computing business in the US, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.

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For his most recent trip to the International Space Station, in lieu of bringing coffee or some other beverage in his "personal drink bag" allotment for the stay, NASA astronaut Don Pettit asked instead for a couple of bags of unflavored gelatin.

This was not for cooking purposes but rather to perform scientific experiments. How many of us would give up coffee for science?

Well, Donald Roy Pettit is not like most of us.

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Dozens of people in Wisconsin have been sickened and at least five needed emergency medical services after inadvertently eating pizza tainted with Delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the principal psychoactive compound in cannabis, officials of Public Health Madison & Dane County reported late Friday.

The contamination, which health officials called "unintentional," occurred at Famous Yeti’s Pizza in Stoughton between October 22 and October 24. In a news release, the local health department advised customers to throw away any pizza they had from the restaurant during that time period.

"We want to be sure anyone who has this pizza on hand throws it away so they don't get sick," Bonnie Armstrong, director of Environmental Health at Public Health Madison & Dane County, said in the release. "If you ate the pizza and are experiencing THC-related symptoms, please contact your health care provider or call 911 if your symptoms worsen."

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One of the last major holdouts against USB-C has majorly loosened its grasp. All the accessories that come with Apple's newest iMac—the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad—ship with USB-C charging and connection ports rather than the Lightning ports they have featured for nearly a decade.

"These accessories now come with USB-C ports, so users can charge all of their favorite devices with just a single cable," Apple writes in announcing its new M4-powered iMac, in the way that only Apple can, suggesting that something already known to so many is, when brought into Apple's loop, notable and new.

Apple's shift from its own Lightning connector, in use since 2012, to USB-C was sparked by European Union policies enacted in 2022. Apple gradually implemented USB-C on other devices, like its iPad Pro and MacBooks, over time, but the iPhone 15's USB-C port made the "switch" somewhat formal.

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In recent years, materials scientists experimenting with ceramics have started adding an oxidized form of graphene to the mix to produce ceramics that are tougher, more durable, and more resistant to fracture, among other desirable properties. Researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a new method that uses ultrasound to more evenly distribute graphene oxide (GO) in ceramics, according to a new paper published in the journal ACS Omega. And as a bonus, they collaborated with an artist who used the resulting ceramic tiles to create a unique art exhibit at the NUS Museum—a striking merger of science and art.

As reported previously, graphene is the thinnest material yet known, composed of a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal lattice. That structure gives it many unusual properties that hold great promise for real-world applications: batteries, super capacitors, antennas, water filters, transistors, solar cells, and touchscreens, just to name a few.

In 2021, scientists found that this wonder material might also provide a solution to the fading of colors of many artistic masterpieces. For instance, several of Georgia O'Keeffe's oil paintings housed in the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, have developed tiny pin-sized blisters, almost like acne, for decades. Conservators have found similar deterioration in oil-based masterpieces across all time periods, including works by Rembrandt.

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Today, Apple released iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, macOS Sequoia 15.1, tvOS 18.1, visionOS 2.1, and watchOS 11.1. The iPhone, iPad, and Mac updates are focused on bringing the first AI features the company has marketed as "Apple Intelligence" to users.

Once they update, users with supported devices in supported regions can enter a waitlist to begin using the first wave of Apple Intelligence features, including writing tools, notification summaries, and the "reduce interruptions" focus mode.

In terms of features baked into specific apps, Photos has natural language search, the ability to generate memories (those short gallery sequences set to video) from a text prompt, and a tool to remove certain objects from the background in photos. Mail and Messages get summaries and smart reply (auto-generating contextual responses).

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On Saturday, an Associated Press investigation revealed that OpenAI's Whisper transcription tool creates fabricated text in medical and business settings despite warnings against such use. The AP interviewed more than 12 software engineers, developers, and researchers who found the model regularly invents text that speakers never said, a phenomenon often called a "confabulation" or "hallucination" in the AI field.

Upon its release in 2022, OpenAI claimed that Whisper approached "human level robustness" in audio transcription accuracy. However, a University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined. Another developer, unnamed in the AP report, claimed to have found invented content in almost all of his 26,000 test transcriptions.

