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OpenAI unveils multitalented AI that writes, translates, and slanders OpenAI’s researchers knew they were on to something when their language modeling program wrote a convincing essay on a topic they disagreed with. They’d been testing the new AI system by feeding it text prompts, getting it to complete made-up sentences and paragraphs. Then, says David Luan, VP of engineering at the Californian lab, they had the idea of asking it to argue a point they thought was counterintuitive. In this case: why recycling is bad for the world. “And it wrote this really competent, really well-reasoned essay,” Luan tells The Verge.

Give a Door — Get a House What is OpenOffice.org? For users, OpenOffice.org is the world's leading open-source office productivity suite. It has been downloaded more than 100 million times to date and reaches a broad audience across fields of applications, languages, and cultures. For developers, OpenOffice.org is much more than that. OpenOffice.org provides a complete, open and free development platform that provides cross-platform compatibility and great extensibility. New 3D View of Methane Tracks Sources and Movement around the Globe By Ellen Gray, NASA's Earth Science News Team NASA’s new 3-dimensional portrait of methane concentrations shows the world’s second largest contributor to greenhouse warming, the diversity of sources on the ground, and the behavior of the gas as it moves through the atmosphere. Combining multiple data sets from emissions inventories, including fossil fuel, agricultural, biomass burning and biofuels, and simulations of wetland sources into a high-resolution computer model, researchers now have an additional tool for understanding this complex gas and its role in Earth’s carbon cycle, atmospheric composition, and climate system. Since the Industrial Revolution, methane concentrations in the atmosphere have more than doubled.

Aristo: A.I. can now score an ‘A’ on 8th-grade science tests Could you score an 'A' on an eighth-grade science test? If so, you're in the same league as Aristo, an artificial intelligence system whose remarkable language and logic skills highlight recent progress in the A.I. industry. For context: Four years ago, some 700 computer scientists competed for $80,000 to develop an A.I. that could merely pass an eighth-grade science test. None scored higher than 60 percent. But now, thanks to improved "language models" driven by neural networks, systems like Aristo are becoming much better at predicting language and understanding how to apply it to solve logic-based tasks.

10 A novel human coronavirus that is now named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) (formerly called HCoV-19) emerged in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and is now causing a pandemic.1 We analyzed the aerosol and surface stability of SARS-CoV-2 and compared it with SARS-CoV-1, the most closely related human coronavirus.2 We evaluated the stability of SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV-1 in aerosols and on various surfaces and estimated their decay rates using a Bayesian regression model (see the Methods section in the Supplementary Appendix, available with the full text of this letter at NEJM.org). SARS-CoV-2 nCoV-WA1-2020 (MN985325.1) and SARS-CoV-1 Tor2 (AY274119.3) were the strains used. Aerosols (<5 μm) containing SARS-CoV-2 (105.25 50% tissue-culture infectious dose [TCID50] per milliliter) or SARS-CoV-1 (106.75-7.00 TCID50 per milliliter) were generated with the use of a three-jet Collison nebulizer and fed into a Goldberg drum to create an aerosolized environment.

No, Facebook Did Not Panic And Shut Down An AI Program That Was Getting Dangerously Smart In recent weeks, a story about experimental Facebook machine learning research has been circulating with increasingly panicky, Skynet-esque headlines. Photo: AP "Facebook engineers panic, pull plug on AI after bots develop their own language," one site wrote. "Facebook shuts down down AI after it invents its own creepy language," another added. Alexa will soon order you around at home “Alexa, should I take an umbrella with me today?” “Alexa, where did I put my car keys?” “Alexa, can you please run my life for me?” Okay, so we may not have arrived at that last point just yet, but we’re probably closer than we think. During a panel on Thursday at the Fast Company Innovation Festival, senior staff writer Jeff Beer interviewed Amazon vice president of Smart Home Daniel Rausch about all things Alexa, from its humble beginnings in 2014’s Echo, when it could accomplish just 13 tasks, to a future where it will be everywhere—even more everywhere than the 70 new Alexa-enabled devices that Amazon recently announced.

River Birds The warming of the planet over recent decades is causing significant changes in the structure and functioning of natural systems, as well as in the way they work. In the context of the Mediterranean region, it is difficult to identify those changes related to climate change that may have occurred in the rivers of the region, as they are already highly regulated and have been altered by excessive catchment areas and a wide range of infrastructures. Recent studies however indicate that low river flows and the frequency of extreme events are increasing, from droughts through to floods.

How AI has shaped every Amazon business Swami Sivasubramanian lives in a wooded area in the Seattle suburbs that’s a favorite with opportunistic local bears. From time to time, usually on garbage night, the animals wander into Sivasubramanian’s backyard to pillage his trash. But try as they might, he and his family had never managed to spot the intruders. “My wife really wanted to see these bears in action,” says Sivasubramanian, Amazon’s VP of machine learning. “She will always try to stay up looking for bears to visit, and she wants me to give her company.”