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Vocab Used : computational, technique, disputed, rigor, linguistics, proponents

The computational technique used in the new analysis is hotly disputed among linguists. But its proponents say it promises to bring more quantitative rigor to the field, and could possibly push key dates further into the past, much as radiocarbon dating did in the field of archaeology.

Thanks to a bevy of easily accessible online tools, just about anyone with a computer can now pump out, with the click of a button, artificial-intelligence-generated images, text, audio and videos that convincingly resemble those created by humans. One big result is an online content crisis, an enormous and growing glut of unchecked, machine-made material riddled with potentially dangerous errors, misinformation and criminal scams. This situation leaves security specialists, regulators and everyday people scrambling for a way to tell AI-generated products apart from human work. Current AI-detection tools are deeply unreliable. Even OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, recently took its AI text identifier offline because the tool was so inaccurate.

That’s an interesting finding! It seems like the study suggests that this new machine-learning tool has the ability to detect when chemistry papers are authored by a chatbot like ChatGPT. This advancement, as outlined in the study published on November 6 in Cell Reports Physical Science, showcases the potential for specialized classifiers to outperform existing AI detectors in distinguishing papers generated by AI text generators. This could be a valuable tool for academic publishers in maintaining the integrity of scientific literature.

A tricky term, morality can’t be neatly defined. This is partially because morality is broad; our moral values often extend beyond compassion and fairness and include group-focused concerns of loyalty and obedience. Defining morality is also hard because people are “moral acrobats” who can easily convince themselves of the righteousness of their actions. Most people genuinely believe that they are morally above average; this includes people we would normally find less moral, such as prisoners and perpetrators of genocide. In lieu of a clear definition, I use the word “moral” to mean the mental processes that are engaged when people think about the world in terms of good and evil.

Billionaires who grew up reading science-fiction classics published 30 to 50 years ago are affecting our life today in almost too many ways to list: Elon Musk wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos prefers 1970s plans for giant orbital habitats.  Peter Thiel is funding research into artificial intelligence, life extension and “seasteading.” Mark Zuckerberg has blown $10 billion trying to create the Metaverse from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash. And Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has published a “techno-optimist manifesto” promoting a bizarre accelerationist philosophy that calls for an unregulated, solely capitalist future of pure technological chaos.

In 1998, Viagra received FDA approval. A financial bonanza followed for its manufacturer, Pfizer, and later for its competitors. Although initially approved—and marketed—specifically for erectile dysfunction, Pfizer and later competitors used aggressive targeted marketing to catapult the drug from an erectile dysfunction treatment to a lifestyle pill pocketed by nervous 30-year-olds heading out on Internet dates.

When she began the job, she called a morning meeting in Muooni with local stakeholders. The village administrator and elders spread the word. Several dozen people toting plastic chairs gathered at the Muooni River, where mining was rampant, and sat in the shade. Yusuf had rehearsed her spoken Kikamba, the local language. Although she had taken part in stakeholder meetings in her fisheries job, she had never led one like this. “The entire county is watching,” she thought at the time. “I have to bring it forward.”

They turned around and began to creep back down the rough road, but as soon as the gendarme was out of sight they turned off and snuck along a hidden side of the ridge. About 400 meters further they stopped and cut the engine. Abderrahmane walked quietly to the crest of the bluff to peer down, keeping low to avoid being seen. Despite all his research into illegal sand mines, he was unprepared for the scene below. Half a dozen dump trucks scattered across a deeply pitted moonscape were filled high with brown sand. Just beyond lay the light blue sea. Abderrahmane was stunned by the “major disfiguration” of the dunes, he told me later on a video call. “It was a shock.”

Now an abandoned gold mine in South Dakota is allowing the deepest look yet into this secret world of buried biodiversity. In new research published in the journal Environmental Microbiology, a genetic analysis of the mine’s microbes from as deep as 1.5 kilometers beneath the surface reveals a schism in survival strategies. Some microbes have big, bulky genomes that prep them to digest any nutrient that might come their way. Others are so genetically streamlined that they can’t even make some of life’s fundamental building blocks and instead rely on scavenging them or living symbiotically with other species.