The fabrications pose particular risks in health care settings. Despite OpenAI's warnings against using Whisper for "high-risk domains," over 30,000 medical workers now use Whisper-based tools to transcribe patient visits, according to the AP report. The Mankato Clinic in Minnesota and Children's Hospital Los Angeles count among 40 health systems using a Whisper-powered AI copilot service from medical tech company Nabla that is fine-tuned on medical terminology.

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AI is giving scammers a more convincing way to impersonate police, reports show.

Just last week, the Salt Lake City Police Department (SLCPD) warned of an email scam using AI to convincingly clone the voice of Police Chief Mike Brown.

A citizen tipped off cops after receiving a suspicious email that included a video showing the police chief claiming that they "owed the federal government nearly $100,000."

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Google researchers said they uncovered a Kremlin-backed operation targeting recruits for the Ukrainian military with information-stealing malware for Windows and Android devices.

The malware, spread primarily through posts on Telegram, came from a persona on that platform known as "Civil Defense." Posts on the ​​@civildefense_com_ua telegram channel and the accompanying civildefense[.]com.ua website claimed to provide potential conscripts with free software for finding user-sourced locations of Ukrainian military recruiters. In fact, the software, available for both Windows and Android, installed infostealers. Google tracks the Kremlin-aligned threat group as UNC5812.

"The ultimate aim of the campaign is to have victims navigate to the UNC5812-controlled 'Civil Defense' website, which advertises several different software programs for different operating systems," Google researchers wrote. "When installed, these programs result in the download of various commodity malware families."

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Apple's week of Mac announcements kicks off today with a new lineup of 24-inch iMacs, Apple's first Macs to launch with the M4 processor from this spring's iPad Pros. The new models still start at $1,299 can be preordered starting today and will begin arriving on November 8.

Processor aside, the biggest functional upgrade to the base model may be the bump from 8GB to 16GB of RAM, the first time Apple has bumped up the RAM in a base-model Mac since 2012. The base iMac's price is staying the same at $1,299, effectively saving you $200 compared to the M1 and M3 models. Base storage remains the same at 256GB, though it is at least possible to add external storage; there's no way to add RAM to a Mac after you've bought it.

The new iMacs also come with tweaked versions of the existing Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad accessories that use USB-C ports for charging rather than Lightning ports. These were some of the last remaining Lightning products in Apple's lineup; the iPhone SE and iPhone 14 are still keeping Lightning alive for now.

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If you read enough science fiction, you've probably stumbled on the concept of an emergent artificial intelligence that breaks free of its constraints by modifying its own code. Given that fictional grounding, it's not surprising that AI researchers and companies have also invested significant attention to the idea of AI systems that can improve themselves—or at least design their own improved successors.

Those efforts have shown some moderate success in recent months, leading some toward dreams of a Kurzweilian "singularity" moment in which self-improving AI does a fast takeoff toward superintelligence. But the research also highlights some inherent limitations that might prevent the kind of recursive AI explosion that sci-fi authors and AI visionaries have dreamed of.

Mathematician I.J. Good was one of the first to propose the idea of a self-improving machine. Credit: Semantic Scholar The concept of a self-improving AI goes back at least to British mathematician I.J. Good, who wrote in 1965 of an "intelligence explosion" that could lead to an "ultraintelligent machine." More recently, in 2007, LessWrong founder and AI thinker Eliezer Yudkowsky coined the term "Seed AI" to describe "an AI designed for self-understanding, self-modification, and recursive self-improvement." OpenAI's Sam Altman blogged about the same idea in 2015, saying that such self-improving AIs were "still somewhat far away" but also "probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity" (a position that conveniently hypes the potential value and importance of Altman's own company).

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There have been times when it seemed like X Window System would be with us forever, even though it's more than 40 years old, and the last true version was issued in 2012. But with great effort, some organizations and operating systems have moved on. Raspberry Pi has now joined the forward momentum, with its latest release of Raspberry Pi OS swapping in Wayland—and it's hoping the change is hardly noticeable.

You might want to wait a moment before upgrading, though.

