Month: May 2024

Enlarge / Scarlett Johansson and Joaquin Phoenix attend Her premiere during the 8th Rome Film Festival at Auditorium Parco Della Musica on November 10, 2013, in Rome, Italy. (credit: Franco Origlia / Contributor | Getty Images Entertainment)

OpenAI has paused a voice mode option for ChatGPT-4o, Sky, after backlash accusing the AI company of intentionally ripping off Scarlett Johansson's critically acclaimed voice-acting performance in the 2013 sci-fi film Her.

In a blog defending its casting decision for Sky, OpenAI went into great detail explaining its process for choosing the individual voice options for its chatbot. But ultimately, the company seemed pressed to admit that Sky's voice was just too similar to Johansson's to keep using it, at least for now.

"We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice—Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice," OpenAI's blog said.

Enlarge / Ed Dwight, 90, exits Blue Origin's crew capsule Sunday after a 10-minute flight to the edge of space. (credit: Blue Origin)

More than 60 years after he was denied an opportunity to become America's first Black astronaut, Ed Dwight finally traveled into space Sunday with five other passengers on a 10-minute flight inside a Blue Origin capsule.

Dwight, a retired Air Force captain and test pilot, had a chance to become the first African American astronaut. He was one of 26 pilots the Air Force recommended to NASA for the third class of astronauts in 1963, but the agency didn't select him. It took another 20 years for America's first Black astronaut, Guion Bluford, to fly in space in 1983.

“Everything they did, I did, and I did it well," Dwight said in a video released by Blue Origin. "If politics had changed, I would have gone to space in some kind of capacity.”

Enlarge / Hurricane Dorian's satellite appearance on a Sunday morning in 2019. (credit: NOAA)

Later this week, the US federal agency charged with weather forecasting will release its outlook for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season at a news conference in Washington, DC. But we already know what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forecast will say: This year will likely be extremely active in the Atlantic Ocean, Gulf of Mexico, and Caribbean Sea.

The Atlantic season formally begins on June 1, and based on current trends, the first named storm may not develop until the middle of the month or later. But make no mistake—when the light switches on later this summer, the season is likely to be a blockbuster.

Why? Because the oceans are screaming at us.

Enlarge / An oceangoing scientific drilling vessel may be needed to figure out how huge undersea aquifers formed. (credit: Credit: IODP)

One-quarter of the world’s population is currently water-stressed, using up almost their entire fresh water supply each year. The UN predicts that by 2030, this will climb to two-thirds of the population.

Freshwater is perhaps the world’s most essential resource, but climate change is enhancing its scarcity. An unexpected source may have the potential to provide some relief: offshore aquifers, giant undersea bodies of rock or sediment that hold and transport freshwater. But researchers don’t know how the water gets there, a question that needs to be resolved if we want to understand how to manage the water stored in them.

For decades, scientists have known about an aquifer off the US East Coast. It stretches from Martha’s Vineyard to New Jersey and holds almost as much water as two Lake Ontarios. Research presented at the American Geophysical Union conference in December attempted to explain where the water came from—a key step in finding out where other undersea aquifers lie hidden around the world.

Enlarge / Battles get a wee bit involved as you go on in Songs of Conquest. (credit: Coffee Stain Publishing)

There are games for which I have great admiration, pleasant memories, and an entirely dreadful set of skills and outcomes. Heroes of Might & Magic III (or HoMM 3) has long been one of those games.

I have played it on just about every PC I've owned, ever since it chipped away at my college GPA. I love being tasked with managing not only heroes, armies, resources, villages, and battlefield positioning but also time itself. If you run around the map clicking to discover every single power-up and resource pile, using up turn after turn, you will almost certainly let your enemy grow strong enough to conquer you. But I do this, without fail. I get halfway into a campaign and the (horse cart) wheels fall off, so I set the game aside until the click-to-move-the-horsey impulse comes back.

With the release of Songs of Conquest in 1.0 form on PC today (Steam, GOG, Epic), I feel freed from this loop of recurrent humbling. This title from Lavapotion and Coffee Stain Publishing very much hits the same pleasure points of discovery and choice as HoMM 3. But Songs of Conquest has much easier onboarding, modern resolutions, interfaces that aren't too taxing (to the point of being Verified on Steam Deck), and granular difficulty customization. More importantly for most, it has its own stories and ideas. If you love fiddling with stuff turn by turn, it's hard to imagine you won't find something in Songs of Conquest to hook you.

Enlarge / SpaceX's Starship tower (left) at Launch Complex 39A dwarfs the launch pad for the Falcon 9 rocket (right). (credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani)

There are a couple of ways to read the announcement from the Federal Aviation Administration that it's kicking off a new environmental review of SpaceX's plan to launch the most powerful rocket in the world from Florida.

The FAA said on May 10 that it plans to develop an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for SpaceX's proposal to launch Starships from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The FAA ordered this review after SpaceX updated the regulatory agency on the projected Starship launch rate and the design of the ground infrastructure needed at Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A), the historic launch pad once used for Apollo and Space Shuttle missions.

Dual environmental reviews

At the same time, the US Space Force is overseeing a similar EIS for SpaceX's proposal to take over a launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, a few miles south of LC-39A. This launch pad, designated Space Launch Complex 37 (SLC-37), is available for use after United Launch Alliance's last Delta rocket lifted off there in April.