Sunday 12th May 2024

How the Moon got a makeover

Our Moon may appear to shine peacefully in the night sky, but billions of years ago, it was given a facial by volcanic turmoil.

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Cryptmaster is a dark, ridiculous RPG test of your typing and guessing skills

There are people who relish the feeling of finally nailing down a cryptic clue in a crossword. There are also people unduly aggravated by a puzzlemaster's puns and clever deceptions. I'm more the latter kind. I don't even play the crossword—or Wordle or Connections or Strands—but my wife does, and she'll feed me clues. Without fail, they leave me in some strange state of being relieved to finally get it, yet also keyed up and irritated.

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Is dark matter's main rival theory dead?

Indranil Banik and Harry Desmond, The Conversation - May 11, 2024 11:25 am UTC

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NOAA says 'extreme' Solar storm will persist through the weekend

After a night of stunning auroras across much of the United States and Europe on Friday, a severe geomagnetic storm is likely to continue through at least Sunday, forecasters said.

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What Happened When I Cloned My Own Voice

Recently my colleague Charlie Warzel, who covers technology, introduced me to the most sophisticated voice-cloning software available. It had already been used to clone President Joe Biden’s voice to create a fake robocall discouraging people from voting in the New Hampshire primary. I signed up and fed it a few hours of me speaking on various podcasts, and waited for the Hanna Rosin clone to be born. The way it works is you type a sentence into a box. For example, Please give me your Social Security number, or Jojo Siwa has such great fashion!, and then your manufactured voice, created from samples of your actual voice, says the sentence back to you. You can make yourself say anything, and shift the intensity of the intonation until it sounds uncannily like you.Warzel visited the small company that made the software, and what he found was a familiar Silicon Valley story. The people at this company are dreamers, inspired by the Babel fish, a fictional translation device, from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. They imagine a world where people can speak to one another across languages and still sound like themselves. Warzel spoke to them about the less dreamy possibilities of voice cloning software: scams, misinformation, and election interference. And he came away with the impression that they were aware of the dangers. But once the technology is out, nobody can quite predict every variety of world-altering chaos, particularly in a year when over half the world’s population will undergo an election.


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Trump Flaunts His Corruption

The former president’s shakedown of oil executives may not have been illegal, but it is undeniably scandalous.One of the few ways in which Donald Trump has improved American politics is in making explicit what was once veiled in implication or euphemism. During the 2016 election, for example, he said what everyone knew but no politicians would acknowledge: That wealthy donors bought access and fealty with their contributions.


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The Biggest Way That Elections Have Consequences

Presidents have surprisingly little influence over the economy—except in a single, vital respect: their agencies that issue regulations.Late last month, the Federal Trade Commission issued what’s called a final rule—a new regulation—banning noncompete clauses in contracts for nearly all American workers. Once the rule goes into effect, it will have a dramatic impact on the U.S. labor market. Workers will have an easier time starting new companies and bringing new products to market. And businesses that want to keep their employees from leaving to work for a competitor will likely have to pay them more; the FTC estimates that the ban could increase earnings for workers by more than $500 a year on average.


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The Limits of Utopia

Fifty years ago, the architect Peter Blake questioned everything he thought he knew about modern building.This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.


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The End of the ‘Photoshop Fail’

In 2017, Rihanna posted a photo of herself on Instagram in which she appeared to have an extra thumb. It was, in retrospect, the thumb-shaped canary in the coal mine. Although far from the first celebrity “Photoshop fail,” it just so happened to predict the era of faux-finger drama we now live in: AI image generators are universally, horrifically bad at rendering human hands. Today, an extra finger is a telltale sign of digital manipulation.Flaws aside, faking it has never been easier. Advances in generative AI mean that anyone can spin up a faux picture of the pope wearing a chic white puffer, no design skills required. New AI image creators such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion use sophisticated technology to let users conjure entire worlds from just a few words. Instagram is rolling out AI-editing features; with a couple of taps, an everyday user can place their dog at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. We are living in the world Adobe Photoshop first teased 34 years ago—but it is no longer defined by the enterprise software.


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Did Something Happen to Our Necks?

It used to be that whenever someone on TV or in a movie fell off the roof or had a skiing mishap or got into any sort of auto accident, the odds were pretty good that they’d end up in a neck brace. You know what I mean: a circlet of beige foam, or else a rigid ring of plastic, spanning from an actor’s chin down to their sternum. Jack Lemmon wore a neck brace for a part. So did Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Roberts, and Bill Murray. For many decades, this was pop culture’s universal symbol for I’ve hurt myself.Now it’s not. People on TV and in the movies no longer seem to suffer like they used to, which is to say they no longer suffer cervically. Plastic braces do still crop up from time to time on-screen, but their use in sight gags is as good as dead. In the meantime, the soft-foam collar—which has always been the brace’s most recognizable form—has been retired. I don’t just mean that it’s been evicted from the props department; the collar has been set aside in clinics too. At some point in the past few decades, a device that once stood in for trauma and recovery was added to a list of bygone treatments, alongside leeches and the iron lung. Simply put, the collar vanished. Where’d it go?


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