People who drink tea regularly appear less likely to develop heart and vascular disease than people who don’t, according to a new study published today in the Journal of Internal Medicine.
The post Tea Drinkers May Have Fewer Heart and Blood Vessel Problems, Large Study Finds appeared first on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.
Smart TVs running operating systems from Samsung, Vizio, and Roku continue sending data to automatic content recognition (ACR) endpoints after users opt out of tracking in the devices’ settings, according to research published on Monday. The paper from Northeastern University researchers points to potential privacy violations from some of the biggest TV brands.
ACR captures video screenshots or audio clips from smart TVs and sends the data to remote servers, where it's used for things like measuring content viewership and serving targeted ads.
The paper, "Watching the Watchers: Privacy Analysis of US Smart TV Automatic Content Recognition," examined eight smart TV OSes across 12 smart TVs from 10 manufacturers (Amazon, Hisense, LG, Roku, Samsung, Sony, Supersonic, TCL, Vizio, and Westinghouse) to examine when smart TVs use ACR and how effective opting out of user tracking is.
© https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/modern-living-room-with-smart-tv-and-remote-control-royalty-free-image/2226225055
Smart TVs running operating systems from Samsung, Vizio, and Roku continue sending data to automatic content recognition (ACR) endpoints after users opt out of tracking in the devices’ settings, according to research published on Monday. The paper from Northeastern University researchers points to potential privacy violations from some of the biggest TV brands.
ACR captures video screenshots or audio clips from smart TVs and sends the data to remote servers, where it's used for things like measuring content viewership and serving targeted ads.
The paper, "Watching the Watchers: Privacy Analysis of US Smart TV Automatic Content Recognition," examined eight smart TV OSes across 12 smart TVs from 10 manufacturers (Amazon, Hisense, LG, Roku, Samsung, Sony, Supersonic, TCL, Vizio, and Westinghouse) to examine when smart TVs use ACR and how effective opting out of user tracking is.
© https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/photo/modern-living-room-with-smart-tv-and-remote-control-royalty-free-image/2226225055
Apple’s new true-crime podcast Heart, hosted by Karen Kilgariff, released all eight episodes on October 19, 2026 on Apple Podcasts for Apple TV subscribers. According to Apple, nonsubscribers could hear the first three episodes free that day, with one new episode released weekly through the finale on November 23, 2026. Content note: Heart deals with […]
The post Heart podcast episode guide: what all eight episodes of the Apple Original cover appeared first on The Mac Observer.
Just when you thought the holiday season couldn’t arrive any earlier this year, here comes an AI-generated Christmas movie.
Titled “Merry the Christmas Witch,” it’s based on a children’s book and will inspire awe in its young audience about the magic of the holidays — through ghoulish and uncanny AI imagery (you can see footage here). The film — which currently has no distributor — cost $1.5 million to make, but its director brags that using AI actually saved him tens of millions of dollars.
“We would never have gotten a movie like ‘Merry’ made if we didn’t take that chance,” Tom Walsh, CEO of the indeopendent production company TW3 Entertainment, and who directed and co-wrote the film, told Variety.
According to Walsh, when he was inspired to make a movie out of author Bobbi Hess’s original book, he realized that it would cost $80 million to make. An “unknown property” like this one would be a hard sell to studios, he explained.
“We were kind of stuck,” Walsh told Varietey. “The doors are not very open to new kind[s] of ideas and new kind[s] of stories and everything, and that makes it a little tough for independent filmmakers, so that’s where AI came in.”
You can sympathize with his position. A movie industry obsessed with intellectual property and averse to risk-taking has made it harder than ever for independent creatives to fund their projects and reach an audience.
Still, many filmmakers dedicated to the art form figure out a way to do it, and by and large, they’re not relying on AI to generate their movies wholesale. This year’s breakout hit “Obsession,” for example, made half a billion dollars on a budget of less than a million with an original story, becoming even more profitable than the 1999 found-footage sensation “The Blair Witch Project.”
I need someone to tell me with a straight face that they'd sit in a theater to watch this pic.twitter.com/BbpJfHXSe6
— Nuñez (@guycen) October 13, 2026
In all, roughly 50 people worked on “Merry the Christmas Witch” for 10 months in what Walsh described as a “hybrid AI production.” But really, it sounds like it was mostly AI. Walsh hired human actors to record the script and help guide how the characters moved and sounded. In the end, though, he decided to replace their performances with AI-generated voices using ElevenLab’s AI voice synthesizer, alongside video generators like Seedance and Nanobanana for the imagery.
The human element, he insists, was still important.
“The quality of your AI production depends on the quality of your traditional production staff,” he told Variety. “If you have inexperienced people who don’t know production…and timing and how shots should look, it’s going to look like garbage.”
Of course, relying on AI probably did save him millions of dollars. But the end result is that the million and a half he did put in was to churn out obvious slop.
More on AI: AI Agent Blamed for Deleting Entire Upcoming Season of TV Show
The post Director Blows $1.5 Million Generating Horrendous AI Slop Movie, Says AI Actually Saved Him Tens of Millions appeared first on Futurism.
Rapid AI adoption left workers cleaning up a flood of errors and low-quality work
Employers around the globe are grappling with the fallout from rushing to adopt fast-changing artificial intelligence tools.
Meta has scaled back plans to axe staff and use more AI agents after the company found employees were spending more and more time cleaning up technical and security errors, Reuters reported. And after thinning its workforce, especially middle managers, in a 2023 efficiency push, the company is expanding its managerial ranks again, LinkedIn posts from workers show.