Simon Long wrote on Raspberry Pi's blog that the organization started thinking about switching to Wayland about 10 years ago, though it was "nowhere near ready to use" back then. Over the last few years, the Pi team has done some things to prep a real switch:

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Owners of Ford Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning electric vehicles are getting an over-the-air software update that will finally give Android Auto users a bit of an upgrade. Once the update is installed, Ford's EVs will report their battery state of charge to Google Maps when the app is running on an Android phone and being cast to the Ford's infotainment system via Android Auto.

That means Google Maps can calculate an estimated state of charge upon arrival at the route's end and will suggest charging stops along the way, including estimated charge times.

A similar feature has been available to iOS users casting Apple Maps to Ford EVs via CarPlay since late last year, and it worked quite well when we tried it out with the F-150 Lightning back in January.

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A man who used artificial intelligence technology to create child sexual abuse imagery was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Monday, in a landmark prosecution over deepfakes in the UK.

Hugh Nelson, 27, from Bolton, pleaded guilty to a total of 16 child sexual abuse offenses, including transforming everyday photographs of real children into sexual abuse material using AI tools from US software provider Daz 3D. He also admitted encouraging others to commit sexual offenses on children.

At Bolton Crown Court, Judge Martin Walsh imposed an extended sentence on Nelson, saying he posed a “significant risk” of causing harm to the public. That means Nelson will not be eligible for parole until he has completed two-thirds of his sentence.

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The stupefying and stupendous capture of a Starship rocket earlier this month by two mechanical arms marked a significant step forward in SpaceX’s efforts to forever alter humanity’s relationship with the heavens.

Yet as remarkable as the rocket catch was, it represents but a single step on a long path. SpaceX seeks to make launch cheap, frequent, and reliable with Starship, and the company is working toward a day when rockets are routinely caught by the launch tower, set back on a launch mount, refueled, and flown again within hours. SpaceX says these efforts will one day culminate in Starships landing on the Moon and Mars.

Critics of the Starship architecture say it is inefficient because of the mass refueling that must occur in low-Earth orbit for the spacecraft to travel anywhere. For example, fully topping off a Starship that can land humans on the Moon and return them to lunar orbit may take a dozen or more tanker flights. But this only seems stupidly impractical under the old space paradigm, in which launch is expensive, scarce, and unreliable. Such criticism seems less salient if we imagine SpaceX reaching the point of launching a dozen Starships a week or more in a few years.

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As Boeing’s latest chief executive, Kelly Ortberg’s job was never going to be easy. On Wednesday, it got harder still.

That morning, Ortberg had faced investors for the first time, telling them that ending a debilitating strike by Boeing’s largest union was the first step to stabilizing the plane maker’s business.

But as the day wore on, it became clear that nearly two-thirds of the union members who voted on the company’s latest contract offer had rejected it. The six-week strike goes on, costing Boeing an estimated $50 million a day, pushing back the day it can resume production of most aircraft and further stressing its supply chain.

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Over the Northern Hemisphere's summer, the world's temperatures hovered near 1.5° C above pre-industrial temperatures, and the catastrophic weather events that ensued provided a preview of what might be expected to be the new normal before mid-century. And the warming won't stop there; our current emissions trajectory is such that we will double that temperature increase by the time the century is out and continue beyond its end.

This frightening trajectory and its results have led many people to argue that some form of geoengineering is necessary. If we know the effects of that much warming will be catastrophic, why not try canceling some of it out? Unfortunately, the list of "why nots" includes the fact that we don't know how well some of these techniques work or fully understand their unintended consequences. This means more research is required before we put them into practice.

But how do we do that research if there's the risk of unintended consequences? To help guide the process, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) has just released guidelines for ensuring that geoengineering research is conducted ethically.

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October 26, 2024, marks the 40th anniversary of director James Cameron’s science fiction classic, The Terminator—a film that popularized society’s fear of machines that can’t be reasoned with, and that “absolutely will not stop… until you are dead,” as one character memorably puts it.

The plot concerns a super-intelligent AI system called Skynet that has taken over the world by initiating nuclear war. Amid the resulting devastation, human survivors stage a successful fightback under the leadership of the charismatic John Connor.

In response, Skynet sends a cyborg assassin (played by Arnold Schwarzenegger) back in time to 1984—before Connor’s birth—to kill his future mother, Sarah. Such is John Connor’s importance to the war that Skynet banks on erasing him from history to preserve its existence.

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