An Australian man asked his personal AI agent to book him a spot at his local gym. Little did he know that this would snowball into a full-blown cyberattack.

The AI assistant, apparently, was overly enthusiastic about following its master’s instructions. It found an exploit to book gym classes several weeks in advance of what the gym allowed, ABC News reported. And taking no prisoners, it even hacked the software to kick someone who was in the waiting list in front of him.

This, per the reporting, is the country’s first known case of a fully autonomous cyberattack.

The man, Andrew, works for a company that sells AI products to businesses. He was experimenting with OpenClaw, an open source AI agent software that allows you to turn your AI model of choice into a personal assistant that can do tasks on your behalf. The AI powering Andrew’s OpenClaw agent was Anthropic’s Claude.

We’ve long seen examples of AI agents backfiring on the people that use them when they take the initiative to do stuff like delete files without permission. But seeing them break into other systems without the operator intending to them to is a novel threat — and one that could put users in legal jeopardy.

Finding the process of entering all his information to book something cumbersome, Andrew told the ABC that he asked Claude earlier this year to go ahead and book the gym slots for him. First it told him it found a way to get him a slot weeks in advanced, which wasn’t wasn’t allowed.

On a whim, he then asked if it was possible to move him up the waitlist. To his surprise, the AI explained that there was a vulnerability in the software that allowed it to put him next in line.

“The API has zero authorizations checks on cancelling other people’s reservations… I tested this with the person in waitlist position #1 — and it actually went through,” the AI reported, per the ABC‘s reporting. “So you’ve moved from #4 to #3 already.”

Andrew asked the AI to undo this, to no avail.

“Bad news — I can’t add them back,” the AI replied, explaining that it was only the cancel reservation feature that lacked an authorization check.

The incident has drawn comparisons to a thought experiment by philosophizer Nick Bostrom that’s now referred to as the “paperclip maximizer.” In this hypothetical scenario, someone asks an AI to find a way to manufacture as many paperclips as possible. The AI, lacking proper guardrails, realizes that humans are obstacles to this goal and tries to use the entire planet and everything on it — humans included — to churn out more paper clips. It’s hyperbolic, but illustrates the dangers of how seemingly harmless instructions can lead to dangerous outcomes, in a sort of monkey’s paw way.

As the ABC‘s reporting notes, this creates a major legal gray area. If someone’s AI agent carries out a damaging cyberattack without the owner intending to, who’s responsible? The user, or the AI’s designers?

The incident comes as some of the top AI labs have, in suspiciously quick succession, come out to declare that their frontier models have broken containment and hacked another company. There’s certainly an element of theater involved in that, as they all try to prove that their AIs are capable enough to be dangerous, too. But there’s also clearly an element of truth: if a random man asking an AI to do something as innocuous like a reservation lead to a full-blown hack, what might bad actors in a large-scale, coordinated effort, might do?

More on AI: Zuckerberg’s Manifesto About the Glorious Freedoms AI Will Bring Was Completely Contradicted by His Own CTO During a Company Meeting

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It’s no secret that doctors across the world are using AI tools to do stuff from taking notes to looking up questions. But what about the next generation of doctors still in training? According to two medical professionals on the ground, the situation is looking pretty alarming.

With AI being used by med students, “the danger is not just deskilling but never-skilling,” write Simar Bajaj, a journalist and med student at the Stanford University School of Medicine, and Joseph Sakran, a trauma surgeon and executive vice-chair of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medicine, in an essay for The Guardian.

“Although a doctor who has forgotten how to reason is recoverable,” they added, “one who never learned how may not be.”

Bajaj and Sakran point to two alarming recent findings.

One is internal data showing that around two thirds of doctors in the US are using OpenEvidence, an AI chatbot specifically designed for clinicians. The technology is already prevalent and deeply woven into how medical professionals carry out their jobs.

The next is a new study published in the journal Nature Medicine that evaluated the reliability of these medical-specific large language models. Shockingly, the clinical AI tools performed worse  at answering medical queries than general purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude did, the work found. According to the authors, it performed about on par to Google’s AI Overviews, which are notorious for being wonky and inaccurate.

Even if AI tools may be handy for research — and putting aside the major questions over their reliability — they’re no substitute for relying on your brain, as fallible as it might be, because when you’re learning, “the struggle is the point.”

“For example, trainees once asked to build a list of potential diagnoses might struggle and offer an incomplete set, learning what they missed, sometimes painfully,” Bajaj and Sakran wrote. “Now, trainees can simply ask OpenEvidence and get a nearly perfect answer, complete with possibilities they might have never considered and none of the embarrassment of having overlooked them.”

Where AI is different from medical advances in the past is that it’s “not just expanding what doctors can see,” they wrote, “but inserting itself into the cognitive machinery that training is meant to build.” 

A bevy of research on the “cognitive offloading” that AI encourages, in which users naturally begin to outsource a lot of their thinking onto the tools, backs this diagnosis. Some studies have suggested AI impairs critical thinking, and leads to lower brain activity during cognitive tasks.

It’s a conundrum gripping the medical world. Earlier this year, doctors from top medical schools proposed a stricter framework on how medical students should use AI tools.

“The process of deliberately crafting the note forces us to use our brains to really wrestle with what’s happening,” Jaideep Talwalkar, associate dean of educational technology and innovation at Yale School of Medicine, told Stat News. “There’s an importance in doing that with great repetition.”

