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While many Americans were nursing hangovers on New Year’s Day, 22-year-old Edward Tian was working feverishly on a new app to combat misuse of a powerful, new artificial intelligence tool called ChatGPT.

Given the buzz it’s created, there’s a good chance you’ve heard about ChatGPT. It’s an interactive chatbot powered by machine learning. The technology has basically devoured the entire Internet, reading the collective works of humanity and learning patterns in language that it can recreate. All you have to do is give it a prompt, and ChatGPT can do an endless array of things: write a story in a particular style, answer a question, explain a concept, compose an email — write a college essay — and it will spit out coherent, seemingly human-written text in seconds.

The technology is both awesome — and terrifying.

“I think we’re absolutely at an inflection point,” Tian says. “This technology is incredible. I do believe it’s the future. But, at the same time, it’s like we’re opening Pandora’s Box. And we need safeguards to adopt it responsibly.”

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Edward Tian

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“I used [my Amazon Alexa] to turn on the lights or set a timer, and as a speaker for books and podcasts,” says the 43-year-old Londoner. “She turned my fan on and off during the heatwave and played me Christmas music in the winter.”

Ms. Barnes would ask her device to set alarms, tell her the time, or for the weather forecast.

“I kept my first Alexa in the kitchen and, a few months later, I got a second Alexa and set it up in my bedroom.”

However, Ms. Barnes fell out of love with her voice assistants when they began giving her frequent delivery notifications, asking her to review purchases, or prompting her to reorder items.

“It started giving me random updates or asking me to rate a product I’d bought last month,” she says, “which I found really irritating.”

She became concerned about conversation data “being stored in a cloud somewhere”. Then she found the voice commands became unreliable.

“I stopped asking her to turn off the lights when I went to bed, as I’d ask a number of times and then manually turn them off anyway.”

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Abigail Barnes found her voice assistant became more and more annoying

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OnlyFans is an online content-sharing platform that has become increasingly popular during the coronavirus lockdown. While OnlyFans creators can upload any kind of content, like photography, creative writing, or recipes, for example, the platform is particularly popular with sex workers.

During the lockdown, OnlyFans has become so popular that sex workers have found that the market is saturated, as reported by Newsweek.

Some OnlyFans creators report earning more money during the lockdown, while others report earning less money due to their fans facing financial struggles and the saturation of the market.

OnlyFans has been around since 2016 but has entered the mainstream recently, with Beyonce namedropping the site in her verse on Megan Thee Stallion’s “Savage Remix.”

However, many people may not understand how the social media platform works, who uses it, and why it is so popular.

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A woman tries out a Microsoft-driven Nokia smartphone next to a symbol of a cloud on March 5, 2012, in Hanover, Germany. OnlyFans is a social media platform where content creators can charge fans for exclusive access to their content. Getty/Sean Gallup

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Just two months after creating her OnlyFans account, Elaina St James quit her day job and became a full-time content creator.

And less than two years later, the 55-year-old mom has already earned around $630,000 in less than two years through the subscription website. Insider has viewed documentation verifying her earnings.

St James says she’s happier since ditching her day job and can give her son a better life. (Elaina St James is a stage name she uses. Insider agreed to use this name to protect her privacy.)

In her 30s, St James worked in consumer goods sales. After having a baby at the age of 42, she decided to step away from her career, instead working in car sales and then in an office job.

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Elaina St James made her OnlyFans account in spring 2021. Courtesy of Elaina St James

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Over the last few decades, an idea called the critical brain hypothesis has been helping neuroscientists understand how the human brain operates as an information-processing powerhouse. It posits that the brain is always teetering between two phases, or modes, of activity: a random phase, where it is mostly inactive, and an ordered phase, where it is overactive and on the verge of a seizure. The hypothesis predicts that between these phases, at a sweet spot known as the critical point, the brain has a perfect balance of variety and structure and can produce the most complex and information-rich activity patterns. This state allows the brain to optimize multiple information processing tasks, from carrying out computations to transmitting and storing information, all at the same time.

To illustrate how phases of activity in the brain — or, more precisely, activity in a neural network such as the brain — might affect information transmission through it, we can play a simple guessing game. Imagine that we have a network with 10 layers and 40 neurons in each layer. Neurons in the first layer will only activate neurons in the second layer, and those in the second layer will only activate those in the third layer, and so on. Now, I will activate some number of neurons in the first layer, but you will only be able to observe the number of neurons active in the last layer. Let’s see how well you can guess the number of neurons I activated under three different strengths of network connections.

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Video: The phenomenon of criticality can explain the sudden emergence of new properties in a wide range of complex systems, from avalanches to flocks of birds to stock market crashes. Neuroscientists are now seeking evidence that criticality is at work in the brain’s networks of neurons. Taylor Hess, Noah Hutton, Emily Buder, Rui Braz, and Myriam Wares for Quanta Magazine

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A long-tailed lizard dances in and out of the gaps in the asbestos sheet ceiling of Gunja and Chand Singh’s new house in Tughlakabad village, a neighborhood in the Indian capital.

It is about 3pm, and the couple is sitting in their bedroom sipping tea their younger son, Arjun, has just made.

