AI may soon be the default way to solve theoretical problems in economics, high-energy physics, and other fields, MIT researchers tell WIRED.

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. Opt in for Optimizer here.

For the past 100 days or so, my mornings have had a new rhythm. When I wake up, the first thing I have to do is feed my digital twin. It consumes my metabolic data, and its first "meal" of the day is my body composition data, sent straight from a smart scale.

Once that's logged in the app, I scoot over to the kitchen to fill an Owala with lemon water to take my medications with. That, too, gets logged in the app. On Mondays, I'll …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Old-school physics-based weather forecasting and even new AI models typically become less reliable beyond two weeks, a problem Microsoft claims to have solved using machine learning.

Researchers with the company say they've found a new, cost-effective way to make more accurate weather forecasts two to six weeks in advance - allowing farmers and emergency responders to plan ahead with greater certainty. The findings were published today in the journal Nature, and the tool is now open-source software.

Microsoft joins Google, Nvidia, and other companies developing AI tools for weather forecasting. Instead of creating a new standalone weather …

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Ukrainian officials claim the Elon Musk-owned Starlink put new limits on its service in the area without warning, disrupting the country's drone operations and missions, according to reports from Reuters and the Financial Times. The move comes just days after Musk wrote on X that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy "has gone too far," in response to President Donald Trump's disapproval of Ukraine targeting Russian oil refineries.

"It is clear that this action is not coincidental and is related to the current political situation," Ukrainian defense tech advisor Serhii Beskrestnov writes on Telegram.

Earlier this week, Russia launched a …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Seven of 16 planetary vital signs are in their most extreme state ever recorded, and El Niño is here to make matters even worse.

For a car that's supposed to be one of the fastest ever made, the new Tesla Roadster certainly took its sweet-ass time getting here.

It's been nearly a decade since Elon Musk made the surprise announcement about plans to build a next-gen Roadster. Now, the Tesla Roadster is finally expected to make its production-ready debut at an event in Waco, Texas - and the timing couldn't be worse.

The new Roadster is set to arrive in an EV market beset by high energy prices, political turmoil, and consumer uncertainty. The tax-credit-fueled exuberance of the post-covid years has since given way to slower sales and fewer options. Automakers are scalin …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A mysterious super PAC that doubles as a pro-solar-energy outfit is funding some of the most knives-out attack ads of the midterms season.

Researchers took lessons from nocturnal animals to help rescue drones overcome a key challenge: flying in the dark.

The deeply uncomfortable film forces audiences to confront what types of stories we tell ourselves about who has economic and political power.

No longer will Americans have to go without delicious and inexpensive industrial dyes in their foodstuffs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is reportedly to allow additives to be added to food without safety review so long as they aren't proven to be carcinogenic and introduced at levels below 0.5 parts per billion. — Read the rest

The post New FDA loophole would allow toxic chemicals into food appeared first on Boing Boing.

After four weeks of using the cream, participants lowered the biological age of their skin by about two years on average.

Solar geoengineering could buy humanity time against climate change—or trigger a dangerous new arms race. A first-of-its-kind simulation offered a glimpse of what happens when geopolitics takes the wheel.

According to an extensive study published in Nature Medicine, being a woman is painful. Or rather, women experience more pain throughout their entire bodies than men. (That conclusion had previously been reached by the Stanford University School of Medicine, which wasn’t quite sure whether my fellow ladies were actually feeling more pain or just reporting it.)

Nature Medicine penned:

“In this study, we harmonized individual-level self-reported pain data from 6,125,459 participants across 902 population-based data sources in 118 countries to establish global reference trajectories of pain. […] Pain prevalence ranged from roughly 2% for facial pain to 40% for back pain, was consistently higher in women across all 11 anatomical sites (risk ratio range: 1.08−1.83) and increased most steeply before age 55 years.”

Participants included in the study ranged from 5 years of age to 100. Unsurprisingly, Nature Medicine found that a fair amount of global pain prevalent in men and women can be attributed to smoking, obesity, and low-income status.

Author Matt Fillingim, a researcher at Montreal’s McGill University, while stating that the exact reasons for higher levels of pain among women are still unclear, offered his explanation to Medical News Today:

“The difference probably reflects a combination of biological and social factors, including sex hormones, immune function, nervous-system pain processing, stress, reproductive burdens, occupational exposures, healthcare use, and differences in how symptoms are reported.”