Bajaj and Sakran have a few suggestions for how to deal with this. One is requiring trainees to periodically work through cases without any AI help, similar to how the Federal Aviation Administration advises aviators to periodically disengage autopilot and fly by hand. Of course, another powerful deterrent could be shame. A recent John Hopkins student found that doctors who used AI are viewed with scorn and skepticism by their peers.

More on AI: AI Model Invents Completely New Viruses Unknown to Nature

The post Doctors Warn That Med Students Are Surrendering Their Brains to Medical AIs That Are Even Worse than Regular Chatbots appeared first on Futurism.

Over 30 student activists came together on Monday afternoon to occupy the Gallup Building in Washington DC, home to a public-facing lobbying office belonging to ChatGPT developer OpenAI.

Once inside the lobby, the demonstrators unfurled a massive banner reading “Stop Stealing Our Future,” while others held signs with messages like “OpenAI bought my Senator.” The demonstration lasted two hours, and ended when police stormed the lobby, arresting 13 protestors.

At the moment, the identity and whereabouts of the protestors remains unclear. An incident report obtained from the Metropolitan Police Department states that 13 people were arrested for “unlawful entry.” After stuffing the activists into vans, the report notes the MPD split the group up, sending seven to the First District Station, four to the Second District, and two to the Third District for processing.

The protest was organized by the climate group Sunrise Movement and anti-AI organization QuitGPT. According to a joint statement shared with Futurism, Monday’s action is just one of many across over 20 states in August calling on politicians to “Dump Big Tech.”

One student organizer who attended the protest, Raya Gupta, explained in the statement that “my friends chose to risk arrest to bring the fight to OpenAI.”

“Our generation doesn’t have any guarantees about whether we’ll have jobs after college, or whether there will be clean drinking water for all of us or whether people will have any power left in politics since our elections keep getting bought by Big Tech,” Gupta continued. “We all believe that not taking action now, as the scales slide between the people and the billionaires, puts our future in great jeopardy.”

Gupta’s comments underscore the degree to which AI has become an omni-cause for Americans across the political spectrum. A growing number of people in the US have been arrested for protests related to AI in some shape or form, whether attending town hall meetings to oppose data center developments, or occupying offices used by federal agencies to tool out AI immigration software.

Despite growing disgust with AI and its developers, politicians on both sides of the aisle have roundly embraced the tech industry’s extremely expensive lobbying efforts. Case in point, the recent opening of OpenAI’s DC Office comes as one of the AI lab’s super PACs injects over $140 million into the coming midterm elections, in a blatant attempt to steer AI regulations at the highest level.

Updated with new information from the MPD.

More on AI protests: Climate Activists Pelt Microsoft Data Center With Balloons Full of Acid

The post Protesters Arrested After Storming OpenAI Lobbying Office appeared first on Futurism.

Since its earliest days, Google’s homepage has been iconic in its simplicity: a central text box and a big button labeled “Search.”

That’s now changing. As anticipated, many users are reporting that the “Search” button is no more, replaced by three buttons for various AI features: “Create images,” “Ask about files,” and “Brainstorm.” 

These are placed next to the lingering “I’m feeling lucky” button, which survived the chopping block. A separate “AI Mode” button that’s existed inside the search bar for some time now still features as well. Some of the options, like “Create images,” were already featured on the home page of the Google app.

The change was first spotted on Monday by search engine experts. You can still perform a regular Google search — which are already pretty AI-laden — by hitting enter. But it’s clear that Google is further experimenting with its AI-centric vision for navigating the internet, though there’s a distinct sense of caution about how far the tech giant is willing to go.

Google Search’s vice president of product Robby Stein confirmed that this was a “small test.”

“This is a small test on desktop to help people find new things they can do with Search,” he wrote in a post on X. “No impact to how the core search box works.”

In May, Google teased an “intelligent” search box that expands into an chatbot-like experience as you type. It came loaded with AI features, including the ability to recruit AI agents to automate searches and an autocomplete feature to help finish your thoughts. 

The biggest change, however, was that the revamped search box showed conversational answers instead of Google’s classic “ten blue links” to other websites.

Experts viewed this as a threat to the open web. Instead of encouraging users to visit other websites, Google’s AI was pilfering and summarizing content into a single contained window. In the long run, this could starve websites of the much needed traffic they need to survive. This was already happening as more people turn to AI chatbots to get their answers instead of a search engine, causing some websites to start using ads that cater to robotic visitors.

Still, heavily AI-infused though it may be, the old-fashioned search hasn’t been completely replaced by Google — yet.

More on AI: AI Investors Are Suddenly Quaking in Their Boots

The post Google Just Updated Its Home Page to Replace the “Search” Button With a Bunch of AI appeared first on Futurism.

Tech Goliaths are scrambling to build as much AI computing capacity as they possibly can, come hell or low water. One of the dominant players in the space, Amazon Web Services, has its heart set on an AI data center so enormous that it could easily become the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States.

According to the New York Times, Amazon has confirmed its investment in a massive gas-burning power plant in Texas, meant to supply up to 7.65 gigawatts of energy to a planned data center in Pecos County. Should it come online as planned, the plant’s 35 turbines would be allowed to spew 33 million tons of CO2 a year, the NYT notes, which would easily make it the largest single fount of emissions in the country.

That’s a stunning amount of carbon exhaust, putting that single data center in a league with entire countries including Switzerland, Ireland, and Bulgaria.

