Jess Asato was portrayed by AI tool as wearing a bikini after she criticised the creation of such non-consensual pictures
A Labour MP has taken legal action against Elon Musk’s AI company after saying its Grok tool helped a user produce fake sexualised pictures of her, part of a wave of such images that flooded X earlier this year.
Jess Asato, the MP for Lowestoft, said in January that seeing herself portrayed by the AI tool as wearing a bikini without her consent was “violating”.
Giving news websites the power to block their content from being used in AI summaries will have global ramifications
The UK’s competition watchdog has ordered Google to change how it uses publishers’ content in its AI-powered search results, in a move that will have global ramifications.
The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is using powers that allow it to set bespoke rules for major tech firms that it deems to have “strategic market status”. Google, the world’s largest search engine, is one of those companies.
Tesla announced today that its unsupervised “Robotaxi” service now covers the entire Austin metro area, a significant expansion of its geofenced operating zone.
It’s a notable milestone on paper, but the actual fleet serving this massive area remains tiny — just ~20 active unsupervised vehicles, according to the latest data, a number that has actually been shrinking.
Last week, as the war in Iran continued to choke global oil supplies, the UK government announced a 13% increase in the cap on energy prices. But it was another related story on the other side of the world that caught my eye.
In Australia, the energy minister announced a fall of up to 10% in the benchmark electricity price in parts of the country, driven by record levels of renewables and batteries in the power grid.
When most people think about how a bicycle frame is built, they probably imagine sparks flying from a welding torch.
That’s certainly how the vast majority of aluminum bike frames are made. But one British e-bike company is taking a very different approach, and it has more in common with Aston Martin sports cars and aerospace engineering than traditional bicycle manufacturing.
Christi Hill and male officer misidentified in Vickrum Digwa murder case on AI platforms including Grok
A former police officer has been forced to flee to a safe space after she was falsely accused online of being involved in the arrest of Henry Nowak.
Christi Hill, who served as a police constable for 12 years, has criticised social media and AI platforms, including Elon Musk’s Grok, for spreading the false claim that she was one of the officers who arrested Nowak as he lay dying after being stabbed by Vickrum Digwa.
Amazon's updated search bar will now show you AI-generated images of products as you describe them. For now, the in-app feature only surfaces AI images of clothing and home goods, allowing you to tap on the image that best matches what you're looking for and search for similar-looking items.
In a blog post, Amazon positions the feature as a way to help you search for items if you can't remember the name of a specific texture or style, like describing a "shirt with a draped collar" if you can't think of "cowl neck." The feature seems like it might come in handy in these kinds of scenarios, but it doesn't really add much if you're just searc …
Researchers from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) have announced the first ultrafast laser delivering 1.05 nanojoules of energy in extremely short pulses as short as 147 femtoseconds integrated onto a photonic chip.
The research team behind the accomplishment said that successfully scaling down ultrafast lasers of this magnitude from large tabletop models to microchip integration could enable extremely advanced sensing technologies, improve medical imaging, and potentially enable next-generation atomic clocks for yet-to-be-developed communication and navigation applications.
Ultrafast Lasers on a Microchip Scale Have Remained an Elusive Photonics ‘Holy Grail’
In a statement announcing the breakthrough, team leader and EPFL Professor Tobias J. Kippenberg explained that ultrafast lasers emit extremely short pulses of light energy lasting only a few hundred femtoseconds, which are quadrillionths of a second. Although the development of this category of lasers has enabled ultraprecise micromachining, atomic clocks, and advanced eye surgery, the team notes that the “bulky” technology has been limited to optical laser tables.
On the other end of the spectrum, engineers have built extremely small photonic chips that channel light in a similar way to how traditional microprocessors channel electricity to perform calculations. Some photonic chip designs are already widely used in the communications industry. However, integrating the ultrafast laser technology at the power levels demonstrated by the research team into a smaller chip has remained particularly elusive.
“For more than twenty years, a high-pulse-energy femtosecond laser on chip was widely regarded as a holy grail of integrated photonics,” Professor Kippenberg explained.
“Overlooked, Surprisingly Elegant Technology” Could Enable Futuristic Technologies
To find the nexus between size, speed, and power that could enable a true high-energy, ultrafast laser on a chip, the EPFL team opted to turn away from traditional laser designs and instead took advantage of what they termed a “largely overlooked” design: a Mamyshev oscillator.
Unlike some designs, this oscillator uses a nonlinear waveguide placed between the two optical filters in the laser cavity, each of which allows a different color of the spectrum to pass through. When a strong light pulse travels through the installed waveguide, the beam broadens into a wider range of colors.
EPFL’s chip-based ultrafast laser operating in the laboratory test setup. The device produces extremely short laser pulses directly on a photonic chip. Image Credit: Zheru Qiu/EPFL.
The team notes that this effect allows part of the light pulse to pass through both filters and remain in circulation. However, they also note that “weak light” does not broaden enough when impacting the waveguide and is ‘rejected.’
Zheru Qiu, a co-lead author of the paper, said that beyond speed and power, their chip has commercial potential due to its material simplicity.
“This design is especially attractive because it does not require any component that is difficult to make on this erbium-doped silicon nitride chip,” Qiu explained.
Another advantage to the team’s design is its resistance to nonlinear interaction. Put simply, when waveguides squeeze light into tiny spaces, that same light interacts strongly with itself.
The resulting nonlinear interactions can degrade the performance of traditional photonic chip designs. However, Qiu said that a laser with a Mamyshev oscillator is “well suited to the tight confinement of light in photonic chips.”
“Our result shows that it is not only possible, but that it can be achieved with a surprisingly elegant architecture that the integrated-photonics community had overlooked,” Qiu explained of their revolutionary architecture.
