“Meta has treated the so-called ‘public availability’ of shadow datasets as a get-out-of-jail-free card, notwithstanding that internal Meta records show every relevant decision-maker at Meta, up to and including its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, knew LibGen was ‘a dataset we know to be pirated,’” the plaintiffs allege in this motion. (Originally filed in late 2024, the […]
Thousands of preprints have been withdrawn from the arXiv preprint server because of factual or methodological errors.Credit: Ralf Geithe/Getty Researchers have launched a database of more than 14,000 studies that have been withdrawn from the preprint server arXiv since its launch in 1991. As well as shedding light on why those preprints were pulled from […]
By Alex Fox Photograph by Shane Gross Hawksbill sea turtles happily flap through the world’s tropical oceans with bellies full of glass-like fragments. Researchers examining the turtles’ digestive tracts would be wise to take care not to slice their hands on shards of the mineral silica that form the skeletons of sea sponges, a mainstay […]
When Madhavi Latha Balijepalle noticed that her morning commute took her past NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, she set a new career goal for herself: working for NASA. “I started manifesting it, thinking about it every day as I drove by. When I started looking for a new job, I saw an […]
MIT engineers have created more than 8,000 electric vehicle (EV) designs that can be combined with artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly build cars in the future. Dubbed “DrivAerNet++,” this open-source database includes designs that are based on the most common types of cars out right now, the engineers said, shown as 3D models that incorporate […]
New Zealand is the only country in the world that has an essentially complete, open-access database of its known fossil record. It’s existed for almost 80 years, beginning in 1946 as a filing cabinet stuffed with paper forms at the New Zealand Geological Survey. The project was the initiative of Harold Wellman — the pioneering […]
A database containing sensitive, sometimes personal information from the United Nations Trust Fund to End Violence Against Women was openly accessible on the internet, revealing more than 115,000 files related to organizations that partner with or receive funding from UN Women. The documents range from staffing information and contracts to letters and even detailed financial […]
Crystallographer Helen Berman co-founded the Protein Data Bank in the 1960s. Credit: Rutgers University The 2024 Nobels were all about artificial intelligence (AI). Pioneers of computer neural networks underlying AI scooped the physics prize , and chemistry went to two scientists who developed the revolutionary AlphaFold protein-structure prediction tool and one who pioneered protein design […]
