Simulations reveal the hidden behaviors of dark matter

With everything we learn about the nature of dark matter—that mysterious, unseeable substance that helps galaxies to form—there are a hundred new questions to answer. A new theory about how dark matter interacts with gasses just hit the wire, and it’s leading scientists down a new path of cosmological discovery.

In a study published Wednesday in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of UCLA researchers created a simulation of how dark matter may ha

Meta announces its first-ever dividend, sending the stock soaring

Meta, for the first time in its history, is giving money back to its investors.

The company, on Thursday, said it would give a 50-cent-per-share dividend to shareholders and also announced plans for a $50 billion share buyback. That came on the heels of a solid earnings beat across the board.

The company’s stock was up more than 14% in after-hours trading.

Meta reported earnings per share of $5.33 in the fourth quarter of 2023, well above the $4.96 that an

Apple revenue jumps 2%, but sliding iPhone sales in China worry investors

Apple on Thursday reported sales and profit that beat Wall Street estimates, powered by growth in its iPhone business. But China sales missed analysts’ targets.

Apple shares were down 1.7% in after-hours trading.

The 2% rise in overall fiscal first-quarter sales for the company ended four straight quarters of sales declines on the strength of its iPhone 15 lineup, which includes devices capable of capturing three-dimensional video for the Vision Pro headset being re

What will happen to your TikTok videos under Universal Music Group’s copyright law?

Overnight, TikTok video feeds started going silent—not as some sort of weird Charlie Chaplin homage, but because Universal Music Group did, as previously threatened, pull its expansive song catalog, igniting a “Mute-pocalypse” where videos featuring music by many of the industry’s biggest names (Taylor Swift, The Weeknd, Lana Del Rey, Bad Bunny, Britney Spears, Drake, Post Malone, Fleetwood Mac) were suddenly flagged for copyright infringement.

The reason

The FCC wants to make AI robocalls like this creepy one illegal

Robocalls are annoying enough, but the growth of generative artificial intelligence could make it much easier for phone-based scams to fool people. Now, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is hoping to head off this potential threat before it becomes an even bigger problem.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, on Wednesday, proposed new rules that would make robocalls using AI-generated voices illegal.

“AI-generated voice cloning and images are already sowing

Netflix’s password crackdown is working, and now it’s contagious. Hulu and Disney+ are doing it, too

It’s about to get tougher for viewers to share logins on more popular streaming services. The Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN+ trio will now disallow users from sharing passwords outside of their households.

On Wednesday, subscribers of Disney-owned Hulu received an email informing them that, starting March 14, the company would start adding “limitations on sharing your account outside of your household.” The company also revised its Terms of Service to explicitly ban p

Why are there so many layoffs? Jobless benefits may be up, but job losses are still low

The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits rose last week to the highest level in 11 weeks, though layoffs remain at historically low levels.

Applications for unemployment benefits climbed to 224,000 for the week ending Jan. 27, an increase of 9,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

The four-week average of claims, a less volatile measure, rose by 5,250, to 207,750.

Weekly unemployment claims are seen as a proxy for the numb

AI2’s new open-source LLM may reset the definition of ‘open AI’

Long before ChatGPT, natural language AI researchers, many of them in academia, shared their research openly. The free-flowing exchange of information and innovation allowed the AI community at large to reproduce, validate, and criticize one another’s work. That all changed with the arrival of supersized LLMs like OpenAI’s GPT-4, when investors started pushing research labs to treat the details of their discoveries as valuable intellectual property—that is, to keep the un

Uber drivers see a dip in their monthly earnings, according to a new report

Uber drivers have seen a “marked decrease” in their monthly average gross earnings in the past year, according to a new research report from Gridwise, an app that helps gig workers track their earnings.

Uber drivers reported a 17.1% decline in gross earnings in 2023 compared to the year prior, the report said. Gridwise’s report pulls from its database of anonymized gig mobility data from more than 500,000 gig drivers and findings from a survey conducted with 528

Big Tech hearings may not lead to new laws, but that doesn’t mean they’re useless

Congressional hearings featuring Big Tech head honchos, including yesterday’s affair between the Senate Judiciary and the execs from major social platforms, often get a bad rap. These bitter brawls  have been panned at turns as “kabuki theater” and “hot mess[es]”—and for good reason. With a few exceptions, the primary output of these events tends to be new viral C-SPAN clips.

But that doesn’t mean they’re entirely useless.


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