It would also be in stark defiance of Amazon’s stated climate goals, which center on reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040.

That’s not lost on the tech giant. But as Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan told the NYT, the “world looks different now than when we co-founded the climate pledge.”

“We’re being transparent about the challenges, investing in innovation, and delivering measurable results,” Callahan continued. “Growth and sustainability don’t have to be in opposition — in fact, our results show they reinforce each other.”

Even without the new Pecos County plant, Amazon’s emissions are staggering. The company recently disclosed a record increase in its total emissions last year, with company-wide electricity usage rising by 34 percent across 2025.

That the company is blatantly papering over its previous climate commitments isn’t a shocker at this point, in other words, as the company reaches new emission highs with each passing year.

More on Amazon: Jeff Bezos Harshly Criticized for $200 Million Pledge to Protect the World’s Most Endangered Species

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New research finds that by making the fossil fuel industry more productive, AI could help increase carbon emissions by up to nearly 5 percent—vastly outpacing the impact of data centers.

Last week reporters Jillian Ambrose and Damian Carrington published a piece which revealed that biggest oil firms made $93bn in profits in three months amid the war in Iran and the climate crisis. They’re online now to to discuss their story and any other questions you might have

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StanEthel asks: Does anyone in the fossil fuel industry accept responsibility for climate change? If they don’t, how is their denial structured: it’s not happening, it’s someone else’s fault, it’s not our fault?

Damian:

The short answer is no, and a rising tide of lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for their role in the climate crisis means that is unlikely to change anytime soon. The science is ever clearer though. An analysis published last September showed for the first time that carbon emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel firms were directly linked to fatal spells of hot weather.

The big oil companies were among the first to realise the dangers of global warming half a century ago. But decades of denial then followed. As the reality of climate crisis has become undeniable, the arguments of the fossil fuel industry have shifted. Gas was cleaner than coal, for example, or that carbon credits from new forests could offset emissions. Today, the industry likes to tout carbon capture and storage (CCS) as a solution. But just this week, one of CCS’s loudest cheerleaders, ExxonMobil, has started a process to sue the European Union which wants to make the company actually store a small amount of CO2.

In the first weeks of the conflict, some predicted that the government’s taxes on North Sea oil and gas would yield a £20bn tax windfall for the Treasury if surging oil and gas prices remained high over the whole year. This is because the government’s windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas, known as the Energy Profits Levy, imposes an effective headline tax rate on North Sea profits of 78%, and the Treasury collects VAT from petrol and diesel sales too.

But prices have not climbed by as much as first feared. So what can we reasonably expect? Before the war, the Office for Budget Responsibility forecast that oil and gas revenues would raise £2.7bn in the 2025/26 financial year. It also suggests that for every $10 increase to the benchmark oil price, the Exchequer can expect an extra £900m in revenue. Meanwhile, every 1p increase in the price of gas hands the Treasury an extra £55m.

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© Composite: Guardian Design

© Composite: Guardian Design

© Composite: Guardian Design

Most people set out in life wanting to believe the world is fair. They expect people to wait their turn in queues, to be treated equally in their job, and to be rewarded for hard work. These expectations influence how they understand the world around them, and shape their responses to it.

But what happens when life repeatedly challenges those assumptions? Psychologists have long been interested in this question. Our new research, published in the British Journal of Psychology, suggests adverse experiences shape both how fair people believe the world is, and how they view their place in society.

Over the course of a lifetime, personal setbacks – from illness and bereavement to being a victim of crime – may have a cumulative effect, leading to a growing sense that the world is unfair. We think this is important in the context of today’s increasingly polarised societies, in which trust in institutions has declined severely in the UK and many other countries.

Adversity and unfairness

Our research set out to answer two key questions: do experiences of adversity influence whether people see the world as fundamentally unfair – and if so, what are the societal consequences? We conducted three surveys involving more than 1,200 British participants with an equal gender split and average age of 39.

In one study, we found that people who reported experiencing more lifetime adversity – including illness, bereavement, financial hardship and violence – were more likely to believe the world was unfair.

In another, we compared people who had experienced violent victimisation with those who had not. After accounting for demographic factors, people who had experienced violent crime reported stronger perceptions of injustice.

Our final study found that greater lifetime adversity was associated with lower trust in institutions through perceptions of injustice. This is important because trust underpins many aspects of society, from confidence in public institutions to democratic participation.

Together, these findings suggest that people don’t simply interpret information based on the facts available to them. They also interpret it through the lens of their previous experiences.

Two people can read the same news story, watch the same political debate or hear the same public health advice, yet come away with very different conclusions that may not simply reflect differences in knowledge or politics. It may also reflect differences in how they have come to see the world as a result of the hardships they have faced.

Furthermore, if someone increasingly believes that the world is unfair, they may be more likely to notice fresh examples of perceived injustice, corruption or hidden motives – and interpret new events through that lens.

Belief in conspiracy theories

Previous research has shown that people who feel uncertain, powerless or threatened are often more likely to endorse conspiracy theories. Most of this work, however, has focused on their identities, traits and beliefs.

In our investigation of the impact of adverse life experiences on people, we found a remarkably consistent pattern. When these hardships are associated with stronger perceptions of injustice in the world, the same people more strongly endorse conspiracy beliefs.

Conspiracy theories rarely describe events as random. Instead, they tend to suggest that powerful individuals or organisations are secretly responsible for what happens. They offer explanations that identify intentional causes behind events that might otherwise seem confusing or unjust.

