hackingbear writes: China's Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve files. Generated videos run between 4 and 15 [or 60] seconds long and automatically come with sound effects or music. Its performance is unfortunately so good that it has forced the firm to block its facial-to-voice feature after the model reportedly demonstrated the ability to generate highly accurate personal voice characteristics using only facial images, even without user authorization. In a recent test, Pan Tianhong, founder of tech media outlet MediaStorm, discovered that uploading a personal facial photo caused the model to produce audio nearly identical to his real voice -- without using any voice samples or authorized data. [...]

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In their first sit-down interview, Michael and Susan Pretti avoided recriminations and recalled the son that Michael called “an exceptionally kind, caring man.”

The left needs a sharper A.I. politics.

Facing charges over his role at a church protest, Mr. Lemon, a journalist, retained a veteran litigator who recently resigned from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota.

Young primates in a southern African nature park were observed to constantly interfere when their mother was giving attention to a younger brother or sister.

On Jimmy Lai and the future of freedom.

The commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, acknowledged at a Senate hearing that he and his family visited Jeffrey Epstein on his private island.

About 137,000 .50-caliber rounds have been seized since 2012, and of those, 47 percent came from a plant in Kansas City, Mo., Mexico’s defense secretary said.

A Detroit billionaire met with Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, hours before President Trump said he would block the opening of a new bridge connecting Detroit to Canada, officials said.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Trump administration wants some of the world's largest technology companies to publicly commit to a new compact governing the rapid expansion of AI data centers, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. A draft of the compact obtained by POLITICO lays out commitments designed to ensure energy-hungry data centers do not raise household electricity prices, strain water supplies or undermine grid reliability, and that the companies driving demand also carry the cost of building new infrastructure. The proposed pact, which is not final and could be subject to change, is framed as a voluntary agreement between President Donald Trump and major U.S. tech companies and data center developers. It could bind OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other AI giants to a broad set of energy, water and community principles. None of these companies immediately responded to a request for comment.

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What started as a rebuke of Dr. Attia has become a discussion about his credentials, longevity medicine and whom patients should trust.

A priest from Sacramento. A bar owner from New York. A taquero from Los Angeles. Puerto Rico came alive at the Super Bowl because of hundreds of non-famous performers.

Henry McGowan headed for Europe, showing signs of mental distress. His father, John McGowan, raced after him. This week, the son will stand trial in Ireland, accused of his father’s murder.

After Republican criticism, a group that offers professional resources to judges withdrew a climate science chapter from its Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1966, a beach-ball-size robot bounced across the moon. Once it rolled to a stop, its four petal-like covers opened, exposing a camera that sent back the first picture taken on the surface of another world. This was Luna 9, the Soviet lander that was the earliest spacecraft to safely touchdown on the moon. While it paved the way toward interplanetary exploration, Luna 9's precise whereabouts have remained a mystery ever since. That may soon change. Two research teams think they might have tracked down the long-lost remains of Luna 9. But there's a catch: The teams do not agree on the location. "One of them is wrong," said Anatoly Zak, a space journalist and author who runs RussianSpaceWeb.com and reported on the story last week. The dueling finds highlight a strange fact of the early moon race: The precise resting places of a number of spacecraft that crashed or landed on the moon in the run up to NASA's Apollo missions are lost to obscurity. A newer generation of spacecraft may at last resolve these mysteries. Luna 9 launched to the moon on Jan. 31, 1966. While a number of spacecraft had crashed into the lunar surface at that stage of the moon race, it was among the earliest to try what rocket engineers call a soft landing. Its core unit, a spherical suite of scientific instruments, was about two feet across. That size makes it difficult to spot from orbit. "Luna 9 is a very, very small vehicle," said Mark Robinson, a geologist at the company Intuitive Machines, which has twice landed spacecraft on the moon.

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Michael Reiter, a former Palm Beach police chief, described a 2006 conversation with Donald Trump to the F.B.I. years later, according to a newly released document.

The agency is racing to repeal a scientific finding that requires it to fight global warming. Experts say the goal is to get the matter before the justices while President Trump is still in office.

Google on Tuesday expanded its "Results about you" tool to let users request the removal of Search results containing government-issued ID numbers -- including driver's licenses, passports and Social Security numbers -- adding to the tool's existing ability to flag results that surface phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses. The update, announced on Safer Internet Day, is rolling out in the U.S. over the coming days. Google also streamlined its process for reporting non-consensual explicit images on Search, allowing users to select and submit removal requests for multiple images at once rather than reporting them individually.

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New documents detail Jeffrey Epstein’s efforts to foster strategic, sometimes reciprocal relationships with Russian officials.

The U.S., whose population the Census Bureau did not expect to start shrinking until 2081, may record its first-ever decline as early as this year because of the Trump administration's accelerating immigration crackdown. Census data released in late January showed US population growth slowed to just 0.5% in the year prior to July 2025 -- the lowest rate since the pandemic -- as net migration fell to 1.3 million from a peak of 2.7 million the year before. Census experts now expect net migration to drop to only 316,000 in the year prior to July 2026 and say the country is "trending toward negative net migration." A joint study by researchers at the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution estimates that 2026 net immigration could range from a gain of 185,000 to a loss of 925,000. Births exceeded deaths by just 519,000 in the most recent period, a surplus the Congressional Budget Office expects to vanish by 2030. At the low end of the AEI/Brookings range, the overall US population would shrink by more than 400,000 -- something that has never happened since the country began taking censuses in 1790.

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