Enlarge / An image of a cell under a lab microscope. This procedure was not related to the new experiment with monkey embryos. (credit: Getty Images)

The early days of how an embryo develops are shrouded in mystery, because it pulls a kind of vanishing act. Once a sperm finds an egg, it begins a roughly weeklong journey to the uterus, becoming a tiny ball of cells along the way. When it reaches its destination, it attaches to the wall of the uterus, disappearing from view.

To shed light on the process, researchers are trying to create embryo-like structures derived from stem cells, rather than sperm and eggs, so they can observe early development in the lab. These three-dimensional balls of cells could offer clues to how diseases, birth defects, and miscarriages arise, without the practical and ethical concerns raised by using actual embryos. In the latest effort, researchers in China made these structures using stem cells from macaques and tried to establish pregnancies with them in female monkeys. The experiment is described in the journal Cell Stem Cell. Although other researchers have created “synthetic” embryos before, it’s the first time anyone has done it with monkeys—animals closely related to humans—and tried to get them to implant in the uterus.

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Say you are a maker of computer graphics cards, under pressure from investors questioning your green credentials. You know what to do. You email your various departments, asking them to tally up their carbon emissions and the energy they consume. Simple enough. You write a report pledging a more sustainable future, in which your trucks are electrified and solar panels adorn your offices.

Good start, your investors say. But what about the mines that produced the tantalum or palladium in your transistors? Or the silicon wafers that arrived via a lengthy supply chain? And what of when your product is shipped to customers, who install it in a laptop or run it 24/7 inside a data center to train an AI model like GPT-4 (or 5)? Eventually it will be discarded as trash or recycled. Chase down every ton of carbon and the emissions a company creates are many times times higher than it first seemed.

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ChatGPT might well be the most famous, and potentially valuable, algorithm of the moment, but the artificial intelligence techniques used by OpenAI to provide its smarts are neither unique nor secret. Competing projects and open source clones may soon make ChatGPT-style bots available for anyone to copy and reuse.

Stability AI, a startup that has already developed and open-sourced advanced image-generation technology, is working on an open competitor to ChatGPT. “We are a few months from release,” says Emad Mostaque, Stability’s CEO. A number of competing startups, including Anthropic, Cohere, and AI21, are working on proprietary chatbots similar to OpenAI’s bot.

Enlarge / Photo taken in Florence, Italy (credit: Daniele Ciabatti/EyeEm via Getty)

When Mark Necaise got down to his last four floppy disks at a rodeo in Mississippi in February, he started to worry.

Necaise travels to horse shows around the state, offering custom embroidery on jackets and vests: “All of the winners would get a jacket and we’d put the name of the farm or the name of the horse or whatever on it,” he says.

Five years ago, he paid $18,000 for a second-hand machine, manufactured in 2004 by the Japanese embroidery equipment specialist Tajima. The only way to transfer the designs from his computer to the machine was via floppy disk.

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Kenya is in the middle of its worst drought in 40 years. In the parched north of the country, rivers are running dry and millions of livestock have perished due to lack of food. Around 4.4 million Kenyans don’t have enough to eat, and the situation will worsen if the coming rainy season fails like the previous five. “I’ve never seen it so bad. There’s nothing in the farms, the drought is too harsh,” says Daniel Magondo, a cotton and maize farmer in central Kenya.

The record-breaking drought is forcing Kenya to confront a controversial topic: whether the country should grow genetically modified (GM) crops. These are plants that have had genes from another organism inserted into their DNA to give them a new trait, such as disease or drought resistance. Although GM crops are completely safe to eat and are widely grown in the US, Canada, Brazil, and India, governments in many parts of the world, including Europe and East Africa, have pushed back against them.

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Since the invasion of Ukraine one year ago, Russia has faced an exodus of tech companies and services. This includes the exit of Samsung and Apple, two of the world’s most popular smartphone brands. In response, the country has doubled down on its efforts to attain technological self-sufficiency, including creating a new Android smartphone.

The handset, which does not yet have a name, will be built by the National Computer Corporation (NCC), one of Russia’s largest IT companies, with an ambitious goal to sell 100,000 smartphones and tablets by the end of 2023. Alexander Kalinin, the founder of NCC, told local media on Monday that he aims to invest 10 billion rubles ($132.9 million) in the project and hopes to capture 10 percent of the consumer market by 2026.

The news comes just days after the US Department of Commerce banned exports to Russia of phones and other electronics that cost more than $300. Experts say, however, that a Russian smartphone will have a hard time beating inexpensive competitors from China, and it may encounter problems with using Google’s Android.

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David Wakeling, head of London-based law firm Allen & Overy's markets innovation group, first came across law-focused generative AI tool Harvey in September 2022. He approached OpenAI, the system’s developer, to run a small experiment. A handful of his firm’s lawyers would use the system to answer simple questions about the law, draft documents, and take first passes at messages to clients.

