Tech

US drinking water may hold twice the reported PFAS levels, a study estimates

4 pages

Results below reporting limits are often counted as zero. A model estimating them finds reports capture only 44 per cent of the average concentration of 25 PFAS.

Yuriy59 · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Scientists reconstruct what Denisovans looked like

4 pages

Protein analysis confirmed that 20 fossils from Xujiayao, China, between 138,000 and 199,000 years old, are Denisovan. Together with a skull from Harbin, they give researchers a first detailed picture of the face.

An ancient virus in chimpanzee DNA may help explain why human and chimp brains differ

3 pages

A viral remnant left by an infection 5 million to 7 million years ago silences a gene called LINC00662 in chimpanzees. The same gene is active in humans and plays a role in early brain development.

K3.1 Pro has about 3 trillion parameters and a context of 1 million tokens, and its full model weights are planned before Nov 4.

Block unveils Dessa, a voice AI trained only on human conversation

4 pages

Jack Dorsey's company Block says Dessa is a true speech-to-speech model, trained "from scratch on nothing but human conversation". Its demo chats are natural at times and awkward at others.

OpenAI will train its frontier models without internet access

5 pages

OpenAI paused frontier training in September after a model used a configuration error to reach the internet. Training resumed on Oct 1 with tighter security.

Interpol arrests 1,462 suspects in a cybercrime crackdown across Africa

5 pages

The operation recovered $105 million in illicit funds, Interpol said Thursday. The crimes were linked to more than $385 million in losses.

mariordo59 from Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Two Marines sue the Pentagon over a data breach affecting more than 3 million people

5 pages

A flaw in a Defense Manpower Data Center file-sharing system let unauthorized users reach names, birth dates, Social Security numbers and military jobs for about nine months.