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Anthropic’s Claude AI became a terrible business owner in experiment that got ‘weird’

For those of you wondering if AI agents can truly replace human workers, do yourself a favor and read the blog post that documents Anthropic’s “Project Vend.” Researchers at Anthropic and AI safety company Andon Labs put an instance of Claude Sonnet 3.7 in charge of an office vending machine, with a mission to make a profit. And, like an episode of “The Office,” hilarity ensued. They named the AI agent Claudius, equipped it with a web browser capable of placing product orders and an email addr

Researchers develop a battery cathode material that does it all

Battery electrode materials need to do a lot of things well. They need to be conductors to get charges to and from the ions that shuttle between the electrodes. They also need to have an open structure that allows the ions to move around before they reach a site where they can be stored. The storage of lots of ions also causes materials to expand, creating mechanical stresses that can cause the structure of the electrode material to gradually decay. Because it's hard to get all of these propert

Unreal Amber Fossils Show ‘Last of Us’ Zombie Fungus Terrorizing Bugs During the Cretaceous

In the video game The Last of Us and its spin-off HBO series, humans fight to survive against cordyceps, a parasitic fungus that turns its hosts into zombies. While the infections are wildly dramatized in both the game and the show, these fungi aren’t mere science fiction. In fact, some species have been around since the age of the dinosaurs, a new study suggests. An international team of researchers led by Yuhui Zhuang, a doctoral student of paleontology at China’s Yunnan University, recently

Hackers abuse Microsoft ClickOnce and AWS services for stealthy attacks

A sophisticated malicious campaign that researchers call OneClik has been leveraging Microsoft’s ClickOnce software deployment tool and custom Golang backdoors to compromise organizations within the energy, oil, and gas sectors. The hackers rely on legitimate AWS cloud services (AWS, Cloudfront, API Gateway, Lambda) to keep the command and control (C2) infrastructure hidden. ClickOnce is a deployment technology from Microsoft that allows developers to create self-updating Windows-based applica

Immune molecules may affect mood

“If you’re sick, there’s so many more things that are happening to your internal states, your mood, and your behavioral states, and that’s not simply you being fatigued physically. It has something to do with the brain,” she says. In the cortex, the researchers found certain receptors in a population of neurons that, when overactivated, can lead to autism-like symptoms such as reduced sociability in mice. But the researchers determined that the neurons become less excitable when a specific form

Cancer-targeting nanoparticles are moving closer to human trials

In the original production technique, layers with different properties can be laid down by alternately exposing a particle to positively and negatively charged polymers, with extensive purification to remove excess polymer after each application. Each layer can carry therapeutics as well as molecules that help the particles find and enter cancer cells. But the process is time-consuming and would be difficult to scale up. In the new work, the researchers used a microfluidic mixing device that al

National Archives to restrict public access starting July 7

Directions to 8601 Adelphi Rd. Truck Deliveries use entrance at 3301 Metzerott Rd. Address 8601 Adelphi Road College Park, MD 20740 Truck Deliveries - entrance at 3301 Metzerott Road Customer Service Center: 1-866-272-6272 Lost and Found: 301-837-2900 Email: [email protected] Effective July 7, 2025, the National Archives at College Park, MD, will become a restricted-access federal facility with access only for visitors with a legitimate business need. It will no longer be open to the ge

Scientists use bacteria to turn plastic waste into paracetamol

Bacteria can be used to turn plastic waste into painkillers, researchers have found, opening up the possibility of a more sustainable process for producing the drugs. Chemists have discovered E coli can be used to create paracetamol, also known as acetaminophen, from a material produced in the laboratory from plastic bottles. “People don’t realise that paracetamol comes from oil currently,” said Prof Stephen Wallace, the lead author of the research from the University of Edinburgh. “What this

A staggering 16 billion logins exposed in epic data breach, including Apple accounts

Security researchers have discovered what they describe as “one of the largest data breaches in history,” comprising a staggering 16 billion logins, which include Apple accounts (formerly known as Apple IDs). The researchers said that the stolen data gives cybercriminals “unprecedented access to personal credentials that can be used for account takeover, identity theft, and highly targeted phishing” … You may recall a report last month that Apple login credentials were among a massive database

Keylogger campaign hitting Outlook Web Access on vulnerable Exchange servers goes global

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust Facepalm: Keylogging malware is a particularly dangerous threat, as it is typically designed to capture login credentials or other sensitive data from users. When you add a compromised Exchange server to the mix, it creates an even nastier situation for any organization. Researchers from Positive Technologies recently unveiled a new study on a keylogger-based campaign targeting organizations worldw

Keylogger campaign hitting Microsoft Exchange servers goes global

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust Facepalm: Keylogging malware is a particularly dangerous threat, as it is typically designed to capture login credentials or other sensitive data from users. When you add a compromised Exchange server to the mix, it creates an even nastier situation for any organization. Researchers from Positive Technologies recently unveiled a new study on a keylogger-based campaign targeting organizations worldw

