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Los Alamos Is Capturing Real-Time Images of Explosions at 7Mths of a Second

Download a print-friendly version of this article. Los Alamos scientists are good at doing things that seem impossible, like taking a picture of something that happens in less than seven-millionths of a second—such as an explosion. And not just one picture, but a series of images that reveal pivotal data about the material that exploded and the physics of the explosion. This so-called dynamic imaging is essential to the Lab’s stockpile stewardship mission because it helps scientists test and un

Genie 3: A new frontier for world models

Given a text prompt, Genie 3 can generate dynamic worlds that you can navigate in real time at 24 frames per second, retaining consistency for a few minutes at a resolution of 720p. Towards world simulation At Google DeepMind, we have been pioneering research in simulated environments for over a decade, from training agents to master real-time strategy games to developing simulated environments for open-ended learning and robotics. This work motivated our development of world models, which are

DeepMind reveals Genie 3, a world model that could be the key to reaching AGI

Google DeepMind has revealed Genie 3, its latest foundation world model that the AI lab says presents a crucial stepping stone on the path to artificial general intelligence, or human-like intelligence. “Genie 3 is the first real-time interactive general purpose world model,” Shlomi Fruchter, a research director at DeepMind, said during a press briefing. “It goes beyond narrow world models that existed before. It’s not specific to any particular environment. It can generate both photo-realistic

What happens to your files when you stop paying your cloud storage subscription?

In brief: The end of a cloud storage subscription does not immediately erase your files, but it does set a countdown clock in motion. Timelines and policies differ, but the underlying risk is the same: unless quick action is taken to download, move, or delete files, the content may eventually be lost for good. For many consumers, digital subscriptions have become a routine monthly expense. They cover a wide range of services – music, video, software, games, and increasingly, cloud storage. As t

US adds OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to list of approved AI vendors for federal agencies

In Brief The U.S. government has added Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic to a list of approved vendors that can offer artificial intelligence services to civilian federal agencies, Bloomberg reports. The companies will see their AI tools offered via a new federal contracting platform, the Multiple Awards Schedule (MSA), which would let government agencies access AI tool vendors with pre-negotiated contracts, rather than negotiating with vendors individually. Bloomberg reports that the General Ser

Build Your Own Lisp

Build Your Own Lisp Learn C and build your own programming language in 1000 lines of code! If you're looking to learn C, or you've ever wondered how to build your own programming language, this is the book for you. In just a few lines of code, I'll teach you how to use C, and together, we'll start building your very own language. Along the way we'll learn about the weird and wonderful nature of Lisps, how to develop a real-world project, concisely solve problems, and write beautiful code! T

xAI’s new Grok image and video generator has a ‘spicy’ mode

Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. xAI’s new Grok Imagine tool is an AI image and video generator that encourages users to make NSFW content. In contrast to rival generative AI video tools like Google’s Veo and OpenAI’s Sora, which try to block users from generating anything seedy, the Grok chatbot’s Imagine feature provides a “Spicy” generation mode that actively directs it to spit out nudity and sexualized content. Grok Imagine includes te

Using drone imagery and AI to rapidly assess damage after hurricanes and floods

A tool developed at Texas A&M University is set to transform how emergency responders assess damage after disasters. The technology, known as CLARKE (Computer vision and Learning for Analysis of Roads and Key Edifices) uses artificial intelligence and drone imagery to evaluate damage to buildings, roads and other infrastructure in a matter of minutes. CLARKE was created by a team of researchers led by Tom Manzini, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and engineering, and Dr. Robin Murphy, a pi

Passkeys are just passwords that require a password manager

Passkeys are just passwords that require a password manager You reset your passkey the same way you reset your password. But you’ll find that passkeys make it harder to switch between password managers, because you can’t copy and paste a passkey. Dan Fabulich 3 min read · Just now Just now -- Listen Share Passkeys are randomly generated passwords that are required to be managed by a password manager. All the major password managers support them, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and