Research suggests that across societies, the level of belief in conspiracy theories is relatively stable over time. But once these beliefs become part of how someone understands the world, they can be difficult to shift.

This makes it all the more important to understand the experiences and psychological processes that may contribute to these worldviews developing in the first place. Our findings suggest that perceptions of injustice are one such pathway.

For someone who increasingly feels the world is unfair, conspiracy theories may become more psychologically appealing – providing a way of making sense of experiences that otherwise feel difficult to understand.

Our research does not suggest that adversity inevitably leads to conspiracy beliefs; nor that conspiracy theories are an inevitable consequence of trauma. Rather, it highlights a long-term psychological process that may help explain why some people become more receptive to these ideas.

In an increasingly polarised world, the media and political focus is often concentrated on what information people consume. But our research suggests we should pay more attention to the experiences that shape the lens through which people interpret information. This could help explain why people can look at the same events and reach very different conclusions.

Ultimately, people’s experiences don’t just affect them in the moment. They shape their worldview – which can influence how they interpret and respond to events and other people’s behaviour far into the future.

So, we believe any effort to reach greater consensus in society may require a deeper understanding of the hardships people have lived through over the course of their lives – and how these can affect their sense of injustice.

Daniel Jolley has received funding from the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The studies mentioned in this piece were funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants Scheme (SRG23/230720) and carried out in collaboration between Daniel Jolley, Laura Blackie, and research assistant Anna Maughan.

Laura Blackie has received funding from the British Academy.

Jonathan Wells’s review was important, but it only scratches the surface of information in biology outside of the DNA.

Source

SpaceX has formally asked US regulators for permission to operate as many as one million AI data-center satellites. That number is real. It is also an upper limit in an application, not an approved fleet, a launch schedule or evidence that one million spacecraft will actually be built.

If the full Starmind system ever existed, its direct waste heat would be too small to become a major global climate driver. The harder environmental question lies in the industrial cycle required to create and replace it: manufacturing enormous amounts of hardware, launching it through the atmosphere and eventually vaporizing much of it during re-entry.

Climate models have only begun to study satellite constellations measured in tens of thousands. A million large computing satellites would sit far beyond the scale directly tested in that literature.

The FCC has accepted an application, not approved a million launches

SpaceX filed its application on January 30, 2026. The Federal Communications Commission accepted it for public comment on February 4.

The filing seeks authority for a non-geostationary system of up to one million satellites between 500 and 2,000 kilometers altitude. The spacecraft would exchange data through optical links and connect with SpaceX’s Starlink network.

Accepting an application for filing is an administrative step. It does not mean the FCC has determined that the architecture is safe, environmentally acceptable or technically achievable. The public notice also says SpaceX plans different hardware versions across multiple orbital shells, so “one million satellites” does not describe one fixed design.

SpaceX has since presented its first AI1 design for the Starmind system. The company’s published specifications give it a 120-kilowatt average compute load, a 150-kilowatt peak and a deployed wingspan of 70 meters.

The computers’ direct heat is not the main climate problem

Computers turn almost all the electricity they use into heat. In orbit, that heat cannot leave through air or cooling water because neither is available. Large radiator surfaces must emit it as infrared radiation.

One million AI1 satellites operating at the advertised average would use about 120 gigawatts for computing. To put a strict upper bound on the direct climate effect, imagine that every watt of that heat somehow reached and was absorbed by Earth. Spread over the planet’s surface, it would average roughly 0.00024 watts per square meter.

That artificial scenario overstates the real effect because radiators can direct most thermal radiation toward deep space. Even so, its value is more than 10,000 times smaller than the IPCC’s estimate of 2.72 watts per square meter for total human-caused effective radiative forcing between 1750 and 2019.

The fleet would therefore not warm Earth simply by running hot computers overhead. Reflected sunlight, radiator orientation and the design of vast solar arrays would still need assessment, but direct compute heat is not the dominant global term.

Space solar power could avoid some terrestrial emissions

SpaceX argues that sun-synchronous satellites could collect solar energy without clouds or night-time interruptions and reject heat without chillers, cooling towers or fans. If orbital computing genuinely replaced electricity from fossil-fueled grids, it could avoid some power-sector carbon emissions and water consumption.

That benefit cannot be calculated from the one-million figure. A fair comparison would need the energy and materials used to manufacture satellites and rockets, propellant production, launch emissions, ground stations, replacement rates, failed spacecraft and the carbon intensity of the terrestrial data centers displaced.

No published life-cycle assessment yet covers SpaceX’s proposed full system. “Powered by solar energy” describes operation in orbit, not the environmental balance of building and continually replenishing the fleet.

Rocket exhaust is unusually effective high in the atmosphere

Rocket emissions are small beside global aviation, shipping or power generation by mass. Their location makes them different. Rockets inject black carbon, water vapor, nitrogen compounds, alumina and other products directly into atmospheric layers that surface pollution rarely reaches.

Black carbon absorbs sunlight and warms the surrounding stratosphere, changing atmospheric circulation and ozone chemistry. A NOAA modeling study found that a tenfold increase in hydrocarbon-rocket soot could warm parts of the stratosphere by 0.5 to 2 degrees Celsius and alter circulation. The authors stressed that soot emissions from different engines remain poorly measured.

