STEM
Wired
Security researchers developed a technique called "Unsaflok" that allows them to open millions of hotel room doors globally by exploiting vulnerabilities in Dormakaba’s Saflok brand RFID locks.
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STEM
MIT Technology Review
Global energy-related CO2 emissions hit a record 37.4 billion tonnes in 2023, a rise of 1.1% over the previous year, according to data from the International Energy Agency. A major driver was an unprecedented shortfall in hydroelectric power generation caused by severe droughts in China, North America, and other regions — droughts worsened by El Niño conditions. That hydropower shortfall alone contributed roughly 170 million additional tonnes of CO2 as fossil fuels stepped in to fill the gap.
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STEM
TechCrunch
Apple announced in February 2024 that it would upgrade iMessage's encryption protocol to defend against future quantum computing attacks, introducing a new system called PQ3. The protocol combines Kyber, a post-quantum cryptographic algorithm, with existing elliptic curve cryptography to achieve what Apple described as "Level 3" security — the highest claimed by any messaging platform at the time.
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STEM
Topics in Cognitive Science
Large language models (LLMs) have been observed to develop unexpected and emergent capabilities that were not explicitly programmed and did not appear in smaller versions of the same architectures. These emergent abilities — including in-context learning, multi-step arithmetic reasoning, instruction following, and rudimentary theory of mind — tend to appear suddenly at certain scales of model size, a phenomenon researchers have described as a phase transition rather than a gradual improvement.
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