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It seems that even Thing from “The Addams Family” isn’t safe from being replaced by machines.A team of researchers at ETH Zurich’s Soft Robotics Lab have created an anthropomorphic robotic hand that can walk around on its fingertips, all on its own. So dexterous is our disembodied perambulator that it can navigate multiple surfaces and even clack away at a keyboard while supporting its own weight, footage of its exploits shows.It’s kind of adorable when you watch it in action, like as it plays a game on a computer. But there’s a somewhat creepy, arachnid quality to its twitchy gait…

Police abuse of AI-integrated surveillance cameras is spiraling out of control.On Wednesday, freshly unsealed court documents revealed that five Indianapolis police officers had been charged with abusing the department’s automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). The accused include officer Jonathan Schultz, an 18-year veteran, who used 300 cameras provided by the ALPR company Flock to stalk multiple women, including his ex-wife, and a woman he met at a workout class in 2023, ABC News reported. Ten hours away in North Carolina, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office halted its Flock partnership and fired a seasoned detective who was caught using the cameras…

Gambling addicts aren’t the only ones being taken for a ride by prediction markets. As gambling platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi become have more popular than ever before, financial criminals are also using prediction markets to unleash fraud and graft on an unprecedented scale.According to the Wall Street Journal, this phenomenon was identified as far back as February, when a payment processing company contracted by Polymarket flagged a massive rise in bets made with stolen debit cards.Essentially, fraudsters began by plugging stolen financial information into the prediction market to make wagers. If they won, the perpetrators would then withdraw the…

In the United States, fierce local opposition to new data center construction continues to dog developers hoping to cash in on the AI boom.Though grassroots organizers have threatened some $130 billion in data center investments, those efforts don’t always pan out, and it’s next to impossible to oust one of the facilities once they’ve taken root.But even after a data center goes online, the battle is far from over. Take the DataOne facility in southern New Jersey, for example, which was recently slapped with a $1 million fine by the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection after inspectors uncovered illegally…

Waymo robotaxis seem to get into accidents far less often than human motorists do. (According to the company’s self-reported data, that is actually the case.) But that doesn’t mean they’re anywhere close to flawless drivers. In fact, they’re horrible improvisers.Just ask the journalist Joe Miller, who recalls in the Financial Times how his Waymo barged into a roadway cleared for the presidential motorcade, after it couldn’t follow the directions given by beleaguered police officers.“I was 10 minutes into my first trip in a driverless car when I realized my vehicle was potentially obstructing the president of the United States,” Mill…

Though it may not look like it, the world as we know it is in a free fall, steadily spiraling into climate catastrophe. Earlier this month, a defeated United Nations even issued a report preparing the world “to face the inevitability of exceeding global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius” above pre-industrial levels in the years ahead.Exceeding that benchmark comes with epoch-defining consequences: mass displacement due to climate disasters, economic turmoil from disrupted supply chains, and widespread loss of biodiversity, among others. Each of those consequences manifests in hundreds of both concrete and increasingly novel ways. Just one of those ghoulish…

The perpetrator of the devastating mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada used ChatGPT to ideate about graphic mass murder for months leading up to the deadly massacre.OpenAI is currently facing 37 lawsuits from families impacted by the February shooting at Tumbler Ridge, where 18-year-old shooter Jesse Van Rootselaar murdered six people at a local school — five students, all aged between 12 and 13, and a teacher — and injured 27 others before killing herself. (Van Rootselaar also fatally shot her mother and younger stepbrother before continuing the rampage.) It’s also being sued by the Canadian province of British Columbia over…

So far, astronomers have confirmed over 6,300 exoplanets circling a host star beyond our solar system. They range from small, rocky worlds to enormous orbs of gas like our own Jupiter or Saturn. Some, scientists suspect, could host life because they orbit their star in the habitable zone, the region where conditions are just right for liquid water to exist on their surface.Getting a close glimpse of these worlds remains challenging because of the unfathomable distances involved. Distinguishing the signals emanating from these exoplanets from their far brighter host stars has also been an insurmountable challenge — until now.As detailed…

In a 2022 study, scientists suggested that there could be enormous mountain ranges — on the scale of the Himalayas — formed roughly half a billion years ago as the supercontinent Gondwana formed in the Earth’s southern hemisphere. The giant mass once made up modern-day Africa, South America, Antarctica, Australia, the Indian subcontinent, and more.Researchers proposed that the supercontinent may have helped kickstart life on Earth by affecting global dynamics, including the climate and related biological processes, a case explored in detail in a new paper.Now, as detailed in a separate study published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science…

Dating is tough when you’re a tech bro with more money than you know what to do with.That, at any rate, is according to the said loaded tech workers who spilled their guts to Wired. One 23-year-old complained that his attempts at getting laid would get derailed as soon as he told a potential hookup that he worked at Palantir, the AI surveillance and defense company. Dates quickly questioned his morals; one called him the devil.“Sometimes people would just straight up stop talking to me,” he told Wired.