Deterministic Simulation Testing in Rust: A Theater of State Machines

It's been just a year since we wrote about how we implemented deterministic simulation testing (DST) of our Go database (FrostDB). Since then, we have been hard at work writing our new database backed by object storage in Rust (read more here about why). In this blog post, I want to lay out the approach we took to build our new Rust database with DST principles front-and-center and how it compares to the approach we took with FrostDB. As a quick recap, DST tests are randomized full system integ

3D Line Drawings

This is an experiment examing how to create a 3D line drawing of a scene. In this post, I will describe how this can be done by augmenting the process of generating 3D Gaussian Splats 3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering, by Kerbl et al. and leveraging a process to transform photographs into Informative Line Drawings Learning to Generate Line Drawings that Convey Geometry and Semantics, by Chan, Isola & Durand. Examples The majority of scenes shown above are generated u

Qwen-Image: Crafting with native text rendering

GITHUB HUGGING FACE MODELSCOPE DEMO DISCORD We are thrilled to release Qwen-Image, a 20B MMDiT image foundation model that achieves significant advances in complex text rendering and precise image editing. To try the latest model, feel free to visit Qwen Chat and choose “Image Generation”. The key features include: Superior Text Rendering : Qwen-Image excels at complex text rendering, including multi-line layouts, paragraph-level semantics, and fine-grained details. It supports both alphabeti

Qwen-Image is a powerful, open source new AI image generator with support for embedded text in English & Chinese

Want smarter insights in your inbox? Sign up for our weekly newsletters to get only what matters to enterprise AI, data, and security leaders. Subscribe Now After seizing the summer with a blitz of powerful, freely available new open source language and coding focused AI models that matched or in some cases bested closed-source/proprietary U.S. rivals, Alibaba’s crack “Qwen Team” of AI researchers is back again today with the release of a highly ranked new AI image generator model — also open s

Topics: ai image model qwen text

In This Look Inside the New ‘Bad Batch’ Novel, the Emperor’s Name Counts for a Lot

From Rebels to Andor, we’ve met different types of people that make up the Empire’s sinister intelligence forces in the Imperial Security Bureau. We’ve seen agents like Kallus realize the extent of their role in the Empire’s evil, and agents like Dedra Meero consumed by the system they created. Now, in the latest Star Wars novel, we’re going to meet an agent learning a very difficult lesson: the long arm of Imperial law doesn’t apply to some people, whether they like it or not. That’s the troub

F1 in Hungary: Please stop saying Monaco without the walls

Formula 1 teams can start their annual summer break today. Sometime this month, each of the 10 teams has to close its factory for 14 consecutive days. Laptops stay in the office, email goes unchecked. It all sounds very civilized for a sport where the difference between hero and zero can come down to milliseconds. As was the case at this past weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix, at least in qualifying. When the Hungaroring was added to the calendar back in 1986, it was F1's first true foray behind t

Tesla awards Musk $29 billion in shares with prior pay package in limbo

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was awarded an interim pay package of 96 million shares of the company over the weekend. The shares would be worth about $29 billion. Tesla stock climbed about 2% Monday. The company said in a filing Sunday that the pay package would vest in two years as long as Musk continued as CEO or in another key executive position. The new award would be forfeited if the legal battle over his 2018 compensation ends with Musk being able to exercise the larger pay package, which was va

The Toyota Corolla of programming

In 1995, an otherwise unknown software developer released the first version of a new scripting language whose explicit aim was to make applications for this new platform called “The World Wide Web”. After starting as a small project, and thanks to the crazy dot-com years, it grew dramatically to become one of the most widely used programming languages of all time. After some stumbling first steps, it eventually got some sort of standardization in 1997, even reluctantly including some OOP feature

LastPass can now warn or block logins to shadow SaaS apps - here's how

LastPass ZDNET's key takeaways: The LastPass plug-in can now prevent access to unapproved SaaS apps. Feature extends plug-in's monitoring of SaaS access attempts. Passkey authentication coming by month's end -- not yet supported. Earlier this year, LastPass announced it was adding the ability for administrators of its password management solution to monitor employee usage of SaaS or web-based applications. Today at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, the company announced it has

Do LLMs identify fonts?

