We tend to think of agriculture as a human innovation. But insects beat us to it by millions of years. Various ant species cooperate with fungi, creating a home for them, providing them with nutrients, and harvesting them as food. This reaches the peak of sophistication in the leafcutter ants, which cut foliage and return it to feed their fungi, which...

Any striking marketing claims in companies' ads about the gut benefits of a popular probiotic may be full of, well, the same thing that has their target audience backed up. In a randomized controlled trial, the probiotic Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis—used in many probiotic products, including Dannon's Activia yogurts—did nothing to improve...

Upholding the First Amendment, a senior US district judge has blocked California's deepfakes law, AB 2839, which was designed to stop deceptive AI-generated content from impacting election outcomes. Last month, a parody video creator known as "Mr Reagan" on YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), Christopher Kohls, sued to block the law. He claimed that...

The second flight of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket, planned for Friday morning, has a primary goal of validating the launcher's reliability for delivering critical US military satellites to orbit. Tory Bruno, ULA's chief executive, told reporters Wednesday that he is "supremely confident" the Vulcan rocket will succeed in accomplishing that...

I was on vacation last week, the kind of vacation in which entire days had no particular plan. I had brought the ROG Ally X with me, and, with the review done and Windows still annoying me, I looked around at the DIY scene, wondering if things had changed since my last foray into DIY Steam Deck cloning. Things had changed for the better. I tried out...

On Monday, Microsoft unveiled updates to its consumer AI assistant Copilot, introducing two new experimental features for a limited group of $20/month Copilot Pro subscribers: Copilot Labs and Copilot Vision. Labs integrates OpenAI's latest o1 "reasoning" model, and Vision allows Copilot to see what you're browsing in Edge. Microsoft says Copilot...