Spy agencies brief people in power. We brief you. Each week we bring you one story that matters, and a few that don’t!
Your Brief for January 9, 2025: The dinosaur highway, plight of the bumblebees, Nvidia powers up, world's oldest ice and more!
News
Secretly Recording
Apple has agreed to pay $95 million to settle claims that its virtual assistant, Siri, was recording private conversations without user consent. The tech giant denies selling Siri data and says the settlement is to avoid more legal battles. One plaintiff, a minor at the time, said they couldn’t have given consent as they did not have an Apple account. Other iPhone owners said Siri activated unintentionally and shared their discussions with advertisers, leading to ads for products like sneakers, restaurants, and medical treatments. The settlement was filed in a California court and now needs approval from a US district judge. Was Siri listening all along?
True Spies
Psychic Spies
Could you explain the inexplicable?
Dr. Edwin May is an unusual scientist. He's a physicist who researches psychic phenomena. For decades, he worked with psychics who believed they could "foresee" events like potential terrorist attacks. But, if you can see the future, are you condemned to experience it?
As head of the Stargate Project, sponsored by the US Department of Defense, Edwin's job was to prove the existence of psychic phenomena and use them against America's enemies. Additional top-secret psychic experiments had already been going on for decades in the US. In 1952, Dr. J.B. Rhine conducted the Army's ESP tests.
For 23 years, beginning in 1972, highly classified research projects like Edwin's helped put psychic spies to work for the US government. And some of Edwin's research has produced astounding results, leaving him no doubt that psychic functioning, or 'psi,' exists. According to declassified CIA documents, Uri Geller's psychic skills were tested for eight days in 1973 as part of Stargate.
So what goes down in the shadowy world of secrets and psychics, and how does a scientist turn spy? Join Edwin in this week's podcast selection, 'Psychic Spies,' to find out!
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Nature
Plight Of The Bumblebees
Are bumblebees waking too soon?
According to conservation charity Buglife, bumblebees in the UK are building nests during winter, a phenomenon linked to climate change. Worker bumblebees, usually dormant this time of year, were seen in Aberdeen over the mild Christmas period. Similar sightings of bumblebees and honeybees have been recorded across the UK during past holiday seasons, including in the Highlands.
More than two of the UK’s 25 bumblebee species might have begun nest-building early. These essential pollinators typically hibernate through winter and emerge in spring. However, their behavior puts them at risk: a lack of flowers and the return of cold weather could cause nests to collapse, potentially wiping out colonies. New queen bees might not be produced without successful nests, jeopardizing future generations of bees!
Technology
Nvidia Powers Up
What’s Nvidia bringing to the future of gaming, AI, and robotics?
Nvidia recently unveiled its latest innovations at CES in Las Vegas, including a new family of gaming chips and an AI model designed to revolutionize robotics and self-driving cars. CEO Jensen Huang introduced the Blackwell-powered gaming chips, promising twice the speed of previous models and movie-quality graphics. Huang also showcased Cosmos, an AI model capable of generating video for training robots and autonomous vehicles. By creating “synthetic” training data—virtual worlds that mimic the laws of physics—Cosmos can reduce the cost of training machines to understand the physical world. Users can provide a text description, and Cosmos will generate realistic videos tailored to their needs. Watch Nvidia at CES 2025 here.
Image Credit: Nvidia
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Scientists have unearthed what may be the world's oldest ice, dating back 1.2 million years, deep beneath Antarctica. Working in -35°C temperatures, the team drilled a 2.8 km-long ice core—longer than eight Eiffel Towers stacked end to end. The project, led by the Italian Institute of Polar Sciences and involving 10 European nations, aims to study ancient air bubbles trapped in the ice. These pockets could illuminate a pivotal moment in Earth's climate history: the disruption of glacial cycles around 900,000 to 1.2 million years ago. Some researchers believe this period brought humanity's ancestors perilously close to extinction. Could the extracted core provide a greater understanding of the forces that shaped our planet's ancient climate?
Image Credit: PNRA/IPEV
Quirky
The Dinosaur Highway
What ancient secrets lie beneath England's limestone?
Nearly 200 dinosaur footprints, dating back 166 million years to the Middle Jurassic period, have been unearthed by Quarry workers in southern England near an inaccessible site discovered in 1997. Paleontologists have dubbed the region the "Dinosaur Highway."
The site featured five different print tracks, including large sauropods and a carnivorous Megalosaurus. These clawed, three-toed impressions resemble the shapes popularized in films and books. The footprints were left behind in muddy lagoons and preserved for millions of years. Found in what was once a tropical, swampy landscape. Using 3D imaging, researchers are piecing together how these massive creatures walked and interacted, revealing clues about their lives millions of years ago.
Image Credit: University of Birmingham
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