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© Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images
© Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images
© Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images
Smart is back in the two-seater business. The Mercedes-Benz and Geely joint venture unveiled the all-electric Smart #2 at the Paris Motor Show today, with a 35.8 kWh LFP battery, up to 290 km (180 miles) of WLTP range, and a starting price of €19,990.
That’s more than double the range of the last Smart EQ Fortwo, which never got DC fast charging. Early orders open in Europe tomorrow, and deliveries start in 2027.
more…
A while ago I experimented with an iPhone 3Gs and a color diffraction grating, just see what different lights would look like through the filter; no art intended. One experiment led to another, and suddenly a series of photos with an LED flashlight turns into a new Photoshop project. (Above: Also seen on “about […]
The post The making of the new Low End Mac “Lightning” wallpaper appeared first on Low End Mac.
The lichen-covered ornament turned out to be a rare work by a pioneering American sculptor.
A person sits on a leopard in a sculpture found inside a small stone building. What did this unusual pairing mean to the people of Karahantepe?
The post Karahantepe’s 11,000-Year-Old Figure Shows a Person Seated on a Leopard appeared first on Curiosmos.
Exposure to light at night may be linked to potentially harmful changes in the heart’s structure and performance, according to a study involving more than 11,000 people. The findings were published in the European Heart Journal on September 9. The research was led by Professor Lu Qi of Tulane University, New Orleans, USA. He said: [...]
Helm no Snap Store facilita instalar e atualizar o gerenciador de charts do Kubernetes em Linux.
O post Helm chega ao Snap Store com foco em Kubernetes apareceu primeiro em Blog do Edivaldo - Informações e Notícias sobre Linux.
A popular heart scan may be unnecessary for many patients but valuable for those whose risk is difficult to judge. Coronary artery calcium scanning has become an increasingly accessible way to refine estimates of heart attack and stroke risk. Yet a Northwestern Medicine study involving more than 6,000 adults suggests the quick, relatively inexpensive test [...]
Remember how Elon Musk vowed that his AI Grok would make an anti-woke, “historically accurate” version of the Odyssey?
Well, he ended up throwing together a whole contest around it — and the winner of the first place prize of $100,000 is, as you probably expected, laughable nonsense.
The problems run deep. The Cyclops Polyphemus is depicted with three eyes, which feels disqualifying. And just a few cuts later, the famously monocular giant is at least four times as large as he was before. The other creatures and gods look like something out of a mobile game; Poseidon emerges from the sea appearing conspicuously cartoonish and impossibly muscled, before smashing Odysseus’s ship and his crew of photorealistic, ripped men.
Half the dialog is delivered in dramatic whispers with the same cadence. The fight scenes are cut to disguise the actual moments of impact, in the same way real B-movies do with aging action stars.
There are some shots here and there that look convincing enough, if you can overlook their bland aesthetic. But this AI “film” suffers the same tragic flaw that all AI films do: their component clips fail to coalesce into a coherent whole. It doesn’t do much on the “historically accurate” front, either; some of the Greek soldiers are clearly wearing the armor donned by Roman legionnaires.
Nonetheless, its creator Nem Perez declared that “this is ‘The Odyssey’ as Homer intended,” before calling it his “most intricate work to date.” He also labeled the video, in oxymoronic fashion, a “5-minute epic.”
This is "The Odyssey" as Homer intended. My longest, most intricate work to date. I pushed @grok @imagine to its absolute limits to create this 5-minute epic.
— Nem Perez (@NemPerez) August 31, 2026
What bothered me most about the recent adaptation was the omission of the Phaeacians and Princess Nausicaa, whom… https://t.co/awYW6Hu4W8 pic.twitter.com/hJHOgdkEec
It’s unclear if Musk actually watched the winner; as far as we can tell, he hasn’t replied or retweeted it, something he’s done for other AI Odyssey adaptations.
For those blissfully out of the loop, the centibillionaire and culture war crusader spent this summer raging against Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the Greek epic, attacking it for its diverse cast, which included several Black women and a trans actor.
Nolan, Musk accused, “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” As such, he vowed that his AI “Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer.”
We’re still waiting for that full-length adaptation. But the short films that the contest has produced already make it painfully clear that AI video generators, and the “filmmakers” that embrace them, simply aren’t up to snuff. In all of the top three entries, Odysseus looks more or less like the same guy — some weird, looksmaxxer’s fantasy of a buff Antonio Banderas. Is this a fault of Grok or Grok users? At this point, the distinction may be moot.
More on AI: Amazon Deploying AI Tech That Forces Actors’ Mouths to Match Dubbed Dialogue
The post The Winner of Elon Musk’s AI “Odyssey” Contest Will Make You Laugh Out Loud appeared first on Futurism.
Pauline Hanson’s gas policy and the party’s relationship with Rinehart is examined in a new Guardian podcast series, The Populist
Listen: The Populist: Aeroplanes and bulldozers | Episode 1 – podcast
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One Nation has come under fire for quietly shelving support for a new domestic gas reservation policy in preference for a policy that favours the party’s billionaire patron, Gina Rinehart.
The Albanese government has announced it will establish a new reservation policy for Australia’s east coast, requiring gas exporters to supply a portion of the gas they produce to the domestic market. The policy is aimed at “modestly” supplying the domestic market to put downward pressure on prices for consumers.
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© Composite: Getty/AAP
© Composite: Getty/AAP
© Composite: Getty/AAP
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