Artificial Intelligence – theck1 IT/AI news

AI for science needs reasoning, not just data

Eric Schmidt, Suhas Mahesh • August 10, 2026 Every few decades, someone announces that science has reached its end. In 1903, the revered physicist Albert Michelson wrote that the “facts of physical science have all been discovered.” In the 1980s, Stephen Hawking predicted that theoretical physics might be finished by the end of the century.

These startups are chasing the next big thing in LLMs

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Will Douglas Heaven • August 10, 2026 MIT Technology Review’s What’s Next series looks across industries, trends, and technologies to give you a first look at the future. You can read the rest of them here. Way back in the summer of 2017, AI researchers at Google put out a paper called “Attention Is All You

Mount Toba eruption doesn’t seem like it could nearly kill our species

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Jacek Krywko • August 9, 2026 Mount Toba was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2.6 million years, and some have suggested it nearly wiped out humanity. Around 74,000 years ago, a caldera on what is now Sumatra emptied thousands of cubic kilometers of magma in about two weeks, roughly a thousand times more

Peer review is overwhelmed—can it survive in the AI era?

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Saima Sidik • August 10, 2026 Jason Semprini was excited about his research on policies mandating that elementary school students receive the human papillomavirus vaccine. HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer, but counterintuitively, Semprini found that mandates don’t do that much to reduce the overall rate of cervical cancer in a population. That’s odd,

No Dogs in Space is a music history podcast for true obsessives

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Terrence O’Brien • August 9, 2026 Sadly, there hasn’t been a new episode of No Dogs in Space since July of 2024. Part four of the podcast’s series on Can wrapped up an abbreviated season 3, which focused on experimental rock. Don’t get me wrong, I loved seasons 1 and 2, but the show seemed

Zuckerberg’s yacht was closer, but someone else saved a stranded boat

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Terrence O’Brien • August 9, 2026 Mark Zuckerberg’s yacht “The Launchpad.” | Image: Sylvain Lefevre / Getty Images Earlier this week, the Alaskan cruise ship Wilderness Legacy rescued a small skiff stranded near Farragut Bay after running out of fuel. But, according to tracking data reviewed by the Alaska Beacon and Halifax Shipping News, the

49ers coach says his Tesla was on Autopilot when he crashed

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Terrence O’Brien • August 9, 2026 Head Coach Kyle Shanahan of the San Francisco 49ers. | Image: Michael Zagaris / San Francisco 49ers / Getty Images Four weeks ago, San Francisco 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan was involved in an accident near downtown Palo Alto. At the time, Shanahan said only that the accident was his

Dropbox is a PC builder’s best friend

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TC. Sottek • August 9, 2026 In 2018 I bet my reputation and self-worth on a huge crowdfunded game design project. It could have been a failure for many reasons, but the one I became most worried about was losing all of the work that was stored locally on my home-built PC – a scenario

Space mirrors could ruin astronomy — and your eyes

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Georgina Torbet • August 10, 2026 Solar energy, at any time of day or night – that’s the dream of space mirror projects. Futurists have been imagining satellite mirrors that could reflect the sun’s light onto the Earth’s surface for over a century. Russian scientists experimented with the concept in the ’90s with the Znamya

The first rival Android app store just arrived in the US Play Store

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Dominic Preston • August 10, 2026 Google appears to have prepared a dedicated section for third-party app stores within Google Play, and Aptoide is just the first. | Screenshot: Google Play Store Following the latest twist in Google’s legal battles with Epic, US Android users are now able to open Google’s Play Store and download