Month: March 2024

National Geographic is justly renowned for its incredible photographs and eye-popping video footage, capturing all manner of natural marvels in gorgeous, jaw-dropping detail. Now the people behind those amazing shots are getting their moment in the spotlight with the documentary series, Photographer.

If you've ever wanted to know more about what it's really like to be a NatGeo photographer, this series will take you behind the scenes as the photographers strive to meet the challenges and inevitable surprise obstacles to get that timeless shot. Each episode focuses on a different photographer, combining vérité footage with in-depth interviews and archival footage to help viewers see the world through their eyes—whether it be capturing a hummingbird in flight, chronicling a campaign against oil rigs in the Bahamas, or recording protests, rocket launches, tornadoes, or the behavior of whales, to name a few.

The exclusive clip above features photographer Anand Varma, who started out studying marine biology, intent on following in his father's footsteps as a scientist, But after taking a job as a camera assistant, he fell in love with photography and has carved out his own niche at the interface of science and art. His latest project is a photographic series centered on metamorphosis—in this case, trying to capture the formation and hatching of a chicken embryo on camera.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

It seems like AI large language models (LLMs) are everywhere these days due to the rise of ChatGPT. Now, a software developer named Ishan Anand has managed to cram a precursor to ChatGPT called GPT-2—originally released in 2019 after some trepidation from OpenAI—into a working Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It's freely available and is designed to educate people about how LLMs work.

"By using a spreadsheet anyone (even non-developers) can explore and play directly with how a 'real' transformer works under the hood with minimal abstractions to get in the way," writes Anand on the official website for the sheet, which he calls "Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need." It's a nod to the 2017 research paper "Attention is All You Need" that first described the Transformer architecture that has been foundational to how LLMs work.

Anand packed GPT-2 into an XLSB Microsoft Excel binary file format, and it requires the latest version of Excel to run (but won't work on the web version). It's completely local and doesn't do any API calls to cloud AI services.

Enlarge / National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy testifies about the Boeing door-plug investigation before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on March 6, 2024, in Washington, DC. (credit: Getty Images | Kevin Dietsch )

A government investigation into a Boeing 737 Max 9 plane's door-plug blowout has been hampered by a lack of repair records and security camera footage, the National Transportation Safety Board's chair told US senators. Boeing was "unable to find the records" and told the NTSB that the security camera footage was overwritten.

"To date, we still do not know who performed the work to open, reinstall, and close the door plug on the accident aircraft," NTSB Chair Jennifer Homendy wrote Wednesday in a letter to leaders of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. "Boeing has informed us that they are unable to find the records documenting this work. A verbal request was made by our investigators for security camera footage to help obtain this information; however, they were informed the footage was overwritten. The absence of those records will complicate the NTSB's investigation moving forward."

A Boeing spokesperson told Ars today that under the company's standard practice, "video recordings are maintained on a rolling 30-day basis" before being overwritten. The NTSB's preliminary report on the investigation said the airplane was delivered to Alaska Airlines on October 31, 2023, after a repair in a Boeing factory. On January 5, the plane was forced to return to Portland International Airport in Oregon when a passenger door plug blew off the aircraft during flight.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Justin Sullivan )

Broadcom CEO and President Hock Tan has acknowledged the discomfort VMware customers and partners have experienced after the sweeping changes that Broadcom has instituted since it acquired the virtualization company 114 days ago.

In a blog post Thursday, Tan noted that Broadcom spent 18 months evaluating and buying VMware. He said that while there's still a lot of work to do, the company has made "substantial progress."

That so-called progress, though, has worried some of Broadcom's customers and partners.

Enlarge / Harvard's got a lawsuit on its hands. (credit: Glowimages)

Accusations of research misconduct often trigger extensive investigations, typically performed by the institution where the misconduct allegedly took place. These investigations are internal employment matters, and false accusations have the potential to needlessly wreck someone's career. As a result, most of these investigations are kept completely confidential, even after their completion.

But all the details of a misconduct investigation performed by Harvard University became public this week through an unusual route. The professor who had been accused of misconduct, Francesca Gino, had filed a multi-million dollar lawsuit, targeting both Harvard and a team of external researchers who had accused her of misconduct. Harvard submitted its investigator's report as part of its attempt to have part of the suit dismissed, and the judge overseeing the case made it public.

We covered one of the studies at issue at the time of its publication. It has since been retracted, and we'll be updating our original coverage accordingly.

Enlarge (credit: Larry Crain | iStock / Getty Images Plus)

There are some circumstances where government officials are allowed to block people from commenting on their social media pages, the Supreme Court ruled Friday.

According to the Supreme Court, the key question is whether officials are speaking as private individuals or on behalf of the state when posting online. Issuing two opinions, the Supreme Court declined to set a clear standard for when personal social media use constitutes state speech, leaving each unique case to be decided by lower courts.

Instead, SCOTUS provided a test for courts to decide first if someone is or isn’t speaking on behalf of the state on their social media pages, and then if they actually have authority to act on what they post online.

Enlarge (credit: alex-mit)

Human brains (and the brains of other vertebrates) are able to process information faster because of myelin, a fatty substance that forms a protective sheath over the axons of our nerve cells and speeds up their impulses. How did our neurons evolve myelin sheaths? Part of the answer—which was unknown until now—almost sounds like science fiction.

Led by scientists from Altos Labs-Cambridge Institute of Science, a team of researchers has uncovered a bit of the gnarly past of how myelin ended up covering vertebrate neurons: a molecular parasite has been messing with our genes. Sequences derived from an ancient virus help regulate a gene that encodes a component of myelin, helping explain why vertebrates have an edge when it comes to their brains.

Prehistoric infection

Myelin is a fatty material produced by oligodendrocyte cells in the central nervous system and Schwann cells in the peripheral nervous system. Its insulating properties allow neurons to zap impulses to one another at faster speeds and greater lengths. Our brains can be complex in part because myelin enables longer, narrower axons, which means more nerves can be stacked together.