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Exposure to toxic metals like cadmium has been associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes such as miscarriage, preterm birth and low birth weight. Because these effects are difficult and ethically challenging to study directly in pregnant women, how such exposures affect pregnancy has remained poorly understood.

More than 100 campaign groups will join together in 15 countries this week to call for a halt to major AI projects Protesters across Europe are planning two days of action against datacentres this week with demonstrations taking place in 15 countries. More than 100 groups are joining together for the “Stop Dirty Data Centres” events on Friday and Saturday. They are calling for a moratorium on large projects, citing environmental and social costs that “we can no longer afford”. Continue reading...

Discord is finally giving up on Electron, the cross-platform framework that lets developers build desktop apps using web technologies. Electron web apps are notoriously heavy on system resources, and Discord is now moving its desktop app fully to Rust - a modern programming language designed for speed and memory safety. "We've been early adopters of […]

Opposition to data centers was part of midterm races across the U.S., with campaigns featuring them in hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of TV ads and many winners pledging to clamp down on the energy-hungry behemoths

Samsung showed off its first Android XR glasses at its Galaxy Unpacked event back in July, and a recent report claimed they would go on sale in mid-December. Now we know when you'll be able to pre-order them, and the news doesn't come from Samsung or Google, but from Warby Parker, which designed some of the frames. In its third-quarter results today, Dave Gilboa, Warby Parker's Co-Founder and Co-CEO, said that the company will begin accepting pre-orders for its first Intelligent Eyewear collection on November 12. On the earnings call, the company added that it will unveil the full...

Perplexity is taking on OpenAI and Anthropic with its own work-focused AI agents. The startup's new always-on "Teammates" can take on multiple roles within a workspace, while pulling existing projects, skills, and memory from the Perplexity tools you already use. Teammates integrate with Perplexity Computer, an AI system that can deploy agents on your device […]

Major Hollywood studios have gone from banning generative AI outright to shunning visual effects vendors that lack an AI plan, according to Daniel Seah, CEO of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Avatar” VFX house Weta FX. Seah spoke to press in Taipei on Friday, after Weta FX signed a partnership with the Taiwan Creative […]

Around 450 million metric tons of plastics are produced worldwide each year. The major share of this sheer volume is used only once and then winds up in an incinerator or in landfills. This also applies to so-called polyolefins, which include polyethylene (PE) and polypropylene (PP). As packaging materials and films, they account for approximately half of our plastic consumption.

Alcon Entertainment had accused the studio of helping Elon Musk create unlicensed promotional material using an artificial intelligence image generator. It continues to pursue claims against him and Tesla.

Albanese should tread carefully as he struggles to make case for how the new technology will benefit ordinary voters Get our daily political email, free app or daily news podcast When will Australia see the benefits of the AI and datacentre boom? So far, all we’ve seen is the possibility of changes to copyright which would hurt Australian creatives, special rules about power and water use, and the threat of mass displacement or replacement of workers, with the trade-off being a mere 10% chance of human extinction. Now add the Reserve Bank’s assessment this week that datacentres were part of growing “inflationary pressures” when lifting interest rates to an 18-year high. Sign up for Guardian Australia’s Politics, really newsletter here Continue reading...

The action does not prevent future presidents from restyling the iconic office that President Trump has filled to the brim with gold flourishes, nor does it prevent a successor from rolling back the proclamation itself.

Volcanic heat, electricity to spare. ScienceAlert stories are written, fact-checked, and edited by humans, never generated by AI. Don't miss a story, subscribe here.

On November 6th, Apple will release an all-new MacBook Pro. It's thinner and lighter and has a beautiful OLED touchscreen. It is very likely what every new MacBook Pro will look like in a couple of years. The M6 MacBook Pro, which is also out on the 6th, is not that laptop. Instead, it's a […]

Weta FX, the New Zealand visual effects company behind “The Lord of the Rings” and “Avatar,” will invest in Taiwanese animation and VFX outfit Moonshine Studio. The investment is part of a partnership with the Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) aimed at making Taiwan an AI hub for Asia’s content industries. Weta FX CEO Daniel […]

Early reviews of the latest MacBook Pro gush with praise for the active OLED display, but are more muted about the touchscreen. (via Cult of Mac - Your source for the latest Apple news, rumors, analysis, reviews, how-tos and deals.)

Meta has added live voice conversations to Muse, its personal AI agent, so users can talk to it instead of typing. The update also gives Muse an animated avatar that reacts as the conversation goes on. The feature is available now in the Muse app on phones, the web and Mac, but only in the […] This story continues at The Next Web

Toei, the Japanese studio giant behind “Kamen Rider” and the Super Sentai series that became “Power Rangers,” has drawn up rules for generative AI and started using AI in its film and video production, president and CEO Yoshimura Fumio said at the Taiwan Creative Content Fest (TCCF) in Taipei. A dedicated team at the company […]

One of the great quests in all of science is to discover, at a fundamental level, what the Universe is actually made of. If you took every amount of matter and energy that existed — or even could exist — and cut it up into its smallest possible chunks, until only something that was uncuttable was left, you’d be left with the fundamental, elementary particles that composed our Universe. In physics, this took us first down to the level of the atom, then to atomic nuclei and electrons, then to protons, neutrons, and electrons, and finally to our modern Standard Model of elementary particles: complete with quarks, charged leptons, neutrinos, their antimatter counterparts, the gluons, the photon, the W-and-Z bosons, and one additional unique particle, the Higgs boson. Of all of those particles, the Higgs boson is the most recently discovered particle: found only at particle accelerators, like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in 2012. But what’s the story of the Higgs boson? What makes it so unique, where does it come from, and how does it fit in with everything else that we know? That’s what Vu H Nguyen wants to know, asking: “Can you explain the Higgs boson in depth? [It is] difficult for me to understand, but I think this is very important in particle physics. Maybe you can explain it in an easier way?” When we think about matter, we normally think about “fundamental” in the way we outlined above: by cutting it up into its smallest indivisible component parts. But there’s more to the story, and the Higgs boson requires us to go deeper than any other known particle in order to understand it. Here’s the story. From macroscopic scales down to subatomic ones, the sizes of the fundamental particles play only a small role in determining the sizes of composite structures. Whether the building blocks are truly fundamental and/or point-like particles is still not known, but we do understand the Universe from large, cosmic scales down to tiny, subatomic ones. The scale of…

New Zealand-based visual effects powerhouse Weta FX is striking a strategic partnership with Taiwan Creative Content Agency (TAICCA) to position Taiwan as an AI hub for Asia’s content industry. The partnership involves investment into Taiwanese VFX house Moonshine Studio, founded by Chia Chi Lin. The Lord Of The Rings and Avatar VFX producer will also […]