Researchers at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon ran a test to measure how often chatbots flatter users. In a paper on social sycophancy in AI advice, they ran OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral through thousands of personal dilemmas. — Read the rest

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Katsushi Murakami designed the Voltron robots, most of the robots in Power Rangers, and many of the Go-Bots. Matt Alt, the author of Pure Invention, reported Murakami's death in a farewell to the designer on his newsletter on August 10, 2026. — Read the rest

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On May 14, 1945, doctors at the University of California Hospital in San Francisco injected Albert Stevens, an Ohio-born house painter, with plutonium without telling him. Stevens had checked in with what doctors diagnosed as terminal stomach cancer. Manhattan Project researchers wanted to know how plutonium moved through the bodies of the workers who handled it, and they selected him as patient CAL-1. — Read the rest

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The next step for AI is spatial intelligence, says Kevin Kelly. Today's models learned from text,  but fail when engineers put them in a robot body because they have no sense of gravity, distance, or three-dimensional space. 

"The primary bottleneck restraining the arrival of this world model is the lack of sufficient quantity of quality data," Kelly says. — Read the rest

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Mario Kart 8 asks you to pick a driver, a kart body, tires, and a glider, and each category has dozens of options with their own speed, acceleration, handling, and weight. Antoine Mayerowitz's interactive guide to the Pareto frontier sorts the resulting thousands of builds with a method an economist developed over a century ago. — Read the rest

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About 9,000 people a year search Arizona's Superstition Mountains for the Lost Dutchman's Gold Mine. Some have died in the search. The mine is named for Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant ("Dutchman" was the era's term for Germans) who supposedly found a rich gold vein and kept its location secret until 1891, when he confessed on his deathbed to a woman named Julia Thomas and gave her a crude map. — Read the rest

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