The trial started small, Wakeling says, but soon ballooned. Around 3,500 workers across the company’s 43 offices ended up using the tool, asking it around 40,000 queries in total. The law firm has now entered into a partnership to use the AI tool more widely across the company, though Wakeling declined to say how much the agreement was worth. According to Harvey, one in four at Allen & Overy’s team of lawyers now uses the AI platform every day, with 80 percent using it once a month or more. Other large law firms are starting to adopt the platform too, the company says.

The rise of AI and its potential to disrupt the legal industry has been forecast multiple times before. But the rise of the latest wave of generative AI tools, with ChatGPT at its forefront, has those within the industry more convinced than ever.

Enlarge / German police officers sit in their vehicle at the Neuenburg junction of the A5 motorway and observe the traffic from France. (credit: Philipp von Ditfurth/Getty Images)

Britta Eder’s list of phone contacts is full of people the German state considers to be criminals. As a defense lawyer in Hamburg, her client list includes anti-fascists, people who campaign against nuclear power, and members of the PKK, a banned militant Kurdish nationalist organization.

For her clients’ sake, she’s used to being cautious on the phone. “When I talk on the phone I always think, maybe I'm not alone,” she says. That self-consciousness even extends to phone calls with her mother.

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This week, Argentina and Uruguay declared national health emergencies following outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1, the fast-moving virus that destroys poultry flocks and wild birds and for decades has been feared as a possible spark for a pandemic among people. That makes 10 South American countries that have recently marked their first-ever encounter with the virus, including Peru—where more than 50,000 wild birds died last fall, and more than 600 sea lions in January. Combine the sea-lion infections with the revelation that H5N1 flu invaded a mink farm in Spain in October, and health authorities must now confront the possibility that the unpredictable virus may have adapted to threaten other species.

To be clear, this does not yet include people. Although past decades have witnessed bird flu outbreaks that spread to humans, only two cases have been identified in the past 12 months: a Colorado adult last May, and a 9-year-old girl in Ecuador in January. (Neither died.) And there’s no evidence yet that the virus has been able to jump from newly infected mammals to people. But the fact that it was transmitted from birds to mammals, and then spread among them, indicates a disquieting trend.

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Twitter’s direct messages have always been a security liability. The DMs you send to friends and Internet strangers aren’t end-to-end encrypted, making your conversations potentially accessible if Twitter suffers a data breach, or to company staffers with the right permissions to access them. Both scenarios are arguably more likely in Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, where key security and data protection staff have departed.

Since Musk acquired Twitter and started laying off thousands of employees at the start of November, remodeling the firm in his vision, multiple waves of tweeters have abandoned the platform. When they do, they often try to download their Twitter archive and delete DMs. In the chaos, the process has often been glitchy.

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Your gut has an obvious job: It processes the food you eat. But it has another important function: It protects you from the bacteria, viruses, or allergens you ingest along with that food. “The largest part of the immune system in humans is the GI tract, and our biggest exposure to the world is what we put in our mouth,” says Michael Helmrath, a pediatric surgeon at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center who treats patients with intestinal diseases.

Sometimes this system malfunctions or doesn’t develop properly, which can lead to gastrointestinal conditions like ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease, and celiac—all of which are on the rise worldwide. Studying these conditions in animals can only tell us so much, since their diets and immune systems are very different from ours.

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A major independent flight tracking platform, which has made enemies of the Saudi royal family and Elon Musk, has been sold to a subsidiary of a private equity firm. And its users are furious.

ADS-B Exchange has made headlines in recent months for, as AFP put it, irking “billionaires and baddies.” But in a Wednesday morning press release, aviation intelligence firm Jetnet announced it had acquired the scrappy open source operation for an undisclosed sum.

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For years, the cryptocurrency economy has been rife with black market sales, theft, ransomware, and money laundering—despite the strange fact that in that economy, practically every transaction is written into a blockchain’s permanent, unchangeable ledger. But new evidence suggests that years of advancements in blockchain tracing and crackdowns on that illicit underworld may be having an effect—if not reducing the overall volume of crime, then at least cutting down on the number of laundering outlets, leaving the crypto black market with fewer options to cash out its proceeds than it’s had in a decade.

In a portion of its annual crime report focused on money laundering that was published today, cryptocurrency-tracing firm Chainalysis points to a new consolidation in crypto criminal cash-out services over the past year. It counted just 915 of those services used in 2022, the fewest it’s seen since 2012 and the latest sign of a steady drop-off in the number of those services since 2018. Chainalysis says an even smaller number of exchanges now enable the money-laundering trade of cryptocurrency for actual dollars, euros, and yen: It found that just five cryptocurrency exchanges now handle nearly 68 percent of all black market cash-outs.