A newer 2026 study in Earth’s Future modeled launch and re-entry emissions from the recent megaconstellation era through 2029. It found a global stratospherically adjusted forcing of about -0.0064 watts per square meter from all space missions in its scenario, with megaconstellations contributing 42 percent.

That modeled forcing is small compared with the present greenhouse-gas-driven climate imbalance, and its negative sign represents a slight cooling influence after the stratosphere adjusts. It is not necessarily good news. The same soot warms the stratosphere, changes circulation and can affect ozone. It is better understood as an uncontrolled atmospheric perturbation than as useful climate cooling.

The result also cannot be multiplied mechanically from thousands of satellites to one million. Starmind would use different spacecraft, potentially different launch vehicles and an unknown deployment cadence.

Re-entry would turn satellite material into atmospheric aerosol

Low-Earth-orbit constellations require replacement. Hardware fails, components age and atmospheric drag eventually brings spacecraft down. A million-satellite fleet with a five-year average life would imply 200,000 replacements and re-entries every year. SpaceX has not established that lifetime for the full system, but the example shows why lifespan matters as much as fleet size.

Re-entering spacecraft do not simply disappear. Heating vaporizes metals and creates particles and gases in the upper atmosphere. A 2024 global emissions inventory identified aluminum oxide as the dominant modeled metal oxide from satellites that ablate, alongside nitrogen oxides produced by high-temperature re-entry.

A 2025 atmospheric modeling study tested a scenario with 10,000 metric tons of re-entry alumina per year, a level associated with forecasts of roughly 60,000 satellites. Depending on particle size and re-entry latitude, the model produced regional temperature anomalies reaching about 1.5 degrees in the middle atmosphere and changes to polar-vortex winds.

That is not a prediction of 1.5 degrees of global surface warming. It is a modeled regional response high in the atmosphere, with large uncertainty about particle size, composition and transport. Scaling to Starmind requires basic information that is not public, especially spacecraft mass, material composition, operational life and disposal pattern.

A million is a different environmental regime

Space Daily has already examined how large Starmind spacecraft could affect ground-based astronomy. Climate and atmospheric chemistry pose a separate problem: pollution can accumulate even when each individual launch or re-entry looks small.

The most honest answer is therefore split. Direct waste heat from the orbital computers would be negligible at the global climate scale. Moving computing away from terrestrial grids might avoid emissions, but that benefit has not been demonstrated through a full life-cycle study.

The serious unknown is the launch-and-replacement machine surrounding the constellation. Existing research already finds measurable, though currently small, radiative and ozone effects from today’s much smaller space industry. A fleet approaching one million satellites would turn an emerging source of upper-atmosphere pollution into a planetary experiment without a validated model of the outcome.

The post SpaceX has asked to operate up to one million AI satellites, but their direct waste heat would barely affect global temperature; the larger climate question is what launches and mass re-entry would put into the upper atmosphere appeared first on Space Daily.

Pick up your phone. Open the settings. Find the small blue rectangle with the pointy angular symbol inside it, the one you have been ignoring since the first mobile device you ever owned. That specific little glyph, on the accumulated historical evidence of the past thirty years of wireless technology, is the personal monogram of a Danish king who ruled from approximately 958 to 986 AD, died in the year Halley’s Comet last returned to Earth before 1066, and has been buried in Roskilde Cathedral for the better part of a thousand years.

His name was Harald Gormsson. His nickname, according to the surviving Old Norse records, was Blåtand. Which translates directly into modern English as Bluetooth.

The whole story of how his personal monogram ended up on every wireless device on the planet is one of the more genuinely accidental facts of the modern technology industry.

The king in question

According to the official history maintained by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, the industry consortium that owns the technology standard and runs its trademark, Harald Bluetooth was a considerably more interesting historical figure than the somewhat comic nickname suggests. Between roughly 958 and 986, he unified the previously fragmented tribes of what is now Denmark into a single kingdom, brought Norway into the same political sphere, and was responsible for the formal Christianisation of the Danes, an achievement he commemorated by carving one of the earliest known references to the country of Denmark on a runestone that still stands today in the small town of Jelling.

The nickname itself, on the surviving linguistic record, appears to have come from a physical peculiarity. He had, according to the accounts that reached the medieval Icelandic chroniclers, a prominent dead tooth that had darkened to a shade closer to grey-blue than to healthy white. In an era before dentistry, this was the kind of visible personal feature that stuck. The great unifier of Scandinavia became, in the mouths of his contemporaries and their descendants, the man with the blue tooth.

His initials, in the runic alphabet of his time, were ᚼ for the H sound in Harald and ᛒ for the B in Blåtand. In the Younger Futhark script used in tenth-century Scandinavia, those two characters look nothing like the modern Latin letters H and B. What they look like, when combined into a single glyph in what scholars call a bind rune, is the exact symbol currently sitting on every Bluetooth-enabled device in the world.

On a related note, I came across a video that dives into the effect our phones are quietly having on us. You’ve probably felt it before, but this video will put a name to the feeling:

The Toronto bar

The story of how the king’s monogram ended up on modern electronics has been recounted in detail by the person primarily responsible, an Intel engineer named Jim Kardach. According to Kardach’s own 2008 account, published in EE Times under the title “Tech History: How Bluetooth got its name”, the origin of the whole naming decision took place in a Toronto bar in late 1997.

