Enlarge / Some of the waste material that ends up part of these bricks. (credit: Seamus Daniel, RMIT University)

Researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia have developed special “energy-smart bricks” that can be made by mixing clay with glass waste and coal ash. These bricks can help mitigate the negative effects of traditional brick manufacturing, an energy-intensive process that requires large-scale clay mining, contributes heavily to CO₂ emissions, and generates a lot of air pollution.

According to the RMIT researchers, “Brick kilns worldwide consume 375 million tonnes (~340 million metric tons) of coal in combustion annually, which is equivalent to 675 million tonnes of CO₂ emission (~612 million metric tons).” This exceeds the combined annual carbon dioxide emissions of 130 million passenger vehicles in the US.

The energy-smart bricks rely on a material called RCF waste. It mostly contains fine pieces of glass (92 percent) left over from the recycling process, along with ceramic materials, plastic, paper, and ash. Most of this waste material generally ends up in landfills, where it can cause soil and water degradation. However, the study authors note, “The utilization of RCF waste in fired-clay bricks offers a potential solution to the increasing global waste crisis and reduces the burden on landfills."

Enlarge / The Tourbillon is recognizable as a modern Bugatti, but it's very different under the skin. (credit: Bradley Iger)

Since the launch of the hypercar-defining Veyron back in 2005, modern Bugattis have served as benchmarks for straight-line performance and no-expense-spared automotive engineering. At a time when a 300 horsepower Mustang GT was something to crow about, the quad-turbocharged, W16-powered Veyron offered more than a thousand, metric (987 hp/736 kW).

Perhaps more importantly, and in contrast to most other world-beating performance cars, the Veyron wasn't presented as some skunkworks project that had been pushed to the ragged edge. Instead, it was a wholly realized ultra-luxury performance machine, replete with the sort of grand touring appointments you'd expect to find in a Bentley rather than a top-speed record holder.

Still, it was the numbers that instantly captivated enthusiasts and casual onlookers alike, and Bugatti would go on to reset the bar with the introduction of the 1,479 hp (1,102 kW) Chiron in 2016.

Enlarge / Zork running on an Amiga at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, Germany. (credit: Marcin Wichary (CC by 2.0 Deed))

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building.

That simple sentence first appeared on a PDP-10 mainframe in the 1970s, and the words marked the beginning of what we now know as interactive fiction.

From the bare-bones text adventures of the 1980s to the heartfelt hypertext works of Twine creators, interactive fiction is an art form that continues to inspire a loyal audience. The community for interactive fiction, or IF, attracts readers and players alongside developers and creators. It champions an open source ethos and a punk-like individuality.

Enlarge / NASA's James Webb Space Telescope reveals the Rho Ophiuchi cloud complex, the closest star-forming region to Earth.

In a feat of galactic archeology, astronomers are using ever more detailed information to trace the origin of our galaxy—and to learn about how other galaxies formed in the early stages of the Universe. Using powerful space telescopes like Gaia and James Webb, astronomers are able to peer back in time and look at some of the oldest stars and galaxies. Between Gaia’s data on the position and movements of stars within our Milky Way and Webb’s observations of early galaxies that formed when the Universe was still young, astronomers are learning how galaxies come together and have made surprising discoveries that suggest the early Universe was busier and brighter than anyone previously imagined.

The Milky Way’s earliest pieces

In a recent paper, researchers using the Gaia space telescope identified two streams of stars, named Shakti and Shiva, each of which contains a total mass of around 10 million Suns and which are thought to have merged into the Milky Way around 12 billion years ago.

These streams were present even before the Milky Way had features like a disk or its spiral arms, and researchers think they could be some of the earliest building blocks of the galaxy as it developed.

Enlarge / The R1S and R1T don't look much different from the electric trucks we drove in 2022, but under the skin, there have been a lot of changes. (credit: Rivian)

In rainy Seattle this week, Rivian unveiled what it's calling the "Second Generation" of its R1 line with a suite of mostly under-the-hood software and hardware updates that increase range, power, and efficiency while simultaneously lowering the cost of production for the company. While it's common for automotive manufacturers to do some light refreshes after about four model years, Rivian has almost completely retooled the underpinnings of its popular R1S SUV and R1T pickup just two years after the vehicles made their debut.

"Overdelivering on the product is one of our core values," Wassym Bensaid, the chief software officer at Rivian, told a select group of journalists at the event on Monday night, "and customer feedback has been one of the key inspirations for us."

For these updates, Rivian changed more than half the hardware components in the R1 platform, retooled its drive units to offer new tri- and quad-motor options (with more horsepower), updated the suspension tuning, deleted 1.6 miles (2.6 km) of wiring, reduced the number of ECUs, increased the number of cameras and sensors around the vehicle, changed the battery packs, and added some visual options that better aligned with customizations that owners were making to their vehicles, among other things. Rivian is also leaning harder into AI and ML tools with the aim of bringing limited hands-free driver-assistance systems to their owners toward the end of the year.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

We’ve been living through the generative AI boom for nearly a year and a half now, following the late 2022 release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But despite transformative effects on companies’ share prices, generative AI tools powered by large language models (LLMs) still have major drawbacks that have kept them from being as useful as many would like them to be. Retrieval augmented generation, or RAG, aims to fix some of those drawbacks.

Perhaps the most prominent drawback of LLMs is their tendency toward confabulation (also called “hallucination”), which is a statistical gap-filling phenomenon AI language models produce when they are tasked with reproducing knowledge that wasn’t present in the training data. They generate plausible-sounding text that can veer toward accuracy when the training data is solid but otherwise may just be completely made up.

Relying on confabulating AI models gets people and companies in trouble, as we’ve covered in the past. In 2023, we saw two instances of lawyers citing legal cases, confabulated by AI, that didn’t exist. We’ve covered claims against OpenAI in which ChatGPT confabulated and accused innocent people of doing terrible things. In February, we wrote about Air Canada’s customer service chatbot inventing a refund policy, and in March, a New York City chatbot was caught confabulating city regulations.