A Study of 6 Million People Found a Pain Gap Researchers Still Can’t Fully Explain

While some research has suggested that women have lower pain thresholds than men, it is, of course, always extremely important that women listen to the warnings that their bodies are giving them and be assertive. Not only are women less likely to be prescribed pain medication, but they are also more likely to become victims of medical gaslighting. Not all medical professionals approach women’s health with the care and understanding it deserves.

Here is one of the endless proofs: According to Yale Medicine Magazine, “On average, it takes women 10 years to receive an accurate diagnosis of endometriosis, and many see at least four or five doctors before their pain is taken seriously.” Treatment for women’s health conditions can also come with a set of unique risks.

In closing, always remember to be your own advocate, ladies.

The post Do Women Really Suffer More Pain Than Men? Here’s What the Science Says. appeared first on VICE.

If you thought you'd seen all there is to see from the Artemis II mission, you're wrong. This week NASA posted over 800GB worth of science data, images, and videos on the Artemis II: Sights & Sounds of Science site. The archive includes over 11,000 photos and videos, over 8.5 hours of audio, and crew-annotated images, such as the one marking where they saw impact flashes on the dark side of the Moon. Together, they offer an unprecedented view inside a historic space mission.

One of the more exciting reveals was footage of the Artemis II team telling the ground team back in Houston about its observation of impact flashes. Impact flashes have …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Here’s what we know about the record-setting El Niño on a record-hot planet, and the most important questions scientists are trying to answer.

Redwoods adapted to a cool, foggy climate. Now a new study shows they slow down photosynthesis when their environment warms.

Humans have taken the mighty wolf and turned it into the pug, a dog so malformed it struggles to breathe. That, of course, is not our only attempt at playing God with dogs. We crossbreed and create new kinds of dogs all the time, and every once in a while we try to do it on a mass scale.

The BBC recently ran a feature on one such large-scale attempt: scientists in Maine in the 1940s built a huge facility to create a kind of “super-dog,” an experiment that went quite terribly, though thankfully fell short of devolving into an Island of Doctor Monroe-style disaster.

After World War II, according to the BBC, a eugenics-obsessed Rockefeller Foundation director named Alan Gregg put up a ton of money, which today would equal about $9 million, for a 13-year project called the “School For Dogs.” That sounds like a fun Disney-produced family film from 2007, but it was actually a bit more nefarious.

The idea was to subject over 500 puppies of varying species to a series of maze runs and intelligence tests to prove that dog smarts are purely genetic, and then use that to breed some kind of hyper-intelligent super dog.  

More Than 500 Puppies Were Part of a ‘Super-Dog’ Experiment. Here’s What Happened.

The research team, led by John Paul Scott and John Fuller, quickly found a rather funny universal truth: no single dog breed is smarter than any other. Yes, some breeds excel at specific tasks, but overall they found that trying to find one dog breed that was definitively, cumulatively smarter than any other was a waste of time.

The result of all this was a series of experiments that intended to prove eugenics right, but instead proved that eugenics is in itself a stupid pursuit that will not lead to the creation of any kind of master race, dog or otherwise, and it did that by proving that social species thrive on a mix of diverse personalities rather than a single genetically engineered master race.

When the dream of building the genetically superior super dog fell apart, the researchers pivoted to even darker experiments, like raising puppies in total isolation behind eight-foot fences to study attachment styles, which led to discovering that puppies deprived of human contact between four and 12 weeks turned into unmanageable a**holes.

The Rockefeller Foundation pulled its funding when the higher-ups realized they weren’t going to get an ingenious dog from it. The facility was eventually shut down in 1958.

The post Scientists Tried to Breed a ‘Super-Dog.’ It Did Not Go Well. appeared first on VICE.

It’s never really been a question of whether sharks can hear well. They can. But measuring how well is difficult.

If hearing is somewhat subjective for us humans, imagine how hard it would be to objectively judge a shark’s hearing. But we recently learned more about a particular breed’s sharp hearing: according to a study published in Integrative Organismal Biology, blacktip sharks off the Florida coast have surprisingly sensitive hearing and can instantly pinpoint where a noise is coming from.

Scientists at Florida Atlantic University parked a boat off southeast Florida. They cranked low-frequency sounds through an underwater speaker and tracked the local shark population using aerial drones. The idea was to startle the sharks with noise they’re not used to and see how they react.