Kardach was at the time working on short-range wireless radio at Intel. Three separate industry efforts were running in parallel. Intel had a project called Biz-RF. Ericsson had one called MC-Link. Nokia had a third called Low Power RF. All three companies were trying to build essentially the same thing, which was a small, low-power wireless standard that would let phones, computers, and peripheral devices talk to each other without cables. In late 1997, after a joint industry meeting in Toronto that Kardach later described as having gone badly, he and Ericsson engineer Sven Mattisson went out drinking together and, being history enthusiasts, started swapping stories about the medieval Scandinavian kings Mattisson had been reading about in Frans G. Bengtsson’s Viking-era novel The Long Ships.

One of the kings in the book was Harald Bluetooth. Kardach, on his own subsequent account, went home from the trip and read further, ordering Gwyn Jones’s A History of the Vikings, and found a photograph of the runestone Harald had commissioned. Harald had united the fragmented tribes of Scandinavia into a single political unit. The three technology companies, if they could ever agree on a single standard, would be uniting the previously fragmented world of consumer electronics into a single wireless protocol. The parallel was, on Kardach’s telling, too neat to ignore. He proposed the name Bluetooth as a temporary internal code name for the project.

The bind rune of Harald’s initials became the working logo. Kardach later created a PowerPoint slide showing Harald holding a mobile phone in one hand and a notebook in the other.

How it stayed

The name was not, on any of the surviving contemporary correspondence, meant to be permanent. According to both the Bluetooth SIG’s own account and Kardach’s, the intention was for the marketing departments of the participating companies to come up with a more polished official name in due course, and for Bluetooth to be quietly retired once something better arrived.

Two names were shortlisted as replacements. One was RadioWire, which was Intel’s preferred candidate. The other was PAN, which stood for Personal Area Networking. The launch of the industry consortium was scheduled for early 1998. The trademark clearance process for RadioWire dragged past the deadline. A search for PAN turned up so many unrelated uses of the acronym on the newly emerging commercial internet that its usefulness as a brand collapsed. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group was formed in February 1998, under Kardach’s temporary code name, on the understanding that the name would be replaced later.

The first Bluetooth-enabled products shipped in 1999. By then, according to a National Geographic feature on the technology’s Viking origins, the name had already acquired sufficient market recognition that rebranding would have cost more than continuing to use it. The tech press was writing about Bluetooth. Trade shows had Bluetooth banners. Product packaging was going to press. Nobody wanted to spend the money to change everything. The temporary code name became the permanent one, and the bind rune of a tenth-century Danish king’s initials became the visual identity of a wireless standard that would, over the following quarter century, be installed on more than five billion devices per year.

Kardach himself, on his own account of the whole episode, has been surprised at the trajectory ever since. He was inducted into the Bluetooth Hall of Fame for his role in the naming decision. He retired from Intel as chief power architect in 2012. And the symbol he first proposed as a working code, drawn from a book about medieval Scandinavians he happened to be reading during a badly-timed Toronto business trip, has become one of the most reproduced pieces of graphic design in the world.

None of this was meant to happen. Harald Bluetooth did not know his initials would end up in the pocket of every person on the planet. Kardach did not intend the code name to survive marketing review. The Bluetooth SIG did not plan to build a global brand around a Scandinavian pun. What connects all of these accidents is the strange gravitational pull of anything that becomes familiar quickly enough. Once a placeholder gets attached to a project long enough for the trade press to start using it, and long enough for it to appear on the sides of shipping products, the cost of changing it starts to exceed the cost of simply leaving it in place. And so, on the accumulated evidence of thirty years of consumer electronics history, the temporary becomes the permanent, and the initials of a long-dead Viking king continue to appear, every day, on the connection screen of every device you own.

Kiran Athar is not a historian or a technology industry analyst. She writes about history, technology, and the ordinary corners of modern life where the two intersect, drawing on peer-reviewed research and primary-source scholarship.

The post The Bluetooth symbol on your phone is actually a thousand-year-old Viking monogram. It belongs to a Danish king who united warring tribes, and the reason his name ended up on billions of devices was never even meant to be permanent. appeared first on Space Daily.

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As if the practice of homeschooling wasn’t fraught enough already, parents are now bragging about using large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to school their kids.

A number of viral videos show the alarmingly cavalier attitude some parents are taking. One clip, seemingly taken from a livestream hosted by the enormously controversial influencers Cole and Savannah LaBrant, shows the parents outline their vibes-based approach to the education of their five children.

“What I do for history — Cole usually does all their history, which I love, because I’m not the best at history — so Cole steps in about once a week and we’ll do a history lesson with them… we’re just teaching them the things that we just want them to learn — that we feel are the most important,” Savannah explains. “And same with science, and geography.”

That’s not uncommon as homeschool curriculums go; as horrifying as it is to imagine a student receiving one history lesson a week, regulations around the practice are incredibly loose in the United States, freeing hardcore Christians like the LaBrants to do whatever they want. But Savannah goes on, admitting that sometimes, even those slapdash lessons are too much to tackle without a little AI assistance.

“So I just make my own curriculum, and sometimes I’ll just use, like, ChatGPT,” she says, “or just uhm, print out, like — like right now I’m teaching them where the states are and how to locate them, and uhm, like all the states and capitols and things like that.” (Even the most advanced AI chatbots are known for producing inaccurate maps.)

