And on the rusted lid these words appear:
“WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR DAMAGES OF ANY KIND
THESE WORKS ARE PATENTED BY KITCHENAIRE”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Many sequences of rRNA remain pretty much the same across all known animals. But Han noticed something unusual in those from the octopus: an unexpected gap that broke what’s usually one rRNA fragment in other creatures into two.

Given how widespread and highly conserved ribosomal RNA is, and how simple the mutation appears to be, it seems unlikely that this is the first time it’s arisen in the whole history of animal life. There must be some other tradeoff that octopuses found a workaround for—maybe it’s related to why they’re so short-lived?

several sound-responsive structures could be built into a single flexible device, with each one reacting to a different sound frequency. “This would allow specific parts of the device to move, bend or vibrate, potentially leading to aerodynamic robotic devices that can change shape in response to sound,” he says.

I’m picturing Yondu’s whistle-powered dart.

It’s important to distinguish between predictive models and explanatory models, and between local models and global models.

The title implies an issue with global explanatory models, but the article describes issues with local predictive models.

Conversation logs between the lab and Luna show that the agent had created an attendance policy but later lost track of it, allowing the employee’s lateness to continue for months.

Sounds like Luna should look into firing itself.

It’s just a list of their customers.

The pre-Hispanic field systems of La Mojana in the Colombian Caribbean are so vast that they can be seen from a plane at high altitude.

Is “pre-Hispanic” a general replacement for “pre-Columbian”, or is it just used in Colombia to avoid confusion with the country name?

Say someone else takes the visual result of the font’s output and re-posts it as plain text.

If anyone searches for that text, their version will come up as the first (and only) published version. Anyone who tries to reference it will cite their version instead of yours. You’d have to convince the court that a clearly different text you published earlier is really the same thing, as long as you view it with a special font that magically transforms it into the text you’re trying to claim—the judge would just as likely think you’re a copyright troll.

If the underlying text says one thing but the font makes it appear to say something else, which version does the author own the copyright to?

Information Transit got the wrong man. I got the right man. The wrong one was delivered to me as the right man, I accepted him on good faith as the right man. Was I wrong?

Sometimes I wonder if the entire planet was repopulated by the freakish occupants of some isolated Cretaceous cave system who managed to survive the asteroid underground.

Specifically, an organism has to keep latent information that’s unobservable to anything it interacts with (i.e., its ecosystem)—or at least, anything with an interest in predicting and controlling it. Otherwise, it has no guarantee of independent behavior, and it’s effectively part of a colony organism (or an organ of another organism). It also has no differential behavior for natural selection to act on, so it can’t evolve in a Darwinian sense.

To take your example of bacteria, we don’t observe and control the entirety of each individual bacterium’s behavior, but it has happened: it’s how mitochondria ceased to be independent organisms.

My personal definition of life includes the propagation of latent information—meaning that a “child” inherits something from its “parent” that isn’t visible to an observer but that nevertheless affects its potential behavior.

Assuming we can see the size and chemical composition of the gas cloud out of which a star condenses, our current theory is that this completely determines the future behavior of the star. If that’s so, then the star wouldn’t be alive by my definition. But if there’s some unobservable quality that the star inherits from its parent and that does affect its behavior, I’d be willing to reconsider.

Reminds me of Judge Holden in Blood Meridian, who sketched ancient artifacts in his personal notebook and then destroyed the originals.

Or Salma Hayek.

If they make a sequel movie based on her current activities, who will they cast to play Julia Roberts in the in-universe version of the film based on the first movie?

The article quotes a post from ISBNdb saying the issue is model collapse from training on synthetic data.

Did the bacterium evolve to fight cancer in its host just due to selection pressure to prevent host death?

If that’s the case, I’m surprised it was able to do it better than its host’s immune system—I guess bacteria can evolve faster due to shorter generations?

Since Ben Garrison is the one human whose output most closely resembles AI, I imagine this is him having an existential crisis.

Maybe search for highest-altitude reservoirs instead of dams?