Scientists Played Sounds for Sharks. They Reacted From 243 Feet Away.

And so they did. The blacktips reacted to low-frequency noise up to 74 meters away, or 243 feet. When they heard it, they made sharp, quick turns away from the sound, assuming it was an oncoming threat they’d rather flee than confront. More than 70 percent of the reactions

There is a zone called the “acoustic far field” where sound waves have stretched themselves thin. Researchers previously assumed sharks were basically deaf to sounds in this field, yet 70 percent of black tip sharks’ reactions occurred within the acoustic far field.

This is a little surprising because sharks lack a gas-filled swim bladder, the organ bony fish use to translate sound pressure into vibrations, much like a human eardrum. Marine biologists think black tips rely on a specialized inner-ear structure called a macula neglecta to detect tiny particle movements in distant water.

While it’s fascinating that sharks can hear much better than we give them credit for, it’s probably not reassuring to anyone who already has an innate fear of taking a dip in the ocean because of them. You are probably already pretty terrified of them, and now you know that they can hear you from about three-quarters of an American football field away.

The post How Well Can Sharks Hear? This Recent Experiment Offers a Surprising Answer. appeared first on VICE.

Let’s get it out in the open early: Beaver Fever sounds like the title of a 1970s porn flick, but that’s not what it is. Beaver Fever is the extremely porny nickname for Giardiasis, an intestinal illness caused by a parasite called Giardia. According to a study published in PLoS One, 1 in 15 cats are infected and can transmit it to humans.

Researchers analyzed over 150,000 cat poop samples across North America. They discovered that roughly 6.5 percent of our kitties are walking biohazards harboring a microscopic intestinal parasite. Roughly one in five infected cats carries a specific strain that can jump into your digestive tract.

The Parasite Behind ‘Beaver Fever’ Turned Up in 6.5% of Tested Cats

If you catch it, a prolonged bout of greasy diarrhea is in your future, along with severe bloating and cramping. The parasite thrives in cold, moist environments, meaning winter is its peak season and, oh, look at that, winter is just around the corner. Midwest cats showed “1.36 (95% CI: 1.28, 1.46) times greater odds of being Gd detected than cats in the South,” according to the study’s text.

Half of infected humans never show symptoms, but severe cases can drag on for years, triggering chronic irritable bowel syndrome or joint inflammation. Children and immunocompromised folks are at the highest risk for complications.

If you suspect your cat might be a carrier, it’s probably best to not let it walk across your kitchen counters. The infection is treatable with antiparasitic meds, but if you don’t want to get it, scrub down its litter box and wash your hands after cleaning it.

Also, keep your toddlers away from playground sandboxes, as those are, after all, nature’s litter boxes.

The post What Is ‘Beaver Fever,’ and Why Are Researchers Finding It in Cats? appeared first on VICE.

According to a comprehensive analysis compiled by StudyFinds, at some point or another, a cat owner will have to choke down their disgust and thank their cat for bringing them the “gift” of a dead animal. It’s usually a small mouse. But are cats actually bestowing a gift on you out of love and appreciation for all you do for them?

StudyFinds dug into several multi-year studies to see whether cats drop off little presents or are just the little household psychos we’ve long known them to be. The evidence leaned more toward the psycho side of your beloved kitty cat.

For instance, a 2013 study in Biological Conservation tracked roaming cats using “KittyCams” and found they brought home only 23 percent of their kills, ate 28 percent on the spot, and abandoned almost half where they died. If your cat were genuinely trying to keep you fed, they’re not doing a good job.

Your Cat’s Dead-Mouse ‘Gift’ May Have Nothing to Do With You

Research in the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery shows that cats are solitary hunters; they hunt alone, and they don’t hunt for anyone but themselves. That mouse they brought before you wasn’t for you; it’s for them, and they just so happen to drop it around you.

What may seem like a gift honoring their lord and master of the house is actually a dinner reservation for one. If you don’t want that dead animal around at all, a 2021 study published in Current Biology found that feeding your cat a meat-heavy, grain-free diet can cut those deliveries by 36 percent.

Those researchers also found that playing with the cat for 5 to 10 minutes a day cuts back on dead animal gifts by about 25 percent.

The post The Real Reason Why Cats Bring You Dead Animals, According to Science appeared first on VICE.