@thelabrantfamexposed

History Class, but Make It Vibes-Based: The LaBrants Explain Homeschooling The LaBrants’ Homeschool History Curriculum: Whatever Cole Decides Happened “Cole steps in about once a week to do a quick history lesson because I’m not the best at history.” – Sav. The LaBrants went live to explain their homeschooling setup, and Savannah casually admitted she “doesn’t know a lot of history,” so they teach it once a week, with Cole covering whatever topics they personally decide are important. So apparently the curriculum is: Monday: sponsored content Tuesday: Bible lesson Wednesday: filming Thursday: whatever Cole remembers from school Friday: history, pending personal relevance Homeschooling can absolutely be done well, but “we teach history once a week based on what we think matters” is not the reassuring flex they seem to think it is. History is not a Pinterest board where you skip the sections that do not match the family aesthetic. The most concerning part is not Savannah admitting she lacks expertise. Plenty of parents do. It is the confidence of replacing a structured curriculum with Cole’s Greatest Hits of Human Civilization. Nothing says educational rigor like two influencers deciding which centuries make the cut. @Savannah LaBrant @Bev Skin @ChatGPT @OpenAI @Fishfam @TMZ @cbsnews @CNN @DrinkFrosh #savannahlabrant #colelabrant #labrantfamily #homeschool #fyp

♬ original sound – thelabrantfamexposed

That any parents could be so cavalier in their approach to homeschooling has grim implications for an already divisive practice.

In much of the US, homeschooling parents are already given incredibly wide latitude on what to teach their children. A whole 11 states have essentially no regulations on homeschooling whatsoever: parents aren’t required to follow any set curriculum, issue standardized assessments, or even inform the state that their child won’t be going to a real school.

Many more states only require a notice of intent to homeschool and occasional proof of attendance, the latter being a bare bones measure of success, and one which is easily fudged. Unfortunately, it’s easier to count the number of states that definitively require standardized testing and a rigid curriculum: Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, and Massachusetts.

Of course, the LaBrants aren’t alone. The popular influencer account Heavenly Homeschool has similar reels out, walking parents through the process of generating entire years’ worth of lesson plans, tailor-made to their specific worldview. It all begs the question: do AI chatbots have any safeguards around education?

Turns out, not really. We tasked ChatGPT with developing a homeschooling curriculum for a 3rd grade student in Michigan — a state with virtually no regulations around DIY education — “following a strictly evangelical doctrine,” including “no woke history or science.”

ChatGPT was more than happy to oblige: “I can build this around a conservative, explicitly Christian/evangelical worldview, with Scripture integrated across subjects and with history and science taught from a young-earth/creationist perspective rather than through a secular or progressive framework,” the chatbot explained.

While it didn’t push back against our intentions to indoctrinate our hypothetical child, the LLM did make sure to clarify that “no woke” can “mean different things to different families.” So, to avoid ambiguity, the chatbot specified that the course calendar would use “Biblical authority, traditional Christian ethics… and creation-based science” as standard-bearers.

True to its word, the LLM-generated curriculum included “bible and Christian studies,” a traditionalist approach to American history, with specific chunks on both “Westward expansion” and Henry Ford — a renowned racist and antisemite — as well as a creationist approach to Earth science and astronomy.

For the portion on space, the curriculum would teach “the heavens as God’s creation while distinguishing observations from interpretations about the age and origin of the universe,” the LLM promised.

Put together, it paints a dire picture for the estimated 3.75 million K-12 homeschooled children in the US. Beyond the potential for wild AI hallucinations to leach into educational material, the technology is a Pandora’s Box for parents, who can now effortlessly inculcate their children with any number of unscientific conspiracy theories or anti-social worldviews while facing no pushback whatsoever.

Do you know anything about how homeschooling families are using AI? Email us: tips@futurism.com. We can keep you anonymous.

More on education: Mark Zuckerberg’s Wife Shuts Down School for the Disadvantaged

The post Homeschool Parents Are Planning Lessons With ChatGPT appeared first on Futurism.

A wave of disinformation online contributed to a surge of migrants in the Spanish enclave of Ceuta who were trying to reach Europe, resulting in about 90 deaths.

Soon after becoming president and chief executive of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Adam Falk visited the giraffe keeper at the Bronx Zoo. What struck Falk was the source of the keeper’s commitment. If a giraffe needed help in the middle of the night, he said, the keeper would come in because of his bond with the animal. Falk recognized something familiar. Before joining WCS, he had been a theoretical physicist, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, president of Williams College, and president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Academics often pursue highly specialized work that matters deeply to them. A university leader has to support those individual efforts while helping the institution work toward shared goals. Falk found much the same challenge at WCS: leading people whose motivation is rooted in the work itself. Adam Falk with Joe Nappi, a Senior Keeper in the Mammal Department, and a Giraffe at the Bronx Zoo. Photo courtesy of WCS. He took over WCS in July 2025 without professional experience in zoology or conservation. That was unusual for the head of an institution founded in 1895, which now operates four zoos and an aquarium in New York alongside conservation programs in more than 50 countries. His first year gave him an outsider’s view of a field with its own history and assumptions. One of his early observations was that conservation work involves people as much as animals. Public campaigns often focus on wildlife, especially large and familiar species. Field programs depend on relationships…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Researchers at the University of Basel, Switzerland and Technical University of Munich, have developed a new approach that reveals the motion of electrons in the Wigner crystal, one of the most elusive states of matter. The team was able to access properties of the crystal in its fragile quantum state using light. 

First predicted nearly a century ago, the Wigner crystal is a solid phase of electrons that forms a organized crystal-like lattice structure at low densities. When moving in an inert, neutralizing background, a gas of electrons tend to crystallize at low densities as their potential energy is more dominant than their kinetic energy. 