Spoiler: not really dafont.com is a wonderful website that contains a large collection of fonts. It’s more comprehensive and esoteric than Google Fonts. One of its features is a forum where users can ask for help identifying fonts – check out this poor fellow who’s been waiting for over two years and bumped his thread. I thought it would be interesting to see if an LLM could do this task, so I scraped the forum and set up a benchmark. I implemented this as a live benchmark. By this I mean that

My Ideal Array Language

2025-07-20 What do I think the ideal array language should look like? The fundamental units of computation available to users today are not the same as they were 20 years ago. When users had at most a few cores on a single CPU, it made complete sense that every program was written with the assumption that it would only run on a single core. Even in a high-performance computing (HPC) context, the default mode of parallelism was (for a long time) the Message Passing Interface (MPI), which is a

Under RFK Jr, CDC skips study on vaccination rates, quietly posts data on drop

Vaccination rates among the country's kindergartners have fallen once again, with coverage of the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccination dropping from 92.7 percent in the 2023–2024 school year to 92.5 percent in 2024–2025. The percentage changes are small across the board, but they represent thousands of children and an ongoing downward trend that makes the country more vulnerable to outbreaks. In the latest school year, an estimated 286,000 young children were not fully protected agains

Tesla hands $29B comp package to Elon Musk amid ‘AI talent war’

Tesla’s board of directors has announced a new compensation package for CEO Elon Musk worth around $29 billion in shares, with the company citing the “ever-intensifying AI talent war and Tesla’s position at a critical inflection point” as reasons for the payout. The massive pay package is being allocated through a 2019 Equity Incentive Plan that is already approved by shareholders, so it won’t go to a vote, according to a regulatory filing and Ann Lipton, a professor at the University of Colora

The US military’s on-base slot machines

When Dave Yeager stumbled upon the chamber of shiny, casino-style slot machines, he felt an instant pull. It was his first night of deployment in Seoul, South Korea, and the United States Army officer was in a bad headspace. The September 11, 2001, attacks had just happened, and he had a wife and two children under the age of 5 at home whom he missed fiercely. He felt lost. WIRED has made this article free for all to read because it is primarily based on reporting from Freedom of Information Ac

Airbnb guest says host used AI-generated images in false $9,000 damages claim

WTF?! One of the many fears about AI use becoming widespread is that people can now alter images – sometimes convincingly – without any technical skills. An example of this surfaced recently when an Airbnb guest said a host manipulated photos in a false £12,000 ($9,041) damage claim. The incident took place earlier this year when a London-based woman booked a one-bedroom apartment in New York's Manhattan for two-and-a-half months while she was studying, reports The Guardian. She decided to leav

The US Military Is Raking in Millions From On-Base Slot Machines

When Dave Yeager stumbled upon the chamber of shiny, casino-style slot machines, he felt an instant pull. It was his first night of deployment in Seoul, South Korea, and the United States Army officer was in a bad headspace. The September 11, 2001, attacks had just happened, and he had a wife and two children under the age of 5 at home whom he missed fiercely. He felt lost. WIRED has made this article free for all to read because it is primarily based on reporting from Freedom of Information Ac

Tesla asks shareholders to approve $29B comp package for Elon Musk amid ‘AI talent war’

Tesla’s board of directors has announced a proposed compensation package for CEO Elon Musk that would be worth around $29 billion in shares, with the company citing the “ever-intensifying AI talent war and Tesla’s position at a critical inflection point” as reasons for the payout. The new plan will be put to a vote at the company’s annual shareholder meeting, which is scheduled for November. It will also be entirely voided if the Delaware Supreme Court decides to overturn a judge’s January 2024

Life, Work, Death and the Peasant: Family Formation

This is the first part of the third part of our series (I, II) discussing the patterns of life of the pre-modern peasants who made up the great majority of all humans who lived in our agrarian past and indeed a majority of all humans who have ever lived. Last week, we looked at death, examining the brutal mortality regime of pre-modern societies, typified by extremely high (c. 50%) infant and child mortality, very high maternal mortality and often high male military mortality, which kept life ex