ElevenLabs has released Music v2.5 as the new default model in ElevenMusic, improving audio quality with richer melodies and more natural instrument sounds across genres. Users on all plans, including Free, now own the rights to tracks they create, and can download lossless copies—five daily for Free users and 400 monthly for Pro subscribers. Tracks that reference other artists' songs are blocked from download to protect original creators.
Major AI companies are accelerating efforts to build superintelligent systems, pushing timelines and resources into overdrive despite unresolved safety and control questions. The push reflects competitive pressure among leading labs to be first to achieve transformative AI capabilities.
Chinese pharmaceutical companies, once known mainly for producing cheap generic medicines, are now developing original obesity and weight-loss drugs aimed at competing with Western blockbusters like Ozempic and Wegovy. Several firms are advancing candidates through clinical trials and striking licensing deals with major international drugmakers.
A new Nature study by Angrist and colleagues examined how remote phone-based tutoring affected children's learning during periods when schools were shut, such as during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research found strong evidence that this low-tech approach helped students keep learning despite the disruption, offering a rare data-backed solution to an otherwise poorly understood problem.
Tesla halted supply of its Solar Roof tiles in August, telling certified installers it would only ship standard solar panels going forward. Contractors say they spent weeks in specialized training and completed supervised installations to become certified, only to be left with sunk costs once Tesla pulled the product after roughly 3,000 total US installations over seven years.
A new open-source utility called balrogg recompresses existing Ogg Vorbis and Opus audio files without any loss of quality, typically shaving 8-12% off .ogg files and 3-8% off .opus files. The command-line tool, licensed under GPLv3 and hosted on GitHub, supports batch processing across multiple cores, adjustable compression effort levels from -1 to -9, and optional progress reporting during encoding and decoding.
Researchers testing a GLP-1 receptor agonist, the class of drug behind popular weight-loss treatments, observed that female mice given the compound showed slower markers of biological ageing compared to untreated mice. The effect was notably more pronounced in females than in males in the study.
Apple's own guidelines reveal that lossless audio streaming through CarPlay only works over a wired USB connection, not wirelessly. This is because wired CarPlay uses the uncompressed LPCM codec, while wireless CarPlay relies on AAC-LC, a lossy codec that discards some original audio data to reduce file size.
A new survey-based study examines how AI adoption in U.S. workplaces affects employment, looking beyond layoffs to also measure job creation and promotions tied to tools like ChatGPT. The research suggests that while some workers face displacement, others are seeing new roles or career advancement as a result of AI integration.
BMW has attributed the reduction of physical buttons in its newer vehicles to changing driver preferences, particularly among younger customers who are more accustomed to touchscreen interfaces from smartphones. The automaker suggests this generational shift in expectations has influenced its interior design choices, moving controls into digital menus and touch panels.
Streaming tags like 'Dolby Atmos' and 'Lossless' refer to two separate audio technologies: Atmos creates a 3D soundstage by placing sounds in space, while lossless audio preserves the full quality of a recording without the data loss found in formats like MP3 or AAC. Because Atmos typically relies on the lossy Dolby Digital Plus codec, and lossless streaming uses formats like FLAC or ALAC, most platforms can't offer both simultaneously.
A developer built a tool that scrapes Costco's undisclosed gas-price data from an internal API called AjaxGetGasPricesService, pulling prices from roughly 600 warehouses nationwide. The project began as a personal effort to compare two nearby Costco locations in Tampa during a spring fuel price spike tied to Strait of Hormuz tensions, then expanded into a broader dataset showing how Costco's gas pricing moved relative to competitors.
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