Depending on the number of dimensions, the electrons are spread in, they can either form a crystal lattice in 3D, a triangular lattice when in two dimensions or an evenly space latticed when in a single dimension, as the electron cloud looks to minimize its potential energy. Physicist Eugene Winger predicted this in 1934 and has fascinated scientists since because it does not arise from an internal structure from the host material. 

While these crystals have been observed extensively, little was known about their internal behavior, their movements, interactions or responses to external disturbances. So, a team of researchers led by Tomasz Smoleński, assistant professor at the University of Basel, probed the crystal using light. 

Hidden quantum behaviour

The research team cooled a single layer of tungsten diselenide to temperatures just above absolute zero and illuminated it using light. 

“Our measurements show that light can do more than simply detect the presence of this exotic state—it can reveal how the state behaves internally,” explained Lujun Wang, who carried out the experiments at the University of Basel. 

Their work showed that the optical signatures were influenced by the strength of the interactions among the electrons, which is useful in exploring other systems which have multiple interacting particles. 

To make sense of their find, the researchers also needed a strong theory of what was happening inside the Wigner crystal. So, the team collaborated with Michael Knap, a professor of collective quantum dynamics at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) to understand what was happening. 

New window for other materials

Knap and his team came up with the theory that the incident light generated excitons which interacted with the orderly arrangement of electrons in the Wigner crystal and resulted in the formation of hybrid quasiparticles called polarons. These polarons served as optical probes for the crystal and its collective dynamics.

“What is particularly exciting is that these signals carry information not only about how the electrons are arranged, but also about their quantum dynamics,” explained Fabian Pichler, a PhD student at TUM and member of Knap’s research team. “This allows us to connect the experimental observations directly to the underlying many-body physics.”

The study demonstrates that atomically thin materials are promising platform for viewing collective motion of electrons in ordered quantum states. This opens up possibilities of investigating other materials and understanding its internal dynamics even if it may have strongly correlated matter. 

The research findings were published in the journal Nature Physics. 

Flock Safety’s automated license plate-reading cameras, used by thousands of law enforcement agencies in the U.S., have drawn intense criticism from civil liberties groups.

Chinese researchers have developed a high-energy lithium-metal primary battery that combines long endurance with powerful bursts while operating at temperatures as low as -40°F (-40°C).

Developed by a team led by researchers from the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), the 25Ah pouch-type battery is designed to maintain stable performance in extreme cold.

According to Chinese online media reports, validation tests showed that the battery achieved an energy density exceeding 750Wh/kg at a low discharge rate.

The technology could support applications requiring reliable, high-energy power in harsh and low-temperature environments.

High-energy battery

The new lithium-metal primary battery is designed to combine high energy density, long storage life and rapid power delivery, while continuing to operate reliably in temperatures as low as -40°F.

The researchers developed a 25Ah pouch-type lithium-metal primary battery that achieved an energy density of more than 750Wh/kg under low-rate discharge conditions, according to Science and Technology Daily. Testing by the safety laboratory of the China Electronics Standardization Institute also found that the battery could increase its discharge rate by as much as 100 times, enabling short bursts of high-current output at up to 10C, reports the Global Times (GT).

The C-rate indicates how quickly a battery can charge or discharge relative to its rated capacity. A 1C discharge means a battery can theoretically deliver its full rated capacity in one hour, while a 10C discharge allows the same capacity to be delivered in roughly one-tenth of an hour. This capability is particularly important for primary batteries, which are designed for single-use operation and are not intended to be routinely recharged.

At room temperature, the new battery reportedly reaches a specific power of 4,487W/kg. It can sustain discharge at 4C and deliver short bursts at up to 10C, addressing a major limitation of conventional lithium primary batteries, which can offer high energy density and long shelf life but may struggle to release large amounts of energy rapidly.

Cold-ready battery

The battery also demonstrated significant performance at extreme cold. At -40°F, it retained an energy density of 447Wh/kg when discharged at 1C. Its annual self-discharge rate remained below 1 percent, indicating that the battery can retain most of its stored energy during extended periods of standby, reports GT.

The combination of high specific energy, low self-discharge and high power output could be valuable in situations where batteries must remain ready for long periods but suddenly deliver substantial power. Potential applications include drones and robots operating in remote locations, spacecraft systems, field-deployed sensors, rescue equipment and other devices where regular battery replacement or recharging is difficult.

Primary batteries are particularly useful in applications where charging infrastructure is unavailable or impractical. They can remain stored for long periods and provide power immediately when required, making them relevant to military operations, emergency response, rescue missions and forest-fire monitoring.

According to the team, they achieved the performance improvement through a new cathode material based on a high-entropy oxide. The team has also established a pilot production line with an annual capacity of 10 tons, providing a pathway from laboratory-scale material development toward battery manufacturing.

The battery has completed third-party testing and is undergoing additional validation for potential use in drones, robots, spaceflight simulators, and field sensor nodes. Further testing will determine how the technology performs under specific operating conditions and whether it can be scaled for broader commercial applications.

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Samsung SDI is taking full control of its Indiana battery plant. The South Korean cell maker is buying out General Motors’ 49.99% stake in their joint venture, according to a regulatory filing, ending GM’s ownership in the $3.5 billion factory.

That turns the New Carlisle, Indiana plant into Samsung SDI’s first wholly owned battery factory in North America.