Gunja and Chand, among India’s four million waste pickers, moved into their bare-brick home in October and are house-proud.

It took them 15 years of back-breaking work and sacrifices to save enough money to buy a plot of land in March 2022. To construct the house and pull themselves and their two school-going teenage sons out of the nearby slum where they lived for 12 years, they took a loan from the man who sold them the plot.

They kept their old shanty — their old home — and the adjoining godown, a storage area with three walls and a plastic and bamboo roof, both a short walking distance from their new house. This godown is where Chand separates paper, cardboard, plastic, and other waste material that he and the workers he hires collect from neighborhoods to sell to recyclers.

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Gunja and Chand are waste pickers who, despite being able to buy a plot of land in recent years, are now struggling due to rising living costs and debt [Suparna Sharma/Al Jazeera]

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You can probably think of at least one building you have visited that felt as though it reached inside you, affected you deeply, and perhaps changed the way that you thought about the world. For me, my first visit to St Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City when I was in my 30s had this impact. The sheer size of its interior knocked the wind out of me, though the details were just as significant. Every surface seemed covered with exquisitely detailed art – material evidence of the immense human effort over many centuries that had produced this setting. As I surveyed my surroundings with tottering knees, I realized how far the effects of architecture could go beyond utilitarian functions like keeping us out of the rain.

But it doesn’t take a massive cathedral to ignite interest in the human response to buildings. You might have experienced similar feelings in many different kinds of settings. Small churches, college courtyards, commercial headquarters (think of the main office of a major bank) can all evoke a response. Even everyday architectural spaces can connect with our feelings. Think of when you last walked into someone’s home for the first time and experienced an ephemeral sense of its atmosphere. Architects have written entire books about these feelings.

The observation that ‘we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us’, attributed to Winston Churchill, may be threadbare but it is nevertheless profoundly true. The buildings we inhabit help to make us who we are. Yet, in the run of our everyday experiences, it’s easy to become desensitized to their influences. Buildings can seem at times like little more than the containers of human experience, but they are so much more than that. Architecture can function as a vessel of emotion and thought. It can influence the way you feel about yourself and others. As any great art can change who you are, so can a building. It is the art that you live, work and play inside. If you are willing to spend the time to curiously explore buildings both from the inside and the outside, you will be rewarded with a greater sense of the power of place and, with mastery, a more refined ability to use your settings to control your own experience.

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Heidelberger Platz U-Bahn, Berlin. Photo by Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty

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Science fiction writers love wormholes because they make the impossible possible, linking otherwise unreachable places together. Enter one, and it’ll spit you back out in another locale—typically one that’s convenient for the plot. And no matter how unlikely these exotic black hole relatives are to exist in reality, they tend to fascinate physicists for exactly the same reason. Not long ago, some of those physicists took the time to ponder what such a cosmic shortcut might look like in real life, and even make a case that there could be one at the center of our galaxy.

The most surefire way to confirm a wormhole’s existence would be to directly prod a black hole and see if it’s hiding a bridge to elsewhere, but humanity may never have that opportunity. Even so, researchers could rule out some of the most obvious scenarios from Earth. If the monster black hole residing in the churning center of the Milky Way, for instance, is more door than dead end, astronomers could tease out the presence of something on the other side. Black hole researchers have tracked the orbits of stars, such as one called S2, circling this galactic drain for years. Should those stars be feeling the tug from distant doppelgängers beyond the black hole, they’d perform a very particular dance for anybody watching, according to a recent calculation.

“If astronomers just measure the orbit of S2 with higher precision so that we can narrow it down [and notice such a dance],” says Dejan Stojkovic, a theoretical physicist at the University at Buffalo who helped calculate the result, “that’s it. That’s huge.”

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Rome’s Pantheon stands defiant 2,000 years after it was built, its marble floors sheltered under the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome. For decades, researchers have probed samples from Roman concrete structures—tombs, breakwaters, aqueducts, and wharves—to find out why these ancient buildings endure when modern concrete may crumble after only a few decades.

In a recent study, scientists have got closer to the answer—and their findings could reverberate long into the future. Not only is Roman concrete exponentially more durable than modern concrete, but it can also repair itself. Creating a modern equivalent that lasts longer than existing materials could reduce climate emissions and become a key component of resilient infrastructure, like seawalls. Currently, concrete is second only to water as the world’s most consumed material, and making it accounts for about 7 percent of global emissions. 

“We are dealing with extremely complex material,” says Admir Masic, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who led this new research on Roman concrete. “To kind of reverse-engineer or understand the original way these civilizations made this material is just a nightmare.” 

Until now, efforts to explain the longevity of Roman concrete have pointed to its use of volcanic tephra—the fragments of rock emitted in an eruption—mined in the Naples area and shipped to construction sites throughout the sprawling Roman empire. But Masic and his MIT colleagues, along with researchers from Harvard and laboratories in Italy and Switzerland, suggest another reason: heat. Using a number of different scanning techniques, they examined a sample from a city wall in Privernum, a 2,000-year-old archaeological site near Rome, focusing on millimeter-scale white chunks running through the sample, called lime clasts. These are not found in modern concrete.

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Photograph: Getty Images

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