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The world is a mysterious place, and Live Science has plenty of material for our popular Life’s Little Mysteries series, which airs every weekend. We’ve been writing mysteries since 2004, and we’ve never run out of weird stuff to cover. Each mystery contains many facts, such as which animals are evolving the fastest and why there are so many venomous animals in Australia. To be honest, I could go on, but it would require linking with thousands of mysteries. So, for your geeky enjoyment, here are 50 of the most impressive facts.1. Until the 1960s, researchers believed that people dreamed…
In recent days, France and Malaysia have joined India in accusing Grok of creating sexual deepfakes of women and minors. The chatbot, built by Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI and featured on his social media platform X, posted an apology on its account earlier this week, writing: “We deeply regret the incident on December 28, 2025, when we generated and shared an AI image of two young girls (estimated ages 12-16 years old) dressed in sexual attire based on user prompts.” “This violates ethical standards and may violate U.S. law,” the statement continued. [child sexual abuse material]. This was a…
Ahead of this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, hardware manufacturer Plaud has announced a new AI note-taker called Plaude NotePin S, along with a desktop app to help you take notes in digital meetings. The company first launched its pin-shaped note taker in 2024. This was something that my former colleague Brian Heater really liked. The new pin features a physical button that allows you to start and stop recording. Additionally, you can tap a button to highlight specific points while recording, just like you can with the newly released Plaud Note Pro. One of the nice…
The fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex is perhaps the most iconic dinosaur that ever existed. Since the first Tyrannosaurus fossil was discovered in Hell Creek, Montana, in 1902, this giant predator, with its fearsome teeth and strangely small arms, has fascinated people of all ages, starred in books and movies, including the movie Jurassic Park, and is displayed in museums around the world.But our image of what this dinosaur looked like and lived has changed significantly thanks to more than a century of scientific discoveries. Think you know everything there is to know about the king of dinosaurs? Well, start the quiz…
Glacial earthquakes are a special type of earthquake that occur in cold, icy regions. First discovered in the Northern Hemisphere more than 20 years ago, these earthquakes occur when huge chunks of ice fall from glaciers into the ocean.Only a few have been discovered in Antarctica so far. In a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters, I present evidence of hundreds of earthquakes that occurred in Antarctica between 2010 and 2023. Most of it is the seaward edge of Thwaites Glacier, the so-called terminal glacier, which could cause sea levels to rise rapidly if it were to collapse.recent discoveriesGlacial…
Voice AI startup Subtle, which created voice separation models to help computers better understand you in noisy environments, today launched new wireless earbuds that help users hear clearly during calls and transcribe voice notes accurately. The company announced the earbuds ahead of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and said it plans to ship them in the U.S. in the coming months. Buds costs $199 and comes with a one-year subscription to iOS and Mac apps. The app allows users to take voice notes and chat with AI without pressing any keys. The company said it uses a…
Of the more than 600 million cats worldwide, less than 10% belong to any particular breed. But are these purebred cats the result of human intervention, or are some naturally occurring?The answer is more complicated than you might think. Most cat breeds have developed over the past 140 years as a result of human selection for specific physical characteristics, said Leslie A. Lyons, a cat geneticist at the University of Missouri School of Veterinary Medicine.However, a select few cats are known as “natural” cat breeds because they originate from cat populations that evolved over thousands of years of natural environmental…
California is offering residents a new tool to make it easier to limit the storage and sale of personal information by data brokers. Since 2020, state residents have had the right to ask companies to stop collecting and selling their data, but doing so required a cumbersome opt-out process with individual companies. The Deletion Act passed in 2023 was supposed to simplify things, allowing residents to make one request to more than 500 registered data brokers to delete their information. Now, the Removal Request and Opt-Out Platform (DROP) allows residents to actually make that request. Once a DROP user has…
People and organizations are grappling with the impact of text written by AI. Teachers want to know whether their students’ work reflects their own understanding. Consumers want to know whether an ad was written by a human or a machine.Creating rules to govern the use of AI-generated content is relatively easy. Enforcing them relies on the more difficult task of reliably detecting whether a piece of text was generated by artificial intelligence.Several studies have investigated whether humans can detect text generated by AI. For example, people who frequently use AI writing tools themselves have been shown to more accurately detect…
Scientists have discovered a giant type of duck-billed dinosaur that lived in what is now New Mexico about 75 million years ago.The dinosaur Athisresaurus wimani probably had a flattened head and a bony crest low on its snout, researchers found in a study. The findings, to be published in the Proceedings of the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, suggest that during the last 20 million years of the Cretaceous Period (145 million to 66 million years ago), platypus dinosaurs, or hadrosaurs, may have been more diverse and duplicated than previously thought.Hadrosaurs were large plant-eating dinosaurs that lived…