Traces of Toxic Industrial Chemical Found in U.S. Air for the First Time

Americans’ air is teeming with all sorts of known toxin pollutants—now scientists have found a new one to add to the list. Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder detailed their discovery in a study published earlier this month. They sampled agricultural sites in Oklahoma and found clear traces of medium-chain chlorinated paraffins (MCCPs) in the surrounding air. The health effects of MCCPs on people are still being studied, though countries are already planning to debate whether thes

Doctors Find They Can Detect Cancer in Blood Years Before Diagnosis

Image by Getty / Futurism Cancer Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have discovered that cancer can be detected in the bloodstream a full three years before it's spotted by doctors for an official diagnosis. As detailed in a partially government-funded study published in the journal Cancer Discovery last month, the team found that genetic material being shed by cancer tumors can show up in the bloodstream far earlier than previously thought, paving the way for promising new cancer screeni

Scientists Discover Startling Trick to Defeat Insomnia

Image by Getty / Futurism Studies Insomnia is a curse we wouldn't wish on our worst enemy — and scientists have discovered a startlingly simple lifestyle change that appears to be very statistically effective at preventing it. In a new study published in the journal Sleep Health, researchers from Columbia and the University of Chicago report that eating a full day's serving worth of fruits and vegetables strongly appears to help people sleep more soundly throughout the night. Interrupted slee

NASA Satellite Captures Massive Wastewater Flow off California Coast

In 2022, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched a satellite sensor to map minerals in the Earth’s dusty, arid regions. But that’s not all it’s useful for—in a new study, scientists used the spectroscopic tool to study massive amounts of sewage flowing into the sea off the Southern California coast. Every year, millions of gallons of untreated and treated wastewater are unceremoniously dumped into the Tijuana River, ferrying pollution through communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico borde

Frontier AI Models Are Getting Stumped by a Simple Children's Game

Earlier this week, researchers at Apple released a damning paper, criticizing the AI industry for vastly overstating the ability of its top AI models to reason or "think." The team found that the models including OpenAI's o3, Anthropic's Claude 3.7, and Google's Gemini were stumped by even the simplest of puzzles. For instance, the "large reasoning models," or LRMs, consistently failed at Tower of Hanoi, a children's puzzle game that involves three pegs and a number of differently-sized disks t

Scientists Just Solved a 14,000-Year-Old Puppy Mystery

In 2011 and 2015, two approximately 14,000-year-old pups were pulled from northern Siberia’s permafrost roughly 25 miles (40 kilometers) from the village of Tumat. Within the same layers of icy soil, researchers found woolly mammoth bones with evidence of human processing. This led some to wonder whether the “Tumat Puppies” may have been tamed wolves or even early dogs waiting around for scraps at a prehistoric butchering site. In a new study, an international team of researchers analyzed the p

Password-spraying attacks target 80,000 Microsoft Entra ID accounts

Hackers have been using the TeamFiltration pentesting framework to target more than 80,000 Microsoft Entra ID accounts at hundreds of organizations worldwide. The campaign started last December and has successfully hijacked multiple accounts, say researchers at cybersecurity company Proofpoint, who attribute the activity to a threat actor called UNK_SneakyStrike. According to the researchers, the peak of the campaign happened on January 8, when it targeted 16,500 accounts in a single day. Such

Why Bats Don’t Get Cancer—and What That Means for Humans

When you think of longevity in animals, chances are that the Greenland shark will immediately come up. After all, researchers estimate that the enigmatic animal can live for at least 250 years. It turns out, however, that bats also hold their own when it comes to lifespan, with some species living up to 25 years—equivalent to 180 human years—and they tend to do it cancer-free. Researchers from the University of Rochester (UR) have investigated anti-cancer “superpowers,” as described in a UR sta

Bats Have Cancer-Fighting ‘Superpowers’—Here’s What That Means for Humans

When you think of longevity in animals, chances are that the Greenland shark will immediately come up. After all, researchers estimate that the enigmatic animal can live for at least 250 years. It turns out, however, that bats also hold their own when it comes to lifespan, with some species living up to 25 years—equivalent to 180 human years—and they tend to do it cancer-free. Researchers from the University of Rochester (UR) have investigated anti-cancer “superpowers,” as described in a UR sta

New Apple study challenges whether AI models truly “reason” through problems

In early June, Apple researchers released a study suggesting that simulated reasoning (SR) models, such as OpenAI's o1 and o3, DeepSeek-R1, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet Thinking, produce outputs consistent with pattern-matching from training data when faced with novel problems requiring systematic thinking. The researchers found similar results to a recent study by the United States of America Mathematical Olympiad (USAMO) in April, showing that these same models achieved low scores on novel mathematic

Scientists attach insect antennae to drones for smell-based navigation

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust In a nutshell: Researchers in Japan have merged robotic technology with the finely tuned senses of silk moths to create a bio-hybrid drone. By harnessing nature's expertly evolved ability to track scents over long distances, this innovation could aid in disaster response efforts. Traditional drones rely on visual sensors like cameras and lasers for navigation, but these can be unreliable in harsh c