Integrated Chips Could Replace Large, Expensive Laboratory Lasers
When discussing the versatility of their ultrafast laser on a chip, the researchers noted that the prototype’s 42-cm-long laser cavity can be folded down to a size smaller than a matchhead. For comparison, they noted that 42 centimeters is “far smaller than optical fiber-based lasers.”
For potential commercial applications, the team said their chips can be manufactured “at-scale,” with an excess of 1,000 individual laser cavities per chip. Although currently in the demonstration phase, the team suggested that a fully realized commercial-grade ultrafast laser-on-a-chip could provide engineers with a critical microengineering tool they have lacked.
“With kilowatt-level peak powers, the chip can drive demanding applications that have long depended on large, expensive laboratory lasers,” says Qiu.
The researchers suggested their chip could impact several technologies, such as advanced sensing and medical imaging, and potentially pave the way for futuristic technologies based on ultraprecise atomic clocks.
Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on X, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.
Newly released NASA satellite images reveal the extent of recent wildfire damage on Santa Rosa Island in vivid detail, showcasing the impact of the largest Channel Islands fire on record.
The images, obtained with NASA satellite observation platforms that include the Fire Information for Resource Management System (FIRMS) and the Fire Event Explorer, reveal fire damage to nearly half of the island’s southeastern side.
The fire was initially spotted on May 15, 2026, and containment efforts began as the blaze spread across the island over the following days.
Now, the new NASA imagery is revealing the extent of the damage caused by the historic fire, which officials say came close to endangering one of our nation’s rarest species.
California’s Channel Islands, with Santa Rosa Island visible in the center. Fire damage is visible on the island’s southeastern portion (Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey).
18,000 Acres Scorched on Santa Rosa Island
Current damage estimates indicate that close to one-third of the island was impacted, constituting more than 18,300 acres on the island, which is part of California’s Channel Islands National Park.
Comparisons with past NASA imagery of Santa Rosa Island, made possible with Landsat satellite images, reveal a sharp contrast between once verdant regions of the island, which are now scorched by fire, shown in reddish brown in the more recent images (see below).
Santa Rosa Island is shown in a side-by-side comparison, featuring the wildfire near its outset on May 16, 2026, and subsequent imagery from May 24, 2026, as the fire spread across approximately 1/3 of the island (Image Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey).
Fortunately, Channel Islands National Park officials reported that the fire had been 97 percent contained by May 26, after burning its way through chaparral and grassland covering large portions of the island.
Endangering One of America’s Rarest Species
The Channel Islands serve as a unique and extremely diverse habitat for a range of species of both plants and animals. Among the species threatened during the recent fires were Torrey pines (Pinus torreyana), recognized as our nation’s rarest pine tree, which only grows on Santa Rosa Island and in a preserve in urban San Diego.
A wild grove of Torrey pines on Santa Rosa Island (Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons/CC BY 2.5).
Fortunately, most of the island’s Torrey pine forest remains intact, although some damage was reportedly discernible in surveys by firefighters on the island and in drone imagery of the scorched areas.
According to island officials, the fire appears to have burned its way inland at lower intensity, making its way through pine areas that burned ground-dwelling vegetation while leaving the overlying canopy largely unaffected.
Damage from the Largest Channel Island Fire
Park officials say that some smaller areas of forest did sustain significant damage, as conditions in those pockets allowed a greater burn intensity.
Closer to the fire’s northern boundary, Santa Rosa’s cloud forests—the wooded areas comprised mostly of oak and pine growth surrounded by chaparral, whose name is derived from the island fog that sustains them—were successfully preserved by firefighting crews who worked ahead of the fire to cool areas where combustible vegetation grows.
Based on recent local reports, the fire that consumed large portions of Santa Rosa Island’s vegetation is the largest known to have impacted any of the Channel Islands. Fortunately, many of the island’s indigenous trees and other vegetation are resilient enough to withstand fire, since they do not rely on it as part of their growth cycles like many mainland plant species.
Additional information about the fires can be found here, and more imagery of the recent damage has been made available at NASA’s Earth Observatory page.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. A longtime reporter on science, defense, and technology with a focus on space and astronomy, he can be reached atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow him on X @MicahHanks, and at micahhanks.com.
The man who headed Trump’s invasions of US cities joined the US and European far right in Portugal to preach “remigration”—a plan to expel all minorities and immigrants.
The man who headed Trump’s invasions of US cities joined the US and European far right in Portugal to preach “remigration”—a plan to expel all minorities and immigrants.
The Dolphin G DM-i is set to go on sale any day now as BYD’s first car custom-designed for overseas markets, including Europe. Ahead of its global launch later this month, the plug-in hatch was spotted in public, revealing the interior for the first time.
DeeDee Henry works out using VR at her home in Ventura, California. | Photo by Maggie Shannon / The Verge
A few months ago, Meta effectively handed Supernatural, a popular VR fitness game on the Meta Quest, a death sentence. As part of overarching VR layoffs, the company announced the game would no longer get any new content, enraging its tightly knit, devoted community. Now it looks like Supernatural is getting a second chance. Today, Meta announced in a community post that the game is being spun off into an independent company later this year.
The new entity will be called Supernatural Health, and will launch as a separate app on the Meta Horizon Store. While Meta did not comment on who would be the CEO of Supernatural Health, Meta spokespers …
DfE plans to withdraw funding for assistive software, saying it is now rarely needed due to ‘widely available free tools’
Disability campaigners have called on the government to halt plans to cut funding for specialist tech support for tens of thousands of disabled students in England.
Almost 10,000 people have signed a petition opposing Department for Education (DfE) proposals to withdraw funding for specialist assistive software available as part of the Disabled Students’ Allowance (DSA).
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