Whistling Past The Shutdown

Enlarge / Fisker CEO Henrik Fisker introduces the all-electric compact hatchback Pear during its inaugural "Product Vision Day" in Huntington Beach, California, on August 3, 2023. It was the last week in June, and José De Bardi hadn’t gotten much sleep. The trouble had really kicked off on June 18, about a week earlier, when the electric vehicle company Fisker announced it had filed for bankruptcy protection.

Away, July, Antler, Monos. There’s never been more choice when it comes to buying luggage. Is the market big enough for everyone? This is shaping up to be a blockbuster year for summer travel. And as airports in London, Singapore, New York, Vancouver, or Sydney flood with tourists, you’ll notice their luggage looks sleeker and more colorful than it did in the past.

Zest AI’s Aaron Long observes that more than 43 million people in the United States, who are finding it very difficult to pay household bills. Growing up in the 1980s in a Black household in St. Louis, MO, my dreams were a lot smaller because I didn’t know how big they could be.

Tiny changes to Spike, the marathon’s unicorn mascot, show how heated logo changes can be. Back in 1890, the Boston Athletic Association chose the mythical unicorn to be its symbol. Later named Spike, that unicorn saw several redesigns in the ensuing century, before eventually finding its way to prominent placement on the Boston Marathon medal.

Enlarge / The Tianlong-3 rocket as seen on its test stand before the anomaly. (credit: Space Pioneer) One of the most promising Chinese space startups, Space Pioneer, experienced a serious anomaly this weekend while testing the first stage of its Tianlong-3 rocket near the city of Gongyi. The rocket was undergoing a static fire test of the stage, in which a vehicle is clamped to a test stand while its engines are ignited, when the booster broke free.

Enlarge / If your right hand starts typing "delve," you may, in fact, be an LLM. (credit: Getty Images) Thus far, even AI companies have had trouble coming up with tools that can reliably detect when a piece of writing was generated using a large language model. Now, a group of researchers has established a novel method for estimating LLM usage across a large set of scientific writing by measuring which "excess words" started showing up much more frequently during the LLM era (i.e., 2023 and 2024).